Sojern will offer its digital marketing solutions for independent hotel and chain properties as a subscription. With this new package, the same enterprise-grade technology developed to power marketing campaigns for the world’s biggest travel brands is available to smaller hotels for a fraction of the price, and all in one platform.
Offered as a direct-booking alternative to a hotel’s distribution deals with online travel agencies, Sojern’s digital marketing solution delivers highly personalized advertising to consumers across multiple devices and digital channels such as Facebook and Instagram, video, display ads and search. The targeted ads and content then drive potential customers to the hotel’s website to book directly.
Most hoteliers don’t have access to the same resources that the major brands have. Many also lack the time and expertise needed to manage multiple vendors and come up with a comprehensive digital media mix that will allow them to reach customers online. Sojern offers hotels a way to run sophisticated digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels to reach travelers at the precise moment when they are planning and booking a trip by providing access to real-time traveler data and all the major digital advertising channels. Users now can access this platform either on commission or subscription.
The Sojern platform identifies in-market travelers and uses advertising to drive direct bookings and increase web traffic on the hotel’s own website while fostering direct customer relationships for the hotel. Sojern automates campaign management and optimization so hotels can focus not on the complexities of digital marketing, but on their first priority: the guest experience. Additional program benefits include complimentary ad creative, A/B creative testing, translation services, and local market and competitive insights.
Originally developed for the world’s biggest hotel brands, Sojern now offers its digital marketing solutions for independent hotels and chain properties in two different ways—both backed by proprietary data science supported by a dedicated customer success analyst:
- Pick Your Plan is priced at a fixed monthly fee, or subscription. Customers pull from their marketing budgets to leverage Sojern’s branding and performance marketing solutions to drive web traffic, build brand awareness and overcome seasonality.
- Pay On The Stay customers work with Sojern as part of their overall distribution strategy to drive direct bookings through digital channels. In the commission model, Sojern takes on the risk of running digital media campaigns and hotels only pay for completed stays.
“Today it’s easier and cheaper than ever for a hotel to build a website and accept bookings online, but attracting qualified in-market travelers to your site is an ongoing challenge,” Sojern Chief Solutions Officer Kurt Weinsheimer said in a statement. “What hotelier has the time, budget or expertise to master marketing across search, Facebook, Instagram, display, video, mobile, native and the next big thing—particularly when they’re competing with multibillion-dollar ad budgets from the OTAs? Sojern has been looking at traveler behavior across the mobile and digital web since 2007 and providing solutions to the biggest travel brands on the planet to increase their share of direct bookings and meet their performance [key performance indicators]. We realized there was an opportunity to turn this expertise into simple solutions for hoteliers with smaller budgets who didn’t want to take on the risk of a traditional media insertion order model.”