Most Facebook Ads for luxury hotels have one of two main strategies: to target luxury users in any geography to book at your hotel, or to target specific local users with a staycation.
Facebook ads for hotels give you multiple ways of showing your luxury hotel to users in your target audience directly, instead of through the lottery of organic Google results.
However, there is a significant level of complexity to both the platform itself and the way that potential buyers engage with ads at different stages of the buying journey.
It is unlikely that a prospect will convert to a purchase after seeing one ad - that is what puts off many companies who use Facebook ads.
However with a better understanding of the platform, buyer behaviour and the multiple touchpoints required, you will start to dramatically increase your return on investment (ROI).
Why should I run Facebook ads for my hotel?
- Integration with other platforms - as well as Facebook itself you have options on What’s App, Messenger and Instagram.
- The sheer size of your audience on these platforms. You can reach 2.5 billion people on Facebook and 1 billion people on Instagram.
- You can use their sales funnel to bring customers on a journey from not knowing your brand, through to a purchase and becoming an advocate.
- Sophisticated targeting options which are not available on any other marketing platform.
- You can use so many different ad formats - video, images and text.
- Advanced performance tracking options quickly tell you whether you are spending your budget wisely.
Facebook ads can be adjusted for different types of audience:
1. Awareness stage
The sales funnel starts with people who don’t know anything about your hotel. This awareness stage is about people:
- Who don’t know anything about your property.
- Who have never been on your hotel website.
- Who have never engaged with your social media content.
- What do you need to do in this stage?
Create brand awareness by bringing traffic to your website and increasing your social media engagement.
Avoid a sales pitch at this point and promote actions which don’t require a commitment e.g. watch a video or read a blog.
2. Consideration stage
This stage is about users who are now aware of your brand e.g. they might have been on your website or who liked your social media content. They may have liked your Facebook or Instagram pages or viewed your videos.
What is the aim here?
To create a custom audience of prospects who have engaged with your content and turn them into leads.
Your objectives here are to drive traffic to a landing page, increase engagement by signing up prospects to a mailing list or maybe even drive conversions.
Special offers and deals work well in this stage e.g. sign up to our newsletter and receive a €10 voucher.
3. Intent stage
Here you have people who are aware of your brand and also started to engage with your content.
They may even have been on your website and started to make a booking but didn’t complete it. At this stage you want to be showing your ads to people who have engaged with your ads in the previous stages, been on your website for certain length or already visited a special offer page.
This audience show the most likely intent of booking at your property. Accordingly, they are ideal to retarget with campaigns which are optimised to give the greatest chance of success in completing their reservation.
Facebook campaign goals provide a lot of options:
- At the awareness stage, you can optimise for audience reach, people messaging you or video views or – the best option - bringing traffic to the website and engaging people with your social media content.
- In the other 2 stages, you are looking to generate sales interest and then optimise your campaigns for conversions i.e. a direct booking at your hotel.
Facebook awareness options:
At this stage it is very important to know who you are going to target?
To answer this question, you need to have a look at your metrics and data that you already have:
- What are your top performing markets?
- Which audience book online?
- Who are the people that are likely to book on your website?
Based on this data you can select your top 5 best performing markets (ones that engage & convert) and you can target those people.
Facebook targeting options:
- Location. You can target people based on cities, countries, and continents.
- Demographics. You can target guests by age or gender.
- Language.
- Interest and behaviour. Which is something that no other platform offers.
For instance, you might target frequent international travellers.
This means, you can send your ads to people who are travelling often and are more likely to book your hotel.
Facebook helps you to reach potential travellers as it knows which people are currently planning to travel.
You can turn this setting on which means your ad will be shown to the appropriate segment of your audience.
What is a Facebook lookalike audience?
If you make available the emails of all your past guests to Facebook, it will find other potential guests who are on Facebook based on your list.
This gives you a unique opportunity to reach people who are very similar to your guests.
Facebook already knows their behaviour online and this helps you to optimise your budget as you will be reaching people who are the most likely to book at your hotel.
You can create lookalike audiences based on the users who have been on your website, people who engage with your social media, or based on the email list that you have of your previous guests.
You can test all these 3 audiences and find out which one is going to bring the best results for you.
Facebook remarketing:
A potential guest goes to your website, or likes, comments or shares one of your social media posts.
Then they leave your website, or they leave Facebook or Instagram. when they do come back and see your ad again, it will encourage them to go back and complete their action.
This a convenient process to convince the previous users to comeback to your website, to remind them to complete the booking that they might have started but never finished.
It also displays targeted ads for those potential guests who have already taken some kind of action on your website.
To do remarketing on Facebook, you need the Facebook pixel.
This is a piece of code that you place on your website and it allows you to track actions that guests make on your website and to remarket to all of these users.
Facebook custom audiences:
You can remarket to anyone who has been on your website, guests who have been on specific pages of your website or users who have spent a certain amount of time on your website.
This feature allows you to personalise your ads and increase your conversion rates.
For example, if someone is looking for your early bird offer, you can target them and show them just your early bird offer and not show them other offers.
Facebook pixel allows you to create the so-called custom audiences.
This means you can find anyone who has engaged with your posts, ads, viewed your video or has sent a message to your page. You will get detailed information on the people that you wish to target online.
Facebook ad formats:
- Carousel. This contains up to 7 or more images with a short text snippet. This is a great format to display all of your room types, multiple images of your spa, your front lobby or any of the other best-selling points in your hotel.
- Single image. You can create up to 6 ads with one image each at no extra charge.
- Single video. You can create an ad with one video.
- Slideshow. You can create a looping video with up to 10 images.
- Collection. It features a collection of items that open into a full screen mobile experience and is only available on mobile devices.