Cowabunga Dudes!

Summer is just around the corner, and for festivals and summer attractions, it’s time to start thinking about how to best use your marketing budget to help increase business this year.  Using Digital Advertising will allow you to pinpoint the audience you want to reach and invite them into your business.

There are many ways that you can do that digitally, but here are a few of my favorites:

Facebook and Instagram –

With Facebook and Instagram, you have the flexibility to use a range of ad formats including photos, video, carousel ads, and more.  Being able to showcase your attractions and allowing your potential customers to experience what it’s like to be at your location.

Here’s an example of a carousel ad:

This Carousel Ad allows you the ability 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.

These carousel ads allow users to swipe (or click) through to see everything you offer.  And, this also allows you to be able to promote something for everyone.

Another use of Facebook/Instagram would be if you’ve been creating a database of people that have been into your business before.  Do you have a list of everyone that has bought tickets online to your theme park?   Do you have a list of phone numbers of those people that registered for your text club?  Emails for your newsletters?

What if you utilized Facebook’s Custom Audience to reach the people that have already done business with you?  With this strategy, we can take your database of emails, phone numbers, or even full names with zip codes and upload that database to Facebook.  Here, we are trying to find as many of those individuals with profiles on Facebook/Instagram.   Once we do, we can serve your ads to that audience/group specifically.

To top that off, we can even create a Lookalike Audience.  This means that we can create an audience that also looks like those people we were able to find matches for on Facebook/Instagram.  This would allow you to promote to an audience that may not know who you are yet.

 

Another tool you can use is Social Mirror.

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 our targeting strategies. We are “mirroring” the EXACT look of your social post as an ad that runs on thousands of OTHER websites and apps, targeted just to the people you want to reach across all devices.

We live in and out of social platforms all day long and sometimes don’t even realize what app or website or social platform we are even on, because we are like busy bunnies hopping around all the time. Social Mirror ads play really well with this consumer online activity. Social Mirror ads run actually outside of social media.  Social Mirror ads can be done with any organic or paid posts from your business account on these 8 social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X (previously Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, or YouTube.

One of the big benefits of Social Mirror is getting to repurpose and reuse your Social Media content, which you’re probably putting a lot of time and money into.  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.  We take care of the rest!

Targeting options for Social Mirror ads include:

  • Behavioral – thousands of targeting categories including demographics, on-line and off-line 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 themselves.
  • 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!

And these ads work! At Vici, Social Mirror Ad campaigns have proven to outperform other ad types and on average we see a Click-thru Rate 7 times higher than the national average.

 

Lastly, I believe that 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 my favorites.  It 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 video ad that runs prior to the content that you’re about to watch.  Whether you’re on ESPN.com watching highlights of March Madness that just ended, or on HGTV watching a re-run 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.

With Video Pre-Roll, we’re using the same strategies as Social Mirror.

  • Behavioral – thousands of targeting categories including demographics, on-line and off-line 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
  • 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.

But this time, you’re exclusively showcasing a video of your business.  This gives the end users, your potential customers, the ability to feel what it’s like to be at your business!   Give them an opportunity to experience a roller coaster from the actual ride, or see the theme park from an arial view.   Maybe your video showcases Happy Hour in progress, or a clip from the live music you have onsite.

Video isn’t going anywhere.  In fact, more and more video is being consumed every day.  It’s a critical part of consumers’ behavior and because of that, having video be a part of your marketing mix, while isn’t mandatory, is a smart move.

No matter where the summer travels take your potential customers, they’re looking for a new experience.  They’re looking for a fun experience.   You can give them this experience.  You just get to decide how you invite them to your experience.