Summer is just around the corner, which means that your business might be in the middle of planning your summer events and attractions. It’s time to start thinking about how to best use your marketing budget to help increase awareness, attendance and business for your summer events this year. Digital advertising strategies allow you to pinpoint the target audience you want to reach and meet your summer goals.
There are many ways that you can do that digitally, but here are a few of our favorites:
Showcase photos of your business
Social media gives you the opportunity to showcase your attractions and allow your potential customers to experience what it’s like to be at your event or business. With Facebook and Instagram advertising, you have the flexibility to use a range of ad formats including photos, video, carousel ads and more.
Here’s an example of a carousel ad:
This Carousel Ad allows you to highlight up to 10 different images/videos of your business. If you’re a waterpark, imagine being able to showcase your top 10 rides/slides! If you’re a beachside bar, imagine being able to showcase up to 10 different menu items! If you’re a family entertainment center, imagine showcasing your cart racing, miniature golf, roller coaster and arcade in one single ad unit! This ad format allows users to swipe (or click) through to see everything included. The ability to use multiple images also allows you to be able to promote something for everyone.
Use your business database of customers
Do you have a list of everyone who has bought tickets to your theme park online? Do you have a list of phone numbers of those people that registered for your text club? Emails for your newsletters? If you’ve been creating a database of people that have been into your business before, then there is another use of Facebook/Instagram for you.
Utilizing Facebook’s Custom Audience to reach the people that have already done business with you can prove to be a successful strategy. With this, you can take your database of emails, phone numbers, or even full names with zip codes and upload that database to Facebook. Then, we find as many of those individuals with profiles on Facebook/Instagram and serve your ads to that audience/group specifically.
To top that off, you can even create a Lookalike Audience based on the profile information found in the step above. This would allow you to promote to an audience that may be new to your brand.
Social Mirror Ads
Social Mirror ads look like your social media display or video posts but appear on other websites and apps, linking back to the social media platform and your website, and run across all devices using targeting strategies. These ads “mirror” the exact look of your social post as an ad that runs on other websites and apps, targeted to the people you want to reach across all devices. Mirror ads can be done with any organic or paid posts from your business account on these 8 social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat or YouTube. Social Mirror ads play well with consumer’s online activity.
One of the big benefits of Social Mirror ads is getting to repurpose and reuse your Social Media content. With these ads, you no longer have to design an ad to a specific size. You just provide the URL of the post you want to use, and that’s it!
Targeting options for Social Mirror ads include:
- Behavioral – thousands of targeting categories including demographics, online and offline behaviors, and interests. Think about targeting people that love waterparks and amusement parks, or happy hour and craft beer.
- Keywords – target a list of up to 500 keywords related to your business, and show Social Mirror ads on the web pages where they appear. Keywords could include travel terms, specific airlines, competitors and even roller coasters.
- A.I. Targeting – Showing your display or video ads to people across all devices, using machine learning to target consumers based on who is engaging with the ad
- Retargeting – Following people after they leave your website and showing them your Social Mirror ad, on other websites and apps they go to, across all devices. One of the most popular and fundamental strategies. You spend so much time working to get people to visit your website, and now what?! You want to make sure you can stay top of mind with them after they leave, so they can come back and buy from you!
Videos
Lastly, incorporating some sort of video would be an amazing way to get the summer customers to virtually experience what you have to offer. There are a lot of video options to choose from out there, but Video Pre-Roll is one of the more well-known forms of video advertising, as it’s been around for quite some time. Pre-Roll video is the ad that runs before the content you’re about to watch. Whether you’re on ESPN.com watching highlights of March Madness that just ended, or on HGTV watching a rerun of your favorite show, pre-roll ads are everywhere. The biggest benefits to pre-roll video ads are that they can be placed on thousands of websites that utilize video content.
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