By Lindley Ferris
March 29, 2016
In February of this year, Facebook officially launched Canvas for all advertisers. With rising mobile traffic numbers and ever-lingering poor mobile website experiences, Facebook is now providing a seamless solution. Without ever leaving the app, your audiences can have a full website experience in a bite-sized, easily consumable piece of content. Canvas tells a brand’s story through beautiful, vivid imagery and videography that is optimized specifically for a mobile experience. This means faster loading times and higher engagement rates.
Here are the 5 key things hoteliers should know about Facebook Canvas:
1. Photography and Videos
Creating a canvas gives hotels the opportunity to truly show what the guest experience is like on property. Utilizing a Canvas brings your hotel to life and reinforces your brand image by providing an interactive experience on Facebook. To create a Canvas, you will need hi-resolution images and video assets. Don’t have any? We can help with that.
2. Mobile-Specific Full-Screen Experience
Canvas acts as an intermediary between the typical Facebook experience and your brand website on a mobile device. Canvas removes user frustrations when ads attempt to take them off of Facebook to sites that load slowly or incorrectly. When interacting with a Canvas ad, users have the ability to pan, swipe and tilt on their phones. With such an enjoyable experience, Facebook may help shift the negative perception around mobile ads (and ads in general).
3. Start with a (Content) Strategy
This should go without saying, but any digital marketing should be centered on having a cohesive content strategy. Before you set out to run Canvas ads, make sure you have a clear direction and message defined. Who will see your Canvas and how should your audience feel about the content when it’s consumed? Storyboarding is highly recommended. Make it enjoyable. Make it memorable.
Need help developing a strategy? We can help with that too.
4. Enhance Your Existing Facebook Campaigns
Canvas does not take the place of your existing Facebook campaigns. Consider a Canvas as another ad type. You still want to set your targeting as you would with any campaign and define your age, gender, geographic location, interests, relationship status, income levels etc. And make sure you’re still running those Facebook retargeting campaigns if you’re goal is to achieve a high return on ad spend (ROAS).
5. Running a Canvas Ad Will Not Cost You More Money
Typically, rich media means increased cost. Lucky for all of us, Facebook is not increasing the costs to run Canvas ads or create them. Where Facebook makes their money is on the targeting. Your budget will increase or decrease based on the audiences you are looking to target in your campaign as well as your Relevance Score. Achieving a high Relevance Score is determined by how engaging your ads are. Since Canvas ads are inherently more interactive, we expect to see CPCs decrease. (Note: Facebook ads already have the lowest CPCs of all digital advertising platforms.) One more thing to note is you can run a Canvas on a CPC or a CPM model. That’s up to you based on your campaign objectives.
That’s it! Check back soon for updates and initial results.
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