How hotels can use paid social to build brand awareness

The awareness campaign usually lasts about six weeks. The Instagram and TikTok ads go out, and at the first monthly review they sit at the bottom of the report with a return on ad spend that looks embarrassing next to brand search. So they get switched off, and the hotel goes back to paying for people who already know its name.

That campaign did not fail. It was judged on the wrong job.

Paid social builds a hotel's brand awareness by putting a clear, ownable story about the place in front of people who have not heard of it yet, on Meta, TikTok and YouTube, so that more of them go looking for you later. Three things decide whether it works. The creative, because the platforms now use the ad itself to find the audience. The plumbing, so the platforms can learn from what people do on your site. And measurement that looks at brand demand, not the last click. It is a big part of what our Growth Marketing practice does, and it rarely works when it is bought on its own.

Awareness is a different job

Search and social do opposite things. A paid search ad catches a guest who is already looking, often for you by name. A social ad interrupts someone who was watching a friend's holiday or a cooking video and gives them a reason to remember you. One harvests demand. The other creates it.

That is why the order matters. Before a pound goes on awareness, the hotel's own name should be covered in Google, because there is no point making more people curious about you if an OTA collects them when they search. A brand protection campaign is the first thing we check in any account.

When we plan a hotel account, Meta usually gets two jobs and only two. It builds awareness with short video in Reels and Stories, and it brings back people who visited and did not book, which our guide to hotel remarketing covers properly. Ask one campaign to do both and the awareness budget ends up chasing the cheapest conversions and reaching nobody new.

If an awareness campaign is optimised for bookings, it will quietly turn itself into remarketing.

Choosing the platforms

LinkedIn, X and Pinterest rarely earn a leisure hotel's awareness budget, though LinkedIn has a place for meetings and events sold to planners. For most hotels the work happens in three places.

Facebook and Instagram

Meta still offers most hotels the broadest reach, with Reels and Stories the strongest formats for awareness. Targeting has changed underneath it. With Advantage+ audience, the age, interests and locations you enter are treated as suggestions, and the system goes beyond them when it thinks it can do better.

In July I hosted a Hotel Marketing Association webinar with Ipsos on what makes advertising work. Their research found that in-feed social rewards empathy and relevance first, and that you have one to three seconds to land the point before the thumb moves. A slow pan across an empty lobby does not survive that.

TikTok

TikTok has become somewhere people go to decide where to travel, not just to be entertained. What works there looks like TikTok. Creator-led content, a person talking, something happening in the first second. Spark Ads let you put paid reach behind a creator's post or your own organic one, which keeps the native look that polished brand video loses. It also sets the highest bar for entertainment. If the ad is not worth watching for its own sake, it gets skipped.

YouTube

YouTube covers two different behaviours. Shorts competes with Reels and TikTok for the quick swipe. Longer video suits the guest planning a bigger trip, happy to watch three minutes of a coastline or a ski area. Demand Gen campaigns now run across Shorts, in-stream and the YouTube feeds from one set-up, and they have replaced Google's old Video action campaigns.

Creative is the targeting

In December 2024 Meta introduced Andromeda, a new system for choosing which ads to show to whom. It is built to choose from a far larger pool of creative and to personalise which ad each person sees, and in practice the content of the ad now does much of the work that audience settings used to. Google's Demand Gen and TikTok's automated campaigns lean the same way. The platforms are reading your ad to decide who sees it.

That changes what a creative brief is for. If your ad shows a bed, the system finds people who respond to pictures of beds. Every hotel has a bed. If your ad shows the walk down to the cove at seven in the morning, or the bar's Sunday quiz, it finds people who respond to that, and nobody else can show it.

This is also why the discount is the wrong lead. An offer tells the platform, and the viewer, that you are a price. Lead with the place and the experience, and let the offer be the reason to act once they care. Selling the experience rather than the room has always been good marketing; the delivery systems now reward it directly.

• Your own story. Show what only your hotel has, the people, the rituals, the view, rather than a room that could be anywhere.
• The first second. Open on the hook, not the logo, because most viewers will decide before the brand appears.
• Different ideas, not small variations. Give the system genuinely different angles to work with, such as a couples' story, a family one and a local guide, rather than one ad in five colours.
• Native over polished. Shoot vertical, use real voices and keep the production at the level of the feed it sits in.
• A steady supply. Plan a shoot each season and refresh assets before people have seen them too often, because awareness creative wears out faster than search ads.

On today's platforms, a weak creative brief is a weak targeting brief.

Measuring awareness honestly

Most hotel marketers learned their trade when every channel could be traced to a booking. Awareness was never like that, and consent banners and AI search are taking more of the journey out of view.

At a Hotel Marketing Association webinar I chaired in October, the conversation kept coming back to the same point.

We've been spoiled over the last ten years of almost perfectly attributable revenue across the full funnel.
Harry Fielder, CEO, Umi

What not to judge it on

Last-click return on ad spend is the wrong test, because the guest who saw your Reel in March and booked in May will usually arrive through brand search or by typing your address. The ad that made them curious gets no credit. Followers and likes fail the other way. They are cheap to buy and say nothing about bookings.

Signals worth watching

• Brand search volume in Google Ads and Search Console, before, during and after a burst
• Direct and brand-search sessions from the markets you targeted
• Availability searches from new users, set up as a GA4 key event, which shows people checking dates rather than just looking
• Meta's estimated ad recall lift, a modelled figure, useful for comparing one creative with another
• A Brand Lift study where the budget allows, though Google's minimums start at around $10,000 over ten days in the UK, which rules out most single hotels

None of this works if the platforms cannot see what happens on your site. In the UK the Meta pixel needs the guest's consent, so set up Meta's Conversions API alongside it and send the booking engine's searches and bookings to both. The same discipline sits behind the commercial metrics a hotel marketing team should report.

Agree the number before you spend

The cleanest way I know to judge awareness is to stop asking each channel to prove itself. Agree a blended cost per acquisition across the whole marketing budget before the campaign starts, then judge the awareness spend on whether brand demand and that blended number move. Agreed afterwards, it reads like an excuse.

Where to start

Cover your name in Google first. Then check that the pixel, the Conversions API and the booking engine's events are firing, because the platforms learn from them. Pick one platform and one story your hotel can tell better than anyone, give it a fixed run of at least a month with its own budget and its own objective, and write down your brand search numbers before the first ad goes out.

At the end of the run, ask your agency one question. What happened to the number of people searching for us by name in the markets we targeted?

If nobody can answer that, the campaign was never measured as an awareness campaign. It was a booking campaign that lost.