Co-Op Marketing: Increase Impact of Your Destination Marketing Strategies With Sojern

Destination marketers have been searching for ways to spend marketing dollars effectively and drive visitation to their particular destination. With a partnership between hotels, attractions, and destination marketing organizations (DMOs), marketers can band together to pool funds and messaging to bring in ideal travelers.

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Benefits of Using a Co-Op Marketing Program

A co-op marketing program, also known as co-marketing, provides the opportunity for hotels, attractions, and DMOs to pool marketing budgets and messaging to drive visitation to a destination and direct bookings to key partners. 

Co-op marketing brings together multiple travel entities to drive more impact together instead of individually marketing for their own businesses. A co-op might include a regional destination, a city within the destination, and hotel and attraction partners. In the most common version of a marketing co-op, the organization responsible for driving economic activity in that destination would be hosting.

There are multiple benefits to participating in co-op marketing campaigns for you and your tourism partners:

• You can serve the needs of all stakeholders with a flexible marketing program.
• You can easily scale marketing efforts.
• You can create efficiency by pooling scarce resources for maximum effect.
• You can take away the hassle by minimizing billing and reporting challenges.
• You can leverage economies of scale to obtain better advertising rates.
• You can experiment and try out new marketing formats or channels you might not have used in the past.

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Use a marketing co-op fund to create consistent, continuous, and always-on multichannel campaigns to help your region, country, or city reap the benefits of increased visibility online.

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Why Co-Op Makes Your Multichannel Campaigns More Effective

Creating multichannel marketing campaigns is a mutually-beneficial way to make the most of your co-op fund. Multichannel campaigns help hotels and attractions drive direct bookings, destinations find ideal travelers, and all parties to make the most of their budget. By creating content across channels including native, video, display, CTV, and more, there is coverage across multiple touchpoints and you’re building awareness around your brand.

A traditional marketing co-op consists of offline marketing tactics including, print advertising, broadcast, direct mail, and more. Now, take that traditional concept and add it to the digital world. With its ever-growing list of channels, formats, and tactics, marketing campaigns are much more complex and can be a huge driver of economic activity. Multichannel marketing campaigns can make the most of marketing investments and increase results—and it doesn’t have to be complicated. When you run a marketing co-op with Sojern, we help you deliver value to your partners without the hassle. We offer features like the ability to split billing however the host and partners want, fund matching by the government, and aggregated economic impact reporting for all participants.

Through Sojern’s multichannel campaigns, we believe that channels work better together and we capture users before, during, and after they search to lead them to your destination and your partners.  A potential path could look like this:

• We inspire potential travelers during their discovery phase by serving them a display ad.
• Then, we run ads on Facebook, advertising to these potential travelers to ensure you stay top-of-mind as they search and plan.
• When they are ready, we engage them to take an action on your website through Search Engine Marketing. 

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While every potential traveler's journey is unique, and paths like this allow us to engage and guide them throughout their dreaming and planning process.

To learn how to deliver value to your co-op partners without the hassle, reach out to our destination marketing experts today.

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Updated on April 2, 2024.