The Ultimate Guide on How To Use Facebook Ads for Your Hotel

By Nathan Gawlik

Nathan Gawlik's experience includes being a General Manager of a Hampton Inn and other front line roles such as a Banquet Captain, Front Desk Agent, Housekeeper, Catering Event Manager, and Director of Sales.

Facebook is a massive social platform with roughly 25 billion visits a month. Only Youtube and Google get more monthly visits. Facebook's daily active users reach over 1.8 billion on average. And you might be surprised to learn that 31% of US senior citizens are on Facebook and 66% of all millennials use Facebook. 71% of Americans use Facebook.

This article is your crash course on all things Facebook marketing. This step-by-step guide covers the basics of how to set up an ad and provide some tips for effective strategy for your hospitality business. Let's start with how Facebook can help you reach more guests.

How to reach more customers on these social platforms

21,000 users, according to Facebook's IQ team, found that travel is the #1 interest on Instagram and 45% of those surveyed say they use Instagram for travel inspiration.

Instagram is shaping travel for everyone. Across all of Facebook's platforms, there is a shift in how people communicate. There are over 500 million travel-related hashtags, even during COVID-19.

How can you capitalize on this growing trend?

Showcasing things to do in an awesome Facebook video can help guests have a more immersive experience. Videos can tell a story that makes travelers want to act. Discovering new travel destinations is a key element to capturing travel demand. Facebook refers to this as Discovery Commerce.

Facebook ads stand out because they allow travelers to discover new products and services. Facebook has hundreds of pages of information and thousands of data points on it's users, meaning products and service ads find users that love and engage with them.

It's important to note that you will have to continually test and learn from several video posts to get the desired results. Many of the videos will get better responses depending on the time of year, how long the video is, quality, etc. If you don't get a good response from the first video you post, don't get discouraged. It only takes one video to go viral and put your hotel center stage. Just consider the Skateboarder Drinking Cranberry Juice video. The original 30 second TikTok has over 70 million views and many celebrities and others have made their own version of it.

It's just important to have fun and make an effort to entice your guests to visit. Can you get your staff involved in a housekeeping cleaning dance? Can you do a walkthrough tour of your property like this video here?

Getting Started Using Facebook Ads

If you haven't created a business page yet, go to https://www.Facebook.com/pages/create. It's important to note that this URL is used to create a new page. To go directly to your business page after it's been created, the best direct URL to use is business.facebook.com. This is where you can manage your ads. If you need greater detail on how to create your business page on Facebook, check out Neil Patel's 10 minute video here.

Once at business.facebook.com, select what you would like to promote. Note that you can have multiple business pages linked to your individual Facebook account.

Follow the steps, review the preview and finalize by checking the box that you have reviewed the merchant agreement and click finish setup.

Now you should see the below page.

Click Next and follow the guided tutorial.

Trip Consideration or Travel Intent

As already mentioned, many people go on social media only knowing that they want to take a trip, but not always knowing where. Other users may have a destination in mind but haven't selected accommodations yet. Facebook and Instagram provide a platform for accommodation providers to reach these guests before they have made these important decisions.

Trip Consideration best practices according to Phocuswire are to,

Select a broad audience: Small or narrow audience sizes may result in poor ad delivery. Facebook recommends choosing an audience of 7 million or larger when using this service. Trip Consideration also can be used alongside existing targeting, including Lookalike Audience targeting or interest targeting.
Optimize for actionable items: With the website conversion objective, it's best to optimize for search, checkout, or purchase events.
Start with autobid: Starting a campaign with autobid will help to maximize ad delivery. If you find that the campaign is performing well after three days, you can then experiment with specific bid targets.
Use an "always on" tactic: Utilizing Trip Consideration as an always-on campaign strategy allows you to reach as many potential travelers as possible.

No catalogue (referenced in the below steps) is required to set up Trip Considerations and it can be combined with other audience targeting. However, you will need to set up your Facebook Pixel before Trip Considerations can be activated. This requires getting some code from Facebook.

What is the Facebook Pixel?

A Facebook pixel "is an analytics tool that allows you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising by understanding the actions people take on your website." And it's main benefits are that it can help you ensure your ads are shown to the right people, drive more sales and measure the results of your ad. To find out more, visit the pixel about page.

What you will need:

A website for your business.
Access to your website's code.

To start this process, navigate to your Facebook Event Manager Page and select which data source you would like to connect to your Facebook, seen below.

Select Facebook pixel and click connect.

Fill in the appropriate details with the name of your pixel and the website url, or web address.

Facebook integrates with many website platforms so you don't have to edit any of the code on your website if you already use one of their website providers. Facebook has agreements with Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress and many more. To view a list of Facebook's website integrations go to their Partner Integrations page.

For our purposes here, we are going to show you how to add the javascript yourself using ResNexus websites as an example.

To do so, click ‘Install Code Manually' as seen below.

The below screen will appear. Copy the base code.

Once you have copied the code, it's so easy to get it posted to your website. Email the exact code to your Red Carpet Professional with the title, Facebook Pixel Script, and your property name. We will have it updated that day.

The process is almost complete. Toggle The Automatic Advanced Matching switch.

Before the site can use this pixel tool, events need to be set up on your site that trigger the intended action to launch an ad on Facebook's family of channels.

If you receive the below message, then the pixel hasn't been set up correctly. Review the previous steps and check out our resources at the bottom of this article if you're still having trouble.

You don't receive the below message in red, you have completed this step successfully and it is now time to move on.

Once on the Event Manager page, you can easily see how many people visit your site among other things.

Influencers and Monetizing Facebook

Under Brand Content in your settings is where you will be able to change your business page to a Travel Advertiser. You must be listed as a travel advertiser to use Trip Consideration.

Click apply as advertiser in the bottom left corner of your Brand Collabs Manager page.

This page should now be pending approval, and Facebook will email you after review. You can also check the status of your pages by visiting Facebook's Brand Collabs Manager website

In addition to following Facebook's Rules for Monetisation, there are certain requirements that your page and your content must meet before being able to use any of Facebook's monetisation products, found here.

Toggle Trip Consideration in the buying platform on Facebook.

Retargeting Ads to Encourage Booking

Facebook can even use retargeting ads to help promote your property. Facebook retargeting will help reach people who have been to your website or app and help drive them to book. These ads will pull from your hotel or destination catalog. Your hotel catalog essentially serves as the home for your inventory across the Facebook family of apps.

This is where you would place items you wish to sell. This could be rooms, items from your gift shop or restaurant, even experiences and packages.

Navigating to your Catalog

From your Facebook business page, click more tools> Ads Manager>business tools>commerce manager>get started>Create a Catalogue.

Select Hotels if you are a B&B, Campground, RV Park, or Hotel. Select Destinations if you are an association. Select Property if you are a Vacation Rental, short term rental unit, Airbnb or other unit that is not staffed.

*Note this step can only be completed once a business ID has been created for your Facebook page.

You can also pull in your pricing and availability from your website. If you wish to do this, you will want to set up a Scheduled Feed. This takes a file from your website and automatically updates your Facebook once you have updated your inventory on your site. This saves a lot of time, as you can avoid updating your items in two locations.

See the screenshot below and follow the prompts to complete this step.

Prospecting

Prospecting is another tool you can use to direct ads to audiences that have looked at similar products as yours but haven't engaged with you yet. Prospecting helps to expand your audience to individuals that have similar interests. This option offers a single image or carousels.

A carousel is two or more scrollable images or videos. These are effective at engaging audiences.

Creative Hub

Dynamic creative allows an advertiser to do more with less. Allowing you to determine the right combination of headline, copy, and content that works best can be challenging. The Dynamic creative tool allows you to upload copy, image and headline so variants of the same ad can be created for you again optimizing the ad for the individual viewer.

These ads are then served across the placements for the performance of each creative element with the given audience.

Summary

This has been your crash course guide on Facebook marketing. Facebook ads have been proven to have a high ROI for travel related content. Utilizing their tools is a great way to reach new guests and increase occupancy at your property.

When I was working at a boutique hotel without big brand support, we found social media to be a valuable asset in our efforts to not be so reliant on OTAs.

The brands who have had the most success follow these principles:

Facebook is a platform designed for people
Ad relevance and value is king
Optimize for real results
Set advertiser controls for your desired business outcomes
Let Facebook do the heavy lifting
Rely on automated budget and creative tools to maximize your campaign results
Need help? Reach out to Facebook Marketing Partners and be sure to review the myriad of resources and helpful articles I used in this research below.

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MARKETING

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CASE STUDIES

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