What Can a Revenue Manager Learn from Facebook Ads?

Qué puede aprender de Facebook Ads un responsable de Revenue Management

Según números de la propia plataforma Facebook, y para reforzar su planteamiento de uso de su herramienta de anuncios Facebook Ads, más de 1,4 mil millones de personas en el mundo usan esta red social y más de 900 millones de usuarios la visitan diariamente.

With so many people actively using Facebook every day, it is important to understand how a hotel can learn from all the intelligence generated and how its data can be shaped in order to segment campaigns to its customers. From BEONx it seems very interesting to understand the logic of the campaigns so as to extrapolate that vision to the strategies of Revenue Management of our hotel, and work on an approach using inputs that are monitorable and traceable by the accommodation.

Therefore, once we start from a concept of “large stock market” of segmented users in a friendly context as related to the hotelier, to a greater or lesser extent in its CRM it can be easily understood why the interest in knowing the details of the operation of the Facebook Ads tool (Facebook Ads). The different advertising campaigns and/or relations with the hotel traveler will be enhanced while the strategies that the hotel needs can be articulated with greater ease.

In this way we will perform an analysis of the functionalities that Facebook Ads put at the service of the ad managers and how this methodology can provide some interesting formulae to structure our hotel’s pricing strategy or simply present to our public the articulated campaigns. Here are some of the factors that Facebook has in mind and that you can also implement in your accommodations offers:

Geographical orientation of the strategy

Geo-targeting allows you to target users in a specific location. Although this may seem obvious, it can also have many nuances. Despite the initial evidence of this orientation option, there are certain approaches that can be very useful for hotels. Factors such as local people, those who are permanently in that place, those who were at a specific moment or those who are passing through, condition a Revenue Management strategy to a great extent. On the other hand, excluding geographical segmentations is also a very practical option that Facebook Ads allows. In this way, we will reduce the error and optimize the resources.

Demographic targeting

The demographic segmentation proposed by Facebook allows adapting the strategy to human factors that greatly condition a revenue strategy. Beyond age and gender, Facebook allows advertisers to fine-tune other types of demographic parameters, including education, financial information, highlighted events, if they are a family and the type of family they are, the political ideology, type of work, relationships, and other elements. There are specific segmentation options within these primary demographic categories. For example, the category “parents” is divided into specific categories according to the age of the child (parents with pre-school children 3-5 years, parents with university children, etc.) and specific types within the category “mother” as “Soccer mom”.

Focus on interests

The segmentation based on interests allows adapting a distribution strategy to the specific needs of potential clients. Interest categories include business, entertainment and family relationships, health and wellness, food and beverage, and more. These categories, like the demographic segmentation, can also be broken down into subcategories. For example, the category of “hobbies and activities” can be reduced to the specific activities relating the categories to each other. This can be useful, together with the use of the CRM of a hotel, to segment the approaches to labeling categories.

Connections and relationships

One option that is not given much visibility on Facebook, and that is very important, are the “connections”. On Facebook, this option is used to link campaigns about users who are fans of a certain page, use of a mobile application or those who have confirmed their attendance at an event. This type of connection can be seen in terms of revenue with the channels on which our hotel competes, too, in identifying those on which we agree and on which we must take a competitive advantage.

Custom public

Custom audiences are user groups that are determined based on a specific specification. As the name implies, the personalized nature of this type of segment facilitates distribution and marketing. The conclusion of this personalization arrives on previous information gathered about these users and that can be articulated with examples such as the following:

• Construction of a personalized public target segment based on the visitors of the website or a specific page.

• Construction of a set of personalized data and segments of guests who have booked through intermediated channels. 

• Construction of a personalized public-based user segments that are members of the loyalty club.

Each personalized audience requires specific fields or actions that have to be defined, although in Facebook the process is very simple and is very well explained. This is very similar to the lists for the re-targeting of Google and is traced through the Conversion Pixels that allow segmenting web users into specific audiences.

Test A/B of the announcements

The Facebook Ads Platform allows you to compare the performance of ads under Test A / B models. The success or failure of a campaign can be conditioned by changes in parameters such as those discussed above or even by changes implement
ted in the design of the ad itself.