How We Made One Hotel Facebook Famous in Two Months with Digital Advertising Share: Martek Cloud Score Awaiting client review n/a Date Published 28 April 2021 Reading Time 8-Minute Read DIGITAL ADVERTISING CASE STUDY From Zero to 3,200+ How We Made One Hotel Facebook Famous in Two Months with Digital Advertising Who Needs Digital Advertising? Who needs digital advertising? Local businesses. Proper social posting supplemented with top-notch Facebook advertising tactics can make your business Facebook famous, especially backed by digital advertising experts. Here’s just one example of how we conquered Facebook fame, and the success story of one local business that skyrocketed from 0 Facebook likes to over 3,200 in just two months. The Client The Sapphire Hotel & Waterpark* is a hotel and indoor waterslide attraction that offers streamlined rooms and suites with in-suite kitchenettes, free Wi-Fi, 140 cm flat-screen TVs, and more. The Sapphire also sports an attached water park with whirlpool tubs, two waterslides, a wading pool, sauna, and fitness room— it’s a must-stay location when visiting the region. However, with all the great amenities and benefits the establishment offers, they had no Facebook presence whatsoever. Here’s why that matters: Facebook active monthly users: 6 billion Number of tourists visiting the hotel’s region in 2014: 12.5 million The number of consumer inquiries about tourism in the region was made via social media in 2014. Not only does Facebook have a massive audience that The Sapphire has left untouched, but people are visiting the region by the truckload. Additionally, people are using social media to find out about tourism in the area, and Sapphire has no presence for these interested parties to find on Facebook. These facts, combined with the hotel industry average of 516 Facebook likes and 78 Facebook posts*, show clearly that The Sapphire was leagues behind in their social presence, and missing out on a huge opportunity. In the digital age, researching a hotel thoroughly before your visit is a must, and so The Sapphire sought expert digital advertising services to turn their social media situation around. The Goal With Facebook being the largest, most engaged social media platform on the internet, Sapphire wanted to take advantage of its audience to promote its brand. The immediate goals were to: Build their presence on Facebook from the ground up Grow an audience of future customers to engage with And ultimately, drive room bookings and waterpark ticket sales The Plan of Attack Our team built a custom Facebook page for The Sapphire Hotel & Waterpark and began regular social posting with best practices. They also set up and ran Facebook Advertising campaigns to supplement traffic and exposure. Facebook page creation Our team created a well-designed and accurate Facebook page for The Sapphire, including all relevant details about the hotel, with accurate business hours and the ability for customers to engage with the business directly from the page. These are a must for generating more business via social media! Facebook posting One part of the plan was to build their presence through organic social posts. Our team began posting relevant, timely, and engaging social posts to The Sapphire’s new Facebook page, following social media best practices, to grow the audience, reach and promote the client’s brand. We provided The Sapphire with a full calendar of custom-crafted social posts that would be scheduled for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. The calendars consisted of five original ports for each week of the month and were approved, scheduled, and published live for The Sapphire’s social channels. Facebook Advertising campaigns Using the information and files provided by The Sapphire Hotel, the digital advertising team created compelling, creative and custom Facebook ads to be delivered to a highly targeted audience. These ads are built to drive traffic, boost promotions and ultimately generate hotel bookings and sales. The recipe for success with Facebook advertising is to reach a highly targeted audience the optimal number of times within a certain time period. Our digital advertising focuses on this recipe for success when creating each advertising campaign, targeting only the people most likely to convert and turn into real-life sales and bookings for The Sapphire. Our Facebook advertising campaigns use award-winning technology that goes beyond current best practices to provide true value to our local business clients through our digital advertising services. The campaign design ensures: Reach A minimum guaranteed number of unique people reached Only the right people see the ads, due to a local and hyper-targeted campaign algorithm Frequency The Sapphire’s target audience will see the ad guaranteed up to five times to optimize conversion Results Guaranteed reach and frequency, always Continuous tweaks and optimizations will be made throughout the course of the campaign for the best The Results After little more than two months, the client’s Facebook presence boomed. Both the Facebook page itself and the Facebook ad campaigns were seeing great results from their efforts. Facebook Page From no Facebook presence to a booming social page, our posting and page-optimization efforts garnered the business huge attention. Page likes growth: 0 g 3,284 Average organic post reach growth: 0 g 2,000 Average organic post clicks: 0 g 100+ Here are the hard numbers detailing the success of the Facebook page from just two months of our digital advertising efforts: Organic page reviews: 15 Average review rating: 5 stars Direct messages from interested customers: 35 Beyond the numbers, it’s clear to see overall user engagement with The Sapphire’s business page. Many users were consistently sharing the hotel’s posts and tagging their friends, creating further promotion and reach for the business through virality. Additionally, the business gained access to Facebook’s advanced analytics by reaching over 1,000 fans of the page. These advanced analytics allow for more detailed tracking of their Facebook success and are gated by follower count for larger, more successful Facebook business pages. This provides valuable business intelligence to The Sapphire and allows for more optimization of ad campaigns to drive even more success and reach. Facebook Advertising Campaigns One Facebook Ad campaign run by the Digital Advertising team was promoting The Sapphire’s waterslide package. The marketing objective of the campaign was to gain clicks and impressions and to drive phone calls directly to the business, but it achieved much more. In just two months, the campaign generated such active engagement and public buzz that it reached “viral” status. Shares, comments, and reactions: 200+ Impressions: 245,000+ Ad clicks: 5,600 Calls to business from ad: 51 Facebook users were with the ad itself. Dozens of users were commenting and tagging friends to let them know about the deal, and word quickly spread across Facebook about The Sapphire. Due to the ad, 51 calls were made directly to the business to discuss the waterslide package further. Making You Facebook Famous Three main factors contributed to this Facebook fame that we use. A well-designed and accurate Facebook page Having a Facebook business page is obviously the main player in achieving Facebook fame, but what’s on the page plays a big role as well. We ensure that your Facebook profile includes vital information about your business including location, hours, and a brief description of your business Keeping the information up-to-date, and making improvements and changes to the profile as necessary keeps your customers happy and informed! Relevant, timely, and engaging social posting We follow social posting best practices to ensure that your social media posts are helpful and fun as well as promotional. While the frequency and topics of posts will vary depending on your specific business, we know that posting too frequently may make you appear spammy and encourages people to unfollow your page or hide your business from their Facebook feed. Generally, we follow this rule of thumb when we craft your social posts, the 30/30/30 breakdown: 30% promotional / 30% industry relevant / 30% engaging What’s best for your business varies depending on who your audience is, and we go through creating the best tactics for your social media channels during the onboarding process. No matter what kind of material you’re wanting to keep clients informed about, we’re here to help. Overall, the secret is to provide your customers with value. That’s what we do to make your customers want to stick around! 3. Highly targeted Facebook Advertising campaigns The recipe for success on Facebook is to serve ads the optimal number of times within a certain period to a highly targeted audience. By supplementing organic Facebook posts with the right campaign, we drive traffic, promote promotions, and ultimately generate calls, in-store visits, and sales for your business. Minus the marketing jargon, the bottom line is that our hyper-targeted digital advertising campaigns get your business tangible results. We focus on optimizing the campaigns to get your business direct phone calls and in-store visits, and that’s value!