The Chamber’s goal has always been to help stimulate the economic development of our amazing community. Over the last few months the board of directors have put together some great plans for bringing back regular mixers, ribbon cuttings and events.
Another way we can achieve this is by helping to attract tourism and bring awareness to our neighboring communities about all the great things Marina has to offer. And there is no better way to do this than to get in front of people who are planning a trip to the Monterey Bay area and are making their plans online.
A Tourism & Travel Destination Website
By switching from being just a “Chamber of Commerce” website to a “Tourism & Travel Destination Website”, we have more opportunities to reach a wider audience and bring awareness to our beautiful town.
Our new website features beautiful landing pages targeting visitors of the Monterey Bay area, calendar of events, news and events blog, business directory, places to eat, things to do and so much more.
How This Help’s The City and Local Businesses
With all these great features, content, search engine optimization, and a strong Social Media strategy, we have better chances of coming up when people search on Google for terms like “Things to do in Monterey”, “Places to stay near Monterey”, “Places to eat in Monterey”, etc…
This gives us better opportunities to promote local hotels, restaurants, businesses and organizations.
Chamber Member Benefits
We also understand many businesses cannot afford a big custom website or have a strong social media team to help with their online marketing efforts.
Our website will list members and non-members in the business directory but chamber members will be given prominent positions toward the top of the page and their very own landing page that can include pictures, descriptions, hours, menus and more. For some businesses this may be their only online presence.
Each quarter, we will also do a “Featured Member” article where we hope to highlight their background, business, products, services and more.
A Virtual Office for the Chamber and Its Members
We have built this new website on a framework which will allow us to operate as a virtual office.
We have built in a Contact Manager system that will allow us to keep track of people’s activities, conversations, contact information and more.
We have built in a Member Manager system that will help us to keep track of member contact information, renewals, membership lapses and more.
Our Member Editor feature allows our members to login to update their own contact information and business pages using an easy-to-use front end visual editor.
The Events Calendar system will allow visitors to easily submit their event information into the system so that our staff can easily approve and publish right away.
The Blog is set up in such a way that our contributors will be able to login, write their article, add their images and submit it in the easiest way possible.
This is Only Phase One
We have many more plans in store and would like to invite you to be a part of the adventure. We are currently looking for blog contributors, WordPress enthusiasts and photographers.
If you are interested in volunteering, please reach out to us using our contact form here.
