The holiday season is dream and nightmare of every marketer.
It’s this time of year when clients are primed for buying. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Years—the most important sales days are packed into a two-month period.
It’s additionally when marketers begin growing advertising budgets. With so many huge shopping days, the firm will improve spending, particularly with Facebook ads.
So how can small and medium-sized businesses compete against these huge advertisers?
This post will show you the way to drive more holiday sales with Facebook Ads…
How Do Holidays Affect Facebook Advertising?
Increased Competition
Competition for limited advert space heats up during the holidays. You aren’t only competing against big brands, however, thousands of smaller advertisers who want in on the game.
Advertisers with the most important budgets don’t always win Facebook auctions. Facebook’s auction system is based on a lot of different factors, a few of which are influenced by price.
With all this competition, your regular strategy may not work. That one niche audience you utilize might be too expensive. That’s a real problem to drive more holiday sales with Facebook Ads.
Advert Costs Increase
More competition means higher advert costs.
A study by Social Code in 2014 and found CPMs rose dramatically in November and December when competitors increased.
Ampush’s study displayed that nearly all metrics increased from mid-November to the end of the year.
So costs are already beginning to improve.
More People Buying Online
More and more people buy Christmas merchandise online.
In the U.S., 40% of consumers plan to buy holiday presents via a mobile device.
Adobe predicts an 11% year-over-year enhance in online sales this year, to $91.6 billion.
People are online and willing to purchase your product.
3 Principles of Better Holiday Campaigns
Warmer is Better
Leads could be broken into two categories: warm and cold.
Cold leads haven’t any relationship to your brand. They haven’t seen your content material or engaged with your account.
An example of that is utilizing interest or demographic targeting on Fb. These people don’t have a pre-existing relationship with you.
Another instance is lookalike audiences. While they could be similar to your clients, they aren’t yet a warm lead because they haven’t interacted with your brand.
On the other hand, warm leads have a pre-existing relationship or have engaged with your brand. Within Fb, warm leads are anybody from the following audiences:
- Fb page followers
- Website visitors
- Lead form, video or canvas advert viewers
- Event attendees
- App users
- Customers
Warm leads are primarily created via custom audiences.
Warm leads are an important part of your pre-holiday strategy. When you haven’t already done so, begin building your warm viewers immediately.
Invest Early and Often
The earlier you spend money on Facebook ads, the better the outcomes.
The same applies to Facebook. Constructing your warm audiences early means a closer relationship between you and your potential customers. When the Holidays arrive, they’ll be more open to purchasing from you.
Rather than spacing out advert spending, choose campaigns with good performance, and start scaling right now. Investing more in November will pay off in December, particularly with advertising prices steadily growing.
Outsmart Other Advertisers
Chances are you aren’t a billion-dollar firm.
Unfortunately, you still have to compete with these large firms. There’s no method to beat them with money or by bidding more. Spending more won’t essentially mean better outcomes or more sales.
Instead, you should spend money more strategically.
By structuring your ads the right method, and understanding how the holidays affect your advert campaigns, you may get more sales and leads while keeping costs down.
14 Advanced Strategies to Drive More Holiday Sales With Facebook Ads
1. Invest in Video Content For Better Retargeting
Since a video is such an engagement content material format, it is an excellent method to build warm viewers.
Right here’s an instance of a video marketing campaign we ran to drive more holiday sales with Facebook Ads.
You may see the price per 10-second view was $.20. 10-second views are a greater indicator of engagement than 3-second views.
And right here’s an instance of a website click campaign.
Discover the price difference? 10 videos second views cost 75% lower than website clicks. Which means our retargeting pools are bigger than website clicks.
An added benefit? You may retarget video views up to 365 days later. Website clicks? Only up to 180 days.
? Tip: Build warm viewers of video viewers before holidays begin.
2. Increase Your Remarketing Audience
For a lot of advertisers, website visitors are greater viewers than video views. And lots of advertisers can’t invest in efficient video content material.
In that case, you’ll want to begin building a large website customer remarketing viewers before the holidays to drive more holiday sales with Facebook Ads. With prices rising in late November and throughout December, you need to begin building remarketing viewers immediately.
The best way to construct remarketing viewers is by serving fascinating and engaging content to potential customers.
Right here’s how to set this up the suitable method.
First, you’ll need to choose your viewers.
Choosing the proper objective is necessary. We’ve had better luck choosing Website Conversions, even when the objective is hyperlink clicks.
Begin by targeting lookalike audiences. Construct them to look like website visitors, conversions, pixel events, or purchases—your pixel will need to be set up already.
Ensure to exclude all of your retargeting audiences. Which means video views, canvas and lead form engagements, and anybody who’s clicked an advert.
Choosing optimization type will impact on prices. For bigger audiences, we’ve gotten better outcomes by choosing website hyperlink clicks. For smaller ones, we often select unique daily reach or impressions.
? Tip: Instantly begin constructing remarketing viewers for the vacations.
3. Train Your Pixel to Find the Right Audience
The Facebook Pixel is every advertiser’s secret weapon.
In most cases, Fb will know who to reach better than you. Account history, site metrics and pixel traffic all feed into your pixel efficiency. Every time an event is triggered, Fb learns more about your audience and who greatest to serve your advert.
You may train your pixel to find target audiences by selecting and optimizing for particular conversion events to drive more holiday sales with Facebook Ads. Fb will learn who completes these events and serve advertisements to similar customers.
However, Fb’s pixel needs enough data to search out people who are likely to complete your event. In most cases, they require 20-25 conversions per day for 1-day conversions, or 25 per week if 7-day conversion window is chosen in bidding.
What if Total Conversions are Low?
Unfortunately, not every pixel will get those many conversions, particularly product purchases. In that case, you may target a different activity like email sign-ups or content material views.
Some advertisers disagree with utilizing content material views as a conversion event, however, we’ve discovered this effective to build a large retargeting pool to drive more holiday sales with Facebook Ads.
? Tip: Invest in pixel conversions to train your viewers. Concentrate on smaller conversions purchases aren’t possible.
4. Build Your Email List
There’s a reason why advertisers spend so much money growing email subscribers: email lists are an excellent source of consumers.
Unfortunately, Fb advert prices are already growing. However, you may still invest in growing your email list before December to drive more holiday sales with Facebook Ads.
The best way to construct your list is by giving away free content material.
It is a proven method to enhance your email list. Think about the product or service you sell, and what your viewers would discover interesting. Then create downloadable content material they would discover interesting and run ads to it.
? Tip: Build your listing by giving away useful free content.
5. Determine Email Life Time Value (LTV)
Knowing the value of an email address helps you bid more strategically for leads and merchandise.
Right here’s the way to discover total worth:
LTV = total $ of products sold to your email listing/total # of emails collected
Let’s say an email is worth $30 in lifetime worth. And let’s say you’re willing to pay $15 per email conversion. Now you may bid up to $15 per lead.
To do that, choose the bid amount, select manual, and set the bid value to $15 average. It will make sure that on average, you pay $15 per conversion.
? Tip: Understand the LTV of emails and set your bids accordingly to bid the true worth of your emails.
6. Use the Right Objective Per Channel
Fb has two lead capture campaigns:
- Lead adverts
- Site conversions
The objective you select can affect advert costs.
AdEspresso ran an experiment to see whether Lead Adverts or Website Conversions had a lower price per lead. Overall they discovered no real difference in total prices.
However, platform type impacted outcomes. Lead adverts performed better on mobile, and it conversions performed better on a desktop to drive more holiday sales with Facebook Ads.
? Tip: Experiment with lead adverts and landing pages on mobile and desktop.
7. Increase Daily Budgets
Fb serves adverts based on auction data. Many factors determine in case your adverts appear however the price is still an essential one.
Larger daily budgets influence the chances of your adverts being served. By increasing your daily budget, you permit Fb to bid more for your target action and show more adverts.
Do not be concerned about spending your total daily budget. When you’ve set a low bid, there’s nearly no chance your daily budget will fully spend.
? Tip: Improve daily budgets in November to win more bids and improve advert delivery.