Background

Group Nine brands dominate search engines and social feeds by applying their subject-matter expertise to hyper-relevant content that resonates with readers.  It is by far their most successful top-of-funnel content strategy, earning tens of millions of unique impressions every month.

While this strategy was incredibly effective at achieving its primary goal of driving traffic and hitting advertising goals, the value proposition for our readers was severely lacking any meaningful utility, which was proven by the shockingly high bounce rates that demonstrated millions of readers coming to our site, getting the info they need, and being forced to leave in order to take action…which was all surprisingly the status-quo across our competitors for this type of content. Nobody seemed to be taking advantage of the opportunity to convert this massive user base of passionate readers into loyal consumers.

As we excitedly dug into this white space rich with potential, we uncovered how burdensome the production workflow of this content type is for our editorial teams.  While enthusiasm for this content to come to life was alive and healthy, early proposals of new features that required “even more CMS fields” had our editor’s heads spinning. With this new information in hand, we broadened the scope of this project to include editorial tooling efficiencies that will enable our editors to focus on telling their story, and not on tedious time consuming data collection & entry.

Location-Based Lists

Article View

Naturally, the “article view” was the most common touchpoint. The MVP of this product would automate the following processes for our editors, clearing their plates of everything but the story they’re telling.

• Photography was the number 1 requested feature from our user interviews. Above all else, they want to get a sense for the vibe of a location. This was also one of the biggest burdens for our teams to source properly licensed photography, and commonly resulted in only select list instances being paired with a photo.

• Locale would default to a neighborhood or region

• Category displays the type of location it is. Cafe, Brewery, Library, Park, etc

• Price Point shows the average cost on a scale of 1-4

• Reservations & Take Out relied on affiliate partnerships with a number of services like Seamless, Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats, and more. This feature required an additional flag on the unique Location Nodes, but once that information was included, calls-to-action would appear anywhere these locations are featured, and would generate a new stream of revenue through affiliate agreements.

• Also Featured In displays the headlines of other renderings of List Nodes across the site…providing a recirculation opportunity, but also further insight for our readers.

• Map CTAs are displayed at the top of these articles, as well as alongside each individual instance.

* Each datapoint would default to the information coming from the Location Node, but editor’s maintained the ability to customize that information in each respective list without disrupting the source of truth.

Location List Node MVP

Map View

One of the first new renderings of a List Node was as a Map, accessible from multiple entry points on the Article, but also discoverable from landing pages, emails, and social.

The best part? This requires zero lift from production teams while delivering incredible value to our users.

The map re-used the exact same components from the Article, just displayed in a different way to satisfy the browsing habits of people who care more about proximity to where they currently are, or plan to be.