Gift vouchers are the ideal present for a loved one and what better time to treat them than at Christmas? (Yes, we are already thinking that far ahead!).

NB: This is an article from Avvio

It may seem like a long way off, but now is the time to start preparing your Christmas voucher campaigns. Before we explore ways of selling your vouchers, let’s quickly look at when you should start the promotion phase.

When should I start advertising?

Gift Vouchers

Typically we see search volumes for “Hotel Gift Vouchers” start to pick up from October with an increase of +24% on the previous months. This traffic jumped up +129% in November and a further +108% in December. If you had a total budget figure in mind, we’d suggest allocating it as follow:

  • October: 5 – 10% of total
  • October: 20 – 30% of total
  • October: 60 – 70% of total

Now that you know when search volume for hotel gift vouchers is at its peak, here are 5 ways you can improve visibility and increase your total voucher sales.

1) Make sure your landing pages are in order

In order to conduct your advertising, you’ll need somewhere to direct your audience. We would suggest creating a Christmas vouchers page, if you haven’t already got one, and adding all the voucher types to it. This page can be linked from the /Christmas tab.

Make sure that you use the same voucher page each year as the page will grow organic authority over time. If you create a new page each year, you’ll restart the ranking process.

Also, make sure that the URL doesn’t contain a specific year e.g.

/christmasvouchers 

/christmasvouchers2019 ✘

Once Christmas is over, just unlink the page from the navigation but still keep it live as this will help you retain an organic presence all year round.

2) Implement Display Advertising

Hasting Hotels Gift Vouchers

Display ads are visual ads that appear in video or image format across the display network. The display network accounts for over 90% of the internet so we’d primarily use display ads to grow brand awareness among new potential customers (outward display) as well as re-engaging with existing website visitors (remarketing).

To make sure you’re reaching the right audiences, we’d suggest narrowing the targeting to hotel specific groups within a target location e.g.

In-market audiences

This will allow you to get your ads in front of a more qualified audience and therefore make the most of your budget.

3) Get creative with your Video Advertising

Video ads are another form of display advertising and we would typically use them as in-stream (30 seconds or more) adverts or in bumper ad format.

In-stream ads gives the viewer the option to skip onward to their desired video after a few seconds and within Google AdWords you’ll be able to measure viewer engagement. Bumper ads on the other hand are short and snappy promotion videos that are 6 seconds without a skip option.

Click here to see an in-stream example

Click here to see a bumper example

The video and image ads will generate a buzz around your vouchers and potential customers can either click directly on the ad or visit your hotel website at a later stage.

In-stream and bumper ads are just two video advertising options that we would recommend, but there are six different video ad types available to you.

4) Get your Search Advertising in order 

Google Search Ads are a powerful way of presenting your ads directly to guests while they are looking for gift voucher options on Google.

As you can imagine, this form of advertising can be expensive as all competitors will be bidding for the same generic keywords so make sure you allocate a large amount of budget to search advertising.

5) Promote your offering via Social Media

Adare Manor Gift Vouchers

Human beings are social creatures and we enjoy interacting across various Social media platforms. As a hotel, you can use these social platforms to promote gift vouchers to potential guests. One way of doing this is to share posts on your Facebook & Instagram accounts. You can click on the ‘Boost Post’ option to ensure that your post is seen more frequently amongst people who already follow/like your brand. 

A second way of maximising your social presence is to use Facebook Business Manager. This social platform management tool will allow you to target Facebook & Instagram users in a similar way that Google AdWords does.

For example, you can choose:

  • The location to target e.g. Ireland, Northern Ireland
  • The budget e.g. €100/ campaign, €3/day etc.
  • The audience e.g. People who have visited your website & similar audiences
  • The interests e.g. Luxury Experiences, Engaged Shoppers etc.

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