While Instagram is the future of travel promotions, Facebook still reigns in the present. Its audience targeting features are unmatched, and until other platforms can offer the same features, Facebook will be the biggest marketing puzzle. It is necessary for any marketing campaign – online or offline – and most hoteliers have figured this out by now (I hope).
Being in the industry for so many years now, I have explored hundreds of targeting options and their combinationsto drive prospective guests’ attention towards the hotel and bring them true value. I’ll share my 3 most favourite tools to target the relevant audience in this blog. Read on!
LOCATE opportunities
You can target people in your location on the basis of 4 characteristics. For example, if you want to target people in Mumbai, these are your options –
- Everyone in the selected location, for e.g. People who live in Mumbai or it’s their latest location.
- Only people who live in Mumbai.
- People who have recently been in Mumbai.
- A person travelling to Mumbai – their most recent location being Mumbai but their home is hundreds of kilometres away.
The last one is truly fascinating for me. I can combine it with interest targets such as road trips and adventure trips. Next, I can target them with amazing hotel deals near their location. This will bring value to them, and guests to you.
Not just geo-location, you can also target people who are currently travelling through behavioural targeting. They are identified through actions in Facebook such as check-ins and engagement on certain posts, etc. This opens up a world of opportunities for you to target people who are residents of a particular area, but are travelling somewhere in the world at this moment. Grab these opportunities with both hands.
Celebrate meaningful LIFE EVENTS
This is where Facebook proves to be awesomely insightful. Imagine you change your status to “In a relationship�? and start seeing ads for a week-long getaway in Paris. Or you land a new job, and receive promotional offers at the nearby restaurant.
If your hotel has a store, target the audience which have upcoming birthdays so that they can tag their friends and better halves as a hint of what to get them for their birthdays. The possibilities are endless!
It was also a creative move by Facebook to allow targeting of friends of people who are approaching a specific life event.
Your next guest looks like the current one – LOOKALIKE AUDIENCE
People just like your guests are waiting to hear from you! You can find and connect with Facebook audiences who are similar to your guests with Facebook Lookalike Audiences. The platform looks at the profile data in your custom audience and creates a new list of users with similar interests and demographics.
It empowers you to use customer information from website and phone app visitors, people who like your page or people in your custom audience. It is created automatically from the sources you upload or connect on Facebook.
I’m really impressed with the way it helps you to effectively connect with people who are more likely to respond to your promotions.
Success story–In May last year, Goibibo ran an ad to increase its app installations. The ad format was “mobile app install�?, and ran simultaneously on Facebook and Instagram. Apart from targeting to 18-45 year olds with an interest in travel, it used website custom audience to retarget ads to people who had already visited their website. Other than this, Goibibo used Lookalike Audiences to find people who resembled those already using the app.
Using these targeting methods, it was able to reach the people who were most likely to become paying customers. As a result, it witnessed an amazing 20x increase in signups, and 15.7x increase in installs.
You too can achieve high growth rates, that too with one month of implementing these targeting methods. With so many different ad formats out there, and ad targets on top of that, I knowit can be hard to decide where to start. But Facebook is a goldmine of data, so don’t be sluggish – hunt for the treasure NOW.
These were just 3 of my favourite targeting tools. For more titbits of advice, do watch the #AskAviArya show. Here’s the link of my latest episode – https://goo.gl/SU8g2S
Cheers!