Advertising Christmas on the Costa del Sol. My client, El Oceano, closes temporarily for a couple of weeks prior to their Christmas Season. It’s a great time to leave Facebook alone for a short while and concentrate on preparing the website for the 2024 Season. Lots of sunny poolside pics!
Advertising Christmas on the Costa del Sol
After weeks and weeks of blasting their Facebook Page, El Oceano Hotel, Restaurant & Poolside Terrace closed for a couple of weeks, “to put the Christmas decorations up”, as we say.
https://www.facebook.com/oceanohotel
The Facebook page is still doing very well, still growing – although admittedly not as quickly as in past years – and we’re combining original content for Facebook with shared posts in local groups and paid, or ‘boosted’ posts for both locally and the UK and Ireland market for Christmas breaks and summer holidays next year.
The number of Facebook followers has jumped up by a thousand, which is good. However, Facebook has taken away the ability to see growth over time or comparative data. That’s not good. Now I can only see that I have “20K likes • 21K followers”. I suggest this may be because Facebook already know their platform’s meteoric rise is dwindling. ‘Plateauing’ maybe a better word. In some way to combat that, we’re dropping ads on Instagram regularly. I’m not hugely confident in Instagram, but it’s free and does expose the brand to many people.
https://www.instagram.com/oceanobeachhotel/
We’re pushing monthly email now, which I’m happy to say is a ‘permanent’ thing. I updated the email list recently, adding a few more thousand contacts over the summer. We’ve already exceed the usual 10,000 mail recipients. They may need to upgrade their bulk email plan.
We updated the website, the two main images on the slider on the home page, to reflect the Christmas season, with live music, etc. I think it’s looking nice.
The Christmas Season Entertainment Line-Up
We maintain up-to-date entertainment calendars, with each event being ‘actionable’, ie: each night can be booked specifically online, plus the usual any-date reservations.
The entertainment page ranks as one of the better viewed pages and is updated daily, throughout the season.
Restaurant Advertising Posters
El Oceano use a lot of these, and they really do work. They are left all over the hotel, restaurant and pool to promote upcoming events in the restaurant. This year’s theme has been that ‘tattered’, torn device across the top and bottom of the main image.
Most of the Christmas evenings are now fully booked, so I’ve been working on the 2024 Season stuff on the website. There are a load of pages, targeting specific key words/phrases, including each month, for example, https://oceanohotel.com/june, which includes any entertainment that month, or if it’s high season and busy, or low-season, etc.
New Photography
We did get some new photography in 2023, though! That was excellent. Lots of images to use all over the place. Thanks to a bloke called Christer Lagervall who came in to the restaurant on quite a few occasions. Sadly, we didn’t get anything new for the hotel, but lots and lots of the restaurant and pool. Some drone videos, too.
Gearing Up for 2024
When Christmas is over, we’ll start a short campaign for the first couple of weeks of January, just pushing the early-bookers, but I expect it to slow down a little over February, ready for the hotel to reopen at the end of March and we start to rock and roll for the 2024 Summer Season!!
