Now, promote your hotel through Facebook dynamic ads

If you think social media today is just about socialising, you can’t be more wrong. It has become a boon for businesses of all shapes, sizes to sell more. As your customer evolves in this fast-changing world, guest targeting will ensure that generic banner ads and other forms of display advertising are often ignored, blocked, or replaced by them.

One of the most consumed social media platforms Facebook has over 3 million businesses actively advertising on the platform. If used correctly the medium has the potential to serve almost all major marketing needs of the hospitality industry. With 1.28 billion monthly daily active users, it has become a distinctive platform for hotels to engage with visitors, and influence their decision-making at different stages. So what’s new on the block for marketers in the hotel businesses?

New recommendation tool: Last year Facebook had launched a new “Recommendations” tool to help users look for new experiences, things to do, events, and services based on suggestions from their friends. It can be optimised as a tool for your hotel bookings. Going beyond this Facebook has also announced the soft launch of a trip planning tool within the Facebook app, called City Guides. The app can be used to discover hotels, restaurants, activities and tours in various cities based on recommendations from friends. It doubles up as a planning tool with a “Book Now” button, which is at present being explored by a limited number of restaurants and hotels. But other hotels, restaurants, attractions and tours can all be messaged or called directly through the app.

How to optimise dynamic ads for hotel?

According to a Facebook-commissioned research that I studied, during an average planning period for travel, users spent five times longer on Facebook rather than on travel-related apps, sites and searches. Taking benefit of its insights, Facebook’s industry-specific ad platform, ‘Dynamic Ads for Travel’ also provides significant opportunity to hotels to engage guests with relevant content during the travel research period. Facebook’s own statistics show that consumers make 56 visits to travel-related digital touch points across devices.

This tool helps hoteliers to instantly retarget guests who have evinced interest in their website or mobile app. For example, if a visitor checks a hotel website but doesn’t end up booking, they can be retargeted with a tailored ad that features the exact date they looked along with relevant trip details. This means you can add dynamic elements to your ad creative with relevant information to automatically populate your ad. If a visitor has booked a flight recently, then you can make use of a dynamic ad for a hotel cross-sell opportunity. Now, if the visitor clicks on the “Book Now” call to action, then information about their destination, check-in and check-out dates can be dynamically populated on the landing page they’re directed to. This further brings down the effort to re-enter travel information, while speeding up the time to convert.

The dynamic ad helps you target visitors with high travel intent history – guests traveling alone, in groups or with kids, those who searched for or booked flights recently, but haven’t booked hotels, or high value audiences such as loyalty members. You can also give upgrades or other ancillary experiences to guests who have already booked a flight or hotel. Not just this, you can get more hotel bookings by letting people know about your current availability and by advertising the property and rooms.

Show ads across all ad placements

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) switched to Facebook’s specialized dynamic ads for travel from regular dynamic ads, resulting in a 20% lower cost per booking. Dynamic adverts let you automatically puts advert on Facebook & Instagram to people who have previously shown any interest in visiting your website or mobile app. To tap into the medium’s potential when creating dynamic ads, make sure you select every available ad placement because it allows Facebook’s delivery system to allocate ads budget based on performance across the placements.

Facebook is already an important part of the digital marketing mix for hotels, and I expect that to grow further. As it offers more advanced options, count on me to present you with the latest tips through my blogs and YouTube episodes!

For more titbits of advice, do watch the #AskAviArya show. Here’s the link of my latest episode – http://bit.ly/2tOZ2hX

Cheers!