How A Full Marketing Funnel Helps Boost Your Facebook Ads

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Have you ever wondered how both a prospecting and retargeting campaign can help move your potential customers through the funnel and eventually lead to conversions? Keep reading to learn how we use this in our Facebook ads and the results we have seen.

The marketing funnel starts at the top with awareness. Awareness campaigns help educate your audience on your hotel, product, or anything else unique about your company that will help you stand out from the crowd. Usually this can include amenities, activities, or experiences you offer at your hotel that will make it enticing for the next person to learn and eventually book with you. In awareness campaigns we utilize lookalike audiences which is a segmentation tool that finds people whose demographics and interests are similar to your current followers. We also use Adara audiences that have specific audiences that we can target based on their interests, hotel experiences, location, travel, and more. There is also detailed targeting and location targeting that helps us get the best results with our ads.

Then we go into consideration. Consideration can include ads or Facebook posts. You can go into more detail about your hotel, product, or service that will make your potential customer consider buying from you. 

Next, we try to convert our audience through Facebook ads. This is how we move people through the funnel to eventually booking with us. This would be in a retargeting campaign where we try to attract that user who showed interest and target them and remind them about us. In retargeting, we promote ourselves and usually offer some kind of incentive such as an offer, deal, or discount code to bring them in to eventually converting. When it comes to targeting we utilize website visitors, social media engagement, or customer lists to remarket to potential customers.

Lastly, we have engaging your audience on Facebook ads. This could involve customers interacting with your ads and leaving positive feedback about their experience with you or this could also include boosted posts on Facebook to get more engagement and interest in what you are promoting or offering. 

Below we will show some data from our hotels’ Facebook ads campaigns that use this full funnel approach and how it helps them move potential customers through the funnel and to eventually convert. The data is shown from the whole month of July. 

Hotel A received 44,036 impressions, 519 outbound clicks, and a 7.16% CTR. 

Then for retargeting we saw 169 clicks, 11.58x ROAS, and 12 conversions.

Then we move onto Hotel B that also uses this funnel approach. 

In this prospecting campaign we got 103,303 impressions, 3,943 outbound clicks, and an 8.58% CTR.

In retargeting we got 212 outbound clicks, 74.54x ROAS, and 19 conversions. 

How were both of these hotels so successful in their Facebook ads campaigns? First, they had their prospecting campaign. This campaign included details about the hotel, experiences, and special features. Then they had the retargeting campaign that features special events, promotions, or limited time offers to hook in their customer in booking with them. Then to keep engagement with past, present, and future customers they post regularly on their social media and utilize boosted posts that promote an offer or something that is exclusive to either educate their audience or remind them to book with them.

The marketing funnel approach works to move people through the funnel to converting with your hotel, product, or service you are offering. Make sure you stand out from the crowd and show off images of your property, special features, amenities, and exclusive offers. Is there a deal you are offering that you don’t want people to miss? Promote the deal, but also focus on the experience that someone can have at your hotel. What does it feel like to stay there? What experiences, adventures, or activities near your hotel are there for your guests? 

Hopefully this has provided a better understanding of the marketing funnel and how to best use it for successful hotel Facebook ad campaigns. Contact us today to get started on your hotel’s Facebook advertising strategy!

How to Increase Your Hotel’s Midweek Stays with Facebook Advertising

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Does your hotel or property suffer from high o accupancy on the weekends but low demand during the week? Maybe this only happens during specific seasons or months, but whatever the cause, you are not alone! In fact, many hoteliers find themselves stuck in the rut of minimal midweek stays. While there are many different approaches to alleviating this issue, we’re going to focus on how you can increase midweek stays through Facebook advertising for hotels. Not only is Facebook easy to use, but it’s also cost-effective because you can run campaigns for only a few dollars per day and enjoy lower CPCs and higher engagement than other ad platforms.

Take a look below for a few tips and tricks when it comes to advertising midweek campaigns for hotels on Facebook.

It All Starts with A Facebook Audience

Exact Match Facebook Audience

The first step to creating any Facebook advertising campaign is to create your audience. While you could continue focusing on the audiences you use for your hotel's regular Facebook campaigns, a more focused approach might prove better in the long run. After all, if those same Facebook audiences were good enough for your hotel's midweek campaigns, they’d already be converting that way.

Instead, we suggest creating an exact match list on Facebook of customers who have stayed midweek at your hotel in the past. Whether you want to target all midweek guests within the past two years or by season, using this targeted approach will be a great starting point for getting your message in front of the right audience on Facebook.

An example of this concept could be uploading a list for everyone who stayed at your hotel midweek last summer and targeting them with a summer midweek promotion.

Lookalike Facebook Audience List

Once you have your exact match Facebook audience created, you can take it to the next level and make a lookalike Facebook audience based on that list. By creating a lookalike audience, you’ll be able to target a fresh pool of potential hotel guests who are similar to those on your hotel's exact match list. This also allows your booking funnel to be continually refreshed and lessens the likelihood that your retargeting list gets stale.

Once you’ve got your new adset loaded with this lookalike audience, dial it down further by utilizing interests, behaviors, and demographics. Is your midweek hotel guest a parent? Married? Do they have a certain education level or work in a particular industry? Maybe they are frequent travelers or have interest in your metro area and its big attractions. Whatever your midweek persona is, using detailed targeting helps narrow your audience even further to ensure your impressions and clicks are more qualified than a general audience.

At GCommerce, we like to target business travelers in particular for these campaigns, as they are typically an audience that stays midweek. How do you target business travelers for your hotel? You could start by filtering through demographic targeting such as specific industries, employers, and even job titles. From there you can dive more into behaviors, such as frequent travelers and frequent international travelers and then narrow it further by interests that business travelers might have.

Creating Midweek Ads For Your Hotel

Your hotel's midweek Facebook audiences are set up and ready to run, great! But now comes the part of actually drawing them in and getting that click-through to the website. When your hotel is struggling with midweek occupancy, running a midweek offer or promotion is a great way to encourage bookings. However, a midweek offer doesn’t always have to be a percentage off or a free night. 

Here are a few of our favorite “offers” for increasing midweek stays:

  • Stay Longer, Save More – give 10% off for booking three-plus nights
  • Complimentary Midweek Happy Hours – provide a free drink or a glass of wine in the lobby or bar after 5 PM during the week (this is great for business travelers!)
  • Free Breakfast – complimentary breakfast for midweek stays (again, great for business travel)
  • Book 3 Nights, Get 1 Free – this is a great way to extend your hotel's midweek audience
  • Free Upgrades During Midweek – why not offer to upgrade that standard hotel room to a deluxe, or deluxe hotel rooms to suites (based on availability)?
  • Host Meetings and Events – offer up meeting and event packages or free stays for hosting at your property
  • Rewards Program – if you don’t already have a rewards program in place, offering rewards for midweek stays is another great ploy for both frequent and business travelers

Alternatively, though not technically an offer, hosting midweek events and activities such as live music or other performances is also a great draw to use in your hotel's Facebook ads.

Use Creative Messaging That Speaks to Your Audience

So now we’ve got our Facebook midweek audience and formulated an offer; the next step is to tie everything together through creative messaging. Your hotel's Facebook ad messaging should align with your audience and offer, but should also be fun and eye-catching.

Below we came up with a few examples that could tug on potential guests’ heartstrings:

  •  Are you trying to get your weekend guests to book an additional day?
    • Play hooky
    • Extend your weekend getaway
    • Stay longer and get an additional night on us
  • Are you targeting people to visit during off-season?
    • Avoid the crowds
    • Save more when you travel during non-peak months
  • Are you targeting corporate travel?
    • Travel for work doesn’t need to be boring!
    • Long day at the office? Get everything you need right here!

Now that you’ve got the tools for success, it’s time to start strategizing and getting your hotel's own midweek Facebook campaigns into place. Facebook might be a small and relatively easy way to start boosting your midweek activity, but in the long run, it can prove to be extremely effective when it comes to engaging your past customers and improving your hotel's current marketing audience lists.

Tropicana Inn & Suites' New Website Increases Conversion Rate and Revenue

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Have you ever wondered just how important a website is to a business?

GCommerce launched a beautiful new website for Tropicana Inn & Suites in Anaheim, CA in October 2017. A deep focus on branding, user experience and design with a focus on conversion rate optimization had a dramatic impact on the hotel’s digital presence and bottom line.

Functionality plays a huge part in the overall user experience and performance for any website. The creative and design team at GCommerce Solutions understands this and makes sure to implement hospitality specific best practices to all of our website builds and designs.

In the case of Tropicana Inn & Suites, it was a Design Ready Architecture (DRA) build that was put together with their new branding and content initiatives. The Tropicana specific DRA that was used took into consideration keeping a user on the website and giving them all the information needed right at their fingertips.

The most important factors considered for Tropicana’s layout & design was:

  • Having a testimonial section right on the website.
    • This keeps a user on the page and provides transparency; keeping them from having to search for another website’s reviews helping to ultimately keep the user on the property’s website.
    • This shows success in the 6% increase in average session duration since the launch of the new website.
  • Highlighting the most visited pages right on the homepage to help keep the user engaged and easy navigation to find the information they require.
  • High quality and professional photography. Per Hospitality Net, after price, photography is the most important factor for travelers and prospects.

LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT THE ACTUAL NUMBERS AND HOW THE NEW WEBSITE HAS IMPACTED DIFFERENT MARKETING CHANNELS

The following results were found after comparing data from the old website vs. the new website post launch.

OVERALL WEBSITE PERFORMANCE

Overall website Performance

Lets delve deeper and review how the new website helped the individual digital marketing efforts.

PAID SEARCH ADVERTISING

Paid Search

FACEBOOK ADVERTISING

Facebook Advertisement

Well designed with user experience and conversion rate best practices in mind, a new website can make a dramatic difference in your hotel’s performance and bottom line. Your website is your online storefront, You want it to be welcoming and portray a true representation of the property’s experience. The user experience should be easy to navigate and help lead your user through the booking funnel. Such as the snap navigation and booking widget used for Tropicana Inn & Suites that affixes to the top of the browser and follows the user down the page. You want the user to be able to navigate your site from anywhere and allow them to book their room from any point of their journey.

GCommerce Solutions would be happy to help with your new website. You can submit a request for more information here or give us a call at 435-214-5301.

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