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Ski New Hampshire

SITE OF THE WEEK

WE don't know skiing, but we do know web sites. When it comes to marketing winter sports online, the state of NH has its act together. That makes sense since a lot of money is one the line and modern skiiers make up their minds at the very last hairy minute.

VISIT the SKINH.com web site

THE NUTS & BOLTS

What I know about downhill skiing wouldn’t fill the back side of a lift ticket. Moving rapidly toward the bottom of a steep mountain in winter strapped to two strips of fiberglass just never caught my fancy. But I know plenty about marketing, and when it comes to marketing skiing, New Hampshire has its act together.

And that is no small feat, considering the myriad ways in which our beloved Granite State does not have its act together. But let’s stick to one slippery slope at a time.

Every mountain resort has a web site. That goes with out saying in a market where skiers check the Internet and can pick the best spot in the wee hours of the morning before cruising up to New Hampshire, mostly from Massachusetts. I just clicked to all 18 New Hampshire downhill ski sites, but there is an easier way. SkiNH.com offers the whole magilla on a single web page. For those who prefer flatter spaces, a report on 13 cross country resorts is just a click away.

The data on the site is reliable, comprehensive and constantly updated. All told, SkiNH.com represents 36 alpine and cross country resorts and more than 200 lodging properties in New Hampshire. The newly designed site is visually appealing. The entire top of the screen depicts a dreamy panorama of White Mountain peaks. To the left side of the screen a snowboarder is barreling down the hill. Click to a new section and the panorama remains, but the snowboarder changes to a downhill racer, an extreme daredevil, a snowtubing family, a cross country competitor and a cluster of kids in a beginner class. These guys know their audience.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

Even the mountains of New Hampshire come to the e-Coast when they need a make-over. The new-improved ski portal is the work of Harbour Light Productions in Portsmouth. Karl Stone, the marketing manager at SkiNH says the group, headed by director Alice Pearce, looked at six or seven New Hampshire agencies to do the web work.

"We came down to two firms and we really liked both of them," Karl says.

The group, he says, had a working web site, but needed a "fun recreational look" and a more aggressive method for processing and posting large quantities of data online. Harbour Light proved to have both the design ability and cutting edge technology.

That cutting edge is Savvy CMT2, Harbour Light’s own content management software, now in its second version. So far, Karl says, he is finding the new administrative system a thrill to use. He is able to control most aspects of the web site from his computer, even adding new pages and new sections from an easy-to-use control panel. He can authorize outside content providers to add data as well, and can process ticket orders online. Most impressive, SkiNH.com offers weekly video footage direct from New Hampshire resorts. You can see that footage streaming online, all uploaded using Savvy2. The new software is so cool, it even has its own web site where visitors can demo the product online.

Josh Cyr, who helped develop the flexible new software, says the latest version is also built into their recent sites for the National Commission Against Drunk Driving (NCADD) and for Attrezzi, a kitchenwares company in Portsmouth. By allowing clients to do all their own future web site maintenance, Josh says, the cost of an upgrade becomes much more affordable.

I’m not a big fan of drop-down menus, but when done well, they offer access to a ton of categories on the homepage. Here they work, offering four horizontal menu rows filled with navigational choices that are easy to understand and follow.

Most visitors are looking for ski conditions and weather. Keith Dolan, Strategic Marketing Planner for Harbour Light, says the average web visitor takes less than a second to decide whether the site is appealing or not. That is the crucial test. The visitor wants the conditions, then fast access to directions, places to stay in the area, and the choice of mountains to ski.

"People really are using the Web to make decisions on where they are going to ski on the weekend. Consumers are extremely sophisticated. Ultimately, this is the entertainment "biz", Keith says. "And Ski New Hampshire needed to look really good."

THE UP SHOT

This web site works for a lot of reasons, not all of them Web-related. First, Ski New Hampshire is ten years old. As a state agency, the group represents the region’s key downhill resorts. That doesn’t mean that the state pays the bills for promoting tourism as in other states. (This is New Hampshire, after all.) The four staff members working from Lincoln, NH are paid by the ski resorts to present a united marketing effort in competition with Vermont and Maine, Colorado and wherever people ski. They raise money through advertising, through membership fees, through the sale of discounted lift tickets, and sometimes through grants from the NH Division of Travel and Tourism.

Ski New Hampshire, therefore, has a solid group of like-minded backers, clear goals, and a simple message – come here and ski.

Ski New Hampshire began as a color magazine. The publication now reaches 130,000 readers. The group also has a toll free hotline. Skiers can listen to a prerecorded message or chat directly with live people who know the sport, the mountains, the amenities and the social life that attracts weekenders and day-trippers to the Granite State. Karl Stone, originally from Delaware, started out as a New Hampshire ski bum after college.

The group runs television spots on Massachusetts stations and provides huge group discount tickets for hardcore enthusiasts.

The web site fills in around the other media marketing tools like mortar. Now tourists from as far away as England can read the magazine, call or email for details, and then check the web site for upcoming conditions before flying across the Atlantic to ski the White Mountains. It’s really happening.

Despite the potential for huge profits, the ski industry is always a risky roll of the dice. Running a resort takes big bucks and everything hangs on the weather. Earlier this week, with wind chill figures as low as minus 45 degrees, skiers were keeping a close eye on the web site -- from inside their warm homes.

"To me the phrase ‘Vermont Skiing’ is a thing," says marketing guru Keith Dolan. "It’s a branded thing. New Hampshire is trying to get to that, and it’s really happening here too."

But solid branding does not happen by accident. It’s an uphill battle. It requires pushing a consistent message to a carefully targeted audience using a variety of attractive media. That is something we have not yet perfected for tourism here in the Seacoast. It takes funding, vision, solidarity, media-smarts, enthusiasm and talent. Ski New Hampshire appears to be putting all the pieces together into a working machine. Now, if only they could take over our state legislature.