By giving our customers access to the right data and traveler insights and helping them activate their own first-party data, Sojern enables travel marketers to gain the visibility they need to deploy and tailor effective campaigns.
What problems do you solve for your customers?
We primarily work with hotels and destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to help them drive travelers to their hotels and destinations. Hotels and local tourism organizations partner to drive demand to their destination, and ultimately their property. The biggest challenge hotels face is that they have the ultimate perishable good. They have high fixed costs and if a room isn’t filled for the night, that inventory – and revenue opportunity – disappears. You can’t sell yesterday’s room today. To keep rooms full, hotels must constantly drive demand, so they use online travel agencies (OTAs), like Expedia or Kayak, and other partners, like Sojern, to drive that demand. About 40% of their budget is spent on acquiring and retaining customers, which is huge. Then, once travelers arrive, the stakes are high. Hotels must provide personalized experiences that meet, or exceed, expectations so they can build long-term brand loyalty and foster positive reviews. We help hotels drive direct demand in a more efficient and cost-effective way by using the best ad tech solutions across the main online channels of search, metasearch, and display, to drive travelers to hotel websites to book. By helping our clients activate their first-party data in conjunction with our traveler intent data, our Sojern Traveler Ecosystem(™) helps them use real-time insights to engage travelers early and build relationships that ultimately translate into brand loyalty. Overall, the Sojern Traveler Ecosystem helps our customers get return on campaign investment, maximize budgets throughout the entire marketing funnel, differentiate their brand from competitors, and ultimately reach their conversion goals. We also know that getting travelers to the hotel isn’t the end of the game. They need to maximize the guest experience, and our Guest Experience Solutions do just that. By creating personalized experiences and allowing hotels to interact with guests one-on-one, our Guest Experience Solutions help hotels identify and capture additional cross and upsell revenue. Backed by artificial intelligence, our AI Smart Concierge allows them to automate responses to more than 1000 questions, freeing up staff to engage with customers, build relationships, and deliver the experience they expect.
With our Reputation Manager, they can create customizable in-stay surveys and automatically escalate issues in real-time to staff members, and view OTA reviews, allowing them to resolve potential problems before a traveler leaves a negative review and tarnishes the brand’s reputation.
Using Guest Marketing Suite, they can engage with travelers via text, email, or chat to quickly up or cross-sell ancillary products by offering relevant promotions.
To help hotels and DMOs drive demand, we also facilitate their partnership so they can more cost-effectively market to potential travelers. A DMO’s job is to not only help hotels fill rooms, but also entice travelers to visit retail stores and book experiences during their stay at the destination. We set up campaigns to help DMOs drive demand to their destination and run co-op programs to create a symbiotic relationship between destination marketers and hotels. These co-op programs are designed to increase awareness about and demand for a destination, but also support hotels directly with their advertising–creating the ultimate win-win.
Which types of companies benefit the most from your services?
Our solutions are designed for hotel and destination marketers. Every destination and property is vying to stand out in a digital world. Why should a traveler visit a specific place or book a specific hotel? Our customers come to us because they want to maximize their visibility and the return on their marketing investment. They simply can’t risk deploying campaigns that don’t work, especially since travel budgets are tight after a tumultuous few years. As I said above, hotels have the ultimate perishable inventory, and they spend a lot of money acquiring customers. Every vacant room represents lost revenue, so time is of the essence. We help large brands increase demand to specific properties in their portfolio and help independent hotels get more exposure than they could get on their own. Our tools give marketers access to the insights they need, such as our travel intent and benchmarking data as well as their first-party data, including historical bookings and guest loyalty information, so they can gain a complete picture of the traveler journey and better understand their audiences. From there, they can tailor campaigns so they’re delivering messaging that is relevant–and inspires travelers to book. Once a campaign is deployed, they can easily see if it’s performing at peak level, and we even automatically manage their budgets to ensure that ad performance is maximized across every channel. Here’s a great example: We partnered with Viva Resorts by Wyndham to reach new Caribbean and Mexican Caribbean travelers and increase direct bookings. They used the Sojern Travel Marketing platform to reach, engage, and convert new travelers. We run programmatic digital advertising on behalf of their properties and they only pay a commission after a traveler has completed the stay. This solution helps them manage seasonality without sacrificing their average daily rate.With our help, Viva Resorts has increased its direct bookings by 3x and seen a 15% increase in direct business share versus online travel industries.
What makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?
Years ago, if a marketer wanted to do online advertising they could use search engine marketing (SEM) to drive a lot of direct demand. But the marketing landscape has changed. The world of advertising technology is incredibly complex and, on top of it, marketers have to learn how to reach prospective travelers across multiple channels, including display on desktop and mobile, social environments like Facebook and Instagram, and different metasearch sites. The proliferation of advertising channels marketers must be an expert in has multiplied, and it can be overwhelming. There are very few adtech players that are able to help marketers drive demand across those channels, and we are one of them. Other companies may be really good at one or two, but we have built the technology to drive direct demand across all channels. We also built our technology from the ground up specifically for the travel industry and have continually pushed the boundaries of what’s possible. For 15 years, we’ve cultivated deep technological expertise and experience, which gives us a significant advantage over our competitors. For example, we have been leveraging AI for over 7 years. Our AI-powered audience enhancement uses our longstanding AI capabilities. We’re able to work at a destination, property, and individual guest level within one platform, which means we’re able to use customer data in the most effective way. From one platform, we can track the guest and then use the same platform to market to that guest one-on-one to maximize bookings and revenue per guest. There are very few platforms that can help marketers activate their data across all channels and guests like we can.With our technology and expertise, we’ve helped our customers increase direct booking revenue, sometimes as much as 376%, and generate 14x return on campaign investment.
