When there is none or very little expressed demand, the only way of doing marketing is by leveraging the unexpressed demand of people who may turn into customers, but have not been thinking of travelling.
NB: This is an article from Direct Your Bookings
In simple words, rather than waiting for customers knocking at our hotels’ doors, we’d rather go out and reach out to them at a way higher stage of their booking journey.
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For that, the answer is not Google. But Facebook advertising.
What follows is a bunch of some of the best examples that showcase how you can reach out to prospects and customers on Facebook to generate new and more travel demand for your hotel, whilst on Google that would simply not be possible.
Besides the platform, it’s in the basics that stands what we are looking for:
Why do people travel?
Vacation, business, taking some time off.. those are all valid, yet general and obvious reasons. But if we dig in further, there are tons of other not-so-obvious reasons that may let people consider spending their time and money at a hotel.
One of these being Birthdays.
People travel, or might consider travelling if presented with some nice options and offers, because of their birthday celebrations.
So today we are about to see use Facebook to market to 5 different targets of people who may come to our hotels for their birthdays. Or the birthday of their loved ones.
Let’s start with the easiest one:
1) Upcoming Birthdays
When creating your audience, in the Detailed Targeting field you can enter a very generic keyword like birthday, and Facebook will return a bunch of related suggestions for you to choose from.
In this case we can be a bit more specific as we want to target people with upcoming birthdays in the next days and weeks.
This is how the audience setup looks like in Facebook:
On top of it, we might want to tell Facebook where exactly it should go find these people, meaning their location. In the example, I selected the whole country Thailand assuming our hotel is in Chiang Mai (where I currently am), which returns a potential audience 1.2M people.
Fairly broad. So we might want to narrow down our audience a bit further.
Location can be as broad or as specific as you wish, and it really depends on your message and goal.
For example, if you are running a campaign with the goal of bringing in people for your restaurant, such a broad country-based targeting would definitely be too generic, as no one would travel from the other side of the country for lunch or dinner.
In this case you might want to limit your audience to your city.
In our case, let’s assume our goal is to generate leads and bookings for our hotel rooms, as we want heads on our pillows.
By the time of this post, Thailand’s borders are still closed and we can only rely on the internal domestic traffic, so targeting other countries would be a poor move.
As said though, 1.2M people may be too broad audience, depending on our marketing budget, so we might consider narrowing the audience a bit more.
Besides its broadness, I would probably avoid targeting like above, for a very simple and logical reason. Think about it: if you are about to celebrate your birthday, would you surprise yourself with a self birthday present?
Well, maybe yes if you are considering the idea of bringing your loved ones to a restaurant for celebration.
But other than that, it’s likely that your friends and family will.
So me (hotel) targeting you (birthday boy/girl) directly may not be the best move. Instead…
2) Close Friends of People With An Upcoming Birthdays
Already in the screenshot above you could see an example of what comes next: targeting friends of people having birthday.
“In a week” or “in a month”?
Depends, like always.
On a very (very much) general level, the closer the friendship, the earlier these friends might think of the present for the birthday boy.
Also in this case though I would invite you to use logic to get to the point. And the point in my opinion is far beyond from in a week or in a month.
How many friends you have on Facebook that are not necessarily friends?
I mean, I have people listed as friends that I don’t see ever since I was 10. Maybe we went to school together, reason why we are “friends” on FB, but would they ever consider spending some money to give me a present?
Of course not, so:
Please note: these targeting options change overnight and very frequently. The screenshot above was taken some months ago, whilst now, for example and depending on multiple factors, you might not be able to see these “Close Friends” options anymore.
3) People with Birthdays in Specific Months.
Give them a reason to travel.
Even if that reason sounds weak, it’s anyway a valid reason. And people don’t need strong reasons to travel, because everyone wants to travel.
Was your hotel founded in September? Target people whose birthday is in September, offer them an incredible deal as they were born the same very month of your hotel… and there it is: you just gave them a reason to celebrate with you.
Not only that, you offer them a reason to relate to you and your hotel, because you have something in common.
Sounds too weak reason? Try, then you tell me. 
4) Users With A Specific Age (milestone)
Celebrating your 36th birthday is not the same as celebrating your 50th.
Birthdays are always the most important days for each of us, but some of them are more important than others.
For my 36th birthday (this month) I will probably take it easy with a dinner and a drink with my partner (also because travelling is still challenging).
But for my 40th or 50th I might definitely want to plan bigger celebration. And a trip is always a perfect present.
To set this one target up, you might want to combine the specific age and either upcoming birthday or specific birthday month.
5) Lookalike audience
Facebook lookalike audiences are simply the invention of the century.
You have a big list of present and past customers of your hotel.
Upload that list onto Facebook and let FB go out and find people similar to your original list: that’s your lookalike audience.
However, as similar as these people are to your original source, this LAL audience will be made by hundreds of thousands people, maybe millions.
Targeting a lookalike audience as is, especially when you have limited budget, it’s like playing bingo.
So, again, we need to narrow down the audience to be way smaller, but more in target.
How?
Create a LAL first.
Define the location(s) you want to target.
Upcoming birthdays or birthdays in specific months of the year.
Conclusions
Ultimately it’s all about being pro-active rather than reactive. Meaning switching from waiting for them to come know at our doors, or go out and start engaging with potential customers way before they do with us.
Finding tons of reasons to travel is extremely easy, despite the times we have been living in.
