We have been working with an experiential travel company. The company organizes experience based travels/trips to various parts of the world.
Last month, they launched a new offering exclusive for women group travel. Group travelling is gradually gaining popularity and this seemed to be a nice time to create a travel product for this segment.
As the marketing partner of this company, our job was to ensure that we generate quality leads for our client for their Women group travel product.
We used Facebook paid ads as our primary channel for lead generation. So this is what we did:
- Understand the right target market
This is what is called the product-market fit. You should know what you are selling and for whom are you selling. Obviously there will be certain degree of discoverability that will be there as you go along, but you should be able to have a fair understanding of who is the probable target audience for your product.
- Research popular travel magazines, communities and groups in this space
Once you have identified a user persona (or multiple user personas), it is time to do some secondary research to understand more about the persona. What do they like, what do they talk about, where do they hang out, what motivates them, what do they like to associate with, etc. You can do so by finding out which magazines do they read, which communities are they part of, which online portals they hang out in etc. You can research the forums to understand more about the lingo and their persona, behavior, their happiness, concerns, fears etc.
All this will help you paint a picture of your ideal client better. Now it is up to you to match your product to the persona you have defined.
- Copywriting
This is where your understanding of your target market and the product you are selling will come into picture. You need to write crisp copy that will explain the value of the ad, the benefit it is offering and for whom. Always try to give a sense of urgency, such as limited spaces, or only 5 bookings left etc!
- Image
The image should be high quality and should essentially evoke the emotion behind the product. Humans make decisions based on emotions, and your job is to trigger that emotion. Facebook has a 20% text limit on the image. So use a compelling copy on the image that truly reflects the emotion in the picture.
- Retarget your audience
To enable retargeting, you would need to have the Custom Audience pixel set up for the product page. Create a rule that states that anyone who visits this page but does not sign up should be recorded in the pixel. Once you have around 40 people recorded, start a new ad retargeting the same people with a different image, a different copy and a more compelling sense of urgency.
- Lookalike audience
Once Facebook has recorded 100 people as part of its custom audience pixel, you can use this to create a look-alike audience. Then create new ads targeting this audience. Lookalike audience creation is a powerful way to target more relevant audience for your products. This way your ads are more targeted and chances of success are higher.
- Video Ads
We also experimented with a video ad for the same product. When you create a campaign based on video views, Facebook automatically creates a custom audience of people who have viewed the video ad. Once you have gathered about 100-200 viewers who have completely watched the video, you can again use the Lookalike audience (explained above) to target them with an ad.
- Multiple ad sets
Create multiple ad sets in a campaign targeting different age groups and devices
For the same interest and behavior, create multiple ad sets based on –
- Age
- Gender
- Device
This way, you will be able to measure which ad sets are giving you the maximum returns and which are just a cash drain. Kill the later. Increase budget for the ads which are performing well.
- Campaign budget
You can opt for a daily budget or a lifetime budget for an ad set. Life time budgets give you the flexibility of choosing time when the ads are displayed. For example, if you feel that evenings on weekdays are when most of your target market is active on Facebook, you can choose to run ads only during evenings. This way you get maximum bang for your buck. You need to experiment to see whether a daily budget or a lifetime budget suits you. Budget setup works for ad sets which have been set to run at least for 24 hours.
Even after executing this, you may not achieve the success you desire. Change your target audience, experiment with different creatives and copy-write and you will hit the mark soon. Always keep experimenting.
However, all things being said, what cannot be undermined is the quality of the product/service that you are selling. You have to sell good quality stuff, and you need to be trustworthy. People should perceive you to be a friendly company to do business with. If you are selling crappy product or your prospects do not like talking to you, chances of conversion go down drastically. No amount of good campaigns or targeting can save you there. Your online persona should match your real life persona.
Our client in question managed to sell all the spots for the travel product and the travel is scheduled to take place in the next couple of months. So I wish happy journey to the travelers and best of luck to our client in organizing a successful the trip!
