Waiting, passively, for potential customers to land on your hotel website so that they can see what you have to offer, but knowing that it may already be too late for you to make a difference because you’re competing with dozens of other hotels in your area?
Or actively going out in search of customers, showing up in front of travellers WAY before your competitors, thus raising your chances to be chosen.
And so in today’s video we’re going to see 5 ways through which you can find new potential customers for your hotel, building up advanced audiences either in Google or Facebook, or both that you can make use of at will.
Let’s get started
Birthdays
First, we should always tap into the real reasons as to why people travel.
And secondly, tapping into the reasons as to why people should say at our hotel.
And what if you find no reasons? Make them.
Can one’s birthday celebration become a reason to travel? Of course, thus it becomes a reason for us, hoteliers, to generate some hotel revenue and extra revenue.
Facebook is definitely the go-to channel as the level of detailed targeting you can reach with it, is nowhere else to be found.
You can easily target people who have an upcoming birthday in 7 days, or 30 days. Even better, you can target FRIENDS of people with upcoming birthdays in 7 or 30 days, and show up in front of them as if you, your hotel and your services as the perfect birthday gift.
Or again, you can target people with specific birthday milestones, like 18years, 30, 40 50. The choice is up to you and many other factors like how much budget you have, how big this audience is, and so forth.
Potentially, you can also use Facebook hidden interests to reach out to targets who are not necessarily included in the suggested option provided by Facebook, and see if you can find targets with clear intention that you can tap into.
Anniversaries
Very similar to birthdays: can a specific anniversary milestone become a reason for travelling?
Wedding anniversary or any other relationship-anniversary, you can target all these people in a matter of a couple of clicks.
Potentially with audiences like Anniversaries and Birthdays you can start targeting people in your own area, proximity travellers, who maybe don’t have to go overseas to celebrate a friend’s or a relative’s anniversary.
Now, as said, reaching out to these audiences is relatively easy.
But the point is, it makes absolutely no sense to go out and reach them out by showing them super boring and yawning offer like “Book Now and get 10% off”, or “Early Booking Deal”, or “Book Direct with X% Off”.
If so, believe me, don’t even try, spare yourself some wasted time, energy and resources.
Specific targets = specific offers.
What can you offer to people celebrating a birthday or anniversary? Seriously, what’s your catch?
Or turn it the other way around, by seeing this with the eyes of your target: what can they get from you, so that when they see what you have, they say “oh, this is an interesting idea”.
Again, if you’re lazy, then be fully lazy, And don’t even start with such thing.
But hopefully, if you’ve made it to this point of this video, fortunately you’re not lazy. So let’s continue.
Passers-by
Let me tell you a little story. During the last Christmas holidays I spent some time travelling with my mom after almost 2 years without seeing each other.
But of course, considering the situation with the pandemic and the ever evolving situation re travel restrictions, we simply couldn’t plan properly. It was literally day-by-day planning.
And so, one morning, we just left and drove all the way south in Italy, with a very rough idea of where we wanted to go, but with no specific place as to where we would have ended up to, that very night.
Restrictions, our mood, the traffic… we said, let’s go and when we want, we stop, we look around and see where we can find a place for the night. Long story short, we booked a hotel 30 minutes before walking in, in a beautiful place in the south of Italy.
So, why this story? Because for that place, for that hotel, we were passers-by and in Facebook you can target passers-by
People who are travelling in your city or town but not living there.
In my example, if another hotel in the city I ended up to would have reached out to me with such targeting maybe with a very specific last minute deal, or maybe even highlighting the fact that they had a secure parking slot which was one of my main decision factor in that moment, maybe I would have booked there rather than the hotel I finally chose.
Now let’s get into some even more interesting targeting option that FB has made available specifically for the travel industry.
Next targeting option: Drum roll…
People planning a trip (Fb Travel Ads & Google Discovery)
How easy. I mean, that’s ultimately the target every single hotel in the world is after, right?
But let’s dig in, what does that really mean? And how can we detect people’s travel intentions?
Now, a classic travel intention is Google’s query: hotel + location (hotel Bergamo, hotel Chiang mai, hotel New York, hotel wherever… ) but bidding on such keywords in the Search network of Google may be quite expensive, also because competing with the OTAs on one of their main battle fields.
So here are 2 options, 2 alternatives that represent to me a softer way to exploit travel intentions at way lower costs.
Google Custom Segments.
If you work with Google Ads, you can run either some Display campaigns or Discovery campaigns, by targeting people who visited certain websites, for example travel websites of your specific town or region.
Now, I know there are tools and service providers that promise to be able to do the same thing, which is fine, but nowadays you can do something similar by yourself, simply using what both Google and Facebook provide you with.
Google’s Custom Segments is one of these options.
Opposite to Search campaigns, Display and ultimately also Discovery are push-type campaigns that are more similar to Facebook’s way of doing advertising.
I’m not a huge fan of Display campaigns, but I’ve become a huge fan of Discovery campaigns and I’ve got incredibly good results with Discovery using Custom Segments, especially when used on a high stage of the funnel.
This is not a video about Discovery campaigns, I’ll be shooting one soon, probably, guiding you through all the benefits of this relatively new campaign type option.
Facebook Travel Ads.
FTA formerly known as Facebook Dynamic Ads for Travel essentially does the same: it helps travel advertisers reach out to people planning a trip.
Point being, hardly anyone in the Hotel Industry works with Facebook Travel Ads. And this is by itself a valid reason to be on it, because if no other hotels use them, well, less competition and higher chances for your hotel to reach out to new customers.
People visiting your competitors sites
5th and last advanced audience.
In the context of Google ads, it’s always been tricky trying to show up with an ad in front of people searching for a competitors’ name.
This is typically what the OTAs do, day in and day out, they likely bid on google for any query that includes the term “hotel”
But as opposed to the OTAs who can use any hotel name even in the copy of their ads, meaning the headlines, descriptions and even in the URLs, if you are a hotel manager and want to get some competitors’ traffic, all you can do is use competitors’ names as keywords, but NOT in copy.
In the context of Google Search Ads, a lack of matching between keywords, headlines and descriptions of your ads and texts in your landing page, means only one thing: lower Quality Score.
And if QS drops, your AdRank drops. And if you AR drops, it means:
Lower CTR (click-through rate)
Higher cost per clicks
Lower of number of impressions
Higher cost per conversion
Before we talked about custom segments in an attempt to target people visiting certain type of websites.
You can do the exact same thing by instructing Google to go after people visiting websites that are similar to your competitor’s.
To be crystal clear, this Google’s custom segment option is NOT a retargeting feature on 3rd-party websites, however it’s a precise indication you’re giving to Google to create an audience of people who are likely interested in services that you may offer too.
And that’s just another way of creating new opportunities, new business, new revenue.
Conclusions
As said, mind giving something of value.
Advertising doesn’t solve problems that remain unsolved organically.
What doesn’t work organically, doesn’t work at all. So make sure to work first and foremost on your value proposition. And then use advertising to amplify your reach.
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Watch it on Youtube.
