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How Cedar Fair Scaled an Immersive Online Experience With Bloomreach Content
Cedar Fair parks provide incredibly immersive experiences. Whether it’s Halloween, Christmas, or Independence Day, you’d better believe that once you step into that park, every coaster, water ride, show, swim-up bar, shop, and all of the other moving pieces are going to encompass you in that shared experience. That focus on an immersive experience was pivotal to Cedar Fair’s digital transformation path, which began where all the best do — with customer expectations.
The Challenge
As one of the largest amusement resort operators in the world, Cedar Fair entertains 26 million guests per year across its 11 amusement parks, including its flagship park, Cedar Point.
Cedar Fair’s parks provide incredibly immersive experiences in person. But that caused it to take a critical look at where its digital experience was to see if it was living up to guest expectations online. With this in mind, the team set about creating a digital vision and clearly defined plan to get there.
The team soon identified a major pain point: the existing digital experience simply did not deliver on the true depth and quality of experience the parks were delivering every day to every guest. This pointed them toward a content problem.
We have the ability to now look at all of the various people who are coming into our parks, and we can deliver the right message for them, at the right time, on the right channel, and do that in a relatively effective way.
Jim Denny
The Solution
Cedar Fair is a house of brands. Every one of its parks has a very individual feel with its own identity, which means that each park needs its own website and app.
Cedar Fair also has a lean team of developers and content creators who, naturally, didn’t want to start from scratch each time. They needed the structure and content to be reusable. It also had to be flexible, so the digital face of each park could showcase its unique personality.
Working with our implementation partner Authentic, Cedar Fair used Bloomreach Content as the foundation for its next-generation digital strategy, encompassing both in-park and traditional digital experience elements. The implemented solution enabled the business to quickly scale experiential initiatives across its family of parks, while also creating an immersive and inter-connected experience that was more tailored to each park visitors thrill-seeking interests.
The Results
With Bloomreach Content, Cedar Fair was able to launch 11 different park sites in just four months. It also built eight different mobile apps to help park-goers get the best possible experience in the parks.
Cedar Fair is also constantly improving the online experience with built-in A/B testing to better understand what customers want from its brands.
