Best way to monetize your Hotels using Facebook

Hi, everyone, and welcome to another show, another episode of the Askavyaria Show. Today we're going to talk about how to monetize your hotels using everything that Facebook has. So Facebook is one platform that you and I know is growing exponentially every single week. We're in July 2017, we're on the 12th of July today. In the last eight to 12 weeks, Facebook has been rattling off updates like a machine gun. There's been so much coming up. And so my Facebook lives are going crazy because I'm doing everything. I'm trying to get out all that information every day. I'm trying to learn from experts that I meet around the world who are my mentors, who are my friends. Experts like Mary Smith, you know, she shares so much information online. Thank you, Mary, for everything that you do. Experts like Pat Flynn, Gary Vaynerchuk, so many people. So, you know, I'm blessed to be in that community, to have some of these people as my friends and mentors and colleagues. And also because of Internet bogus what we do for hotels in the hospitality industry. We've got a lot of information which I'm trying to pack into this short show that we're bringing to you right now on how to monetize your hotels using Facebook. Facebook has a lot of opportunities now for you hoteliers, you have a few opportunities. You want to sell your hotel rooms, you want to sell your spa, you want to sell your fnb, you want to sell your banquet queries, and you want to sell other integrated facilities and services that you have. It is absolutely brilliant what Facebook can do for you today. So today, most of the times I've seen people are using Facebook ads to drive traffic to their website and then they say, guess what? We tried Facebook advertising, but it's not working. Well, you know what, like everything else in life, there are a few subtle tweaks that you have to make and everything works if you know those tweaks. So I'm going to share some of them with you. When you generate traffic from a Facebook lead, going to your website and then eventually going to your booking engine, we all know that booking engine conversions are less than 0.5 in most cases. So you don't. 0.5% in some cases even lower. So you don't want to send your Facebook traffic over there. Here's what you want to do to sell your rooms. You can have a room only package which is available on Facebook, a Facebook only offer. So create a Facebook only offer. Make it a time sensitive offer. You could say it expires in two hours or you could say expires in 24 hours and say it is available only on your website, on your Facebook page. So I'll repeat a great offer showcasing your room, double room or triple room, whatever you're selling and advertise. And with that offer, make it a time sensitive offer. Have people clicking and coming to a separate landing page. That landing page can have a payment gateway or it can have a click to call option, which means when somebody sees that offer, that time sensitive offer, they click. It reaches a click to call opportunity where your reservation team gets a query, a hot lead from somebody who is willing to make a booking in the next few hours or maybe a day. And 10 to 15% if you have a decent call center, if a decent reservation team, 10 to 15% of these hot leads are converted. 10 to 15% versus the 0.25 or 0.3% conversion on a booking engine. That's a huge difference that you should try to monetize. That's opportunity number one. Opportunity number two for your room, the fmb, everything else can be, you can have a click to chat opportunity. You know, sometimes a customer is in a meeting or he's doing multiple things and he does not want to start talking about business, about how much is the room and all of that on the phone. And because he's not in that commitment mode just yet, or he's doing other things right now. So he starts chatting with you. Once he starts chatting with you. So you have a nice Facebook ad and it has a click to chat option. The user clicks it and starts chatting with you online. Once they start chatting with you, you can do two things now. You can have it robotized, automated, or you can have a human being there. Now in this case, I always say that you should have some parts automated, but some parts should still have a human element. Dear Mr. Karan, how are you? Nice to see you again. Nice to know you traveling with your family. Some things just cannot be automated. But there are some things like send me the payment link. Can you send me five more pictures? All those can be robotized or automated on a Facebook chatbot. So being the amalgamation of automation and humanization, have that click to chat coming in and people, because you know that There are typically five to 15 questions people are going to ask you. What kind of rooms do you have? Do you have a late checkout? What are the prices? What does the Facebook only offer? So have those questions and have those replies ready with your call center team and also automate the same and you will start seeing 5 to 15% conversions from Facebook on every lead that is coming to you. So I explained two things so far. I explained that you can use Click to Call and you can use Click to Chat again with time sensitive offers leading to landing pages or leading to chat or then eventually going to your call center. Now comes to this is for the rooms. Now comes your fnb. Your FNB is a huge part of your business. Now you can get F and B traffic from two sources. There are people who are living in your hotel and then there are people in and around your vicinity. So you might have a lot of corporate offices in and around your vicinity which might want people and people going out for lunch. So you can have time sensitive offers for people during lunch. When I say time sensitive here, they could start at 12:45 and finish at 2:45 depending on the lunch timing in and around the area. And you offer them a coupon and you say you print this coupon out or show this coupon on your phone and we'll give you an x percent off. Or we could give you a free beer or whatever you want to give for lunch for that particular offer that will help you monetize FNB like never before. So this is for the local audiences. The other is to be able, I would always recommend a lookalike audience. So if you're able to upload database of all your checkout guests and all your check in guests, all your checkout guests and all your check in guests, people who have checked in, you know your CRS will have the email IDs of those people and upload it onto Facebook and run campaigns to these people. So people checking Facebook throughout the day who are living in your hotel will also get to know oh my God, there is a, there's an offer in the evening, there's a salsa night in the evening or there's a lunch offer happening or there's a special breakfast buffet that's laid out so people who are living in your hotel and people who are in the vicinity can both get these offers. You can also go back to the click to call offer to say people can call for lunch and find out those are people in the local vicinity can click and find out about what's happening at in your hotel. So FNB has got a lot of options. I shared with you some of them here on Facebook that you can leverage on Facebook. Now we going to talk about the spa in the hotel or the gym in the hotel or sometimes you have an ayurveda massage center in the hotel. All of these are revenue generating opportunities. And yes, yes, yes, all of these can do well on Facebook and I'll tell you how. So if you have a gym membership that you're wanting to sell, you're obviously wanting to sell a gym membership to people who are living in the vicinity of your hotel. And this is extra income and extra revenue for the hotel. So yes, you can create offers, gym offers for people saying that we are only half a kilometer from your home. Or drive, you know, give the gift of health to your spouse or your loved one on a Father's Day, on a Mother's Day, there are many opportunities where people are gifting the gift of health to others. The best way to get a GYP membership is to have an event. So I would create a group on Facebook, an event on Facebook and say between 5 and 7 in the evening or 4 or 8 in the evening, or 9 or 12 during the day, whatever time suits you and suits people in your fraternity and your vicinity to come to your hotel and experience the gym. So it's sort of a meet and greet, it's an event. And have a picture of a nice healthy smoothie. So say, come and enjoy our free healthy smoothies. Free healthy smoothies while we show you around our gym. Or offer them a free workout with one of your best trainers, or give them a free Ayurvedic massage or whatever you have. But allow people to see that experience, to actually experience the experience that you have before they come and buy something from you. And also when they're driving from their home or their office on the way and they come to your gym, they realize how close you are to their place of work or the place where they stay. Then so they have to download that and show you on their phone that offer that they saw or that event, or they subscribe to that event and say, yes, they're coming there. So either create an event or create an offer to say, you know, this is a time sensitive offer for only two hours or the next two days. We are having this event, only 25 people allowed, where we're going to have healthy smoothies, we're going to talk about health. There's going to be a fitness instructor coming in and we're going to, you know, do your body type and free analysis of your body weight and all of that BMI and all of that. So create an offer for health and give them something for free, free. And promote it on Facebook in and around your vicinity. Now here's where Facebook helps They can help you target mile wise so how many miles near your hotel you want to target. Or you could also go company wise. So for example, you have the Internet moguls office next to your hotel or you have any other brand next to your hotel, could be Microsoft or Google or whatever small, large, big company. You can actually target those particular companies and make offers for them only. So you would say special offer for Internet moguls. Special health offer for Internet moguls. Team of 25% off on a gym membership. Time sensitive offer. Expires in two days. Come in for a free health checkup or a free workout with the trainer. This offer is only for Internet moguls employees. Please pass it on to two people. If two people come, you get a better offer or whatever. Have that and display it. It will show only to those people who are working in the Internet mogul's office. So if you have a corporate scenario next to your hotel and there are hundreds of companies, target the top 25 companies. And with 25 separate ads, I would go 55555 so that you can see which ones are working best. And with that you get a lot of footfalls. And once those people start coming in, then you know how to convert them. So that is what Facebook can do for your gym, for your spa, for your massage center, whatever you have in your, you know, as a part of your hotel. Now comes the most interesting part. This is banquets. I love banquets because hoteliers love banquets and hoteliers love banquets because they find a lot of ROI in it and they like the ROI because they spend very little money on targeting on social media and they get a lot of queries again. So banqueting could be for weddings, could be for receptions, could be for. In the Indian scenario, it could be for small engagements, it could be for roka, it could be for small kitty parties, it could be for meetings, it could be for incentives, it could be for conferences, it could be for events, it could be for a plethora of things. So say for example, let's keep the basics of meetings, incentives, conferences and events. So with these four, have four separate ad copies going out. And here I would suggest have only crypt to call and crypt to chat because people who are looking at weddings or sagais or receptions or conferences or exhibitions, they're all different. People who are looking for events and conferences are corporate, mostly HR people or admin people. So I would target admins of all the large companies in my city and have them in a personalized ad where it could Be a video ad. And I would love to do a video ad which I would. So I would say my name. Hi, my name is Abhijit. I am the banquet manager for Ajanta Hotel. We look at my banquet and have a camera person showing everything. This is a 500 person banquet. It divides, it's got a divider. It divides into two parts. 250 people can come. You can have two settings of 250 people each or we open it up in the evening and 500 people can come here or you. And so that. And you could target these kind of video ads to people who are looking at people who wanted to get married in their family or whatever. Or if you're looking to target only the corporate customers and all of those, you could have an ad to say. Hi, dear HR head, dear admin head, Are you looking for a conference facility which is not far from your hotel which understands the cuisine that your hotel that your people would want it understand the projection setups, the AV and audiovisual equipment and all of that. Well, look no further because my name is Abhijit Arya and I am the banquet manager at the Janta Hotel. This is my banquet. This is the meeting facilities that I have. This is how I can do the event. In the evening we'll open up the bar here and the mic can be here and the DJ can be show them the whole setting and that short one to four minute video, post it on Facebook and target it only to the HR heads and the admin heads. You can actually choose on Facebook the HR head or the admin head of various organizations. And then when you press save you can target that video ad to these very people just by doing target. See, the idea of me making this video is because 90% of the people I speak to don't understand what Facebook can do. Basically Facebook allows you and I, everybody today to be able to target like a sniper. You can actually say I want my ad to show to this very person and those people will see it. So you could upload your lists on your email, your local targeting, targeting based on designations, targeting based on companies, targeting based on how much money they're making, what kind of content cards they like. And then if you are exhausted with your database already you could then create a lookalike audience. Which means once you've uploaded information they say uploaded 500 email IDs of people who stayed with you. And you're like, you know, these are the kind of people who stay with me. They afford hotels between 200 and $400 a night and they eat one meal and you know, they're medium to high level executives at various firms. But I have only 500 or 5,000 people on my database. You can then choose a lookalike audience which will replicate and send your ad to people who are matching the description of the kind of people who are already in your database. Facebook has already got data of 2 billion people, their birthdays, their anniversary, who they like, who they don't like, their ex divorces, their ex relationships. I'm sure it's going to be able to predict the people who want to, they're going to, they're most likely to have relationships with in the future as well. So all that predictability that Facebook has, it is one of the only organization in the world that has got everything, all their artificial intelligence, everything that is built and they give it to you in your hands to use as a marketer. And I think the opportunity for hoteliers have never, never, never, never been as good as it is today for them to be able to target like a sniper. So I spoke about rooms, I spoke about fnb. I spoke about offers for your spa, I spoke about banquets, I spoke about click to call, I spoke about click to chat. I spoke about look alike audiences, I spoke about targeted offers. And while we're editing this video, Karan is going to make sure that we have the right offers shown. We're going to have the right landing pages so you can go through all of that. And if you like this video, please comment in this section. Let me know how you liked it. Let me know if you want me to add more information to this. Because Facebook has got so many opportunities for business, I will be making more and more, more and more videos for Facebook, for the hospitality industry. I hope you like this video. I look forward to hearing from you and look forward to having more and more videos being created on the AskAviaria show. Thank you for watching.