Should I advertise on Facebook?
Facebook’s advertising platform allows you to run highly-targeted ad campaigns across both Facebook and Instagram, normally at a much lower cost to running ads on Google. Whether you should use this medium for your hotel largely depends on the objective, your budget and the type of services you want to promote.
A few years ago, when we first learned about how highly targeted Facebook’s advertising platform could be for the wedding market, we thought it was going to revolutionise the way we marketed weddings. With a few clicks, it’s possible to target women, aged 25-30, within 10 miles of the hotel, who have become engaged within the last three months and are educated to degree level.
Compare this to serving an ad to someone that simply typed in ‘wedding venues Oxfordshire’ into Google – it’s certainly not like-for-like targeting! What’s strange though is Google Ads always outperformed Facebook Ads when it came to weddings – and here’s why: intent. Whilst you could be so narrowly targeted on Facebook, there was little to no intent when they clicked on an ad, compared with someone who actively Googled a phrase that suggested they are looking for what we had to sell. To this end, over time we’ve found that Facebook Ad spend is better utilised to build brand awareness and importantly amplify marketing messages communicated from other channels. For instance, within the ‘audience’ tab on the Facebook Ads dashboard, you can upload your entire email database to Facebook and within a minute or two it will tell you how many of those email addresses are linked to Facebook accounts. So let’s say you have 10,000 emails on a database, it’s likely that 4,000 of those email addresses were used to setup Facebook accounts – you can now target those 4,000 people with ads on Facebook.
This becomes exceptionally useful when you send them an email containing a sales offer and complement it with ads containing the same message on Facebook, improving the chances of each recipient seeing and engaging with the core message. Plus, this form of advertising tends to be much less expensive than traditional pay-per-click ads because your objective will be focus on reach and engagement, not traffic – and Facebook Ads will always be more expensive if you take people away from Facebook.