From Black Friday deals to seasonal packages, Q4 is prime time for holiday sales. But if your hotel uses online travel agents (OTAs), then you know their fees can cut into your margin.
Your strategy to balance out the OTAs with more direct bookings this year? Organic and paid social media.
Today, the hotel marketing experts at Forge Apollo are here to share our top tips for driving direct bookings during sale season, drawing on our experience running seasonal campaigns with regional chains like ICONA Resorts and producing creative for international brands like Hyatt.
Your Advantage Over the OTAs
Rate parity restrictions may prevent you from offering a lower room rate than the OTAs. So, how are you supposed to attract more direct bookings? You have a few advantages on social media.
- Value-Add Packages: Bundle extra perks to enhance the stay without changing the room price.
- Visual Storytelling: OTAs rely on static, architectural photos or user-submitted photos, whereas with a variety of social media formats and creative production, you can immerse your audience in the experience of staying at your hotel.
- Local Expertise: Your team members are experts in your local area. Use that expertise on social media and benefit from everyone searching for travel and activity inspo in your area.
- First-Party Data: Your own data, such as previous guests, website visitors, and social engagement, offers prime retargeting potential.
Phase 1: Planning
Prepare Your Offers
Plan multiple offers to cover holiday spending frenzies and attract last-minute visitors with seasonal perks. Go beyond Black Friday hotel marketing alone to add some more creative packages to the mix. Some successful offers we ran with ICONA Resorts in Q4 include:
- Gift card sales (ex, “Buy $100, get $20”)
- Seasonal experience packages that require guests to visit during certain windows (a cozy escape mid-week in December, a holiday stay on Thanksgiving weekend, etc.)
- Packages that require guests to book now, but the actual stay takes place later (ex, “Book next summer’s stay now and get breakfast included)
In addition to your offer terms, pre-plan the offer dates and redemption codes to give yourself plenty of time to create marketing assets.
Segment Your Paid Audiences
Define the audiences you want paid ads to reach now so you can tailor your campaigns to speak to them.
In addition to the hotel’s typical personas, we like to include:
- A local audience for last-minute visit offers and gift card deals, since they’re the most accessible.
- Past guest retargeting for early access to next year’s vacation.
- Audiences in other seasonal conditions who may prefer your conditions (i.e. people in cold climates craving the beach, or people in a hot area who want to go skiing)
Technical Setup
Remember that retargeting audience we mentioned being so valuable? To use that, add a pixel from your social advertising platform, like Meta, to your website.
This is also the time to check that you have conversion tracking in place so you can properly attribute revenue to the right marketing channel.
Especially during sale season, we see revenue across channels increase, so a general surge in bookings isn’t a sign that your social media campaigns specifically worked. You need to be able to track the bookings back to the channel.
If this step is a little technical for you, a social media ad agency, like Forge Apollo, can help you set them up.
Phase 2: Your Organic Social Strategy
Now it’s time to plan some content. In the organic half of the strategy, we’ll focus on awareness and engagement.
Build Anticipation
Remember all of that planning we did earlier? That’s so you can start building anticipation early with content like countdowns and teasers, or behind-the-scenes holiday decor setup.
We’ve seen how waiting too long to define the particulars of an offer kills your opportunity to build anticipation.
We like to start teasing 2-3 weeks before any major sale (unless it’s a pop-up flash sale).
Post Experiential Content
If your offers aim to attract visitors during the holiday season, create that magic for your audience. Your posts should highlight all of the seasonal touches that make people want to visit now, like:
- Cozy spaces or decor
- Seasonal drinks & dining
- Local holiday events
In this post for ICONA Resorts, we highlighted a pop-up Winter Wonderland event at one of their properties.
View this post on Instagram
In this post, we highlighted the holiday ambiance around the hotel’s town, Cape May, at Christmastime.
View this post on Instagram
Or, if you want people to book now for their visit later, you can post aspirational content about the season to come.
UGC & Influencers
Leverage local content creators for user-generated content (UGC) and influencer partnerships to highlight your offerings or include you in roundups of activity ideas.
For example, this creator tagged ICONA’s Winter Wonderland as a Christmas activity idea at the Jersey Shore.
View this post on Instagram
Social-Exclusive Sales
Pick one offer to promote as a social-exclusive flash sale. Give it a short deadline, like 24-28 hours. We generated $47,757 for ICONA Resorts with a single social campaign.
Phase 3: Scaling with Paid Social Media
Paid social media is where you’ll target conversions and earn more direct bookings.
Choose Your Campaigns
First, identify how many campaigns you need. We suggest one for each offer. The more you split your campaigns, the more diluted your budget will get. So try to stick to your most compelling offers at first.
Choose Your Platforms
Then, identify which platforms you want to advertise on. We’ve had the best luck with Meta (Facebook & Instagram), but you could also consider platforms like TikTok or Pinterest.
Retargeting
Create retargeting audiences for website visitors who browsed dates but didn’t book, positioning your offer as superior to the OTA (without breaking any of your OTA contract rules).
Not only can you point out value-add perks, like offering a free breakfast or spa credit, but you can also mention perks like the ability to get a refund or easily move your stay date, which OTAs don’t frequently offer.
Plan Your Creative
Based on your platform choices, identify which contact formats you’ll need, then plan how many ad sets you want to create. We suggest having at least a few separate ads for each campaign.
Ad Creative Best Practices
- Test a variety of ad formats and placements to find what works best with your audience (3-5 per campaign)
- Create assets in the appropriate size for each placement (1:1, 4:5, 9:16, etc)
- Account for Meta safe zones (download our templates to make sure nothing important is obstructed)
- Use a mixture of high-quality lifestyle and architectural images
- Choose a consistent CTA & messaging for each campaign
For example, here are two creatives we made for ICONA Resorts’ sale, in a 1:1 and 9:16 aspect ratio.
Debrief When The Season’s Over
Once you have time to breathe, revisit your data to draw insights into what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d like to try differently next year.
Ask questions like:
- What got a lot of engagement but didn’t convert? These are good campaigns to try tweaking for next year.
- What had the best conversion rates? This is a good candidate to put more spend behind or scale the audience for next year.
- What got no engagement or conversions? These are good candidates to drop or seriously alter for next year.
- Did any parts of your production process hold you back? Social media needs to be agile. If you were stuck waiting on lengthy approvals or production timelines, creating stronger guidelines or working with an outside production company could help.
We see a lot of hotels get stuck in the trap of always preparing for the next campaign without ever taking the time to learn from the ones they’ve run already.
Get More Direct Bookings with Hotel Social Media Marketing Experts
If you really want to outpace the OTAs with your holiday sales, we can help you craft an organic and paid hotel social media marketing strategy to get you there. Our unique combination of a strategic digital marketing team and an award-winning video production team has helped clients like ICONA Resorts earn more bookings. Ready to discuss your next campaign strategy? Contact our social media marketing team in Philadelphia today.
