In our most recent post, Laura shared some highlights from our 2014 festive season analysis. After reviewing the data, what insights can marketers extract when planning for seasonal peaks in the year ahead? Below is an excerpt from the Skai 2014 Global Online Retail Shopping Season Report that shares 4 key imperatives that your teams can apply throughout the year.
To maximize performance for seasons to come, marketers must iterate their strategies and always put the consumer first. By enhancing every step of the path with your customers — from keywords, ads, and bids, to website landing pages, follow-up tactics, and optimization — you will be able to capitalize on all opportunities during this important time of year and beyond.
Be Device Conscious
Consumers are relying on multiple devices to search for products, interact with brands, and purchase goods and services throughout the peak shopping season. Marketers should not see this trend as a threat, but an opportunity to engage with consumers more often and influence purchase decisions.
To meet KPI goals, marketers need to be sure to provide consistent, relevant messaging across all channels and create a seamless, mobile-optimized experience for consumers, even through the post-click. Take into account the consumers’ intent when searching on each device and tailor his/her experience accordingly. Be sure to take into account mobile apps as well; track activity holistically to measure and understand true customer lifetime value. Skai offers a mobile SDK to measure in-app activity and provide insights that can direct optimization strategies.
Maximize Google Shopping Campaigns
Consumer product interest and intent is very high throughout the peak shopping season, giving marketers the perfect opportunity to leverage Product Listing Ads (PLAs) via Shopping Campaigns. But utilizing this ad format is the first step – the real challenge is enhancing your product feed and optimizing these ads to promote your best performing products to drive sales, revenue, and conversions.
Apply Custom Labels to classify product and aid in monitoring, reporting, and bidding. Make use of available benchmarking data to understand the PLA competitive landscape and where more or less aggressive bid strategies can be applied. Finally, leverage bespoke PLA bid policies offered by Skai to account for the nuances of the Google Shopping marketplace.
Use Social Channels to Reinforce Messaging and Drive Engagement
There are a shrinking number of slots to get in front of audiences organically on social media. The good news: social ad formats are becoming more engaging and audiences are responding.
It is critical for marketers to understand these dynamics and leverage cross-channel insights to inform social programs. Skai Intent-Driven Audiences allow marketers to automatically target users with search intent on social networks. In addition, retailers can take advantage of Skai Demand-Driven Campaigns (DDC) which allow you to automatically turn top performing products on PLAs into Facebook ads. These solutions ensure consistent messaging and optimal targeting for cross-channel success.
Leverage Insights on Past & Future Performance to Inform Your Strategy
Past performance can be a good barometer to help you develop your overall digital marketing strategy during times of reoccurring seasonality, such as the festive season.
However, each year brings new opportunities, obstacles, and calendars – lean on predictive media tools to steer your efforts. Skai Halogen, for example, uses a wide variety of first-party data and market intelligence to provide forecasts and scenario plans that can be automatically applied to active campaigns.
To view all the insights and to read the report in full, click here.
