3 Facebook Advertising Strategies for the Travel Industry
3 Facebook Advertising Strategies for the Travel Industry
There’s a reason Facebook is such an effective platform when advertising a business in the travel industry.
More now than ever, we log into Facebook to be presented with pictures of our friends or family in exotic, exciting or mind-bending beautiful destinations. These pictures are inevitably followed by a familiar twinge of jealousy and daydreams of white, sandy beaches or courtyard cafes in a sunny European city.
Then, further down your feed and seemingly out of nowhere, an airline is advertising 50% off flights, a hotel company has rooms for the next month at hugely discounted prices, a package holiday business is giving away trips to people if you ‘ENTER OUR NEW COMPETITION!’.Think about it, what better place to advertise for travel than on a platform that bombards us with images and videos of people we know in real life are having a great time travelling? Travel companies have realized this trend and have tapped into it to make Facebook a supremely lucrative space to market in.
In 2019, 79% of travel marketers used Facebook ads, with 65% of travel marketers saying they plan to spend even more in 2019. It’s clear why. The average CPC (Cost-per-Click) in the travel industry is a mere $0.63, lower than any other industry, so it’s clear that users are really compelled by ads that offer the potential for a new envy-inducing profile picture.
But how can you exploit this clearly effective market and platform combination for yourself? How can your travel company really make the most of Facebook and all its advertising features, to create a campaign that will convert dreaming users with itchy feet into paying customers? In this blog, we’re going to run you through the best tactics and methods for driving sales and improving your ROI for your Facebook travel ads, providing examples of where some businesses have really found success when applying these methods.
1. Make the Most Out of Dynamic Ads
This is a big one for travel companies when it comes to increasing the CTR on your ads and getting your content in front of the right users. Dynamic ads ensure that your ads are targeted at users who are already interested in what you have to offer.In fact, it allows you to target customers so accurately they won’t believe how relevant the offers you’re going to set up for them are.The great thing about dynamic ads for the travel industry is that you can target individual users with ads that are specific to a desired check-in/check-out time, to the flight route they want to take, to the specific destination they have in mind, to the combination of hotels, flights or other services they have viewed together. If a user has looked at flights to Bolivia on the dates of 3rd June, returning on the 23rd June, imagine how pleased they’d be when, later that day, they stumble across an ad that offers a 50% discount on flights to La Paz on those very dates.
This demonstrates the power of dynamic ads when it comes to the travel industry. There are so many super-specific actions you can track on a user’s journey around your site, that you can craft ads and offers that really encourage the click and eventually the purchase.
Tripaneer is a company that benefited enormously through its retargeting campaigns, as it really stepped it up during 2019. A business that sells interest-specific travel experiences, they aimed to retarget users who had viewed specific trips and give them the final push to make a booking.
To do this, they set up dynamic ads that focused on a specific activity the user had expressed an interest in on their site, a yoga holiday for example, and then targeted them with ads that were focused on yoga retreats.
Taking into account the fact that their users are international, they personalized each ad to display the pricing in the currency of the user. They did this by making use of the Facebook Pixel, which tracked a user’s journey through their website, then presented them with ads from their product catalogue with the specific products they looked at, along with native currency prices and the CTA ‘Book Now’.
Did it work? Well, yes. Tripaneer found that by showing these dynamic ads they impressively increased the number of clicks, conversions and sales generated by their previous campaigns. They saw a 26% increase in conversions, a 32% decrease in their costs per purchase, and a 29% increase in their ROI.
Clearly, Tripaneer found that these dynamic ads were hugely useful, so if you’re a travel company with the aim of capturing users at the ideal stage of the sales funnel, then you should definitely learn how to create and optimize dynamic Facebook ads.
2. Stand Out with Your Ad Format
Don’t limit your ad campaigns to simple single image ads, and don’t rule out using different formats for ads designed to achieve a specific goal. As a travel company, you’re in a unique position to show off a product that virtually no other business can.
You can show stunning landscapes, scenes of fine dining, of festivals, wilderness, sporting activities, cityscapes, rooftop bars, cultural experiences, you name it, because as a business that specializes in the travel industry, you genuinely are promising the possibility of all these things and more. So, it stands to reason that you need to show this off effectively, and with all this freedom to show your products off comes the freedom of using different ad formats to optimize your campaigns.Use video ads to show off panoramic views of mountainous landscapes, carousel ads to display a wide range of activities, canvas ads to immerse the user in a bustling city street or market. Think about how you can really capture your user’s imagination to inspire them to purchase. Of course, putting effort into thinking about how you can best display your product is a completely worthwhile exercise, but different ad formats can go beyond just showing your product off in the best possible light; you can use alternative formats to inspire certain actions in your audience. As an example, Trentino Marketing made use of distinct ad formats in order to build brand awareness, generate leads, gauge specific interests and then convert those leads into sales.How did they do this?They started by focusing on the first step any business should take when launching a Facebook ads campaign: building brand awareness. To do this, they created some short, eye-popping video ads of the mountains, lakes and valleys in the Trentino region, in an attempt to spark an interest in the region and an awareness of the natural beauty there.
Then, they used carousel ads to display all the types of holidays the user could experience. Water sports, cycling, hiking, the Italian lifestyle, all of these types of holidays could be displayed on the format as it allows up to 10 different images to be displayed on a single ad. They displayed these ads to people who had either watched their video ads for a certain amount of time or had clicked through to their website. This makes sense, you hardly want someone who has scrolled straight past your ad, barely registering your brand to suddenly be hit with ads that display certain types of holiday.You want these ads to appear in front of those who are aware of your brand: those who have actually registered your ads.
Users could then see a range of different holidays and click on the one that suited their interests best, where they would be directed to a dedicated landing page for that specific holiday.This also allowed Trentino Marketing to gather more data on specific users, taking them to the next stage of their Facebook ad campaign.Trentino had gauged the level of interest in specific users, they had found out what specific interests each user had, so they then exposed these still interested customers to five different Canvas Ads in three distinct languages in a push to convert those prospective customers.
The interactive and full-screen nature of the Canvas Ads were designed to immerse the user in the landscape they would hopefully visit, in a bid to inspire them to purchase. The results of the campaign were pretty impressive:
- 4.2x increase in holiday offers viewed
- 18.4% increase in organic search traffic following the campaign
- 13 million highly targeted users across Europe and the US in just 4 months were reached
- 1.5 million of the users reached watched their videos to the very end
Sound like success?
It certainly does to us. It’s pretty clear that if brand awareness and conversions were the goals in this campaign, they’ve done pretty well.
3. Utilize Facebook Messenger for High-End Customer Service
Travel can be a hassle. There can be so many different things to check, to organize, to sort out. It really helps when a customer can quickly and easily find the solution to a difficulty they’re having, or if you can offer a smooth experience all-round when they are engaging with your company.
Facebook messenger can be a really excellent way to achieve this. It allows people to stay in meaningful contact throughout their customer experience, satisfies demands or queries quickly, and if used properly can drive brand advocacy through effective, personal support. This kind of brand advocacy goes a really long way in the travel industry. People want to know that their trips or their holidays are going to run smoothly. Any time they hit a stumbling block or come across a problem, you need to be able to answer them or help them as quickly and as seamlessly as possible. One business who have made use of Facebook Messenger to great effect is KLM. The airline giant introduced Messenger as a means of communication back in January 2017 and haven’t looked back since. Their integrated AI bot, which is programmed to answer over 60,000 messages, helps the airline share flight information such as boarding passes, flight status updates and check-in notifications with the customer, allowing for a seamless flying experience. And this has been reflected in the popularity of the scheme. Customer satisfaction rates are at an all-time high, there has been a 40% increase in the number of users taking to Messenger to get their problems addressed, and 15% of all boarding passes are now sent out through this medium.
Of course, you probably don’t run an enormous multi-billion-dollar airline company, but the premise of Messenger as a form of customer service remains the same. In fact, your business will likely be handing a lot less enquiries, so you will have time to address customers personally and add an approachable face to your company.It is simple enough to set up chatbots that can handle the most basic enquiries for you, but often people want a real person to be dealing with their enquiries.
So, if you are operating in the travel industry you need to seriously consider opening up Messenger as a channel of communication between you and your customers. People remember their holidays. If they have had a positive, easy experience with your business, the chances are they will return to you.
Closing Words
As a company that specializes in the travel industry, you would be wasting a huge opportunity if you weren’t taking full advantage of Facebook as an advertising platform.However, if you are using Facebook to advertize your business, make the most of just how much people love going on holiday. It’s the ideal online real estate for you to capture imaginations and move people effectively through the sales funnel.Use dynamic ads, think carefully about what ad format suits your ads at different parts of your campaign, and deliver a smooth customer journey. Soon, you’ll see just why travel companies love this platform as much as they do.
As a company that specializes in the travel industry, you would be wasting a huge opportunity if you weren’t taking full advantage of Facebook as an advertising platform. However, if you are using Facebook to advertize your business, make the most of just how much people love going on holiday. It’s the ideal online real estate for you to capture imaginations and move people effectively through the sales funnel.Use dynamic ads, think carefully about what ad format suits your ads at different parts of your campaign, and deliver a smooth customer journey. Soon, you’ll see just why travel companies love this platform as much as they do.
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