Travel and Adventure Marketing Strategies using Facebook
I’ve had great success using Facebook and Instagram as a part of the marketing mix for Travel and Adventure clients. Though social platforms, travel companies are able to evoke emotion, excitement, and even a sense of exclusivity. You’re able to focus on branding the business, promoting specific trips or vacations, build remarketing and email lists, and ultimately nurture new fans into happily paying customers.
I recommending using social platforms for travel and hospitality companies because they’re able to take advantage of a community and show off beautiful images and video. This gives a better sense of what a customer can expect on that Willamette Valley wine tour, or the weeklong train trip across America, or the five day bike tour through Croatia. Google and Bing search ads lack this visual sensation. Instagram, to me, is the queen of beautiful images and inspiration for brand awareness.
I want to show you an example of how to use Facebook to find new customers and nurture with a full funnel marketing plan. It starts with introducing people to a brand, promoting specific trips or vacation packages, and finally asking users to convert.
Step 1: Create a campaign to drive traffic to your homepage
The first step is to get people interested. If you can show off your brand and encourage users to explore your site, then the first step is accomplished! Create a campaign, ad set and a few ads to test using an audience.
Recommendations:
Objective: Traffic
CTA: Learn More, Read More, etc.
Budget: 25%-50%
Ad Format: Carousel, Collection, Single, Video
Audience: Email Lookalike or Interests
Step 2: Create an interest campaign with ad sets based on each trip or vacation
If you have a variety offerings, you’ll want to create an ad set dedicated to each one using a different target audience. For example, if you have a bike trip in Croatia, you could create an interest audience focused on people who are interested in biking > and Croatia > and who are frequent international travelers.
Recommendations:
Objective: Custom Conversion Checkout Initiated
Audience Recommended: Interests
Budget: 25%-50% (depending on how many vacations offered)
Ad Format: Carousel, Single, Video
Step 3: Create a remarketing campaign for users who’ve visited checkout pages, but not booked
First, create remarketing audiences in Facebook’s audience section so that you’ll have an audience to show ads too. With the two campaigns above and from organic pageviews, the remarketing lists should be sufficient. Next create a remarketing campaign with ads sets focused on each of these remarketing lists. An example of a remarketing list might be anyone who has visited the Bike Croatia page, but not converted. You can either focus on advertising to users who’ve been to checkout pages, or just on the product pages - depending on the size of the audience. Additionally, to encourage checkout, offer a discount or free gift in the ad to make your offer more enticing.
Recommendations:
Objective: Custom Conversion Bookings (thank you page)
Audience: Anyone who has been to the trip pages, or checkout pages, but not booked a trip.
Budget: 15%-25%
CTA: Book Now, Book Soon
Exclude: Brand Awareness and Interest audience so that users are not inundated with ads from each campaign.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
• When choosing a Facebook campaign objective, keep in mind that the further the objective is from your goal, the cheaper the clicks will be. For example, the campaigns that drive traffic have had an average CPC of $.30. For campaigns that focus on getting users to checkout pages, the cost is about $.67 CPC. Lastly, for my remarketing campaign that targets anyone who’d visited trip pages, the average cost per click is $1.10.
• Watch out for ad frequency. Some audiences can be very small and narrow. This means ads will appear to the same people 5, 6, 7+ times. This is overkill. I recommend showing ads no more than 3 times.