Email marketing to your own customers is intrusive. In just Rs. 3 you can reach out with your communication to your existing customers through Facebook. Want to know how?

My Pain:

Repeated email marketing could be irritating to my customer?

Who says LinkedIn is expensive for promotion in Service apartment/ Hotel Industry?

My Experience:

We initiated an advertisement in the in-flight magazine (please read our blog How effective is it to advertise on in-flight magazine). Our objective was to communicate to maximum people (our own customers database & maximum corporate Air travelers) who were to travel in near future, about our free stay contest in the in-flight magazine (honestly the purpose was not that the people were dying to win the contest but got an excuse to reach out to all travelers about TrustedStay). Means our objective was to create an awareness that TrustedStay is a Pan India Service apartment provider. We were not bothered about leads at this point of time.

We decided to launch awareness campaign across Social Media. Facebook was one of them. If you want to know how to launch awareness campaigns on other Social Media platforms, follow the links below.

How to setup your advertisement campaign in Twitter for serviced apartments?

Who says LinkedIn is expensive for promotion in Service apartment/ Hotel Industry?

Audience: We defined our audience as under

Job Title: Our serviced apartments decision makers are Admin, Facilities, HR, Procurement & Travel desk. The idea was to reach out to all these people in Social Media with any of the above designations who could be our potential client.

Company Name: Our service apartments users were mainly the following Industry, Banking, Insurance, IT, Automobile, Engineering, Pharma, Start-up’s, Major Corporate Group companies. So, we thought of targeting all employees in these companies.

Own Customers: We have a database of 35000 customers who contacted us for serviced apartment. Which includes customers who gave us the booking and who did not, but we captured their details in our CRM database. We thought of non-intrusive communication to all those who are in SM platform.

How to create an Ads Account in Facebook:

Before you setup & start running the campaigns, you need to have an ads account or a business account on Facebook. Here are the steps to create an Ads account in Facebook.

1. Go to https://business.facebook.com/
2. Click on “Create Account” on the top right corner.
3. Enter you Account Name, Your Name and your business Email Id.
4. Next add your business’s address and click Submit.
5. A confirmation email will be sent to the email you provided. Confirm it.
6. Now you have a Facebook Business Account. Next, we move onto creating the Ad account.
7. Once you have confirmed the Email, you are taken to your Business Account. If not go to this link https://business.facebook.com/settings/ad-accounts
8. Click on “Add” and Select “Create a new ad account” from the drop-down.
9. Enter your desired name in “Ad account name” and fill up the other details. Make note that you choose the currency (INR) & time zone (Asia/Kolkata) properly since you won’t be able to edit or make changes to it once selected. Click Next.
10. Select My Business in the next step and click Create.
11. In the next section, Select the person (Your name) & enable all the check boxes to give yourself the Admin access. Click Assign.

There you go, now you have a Business Account as well as a Facebook Ad Account for your Business. You can go on and create campaigns using below instructions.

Campaign setup:

FB Campaign: (login to https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager/)

Create Campaign:

Select “Reach”

Enter “Campaign name” (Inflight Magazine)

Adset-1 (wanted to reach audience having specific job titles designation)

Adset Name (Job Title)

Audience

Location (India)

Age (18-60)

Gender (All)

Detailed Targeting (Job Titles all variation in designation of Admin, Human Resource, Facilities, Purchase) Audience meter indicated a reach of 4.7 lacs

Placement: Select Manual Placement

Platforms: Select Facebook & Instagram

Feed: Select FB News Feed, Instagram feed, FB Market place, FB Video feed, Instagram Explore

Instream: Select FB instream Videos

In-article: Select FB Instant article

Budget & Schedule

Select amount & period. We kept daily budget of Rs. 100 for 10 days, the audience meter showed a daily reach of 1.4K-4.2K / 4.7 Lacs.

Create Ad

Format: Select Single image/Video

Media: Add Video

Text& Links: Write Primary text for the post

Confirm

Adset-2 (wanted to reach out to all employees of a particular company/companies)

We wanted to target audience who are currently working in that company but FB picks up also those who are talking about that company and its agents/dealers. Resulting in a wrong audience.

Adset-3 (wanted to reach out to all our database of 35000 who were present in FB)

Step 1:

Pulled out names, email & contact details of all our 35000 customers from our CRM

Step 2:

Ad manager: Click Audience

Create audience: Drop down Select Custom Audience

Select Customer List: Check the fields required for your contact list: Press Next

Does list include Customer Value: Select NO: Press Next

Add Customer List:  Name your audience “My Contacts” it creates an audience list.

Once uploaded it showed the size 14000 (means 14000 out of 35000 of our customers had account in FB).

Step 3:

Edit Campaign

Adset Name (Own Customers)

Audience

Location (India)

Age (18-60)

Gender (All)

Detailed Targeting (All demographics, Interests or behaviours)

Placement:

Select Manual Placement

Platforms: Select Facebook & Instagram

Feed: Select FB News Feed, Instagram feed, FB Market place, FB Video feed, Instagram Explore

Instream: Select FB instream Videos

In-article: Select FB Instant article

Budget & Schedule

Select amount & period. We kept daily budget of Rs.100 for 10 days, the audience meter showed a daily reach of 1.4K-4.2K / 14000.

Create Ad

Format: Select Single image/Video

Media: Add Video

Text& Links: Write Primary text for the post

Confirm

Results:

Audience	Reach	Amount	Period	100% Video Views/1000 Rs Spent
Job Title	4.7L	4,000	11 Days	260
Company	NA	NA	NA	NA
Own Customers	20K	8,000	27 Days	425

We felt that a reasonably good numbers of our own customers were on Facebook and reaching out to our own customers Facebook was the best way to reach out.

In case you are wondering whether Facebook is the best platform for your ads, you can read this post about Which social media platform is most effective to create awareness for Service apartment / Hotel Industry?

My Conclusion:

Of course you may say that I can send emails to my customer database which is free. But that is intrusive way of communicating. This may be annoying and the customer may want to unsubscribe the mails. But imagine he sees your brand while on Facebook and that Rs 2.35 is worth the money. Your comments are welcome.