5 Badass Facebook-Ads targeting features for travel Startups
Facebook created an amazing playground for advertisers to reach people based on their demographics, social status, interests, and even their behavior. What it does when used right, it gives the marketer a unique opportunity to adjust a dedicated creative message for each person. Working for a travel tech startup with a super challenging marketing mission, I study and explore hundreds of targeting methods and their combinations, on the Facebook ad platform, to drive our prospects’ attention to our value proposition and bring them true value.
Location Drop Down Menu:
Facebook lets you target people in your geographic location by 4 characteristics:
- Everyone in the selected location, e.g., everyone who lives in London or his latest location was in London.
- People who live in this location, e.g., only people who live in London
- People recently in this location, e.g., only people whose most recent location is in London.
- People traveling in this location, e.g., only people whose most recent location is in London but their homes are more than 100 miles away from London.
For me, the last one is the most fascinating, as I can combine it with lots of Interest Targetings such as, people who like road tripping or adventure travel. Once targeted, I can poke them with amazing hotel deals from roomertravel.com near their current location if they are up for a quick rest in a massively discounted deluxe hotel room 10 miles away from them. I think that can bring huge value to people.
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Life events:
That allows you to target people with upcoming events in their lives or life events that recently happened, e.g., people whose birthday is within one week, or couples that are about to celebrate an anniversary in the next 30 days, or people who become engaged in the past 6 months.
Facebook was thinking very creatively when they also allowed the targeting of friends of people who are having a specific life event.
I especially love those methods that go along with a romantic kind of creative and try to catch people who are into an intimate weekend in Paris or something.
Expats:
In the last year, Facebook added an interesting opportunity for advertisers to target people whose original country is different from the targeted location you chose. You can find it in the Behaviors section. It is a bit similar to the location targeting at the beginning of the post, but it allows you to target people who were also originally born or live in a different country. Here is how you can combine Expats targeting with the “people traveling in this location” geo-targeting method:
- Targeted Location: United Kingdom
- Location Targeting Drop Down Menu: People traveling in this location
- Behavior Targeting: Expats (US)
That will set up your potential audience reach to include only Facebook users who are originally from the U.S. that live at least 100 miles from the UK and their recent location was in the UK, aka traveling in the US. Let’s emphasize this one with a more specific example: You can target someone who is originally from Brooklyn, NYC, who has worked and lived in Amsterdam for the last couple of years and is on a business trip in London at the moment.
Currently Traveling:
While the geo-location drop down menu lets you select people who were recently located (by their mobile location services) in a location that is at least 100 miles from their home, the behavioral targeting of people who are “currently traveling” lets you target Facebook users who were recognized by Facebook algorithms as ones that their activities on Facebook (check-ins, engagements with certain content, etc.) point out on that that they are currently traveling.
This method opens up the opportunity to target residents of a specific location who are at the moment traveling somewhere in the world, e.g., people who live in London and are currently traveling somewhere.
Pay attention to the fact that due to Facebook’s OR logic (for Interests and Behaviors targeting) you cannot mix this method with the Expats targeting. Well, you technically can, but it will create an audience of Facebook users who are EITHER current OR traveling expats. In other words, it won’t unite the two methods and create a mixture that combines only individuals who are BOTH currently traveling AND expats. (BTW third party marketing partners of Facebook are able to implement an AND logic on Behavior and Interests targeting).
ZIP code / Address targeting:
It might look like a very basic targeting method, but the real beauty of it is combining it with the “people traveling in this location” method. That, for example, will let you target people near specific hotels or airports. If you want to target people near large central airports (JFK, Heathrow, etc.), you don’t even need a zip or an address, just the name of the airport and it will find the location automatically.
Last thing I would like to say before the conclusion, and it will be the most important message that I want to send you. All of these methods and amazing features that Facebook brings to the marketing and advertising world are in my opinion only tools that should help us make better creatives for our ads using the right and relevant context. For example: if you want to sell a hotel room for people who are traveling near an upcoming music festival venue, you should try and target people who are travelling there, are fans of a band that is performing at the festival, then tag the band in your ad’s creative or provide information about their gig or about the area the band members are staying during the festival, etc. That will get you the attention and the engagement you need to be able to provide the value you want to your targeted audience and sell your stuff.
And that would be it
Cheers,
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