Over the past several months, Facebook has been adjusting the way they manage their major advertisers. In the past, they have had advertising teams which focused on geographic areas, such as specific countries or regions. Going forward, however these teams will target specific advertising verticals instead. The thinking behind this seems to be that different verticals (travel, financial, education, ect) will have a lot in common, regardless of where the company is from in the world. In addition, they plan on spending a significant amount of resources wooing companies in the travel industry to market on Facebook.
Travel has always been a huge niche, but Facebook hasn’t been able to bring them into Facebook in a significant way. Facebook recently presented a study conducted by the Sparkler research agency to 40 of the top prospective travel clients. The study showed that Facebook is typically used by travelers during each of the five stages of taking a vacation. These stages are, dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing and reflecting.
If Facebook ad managers can show that people are heavily influenced by their platform throughout the major steps in booking and enjoying a vacation. This will, naturally, help to bring in additional advertisers to their ad network. The study helped confirm this, showing that 95% of people use Facebook for some sort of travel planning activities. In addition, over half of people said they start dreaming of a vacation while on Facebook (most likely while viewing ads or vacation pictures of friends & family).
Facebook is also planning some improvements to their ad targeting system with the travel industry in mind. They will help marketers identify which people on Facebook are most likely to take a vacation using, ‘travel intenders.’ This will help marketers place extremely targeted advertisements on Facebook, rather than just relying on SEO strategies, which are common in the travel industry.
While Facebook may be reaching out directly to the largest travel related companies, this move also creates opportunities for other marketers to jump in to travel marketing on Facebook. Affiliate marketers, for example, may be able to take advantage of this new focus from Facebook, especially if they move quickly. Facebook done the research, and laid the platform, for marketers to succeed with travel advertisements, it is now up to marketers of all sizes to take advantage of it.
What do you think of this move by Facebook? Have you, or will you, use Facebook ads to promote travel products in 2014? Comment below.
