Somerset County Cricket Club

Event space focus

Somerset County Cricket Club is a professional cricket club based in Taunton, Somerset. It is one of the 18 first-class county cricket clubs that compete in the domestic cricket structure in England and Wales.

Somerset CCC plays in the top tier of English domestic cricket, known as the County Championship, as well as in limited-overs competitions like the Royal London One-Day Cup and the Vitality Blast T20 competition.

The team at Somerset wanted to bring more focus to their event space offering at their ground, the Cooper Associates County Ground. Looking at competitors such as Emirates Old Trafford cricket ground in Manchester, Somerset wanted a new, more premium website which positioned their event space as a desirable option for a huge variety of events including weddings, corporate events, dinners, large scale events and more.

Before the kick off

The internal design team at Somerset County Cricket Club developed a new, more distinguished brand for the Cooper Associates County Ground. This new look helped to brand the events offering as more of a standalone piece, away from the day-to-day happenings at the club.

The team at Harrison Carloss were approached to take this new branding and translate it into a digital space which allowed the venue’s offering to be showcased. Due to the sheer number of event possibilities, the website needed to be broadly appealing – but we didn’t want this to mean unenticing.

Functionality on their existing site was very limited therefore they wanted to embrace the opportunity to integrate tools such as booking widgets to site and allow for greater engagement from their audience.

Dynamic new website

We created a dynamic and engaging website that effectively showcased the space at Cooper Associates County Ground and the various ways it could be used.

We used rich media such as virtual tours and striking photography to help really convey the feel of the space, alongside clear iconography to convey key aspects.

As Cooper Associates County Ground has a number of spaces available to hire, we built an easy-to-use search tool to help users to find their ideal space based on party size and other requirements. From here, a user can select their space and send an enquiry direct from the page with all required information.

In terms of integrations, we integrated CaterSOFT to allow all enquiries to be directly sent into their booking system, removing the need for manual entry. ResDiary was integrated to allow users to book tables for events such as the Sunday carvery and afternoon tea events. Finally, Sport Alliance was integrated from a newsletter perspective to allow users to add their email to the main SCCC newsletter sign up.

We also created landing pages per type of event to help drive organic sessions and increase relevancy of the site. This helped to convey the breadth of possibilities when it came to holding an event at the site.

Additionally, as part of a 12-month SEO retainer, we brought the site up to scratch with optimised meta data and relevant internal linking. Every month we checked the site for technical issues and created relevant blog content based on long-tail keyword research to help target users earlier in the user journey.