VISIT FLORIDA's Six-Month Campaign With Sojern Drives $108M in Estimated Economic Impact
VISIT FLORIDA’s six-month campaign with Sojern generated $108M+ in economic impact and 268K+ travellers. With full-funnel digital strategies and footfall tracking, the partnership supports year-round tourism and regional dispersion.
Introduction
VISIT FLORIDA is a destination marketing organisation (DMO) focused primarily on driving visitation to the state of Florida and increasing economic impact. As a highly sought-after travel destination and one of the most well-known domestic and international destinations globally, Florida continues to set record-breaking visitation numbers. The long-term digital marketing partnership between Sojern and VISIT FLORIDA has been pivotal in boosting tourism and delivering economic impact.
Objectives
Digital marketing is the foundation of VISIT FLORIDA’s advertising strategy, as it allows the organisation to be data-driven, flexible, and optimisable. VISIT FLORIDA sought a digital marketing partner who specialised in travel data to reach travel intenders who were either looking to visit Florida or a competing destination, in order to deliver messaging that would inspire travel to Florida and ultimately drive economic impact to the state.
As a state with unique needs throughout 67 counties, it was critical for VISIT FLORIDA to gain access to the right data and insights through a partner who didn’t deliver a one-size-fits-all approach. The organisation aimed to adjust efforts as needed for DMO partners across the state, driving the right visitation at the right time and helping them reach key audience segments.
Detailed reporting was imperative for an effective partnership, as VISIT FLORIDA needed very granular information on its audience to understand what messages were resonating, who was engaging, and who was visiting Florida and its destinations. It also needed accurate footfall measurement as it was focused on driving dispersion throughout the state.
Solution
“The partnership started with Sojern being just another programmatic media vendor in the overall media strategy. As time went on, VISIT FLORIDA had more in-depth conversations with the team and discovered all of the value Sojern brings. Utilisation increased and the results continued to improve,” said Summer Gonzalez-Mendez, senior manager of paid media at VISIT FLORIDA.
Today, the partnership is focused on a multichannel digital advertising strategy including display, native, video, CTV and social. Many different campaigns and media tactics run throughout the year, all delivering strong performance. The strategy is a full-funnel approach for all of VISIT FLORIDA’s media, activating tactics to drive awareness down to conversions. The organisation consistently tests new solutions with Sojern as soon as they become available, helping VISIT FLORIDA stay ahead of the curve in the travel marketing space.
“Everything Sojern has to offer, we want to buy into. We love being a test partner. We recently started running social media campaigns with Sojern and are seeing excellent results,” Gonzalez-Mendez said. “We include Sojern in every single campaign that we run throughout the year, and we’ve tapped them for almost all of our international campaigns. Sojern is probably our first and foremost go-to media partner, and they are very differentiated from other programmatic media vendors.”
Sojern delivers monthly economic impact reporting to the VISIT FLORIDA team that includes footfall attribution. Using this granular reporting, VISIT FLORIDA can report attributable economic impact results to its team, committees, board of directors, and stakeholders throughout the state.
“When you work with a partner like Sojern that can show the passenger count of visitors coming to Florida and where they're going in Florida—because a big goal of ours is dispersing throughout the state—we're able to take that to our destination partners to show them how we are driving the economy in their specific destination throughout the year, and leaning into support their need periods. Florida has a lot of peak and off seasons, and a partner like Sojern allows us to plug the holes throughout the year depending on seasonality and needs from our DMO partners,” Brett Laiken, CMO of VISIT FLORIDA said.
A recent campaign that ran from October 16, 2023, to March 31, 2024, focused on targeting domestic travellers seeking sunny destinations in the winter. The campaign goals were centred on driving searches and bookings, in addition to website engagement. The campaign was very successful, resulting in $108,888,604 in estimated economic impact from online bookings, a 258:1 ROI, 268,594 confirmed travellers (157,142 foot traffic visits and 111,452 online bookings) and 76,287 hotel night stays.
“Sojern has always proven to be a successful partner. They provide insights that we may not otherwise see, and without them we have a hole in our reporting and analytics. They help us get to a granular level of our consumer to understand the intricacies that help us drive visitation and position ourselves as a unique destination, and to have that one-to-one personal connection through our messaging. They are an absolute necessity for our media and build the foundation of our campaigns, including our evergreen, always on campaigns. My take as CMO at VISIT FLORIDA: Sojern is a must. They are an exceptional partner and truly have our best interests at heart. They're not looking to sell media for the sake of it, they plug in what works best for our organization. I can’t say enough about Sojern and how honored we are to work with them as a valued partner.”
- Brett Laiken, CMO
This article was written in partnership with Sojern.
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Introduction
VISIT FLORIDA is a destination marketing organisation (DMO) focused primarily on driving visitation to the state of Florida and increasing economic impact. As a highly sought-after travel destination and one of the most well-known domestic and international destinations globally, Florida continues to set record-breaking visitation numbers. The long-term digital marketing partnership between Sojern and VISIT FLORIDA has been pivotal in boosting tourism and delivering economic impact.
Objectives
Digital marketing is the foundation of VISIT FLORIDA’s advertising strategy, as it allows the organisation to be data-driven, flexible, and optimisable. VISIT FLORIDA sought a digital marketing partner who specialised in travel data to reach travel intenders who were either looking to visit Florida or a competing destination, in order to deliver messaging that would inspire travel to Florida and ultimately drive economic impact to the state.
As a state with unique needs throughout 67 counties, it was critical for VISIT FLORIDA to gain access to the right data and insights through a partner who didn’t deliver a one-size-fits-all approach. The organisation aimed to adjust efforts as needed for DMO partners across the state, driving the right visitation at the right time and helping them reach key audience segments.
Detailed reporting was imperative for an effective partnership, as VISIT FLORIDA needed very granular information on its audience to understand what messages were resonating, who was engaging, and who was visiting Florida and its destinations. It also needed accurate footfall measurement as it was focused on driving dispersion throughout the state.
Solution
“The partnership started with Sojern being just another programmatic media vendor in the overall media strategy. As time went on, VISIT FLORIDA had more in-depth conversations with the team and discovered all of the value Sojern brings. Utilisation increased and the results continued to improve,” said Summer Gonzalez-Mendez, senior manager of paid media at VISIT FLORIDA.
Today, the partnership is focused on a multichannel digital advertising strategy including display, native, video, CTV and social. Many different campaigns and media tactics run throughout the year, all delivering strong performance. The strategy is a full-funnel approach for all of VISIT FLORIDA’s media, activating tactics to drive awareness down to conversions. The organisation consistently tests new solutions with Sojern as soon as they become available, helping VISIT FLORIDA stay ahead of the curve in the travel marketing space.
“Everything Sojern has to offer, we want to buy into. We love being a test partner. We recently started running social media campaigns with Sojern and are seeing excellent results,” Gonzalez-Mendez said. “We include Sojern in every single campaign that we run throughout the year, and we’ve tapped them for almost all of our international campaigns. Sojern is probably our first and foremost go-to media partner, and they are very differentiated from other programmatic media vendors.”
Sojern delivers monthly economic impact reporting to the VISIT FLORIDA team that includes footfall attribution. Using this granular reporting, VISIT FLORIDA can report attributable economic impact results to its team, committees, board of directors, and stakeholders throughout the state.
“When you work with a partner like Sojern that can show the passenger count of visitors coming to Florida and where they're going in Florida—because a big goal of ours is dispersing throughout the state—we're able to take that to our destination partners to show them how we are driving the economy in their specific destination throughout the year, and leaning into support their need periods. Florida has a lot of peak and off seasons, and a partner like Sojern allows us to plug the holes throughout the year depending on seasonality and needs from our DMO partners,” Brett Laiken, CMO of VISIT FLORIDA said.
A recent campaign that ran from October 16, 2023, to March 31, 2024, focused on targeting domestic travellers seeking sunny destinations in the winter. The campaign goals were centred on driving searches and bookings, in addition to website engagement. The campaign was very successful, resulting in $108,888,604 in estimated economic impact from online bookings, a 258:1 ROI, 268,594 confirmed travellers (157,142 foot traffic visits and 111,452 online bookings) and 76,287 hotel night stays.
“Sojern has always proven to be a successful partner. They provide insights that we may not otherwise see, and without them we have a hole in our reporting and analytics. They help us get to a granular level of our consumer to understand the intricacies that help us drive visitation and position ourselves as a unique destination, and to have that one-to-one personal connection through our messaging. They are an absolute necessity for our media and build the foundation of our campaigns, including our evergreen, always on campaigns. My take as CMO at VISIT FLORIDA: Sojern is a must. They are an exceptional partner and truly have our best interests at heart. They're not looking to sell media for the sake of it, they plug in what works best for our organization. I can’t say enough about Sojern and how honored we are to work with them as a valued partner.”
- Brett Laiken, CMO
This article was written in partnership with Sojern.
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