With few billion active users daily, Facebook is an ideal place for small tour operators and travel agencies. People share photos, videos, and updates during their travel there. So, Facebook is a huge & cheap advertising opportunity for activity and tour operators!
Also, it is why tour operators need to enable social sharing on their website!
By Investing in Facebook ads, tour operators build relationships with their potential bookers and grow their customer base. You achieve this by:
There are two possible advertising options to choose from on Facebook – organic (unpaid) and paid.
Organic reach refers to the total number of unique people who were shown your posts through unpaid distribution.
Paid reach is the total number of unique people who were shown your posts as a result of an ad.
Organic reach on Facebook is declining. This is because more and more content is being created and shared every day. If you really want to reach more customers via Facebook or to have them ‘liking’ your Page, paid advertising should be a part of your social strategy.
This doesn’t mean that posting content from your tours organically is not necessary. On the contrary, organic reach is necessary because paid reach can easily lose its purpose without it. If a potential booker sees no other (organic) posts on your Page, your tour business won’t seem interesting or ‘live’.
It is very important to actively publish valuable content (once per day is enough on Facebook).
The easiest way for tour operators to reach more of their existing and new fans is through promoting their most successful organic (unpaid) posts. Campaigns enhance your Facebook presence.
For example, Orioly helps you a lot with you social media promotion. It provides automatic posting of your tours on Facebook, too. This post is then shown to your fans for a few times. This way, they get reminded to ‘like’ you and to visit your ‘book now’ offer. In order to promote your post even further, to reach more of your fans and their friends, you need to ‘boost’ it.
As we can see from the graph below, promoted posts (or boosted posts as Facebook calls them) and social ads are highly effective in reaching today’s customers (49%). This is a 2015 statistics and they are already surpassing search engine advertising.
Before we explain how to do it step by step, let’s have a look why Facebook ads is a better option for tour operators than Google advertising.
Social advertising refers to advertising on social networks. Facebook ads is based on demographic information, geography, and larger social profiles. So it looks at everything that’s been published on a person’s profile page.
Search advertising is advertising through search engines, mainly Google. The difference is in how they target users. With Google Ads, you appear at the top of the search rankings based on the exact searches of people (your pre-set keywords). You can set your targeting based on geography but it heavily relies on a search term people type into the search box.
As we can see in the chart on the left, social advertising is a growing trend we’ll see over the years. There’s been an enormous shift in online ads towards social advertising. Facebook has definitely overtaken Google in terms of advertising and will continue to grow.
When you are coming up with your key search terms for a Google Ad, you must think of what user’s intent is.
For example, if you’re providing adventure tours, you’ve got to invest much more for your ad to appear on the first page of Google to be noticed by a person who searches for adventure tours. But you do not know the person’s intentions. Perhaps he/she has typed “adventure tours” onto the search box for some other reason.
Using Facebook ads, you can set the targeting of your ad to be shown to only young people in the US who are interested in adventure sports. You can time your ad before summer. You will catch their attention and once they start to plan their holidays, you increased your chances to be their first choice. All this for a small investment.
Facebook generates valuable interest in your business through their interests (or likes) and targeting.
Their targeting gives you a pretty good feeling of a person. And this natural environment is where Facebook targeting really stands above Google Ads.
Facebook users are checking their profiles multiple times a day. They are sharing friends, content, media, articles they love… everything that interests them. A majority use it for travel inspiration. Tour operators should use it to involve the users.
Facebook’s ‘Boost Post’ option is the easiest way to reach more audience and increase engagement. Which allows you to reach not only your fans but also their friends. Depends on how you set your targeting.
Download this free step by step guide and learn How to Create a Facebook Post You’d Want to Promote?
ORIOLY
on January 19, 2017
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