Similar Audience and Lookalike Marketing on AdWords and Facebook is all about expanding your audience and bringing in new customers who are not aware of your brand, but meet similar characteristics and behaviours to those who are, giving you a better chance of reaching quality users through a prospecting campaign.
It’s no secret that remarketing campaigns are the most valuable to your hotel when it comes to seeing direct conversions coming in. Despite that, it simply isn’t enough to stick with who you know and who knows you.
Brand awareness should be a key component of any well-rounded marketing strategy. The problem is, brand awareness audiences can be huge and lack the refinement that makes remarketing audiences so valuable. That’s where similar audience and lookalike marketing comes in.
Similar Audiences on AdWords
Similar audiences targeting is a Google AdWords feature that enables you to create audiences based on your remarketing lists. These are lists of people, collected through cookies and tracking codes, that have engaged with your website. The Similar audiences targeting will help you find new users who have not engaged with your website and may not be aware of your brand, but share characteristics with those who have.
Who Will It Target?
This new audience will have interests and behaviours that are similar to those of your remarketing audience, which allows you to reach new users who are most likely to be interested in your product.
What Are The Benefits?
- Instead of running a blind prospecting campaign, targeting everyone who is unfamiliar with your brand, you can narrow down the list into a more refined and specific pool of potential new customers.
- Your similar audience’s database can be narrowed down further to create a group from a small fraction of your remarketing audiences, to improve your targeting. For example, instead of targeting people who are like anyone who has visited your website, you can narrow this down to only people who are comparable to those who have booked, or who have visited specific pages on your site.
- You refine further by interests. Imagine you’ve created a remarketing list of people who visited your spa page in the last 30 days. Instead of reaching a very broad audience of people interested in “beauty”, similar audiences will help you to find new people who tend to search specifically for “hotel spas”, “spa treatments” or other related keywords and browse websites similar to yours. Based on this, similar audiences will then find new people with similar activity and demographics to those from your source group.
Lookalike Audiences on Facebook
Much like similar audiences targeting on AdWords, a Lookalike audience on Facebook can also narrow down your audience targeting. Just as with AdWords, Facebook allows you to create audiences based on website traffic and engagement. 
Who Will It Target?
In order to set up your audiences you first have to ensure you have the Facebook pixel set up to track conversions and make the link between your website, booking engine and your Facebook Business Manager & Page.
Once established, audience setup is your next stop. In the Audiences tab in your Facebook Business Manager, you can create new audiences based on engagement and activity on your website and/or Facebook page.
What Are The Benefits?
- What sets it apart, is the ability to pull together audiences drawn from Facebook activity as well. Audiences can be built from engagement with other Facebook ads, posts and your page itself.
- Once the initial set-up is done, it’s a simple one-click to create and start populating a lookalike audience based on data from one of your existing website remarketing databases.
- What really gives a lookalike audience on Facebook an edge is the total customizability of the audience pool. Through a degree metric, you can decide just how closely the new lookalike audience matches the original sourced audience. In other words, the narrower you make your audience, the more traits they will share with your original source pool. Depending on your marketing goals, you’ll be able to make the choice between focusing on the quality of your audience versus quantity.
Conclusion
The true benefit of a similar and lookalike audience targeting is being able to refine a prospecting audience that is more likely to convert thanks to the shared traits with your current pool of guests and website visitors.
These carefully curated audiences help you to avoid shot-in-the-dark targeting, wasting your marketing budget, by instead narrowing it down to those most likely to actually want to visit your hotel website and ultimately, make a booking.
So if you’re not already using lookalike or similar audiences as part of your prospecting marketing activity, why not give it a go? Let us know how you get on!
