Introduction
Airboat Adventures is a family-run swamp boat tour operator in New Orleans and a long-standing Sojern customer. They leveraged Sojern’s Managed Platform to capture a greater share of their market, manage heavy seasonality, and drive direct bookings in a cost-effective way.
Objectives
Airboat Adventures had seen great success increasing direct bookings through running multichannel digital marketing campaigns with Sojern. However, they were looking for a more flexible way to activate their spend—one that took their seasonality into account. “Our busy season starts from early Spring, where we are often fully booked,” explains Business Development Manager Brittany Perrin, “but I want my digital marketing to be working for me at the times when we are not fully booked—when we need that extra push.”
"We were looking for a marketing plan that gave us a more personalized, seasonal approach. We wanted to be more targeted at different times of the year. I was very impressed with Sojern. The team took the time to understand my business and my seasonality. It was very in-depth and their planning made me think of things in different ways. Sojern helped me look at our plans on an annual basis, and figure out how much I’m spending and when, and what I’m getting out of it. The Annual Media Plan has proven very cost-effective."
Solution
Sojern worked with Airboat Adventures to build a flexible, multichannel digital marketing strategy that navigates seasonality through their Managed Platform to drive both brand engagement and direct bookings. By leveraging the Sojern Traveler Ecosystem™, Sojern taps into billions of travel intent data points to find and engage with those who are looking for or have booked travel to New Orleans. “In the past, I’ve only been able to see my own visitor data,” continues Perrin, “Sojern was able to figure out which cities are looking at New Orleans in general, rather than who is looking at us specifically. It gave me a better idea of when people are booking.” Sojern's artificial intelligence takes those market dynamics into account and then optimizes budget allocation across channels and tactics to maximize site visits and ROI. This has helped them get smarter with their marketing spend without having to invest a ton of time or resources into it. “Yes, digital marketing is something that you can try to do yourself. But Sojern has access to more data to help you perform better. They do a much better job than you’d be able to do on your own.” Since starting on the Managed Platform, Airport Adventures has consistently achieved a 3X ROI (sometimes nearing a 4X in some months) on their direct booking goals, and have beat their brand engagement goals by 31%. As a relatively small operation, Airboat Adventures is able to focus on delivering an outstanding customer experience knowing that Sojern is helping them achieve their marketing objectives.
About the Partnership
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"We were looking for a marketing plan that gave us a more personalized, seasonal approach. We wanted to be more targeted at different times of the year. I was very impressed with Sojern. The team took the time to understand my business and my seasonality. It was very in-depth and their planning made me think of things in different ways. Sojern helped me look at our plans on an annual basis, and figure out how much I’m spending and when, and what I’m getting out of it. The Annual Media Plan has proven very cost-effective."
