The trick to effective content marketing is being in the right place, at the right time, with the right content and messaging.
NB: This is a viewpoint from Matthew Barker, founder of I&I Travel Media.
Once you’ve defined your audience you can start planning content campaigns to fit their needs at various stages of the customer journey to purchase.
There’s a lot to know. For now, let’s focus just on Facebook.
Facebook ads are useful at various stages of the customer journey, but it’s worth bearing in mind that people aren’t often purchase ready when they’re using Facebook. They’re more likely to be browsing and chatting than booking.
This makes Facebook ads ideal for soft content “amplification” such as promoting downloadable content, contests, etc.
Other notable features are video view ads which are currently at very low ‘cost per view’ and can be a great source of “inspiration & dreaming” phase audiences.
The secret weapon: retargeting & lookalike audiences
The above channels are useful enough in their own right and can bring a lot of extra value to your content marketing efforts, but it doesn’t stop there.
Wading in to really shake things up is the hugely powerful concept of audience retargeting.
Not strictly a channel in its own right, retargeting (or “remarketing” to Google) is a targeting tool that can be used in conjunction with all the ad formats outlined above.
In a nutshell it means we can show our ads specifically to people who’ve already visited our site and engaged with our content.
This puts the paid channels on steroids and unlocks the secret to content marketing ROI by recapturing the people we’ve previously reached with our content efforts.
Use-case: people who’ve downloaded a travel guide on your site have demonstrated a keen interest in the subject. Showing these people related ads further down the customer journey is a surefire way to turn engaged audiences into leads and sales.
A second powerful retargeting feature is lookalike audiences, i.e. other people who share the demographics and interests of your target audience, letting you reach even more people with your ads.
If 1,000 people download a travel guide from your site then that’s a great result! You can then use a lookalike audience to target audiences that are orders of magnitudes larger with overlapping interests and demographics to the original 1,000 people. This means high volume while retaining the relevance and targeting of your original audiences.
Watch out: Retargeting has earned a bad rap thanks to its ‘stalky’ undertones and the unsettling feeling of being watched and followed as you browse around the web. Generally speaking, if your ads feel intrusive then you’re doing it wrong.
It’s a powerful tool and needs to be handled with caution – unfortunately many advertisers go way overboard. Be subtle, offer genuine value and try to provide an enjoyable user experience.
An obvious (but surprisingly overlooked!) way to keep things subtle is to remove or exclude people from your retargeting audience once they’ve converted. Otherwise you’re wasting budget and potentially upsetting people at the same time. (h/t @travelfish).
NB: This viewpoint is an excerpt from "The Complete Guide to Paid Media Channels in Travel Content Strategy", written by Matthew Barker, head of strategy at I&I Travel Media.
NB2: Need step by step help with retargeting on Facebook? We walk you through how to set up a campaign -- based on a case study -- in our Tnooz Report "Hotel Marketers: Marketers: How to Use Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Retargeting" ($25).