We are excited to share our E-Book, 6 Big Travel Trends for 2023. It's filled with insights on the current state of the hospitality industry and where it's headed in the future.
With this knowledge, you can make the most informed decisions and have an advantage in the ever-evolving hospitality industry.
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!
By now, many of you have heard us talk about Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This new analytics update is part of a series of steps that will bridge the divide between database driven analytics and privacy concerns. The GCommerce team has been implementing GA4 for our clients over the past year and now Google has officially announced that the existing Google Universal technology will no longer receive new data as of July 2023, the clock is truly ticking.
Facebook is not just a social site to connect with friends and family, it is now a platform used by many businesses to promote their products and services. Facebook Ads have proven to be one of the most effective ways to promote your business and get your CTA to the appropriate consumer. But, are you creating content for this platform that will be successful?
The new year is already upon us and we know exactly what’s on your mind: how in the world can I continue improving my hotel’s digital advertising efforts in 2020?
Okay, so maybe that’s not exactly what you were thinking, but hey, if you’re a digital marketer who wants to keep up with the ever-changing landscape of social media marketing, then you should be.
When it comes to improving social advertising for hotels, there are dozens of tips and tricks that you can employ, but how do you know which ones are even worth testing? Luckily, you’ve come to the right place. Our expert hotel marketing team spent a lot of time testing new strategies and techniques in 2019, thus giving you a shortlist of six easy ways to improve your hotel’s social media advertising!
I know, I’m hitting you with a harsh one right out of the gate, but unfortunately, that’s the reality of paid advertising. However, we aren’t saying that only to sound like money-spending marketers; there are actually two very good reasons.
That’s right, the hotel digital advertising landscape is still all about video and we definitely don’t see that changing in 2020. If you want to improve your hotel’s social advertising performance in the new year, you absolutely need to be running video ads. The fact of the matter is that if you aren’t running video yet, you’re behind. Before you start panicking, check out one of our previous blogs detailing video advertising and how you can easily get started.
If you already run video, that’s great! In our findings alone we’ve seen click-through rates increase by 133% and other reports have found that video advertisements have helped grow revenue up to 49% faster than static ads.
While video advertising for hotels is great on many levels, it also comes with expensive overhead costs that many smaller boutique hotels simply cannot afford. Luckily, you don’t need a production crew or casting agency to create simple videos on your own.
Earlier this year Facebook rolled out new image-to-video templates that allow hotel marketers to create their own “video” ads by piecing together images, text, animations and more! These easy-to-use templates allow budget-conscious marketers to reap the benefits of video without blowing through their entire yearly budget. The best part is that these image-to-video ads can run with the same amount of budget as static ads and receive higher engagement rates.
While video advertising is the preferred method of jazzing up your hotel’s social media ad practice, there are also other ways to make images more interesting. Recently at GCommerce, we’ve been doing a lot of testing with self-made .gif ads right from our smartphones. Using apps like Enlight Pixaloop and kirakira+ we are able to add dimension to our static images that operate like .gifs and provide us more leverage in the marketplace.
Simple examples include adding moving clouds and snowfall with Enlight Pixaloop or making the night sky sparkle with kirakira+. All you need to do is follow a few Gen-Zers on social media to quickly see that plain images are being replaced by images layered with colorful graphics, textures, animations and more.
This might seem like a no-brainer, but when’s the last time you audited your audiences on Facebook? While your base audience may remain steady over the years, your segments should also be changing and evolving as the platform rolls out more targeting options. Spread your budget out and get more granular with your hotel’s targets by pushing out more customized ads. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
The list could go on forever, but I think you get the point. It’s not enough to mass-canvas Facebook’s marketplace with the same ads to everyone. After all, wouldn’t you respond more favorably to an ad that seems curated to your interests?
A couple of months ago, Facebook began rolling out another feature in ad creation allowing marketers to create multiple variations of text, headlines, and descriptions within one ad. Creating these variations allows Facebook to use the machine learning we discussed earlier to serve the best variation combination to each user based on their past history with your ads and on Facebook in general. Although this feature is relatively new, we expect this additional opportunity for ad customization to result in an uptick of click-throughs and conversions.
I’m just going to give it to you straight: your Facebook ad copy absolutely must be mobile-friendly. Don’t believe me? In 2019, 94% of Facebook’s revenue came from mobile. In case you need some more perspective, that number grew by 91% from Q2 2018.
We aren’t saying desktop is dead for Facebook advertising, but we do need to start acting like it is. This means that when you create your ad previews in the Facebook Ad Manager, you need to be looking in the mobile view, which only allows up to 3 “mobile lines” of text. The sooner we start writing copy that appears flawlessly on mobile screens the better.
The time is now to start improving your hotel’s social advertising for 2020! Reach out to us at GCommerce today to get started.
