Sodexo Live! is one of the UK’s largest hospitality and live events operators, responsible for iconic brands such as Prestige Venues & Events, Bateaux London, Peyton & Byrne, and Heritage Portfolio in Scotland. While its venues carried enormous prestige, the business faced a fragmented digital presence and lacked a unified strategy to consistently generate high-quality leads.
POLARIS went through a competitive RFP process to become the brands first digital strategy partner in the UK.
Partnering with Sodexo for over five years as their digital growth partner, POLARIS led the digital marketing strategy and campaign execution across the UK. Our role extended across every aspect of marketing strategy and communications, where we worked closely with business units and functions ranging from sales teams to the UK senior leadership.
We secured organisational buy-in, upskilled internal teams, and embedded digital capability at scale. Our remit included SEO, content marketing, paid media, CRO, social campaigns, and account-based marketing, transforming Sodexo Live!’s digital presence into a core driver of commercial growth in the UK.
Sodexo, the global leader in professional services, partnered with POLARIS to increase their SEO performance for 4 of their UK business units within the sports and leisure portfolio.
POLARIS partnered with Sodexo to manage their SEO and drive performance for prestigevenuesandevents.sodexo.com, bateauxlondon.com, heritageportfolio.co.uk, and peytonandbyrne.co.uk.
Meeting Venue Demand Across the Portfolio
Sodexo needed to generate consistent enquiries across a wide and varied portfolio of venues, each with its own commercial pressures. At any given time, some venues were performing strongly while others required additional support. The challenge was to create a strategy that could not only build long-term visibility but also provide the agility to shift focus quickly and drive demand to underperforming venues as needed. This meant building an overall presence for the Sodexo brands but also for their venues within the UK portfolio regionally.
Driving Enquiries Across Different Event Types
The business also had to capture leads across a diverse mix of event types, from weddings and gala dinners to AGMs, conferences and summer parties. Each audience had different motivations, budgets and search behaviours, which meant our digital approach needed to be both broad and highly targeted. Paid campaigns were designed to flex around seasonality and short-term demand, while SEO and content provided sustained visibility across every major event category. Other challenges included:
Limited senior stakeholder buy in and a skills gap in digital marketing
A fragmented digital presence across Prestige Venues & Events, Bateaux London, Peyton & Byrne, and Heritage Portfolio meaning users could not experience the entire portfolio
Our digital growth strategy for Sodexo was designed to deliver impact at two levels: national visibility and local conversion.
At a UK-wide level, we positioned Sodexo to compete with dominant venue marketplaces, ensuring the brand ranked prominently for high-intent searches across weddings, conferences, gala dinners and other major event categories. At the same time, we deployed a granular radius-based approach that targeted audiences searching within specific geographic locations across the UK, driving qualified enquiries directly into individual venues.
This combination of broad exposure and precise local targeting gave Sodexo a model that could generate consistent demand across the entire portfolio, while allowing us to pivot quickly when commercial priorities changed. Underperforming venues could be boosted in real time, seasonal campaigns could be launched around peaks such as Christmas and summer parties, and flagship cultural moments could be maximised to grow hospitality revenues.
To extend reach further, we launched B2C social campaigns promoting hospitality at some of the UK’s most prestigious events, including Royal Ascot, Henley Royal Regatta and the Chelsea Flower Show. These campaigns built awareness, strengthened Sodexo’s brand association with the country’s cultural calendar, and drove direct bookings for high-value packages.
At the heart of the strategy was a persona matrix developed through stakeholder workshops, competitor benchmarking and third-party research.
This framework ensured that every initiative, from SEO and content through to paid media, social and account-based marketing, was audience-led, commercially aligned and designed to deliver measurable growth.
We transformed the Prestige Venues & Events website into a true growth engine. Location-specific landing pages were rolled out for London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Brighton and Liverpool, supported by new occasion hubs covering meetings, conferences, weddings, gala dinners and summer parties. More than fifteen venues were migrated from external domains, consolidating authority into one central platform. A structured internal linking model was introduced to connect occasion, location and venue pages, delivering both stronger SEO performance and a seamless customer journey.
Using the persona matrix as our blueprint, we produced and optimised more than fifty high-value landing pages. These included detailed occasion pages and keyword-rich venue profiles for flagship locations such as Bateaux London, the RAF Museum and the Scottish National Gallery. To keep the brand front of mind throughout the year, we launched always-on content campaigns like Venue of the Month and seasonal features, giving Sodexo Live! the flexibility to spotlight venues or categories that needed additional commercial focus.
Paid media was built for agility. Paid search and LinkedIn campaigns drove targeted demand for underperforming venues, while seasonal activations such as Christmas parties and summer events created spikes in enquiries during key booking periods. We also introduced B2C social campaigns for flagship events including Royal Ascot, Henley Royal Regatta and the Chelsea Flower Show, building brand association with the UK’s cultural calendar and driving high-value hospitality bookings. Alongside this, CRO audits streamlined user journeys with stronger calls to action, optimised lead forms and a redesigned blog, delivering a thirty-five percent uplift in conversions.
True transformation required cultural change. We delivered workshops with sales teams, marketers and senior leadership to demonstrate the scale of the digital opportunity and build confidence in digital as a growth driver. These sessions secured stakeholder buy-in and upskilled in-house teams, embedding a digital-first mindset that would continue to generate results long after the agency engagement.
"Polaris educated our teams and delivered campaigns that consistently drove results. They helped us build digital capability in-house while generating significant growth for Sodexo Live!."
- Theodore Rogers, Digital Marketing Manager, Sodexo
Commercial Outcome
What began as a website restructure grew into a multi-channel digital programme that generated more than £60 million in qualified pipeline value over five years. Venue enquiries tripled, digital became the number one channel for new business, and Sodexo was positioned as a credible competitor to digital first platforms in the UK venue market.
“We were the first digital partner to introduce Search marketing to Sodexo in the UK. Educating global brands on how to adopt digital is certainly a strength our partners value."Amo SokhiManaging Director
