White Sand Travel – Success with Facebook ads | Travel Research Online

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White Sand Travel – Success with Facebook ads

Did you watch the Super Bowl?  Well, you will no doubt hear all the analysis about the call of the Head Coach for the Seahawks – did he make the right call? Should they have run the ball instead of throwing?  Not making the right call can cost you all that you have worked hard for!

It’s all well and good you think, that’s the Super Bowl but what about my travel business? What Super Bowl plays and travel have to do with each other?

While the Super Bowl and play calling has nothing to do with travel, we find ourselves in a similar position of having to make the right call, implementing the right strategies, critically looking at your business model and seeing it through the eyes of a potential client and making critical decisions that can position us in the figurative end zone.  Marketing is one of the most important and possibly expensive plays we have to make in our businesses as it our way to amplify our services and products to an audience who otherwise are unaware of our solutions to the problems they have.  If we do not have a way to amplify our message to our audience, then there is no message and likely no business. No matter how good we are, if people do not know it, then we are not getting the reach we need to show everyone how good we truly are.

No matter how much we may talk about social media, it is a way for us to get the message across to our audience.  Advertising on Facebook will help us meet and stay in touch with potential customers – the average Facebook advertising has an average reach of 89% I have heard.  With Facebook ads, we have a unique opportunity:

  • Reach a massive amount of people; people can’t purchase your services if they do not know you exist
  • Spend as little as $1.00 per day (depending on the objective) which is among the lowest cost per impression in the industry. Spending $1.00 per day for 30 days can potentially get you in front of 4,000 people who may not otherwise see you.  If we are doing that and our competition is not doing the same, we are winning the awareness game in our niche
  • We can target our audience – recent visitors to our website, email subscribers that we currently have and fans of similar pages

By planning and implementing a Facebook ad strategy we can gain many new fans as well as increase engagement and conversions.  Facebook has an Ads Manager option as well as a reporting function that allows us to monitor our ad performance and make adjustments as needed. If the ad is not performing, we can easily edit the campaign to be more appealing to the audience, or just discontinue the ad. Having the control to edit our ads without going through a third party is tremendous as we look back at advertising in the past and how much effort was involved. Basically, we have guidelines that we must meet with Facebook but we have the opportunity to get in front of millions of viewers with the control staying with us.

A recent Facebook ad campaign of ours yielded 114 new likes, 135 engagements and 174 clicks to our website, 109 conversions and 18 post likes and shares. It was $129 well spent.

A traditional ad campaign, with a local vendor (co-op) in 2014 with a monthly budget of $240.00 yielded a result of 3 paying clients. The results on Facebook crushed the number for my 2014 campaign. One of the biggest advantages to advertising on Facebook is no long contracts and you can manage your advertising dollars solely at your discretion.

Whatever your marketing strategy may be, it should make sense to you and be a good return on your investment. Plan ahead and have a good campaign to target your audience.  Most of all be creative and don’t hesitate to step out of your comfort zone and be different – be “you.” People are looking to do business with “real people.”

Judith White is the owner at White Sand Travel in Stone Mountain, Georgia. The full service agency specializes in destination weddings, honeymoon and romance travel planning for busy couples that want an incredible vacation experience without the stress of planning it. You can find Judith online at whitesandtravel.net

 

  2 thoughts on “White Sand Travel – Success with Facebook ads

  1. David Holman says:

    Can you share just how many paying clients resulted from that campaign? “likes” are all well and good, but, personally, I have had disappointing results with Facebook Ads, in terms of actual dollars flowing in.

  2. Judith White says:

    Hi David,

    I am so sorry, I didn’t realize you posted this comment. I will be very honest and say that I have had no paying client as a result of my facebook ads. I share your feelings but I feel like the exposure and engagement will eventually pay off. Quite frankly I feel that they are pushing us more into paying for ads as organic reach is down. However, I think not having a presence on Facebook is not a good thing either. At this point, I am trying as much as I can to gain traction.

    Best Wishes.

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