Maybe The Best Facebook Campaign For Queenstown Tourism Just Now

If you’re a tourism or activity provider in Queenstown. there’s a great Facebook advertising campaign that you should be testing right now.

If you’ve heard me talk, or been on any of my courses, you’ll know I’m a passionate advocate of getting more out of the platforms you are currently using online, whether it’s your website, email marketing, social media, or anything in between.

You’ll also know I realise we don’t all have the budgets of our tourism heavyweights – the Regional Tourism Operators, or the real big spender Tourism New Zealand.   I’ve highlighted a few ways you can piggyback on your tourism organisation’s media spend in a previous article.

If you keep up to date with Destination Queenstown’s activities (and you should if you’re based here), you’ll be aware the latest issue of Mindfood Magazine has recently hit the shelves and is dedicated to our wonderful destination, that place we call home, Queenstown New Zealand.

So what’s this Facebook advertising campaign I’m talking about?  

Destination Queenstown and Mindfood have made a mammoth effort to showcase our area.  If the campaign is working well, Queenstown will be on the top of a lot of people’s minds if they’ve been reading the latest issue.  Heck, they may even be thinking about booking a trip down here.  If you splashed the cash, you may even be getting a lot of enquiries from the advert you took out in the issue.

But what if you’re not?  What if you couldn’t afford to get into the magazine?

What if you couldn’t afford to take out an advert the magazine?

Even if you took out an advert in the print issue, how can you stay top of mind with their readers?

Have you thought about testing a cheap Facebook campaign to try and grab the reader’s attention?

If Queenstown is top of mind, you could be too.

Queenstown businesses can reach Mindfood readers for a fraction taking out a print adClick To Tweet

How To Set Up A Facebook Campaign For Mindfood Readers

You could test a Facebook advertising campaign targeting people who are interested in Mindfood Magazine, and limit it to the domestic New Zealand market (and Australia too if you have the budget, but they’re less likely to jump on a plane at the last minute).

Here’s how :

Step 1 : Start a new Facebook campaign and pick your objective (e.g. Brand Awareness or Conversions ideally).

Step 2 : Select the targeting to be people interested in Mindfood

You can do this by searching for Mindfood in the “Detailed Targeting” box, and low and behold, MiNDFOOD is displayed!

 

That’s 257,610 potential people your advert can reach.

Step 3 : Select Your Placements

Personally I’d edit the placements at this stage.  I’d probably take out Audience Network for now, and potentially Instagram depending on your budget.  You can do that by clicking the ‘-‘ sign on the right hand side.

 

Step 4 : Craft A Compelling Advert

Call out MiNDFOOD readers in your ad.  I’ve mocked one up below (this may not be the best wording but hopefully you’ll get what I mean!  I should have put something like “Read the recent issue and booking your trip to Queenstown?” but you’ll have to craft that based on your business and offering)

Remember to watch the length of text though – it can appear differently on different devices as show below for right hand side ads and mobile.  You’ll also want to be consistent with the case of your text – the main Newsfeed puts the Link Text in all caps – the other placements don’t.

 

Step 5 :

There’s a few things I’ve missed out in the brief description above.  Depending on your offer you could narrow the targeting down to only females, males or based on other demographics such as age group, location (e.g. Auckland only, or places within driving distance or with direct flights).  Ideally each demographic would be in a different Ad Set so you could easily see which one was performing better.

Facebook Conversion Issues

To get true results and reporting from the above you must have your Facebook conversion pixel set up correctly to track enquiries or bookings, but that’s another story.  Setting this up correctly depends on what technology you use on your website, or the support provided by your booking engine.  Sadly, it’s often not quite as easy as blog posts or speakers tell you (can you hear me hotel booking engines??!!).

Tracking Facebook conversions correctly is more than just sticking the generic Facebook pixel on your website.

What Are You Waiting For?

If you’re used to running Facebook ad campaigns, this is a quick campaign to test.

You’ve got a reach of a potential 257,610 MiNDFOOD readers for way less than the cost of a print ad would ever be!

You may even reach MORE people than your print ad would as there’s probably people following them on Facebook who rarely buy the magazine!

How to reach 257,610 Mindfood readers for way less than the cost of a print ad.Click To Tweet

If you’re going to use it, use it quick, and customise the ad wording above so it’s not the same as everyone else’s who reads this!  The shelf life of this campaign is only for the upcoming season.

Digital Versus Print Advertising

The point of this article is to highlight different ways you can use digital marketing platforms to reach your potential audience, and not to say “print is dead”.

I think what Destination Queenstown, MiNDFOOD Magazine, and all the advertisers who supported the issue did an amazing job in showcasing our wonderful town, and I haven’t even seen the issue (I’m writing this overseas).  Digital marketing should be complementing whatever you do in print, or even better, the other way round.

Depending what market you’re in there’s a whole army of campervan drivers driving around New Zealand still picking up an amazon rainforest of brochures to look for things to do during their trip to the land of the long white cloud.

Despite this, when was the last time you tested something else?  Are you doing print because you’re scared not to?

I only write that as a challenge, not so say ditch it.  Without a shadow of a doubt, you can track digital marketing in ways you couldn’t even dream of tracking print.

Sadly most businesses completely overlook this in any brief and get too smitten with a pretty website.  If you’re online you should be tracking as much as you can.  I have clients tracking every email click, phone call, enquiry form, social media click and more from their website (Google Tag Manager is AWESOME!), and tying that back to campaigns so they can know what’s working, and what needs some more loving.  Even better there’s a dollar value attached to each one.

This does take an investment up front, but the data is gold, and far more valuable than just sticking a website up there.  The insights you get can be amazing.

If you’re a marketing manager, having this data can help you look better.  

If you’re missing out on tracking a whole bunch of conversions at the moment, there’s a good chance your marketing campaigns are going better than you think (Did I just say easier to justify next year’s marketing budget??).

I’m currently working with a client who is redeveloping multiple different websites, mainly because the first iteration made it impossible to track any revenue information due to missing advice (oh yes, and Google Analytics wasn’t implemented properly on two out of three sites so pop went any visitor data for 4 years due to two missing characters!  Nice testing by the web company ;-)).

How Else Can You Piggyback On This Facebook Campaign?

If you have all your digital marketing sorted, you should have remarketing pixels from both Facebook and Google AdWords on your website.  If you do, bonus points to you as when people click on your advert and hop on over to your website, you’ve just ‘pixelled them’ so you can use them for future advertising campaigns.

Facebook allows you to keep that audience for up to 180 days, and Google for up to 540 days!

If you’re really savvy, you’ll have a number of audiences set up like 1-7 days, 7-14 days, 30, 60, 90, 180, 360 and 540 days.  You never know when this may come in handy in the future.

Doing a winter campaign?  What about being able to remarket to a New Zealand and Australian audience who’s visited your website last winter?

That’s where the power of real remarketing and segmentation comes into play!

If you try this, please let me know how you get on in the comments below. You’ll need proper conversion tracking in place to really know.  Sadly, this is often overlooked in digital marketing.

If you’d like to get me to help to set up your digital marketing analytics and conversion reporting correctly using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, get in touch.