How To Optimize Your Hotels Facebook Marketing Strategy

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Start learning how to optimize your hotel’s Facebook marketing strategy.

Does your hotel have a Facebook marketing strategy that is optimized towards driving more direct bookings?

With an optimized Facebook marketing strategy, your hotels will reduce customer acquisition costs and a higher return on ad spend (ROAS).

Increasing your hotel’s direct bookings through Facebook is done through simplified processes that collect guest information and creating tailored experience offers.

All of this is done within relevant privacy regulations.

Setting S.M.A.R.T.E.R. Facebook Goals

S – Specific – state in detail what needs to be achieved
M – Measurable – establish how progress and results will be measured
A – Attainable – set challenging goals, but achievable within budget and available resources
R – Relevant – goals have to be aligned with the process and set in a relevant context
T – Time-bound – set a reasonable deadline to focus your attention and energy
E – Exciting – set goals that excite and inspires
R – Risky – today we have to focus on goals that focus on flexibility, value innovation, and growth mindset. This is about thinking outside the box for managing and solve challenges creatively. Take a new perceptive of your hotel’s day-to-day operations
Facebook marketing is a dynamic ever-changing process. The processes we outline here will include all parts of your hotel’s Facebook umbrella.

The principles here help hotels reach their goals faster.

Brand Awareness

We bring our Facebook marketing strategies into your hotel’s digital marketing strategy.

Use your hotel’s digital funnel to build brand awareness. You have to attract new ideal customers and build a relationship with them online.

Community

The power of Facebook comes to life with an engaging community. This is done by creative growth strategies in context with value engagement.

Today hotels have to start to connect with new ideal customers and current customers.

Exclusive Hotel Social Media Community on Facebook => Join Free Today!

Share your hotels Facebook page

Share your hotel’s Facebook page in your personal feed. Collaborate with your hotel’s team members and encourage them to do the same.

It is ok to ask friends to follow or like your hotel’s Facebook page.

Invite friends to follow or like your hotels Facebook page

Facebook will let you invite friends to like or follow your hotel’s Facebook page.

Ask friends to share your hotels Facebook page in their feed

Your friends will help you with a larger reach for your hotel’s Facebook page.

It is important that you recognize them and send them a personal thank you note.

Post as your page in Facebook groups

There is an abundance of relevant Facebook groups where your hotel can share an update as your page.

I encourage your hotel to join my Facebook Group – Hotel Social Media Community and start to share some updates there.

Relationships

Facebook has several alternatives for your hotel to start building a lasting relationship with your ideal customers.

Going live with a behind-the-scenes scope of your hotel is a great way to help customers learn more about you and your team.

You can also go Live as your hotel Facebook page with a guest.

One of my favorite options is to create a live event that is announced in advance. This can be to celebrate a new unique experience offer creatively.

Amplify your reach

You already started to tap into the community to help you amplify your hotels content.

Earned content is critical for success with Facebook today.

But paid content directly from your hotel’s Facebook page will help you connect with new people and customers.

Promote Local

You can promote your hotel locally by optimizing your hotel’s Facebook page profile, advertising to the right people, and refine your campaigns.

Make sure your Facebook profiles section contains your correct address, business hours, and contact information so people can get in touch and visit your hotel.

Local advertising

Connect with people in your local area through local advertising.

We still will face a period of uncertainty, but what we know is that your hotel’s new ideal customer will come from domestic and local travel.

Increase direct bookings

Boost direct bookings by reaching a community that already is discovering new things they love.

Understand your customers

By understanding your hotel’s most engaged customer you are setting out a strategy towards reaching more customers online.

Install Facebook Pixels on your hotel’s website

Facebook pixels will allow your hotel to track important events on your website, including visits, direct bookings, and other relevant actions.

And your hotel can use Facebook pixels to deliver unique experience offer ads to the most relevant customers.

Personalized advertising

Every process of building a dedicated digital funnel for your hotel has an underlying purpose.

Our underlying purpose is to build a dedicated community for your hotel that is ready to make a direct booking from your unique experience offer ads.

We do this in context with Facebook pixels that will help your hotel understand people who have visited your website. It will also help hotels understand people who are similar to their best customers.

Optimize your advertising

Advertising on Facebook or any advertising network for that matter is an art.

We usually set up a set of ads to see what performs best. From there we start collecting data and then make small changes. Small changes in text, images, or audience can have a big impact on your result.

Your return of ad spend is impacted by an optimized path towards more direct bookings.

Set up a hotel catalog

Hotel ads are a type of dynamic ad that is optimized for people who are in the market to book a hotel property for their next trip.

You can also use your hotel ads by creating a populating catalog. A catalog will contain all the information about all the hotels you want to promote.

A catalog will be set up manually through the Facebook Commerce Manager.

– Set up a catalog
– Create/upload hotel feed
– Add hotel sets
– Associate a Facebook pixel or Mobile SDK (Software Development Kit)

Hotel reach

To reach customers at all stages of their booking and travel journey, we recommend that hotel advertisers leverage the full suite of Facebook tools below:

Traveler Goal	Tool	Placement	Objective	Creative	Optimization
Find trip inspiration	Stories, Video, Trip consideration	Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories	Video Views, Awareness, Conversion	Vertical Video <15s, Single Image, Collection	Landing Page Views, Reach, Ad Recall Lift
Plan (whether they have a destination in mind or not)	Trip consideration	Automatic placements	Website conversion	Single image, carousel, collection	Offsite Conversions*, Landing Page Views
Plan and book a room (with a destination in mind)	Hotel Ads for Prospecting	Automatic placements	Catalog Sales	Carousel, Collection	Return on Ad Spend, Offsite Conversions*
Book a room (from your site visitors)	Hotel Ads for Retargeting	Automatic placements	Catalog Sales	Carousel or Collection	Return on Ad Spend, Offsite Conversions*
Book a room from a sale/promotion	Trip consideration	Automatic placements	Website conversions	Carousel, Collection, Vertical Video <15s	Return on Ad Spend, Offsite Conversions*
Install a hotel app	Trip consideration	Automatic placements	App Installs	Vertical Video <15s	App Installs*
Discover ancillaries, amenities	Hotel Ads for Retargeting	Upsells and ancillaries for hotel and travel ads
Engage post-booking	Messenger	Streamline your hotel’s Messenger customer service.

Customer acquisition

Make it simple and easy for customers to inquire about your hotel’s experience offers.

Lead ads campaigns for customer acquisition

You can use lead ads to:
• Identify new ideal customers for your hotel
• Understand the interests and behaviors of the new ideal customers
• Get people to enroll in your hotel’s loyalty program
Lead advertising campaigns are created via Facebook Ads Manager.

When running a lead ads campaign on Facebook for your hotel, prioritize video ads over images. A recent Facebook Ads Experiment by Biteable found that video ads generate 25% more views, 480% more clicks, and 270% more leads than photo ads. Compared to text on a screen, videos catch the eye and engage viewers. On top of that, they deliver information a whole lot faster than reading text, meaning you can get your point across to viewers in seconds

Get to know your new ideal customers

Our overall purpose is to create customer acquisition campaigns that generate more direct booking for your hotel.

But we also want data from the campaigns to help us better understand what motivates our audience.

Refine and optimize your hotel customer acquisition campaign

As we are learning from our campaigns, we can now look at what data can be refined and optimized.

This can be data related to location, demographics, or questions asked on your lead form.

Retargeting for the win

With all the data we now have collected we can start to create retargeting campaigns that will help your hotel reach new ideal customers.

People that are ready to take action

We want to use Facebook to follow up on customers that are ready to take action with your hotel.

The purpose of Facebook pixels and Mobile SDK (Software Development Kit) is to help your hotel dedicate hyper-targeted campaigns towards customers who are already interacting with your hotel online.

Creating a custom audience

Custom audiences are what helps your hotels create unique experience offers towards customers who are already interacting with your hotel online.

Understand the customer journey

With a unique digital marketing funnel and process, you now will have data that allows your hotel to meet customers where they are in their journey.

This will allow you to restart a conversation with sponsored messages to customers who already engaged with your hotel.

Test and measure data

We don’t want to leave our processes to luck.

We are using Facebook measurement and other relevant tools for reputation management. This will help your hotel understand which types of ads are getting the most engagement.

And we to ensure that hotel owners and decision-makers have a good understanding of the return of ads spend (ROAS).

Facebook Marketing for Hotels [Infographic]

Credit: The Europe Hotel and Resorts, Mari Smith

Conclusion

You can optimize your hotel’s Facebook marketing strategy in context with the digital marketing funnel and a process that support your goal.

If your hotel needs assistance to reach your Facebook goals, then contact me.

We are in this together!

I need to let you all know that we are in on this together. If you need to vent, talk, cry, or just have some to talk with then I am here listening. Since I am working part-time at the local Kroger, I will to the best of my ability to work it out around my schedule.

But you can reach me here:

Email: hotelblogger@aremorch.com

LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn Page

Also, join us at our Facebook Group – Hotel Social Media Community

We will get through this unprecedented event together! #hotelstrong #hospitalitystrong

For any specific information on COVID-19, I recommend go to CDC, WHO, AHLA, AAHOA, and HSMAI. Also, follow information from your local authorities.

NOTE

We are starting to reopen some hotels again (Yay!!!). Make sure you follow their guidelines and say THANK YOU to those that now show a unique spirit to serve, and helps us all get through this!! #hotelstrong #hospitalitystrong

About Are Morch

Hi, I am Are Morch. Your Digital Marketing Coach and Customer Experience Expert specializes in creating effective digital customer experience offer for hotels while growing and scale customer acquisition and revenue.