Winter is coming and so are the holidays! Paid media campaigns are an essential part of your brand’s holiday success.
As the music goes: “This is the most wonderful time of year”, but also the most competitive and everyone is chasing the same shoppers.
Starting now, your inbox is filling up with holiday advertising and just like shopping for gifts, planning your holiday campaign is something you don’t want to do last minute.
Haven’t started planning your campaign yet? Here’s an early gift for you!
We’ll tell you why you should do it, where and how.
Why: “All I Want for Christmas Is…”
It’s that time of year where there’s going to be a lot of spending. That’s why it’s important to have a holiday advertising plan for reaching your customers and prospects before your competitors do.
According to eMarketer, 2019 was the first holiday season to pass the trillion-dollar mark in retail sales. Brick-and-mortar retail and e-commerce spending totaled $1.007 trillion, that’s a lot of sales!
Deloitte in the USA concluded that over the 2019 holiday season, the average family spent $1496 and that 60% of holiday shoppers start buying Christmas gifts before December 1, what does that tell us? That’s right! Businesses need to prepare their holiday campaigns at least 3 months before Christmas, so they can reach a bigger number of consumers.
One might think that maybe consumers want to stick with what they know, because it may be more reliable to them…that’s not quite true, especially on holidays.
As the studies show, 79% of shoppers are willing to buy from a new retailer over the holidays and are driven by the following: better prices, unique products, and coupons, or discounts.
According to Deloitte, holiday shoppers use several online sources to research gift ideas and to purchase them:
Where: “Santa’s little helpers”
There are platforms you must include in your holiday advertising strategy: Social Media Ads and Google Ads.
Social Media Ads
Generating sales is all about finding and establishing a positive relationship with the right customers. Facebook, Instagram, and social media channels in general (depending on your target, of course) are one of the main marketing channels you can use to do this, reaching a qualified audience that is interested in what your business has to offer.
Combining Social Media ads with engaging content, like blog posts and videos, is a great way to make users interact, rather than exclusively promotional ads and it’s also helpful to create new prospects. Not sure how to do it? Social media and content creation are some of our favorite things!
Google Ads
In 2020, there are 6.9 billion searches on Google every day or 2.5 trillion searches per year worldwide! That said, if you want your business in front of holiday shoppers, Google Ads is the answer. Google Ads allows you to create online ads to reach consumers that are interested in the products or services you offer.
As of 2019, Google Ads (Adwords) allows you to choose between different campaign types: Search campaign, Display campaign, Shopping campaign, Video campaign, and App campaign. Choosing the right campaign type for your business is your first step in getting ads running!
Need some help setting up your holiday campaigns? Get to know our online advertising services.
How: “Be good for goodness sake”
Just like Santa, your clients (and potential clients) are making a list, in this case, to see where they are going to make their holiday shopping.
One of the first things you need to do is to decide what you’re going to offer, so it’s important to understand what your public wants. You can simply ask them what products they prefer on your social media for example or analyze their buying preferences during the year, always considering the global context of what is happening/trending at the time.
This brings us to the copy and image you’ll use on your campaigns. The “secret” to nail a great copy is (again) to know your audience and they want. Remember: you have to catch their attention with something THEY want and/or need.
So the first thing to do in campaigns, emails, or posts, is to analyze your audience. This is possible through social media stats, Google Analytics, and other tools that allow you to understand your audience’s actions and preferences.
But even if you know your audience and what they want, it can still be tricky to figure out how to win a sale. So, to understand not only what they are researching but HOW they are doing it, you can use tools like Google trends, Ubbersugest, Answer the Public, among others to understand their search trends.
Summing all up, there are 4 things to have in mind if you want to be part of consumers holiday list this year:
- Appeal to emotions (especially around the holidays)
- Create a great offer
- Personalize messaging to the user
- Send an email with your holiday offers
It’s time to start preparing for the holidays! Do you have any ideas for your holiday campaigns? We might have some… Get to know our online advertising services.
