Consumers are everywhere in the digital world – across devices, apps, and publishers – making it more challenging than ever for marketers to engage them. Marketers must take a holistic, cross-channel approach to consumer engagement in order to breakthrough. They need to optimize across the entire purchase path – capturing attention, promoting consideration, and driving purchases – seamlessly across relevant touch points.
This approach is especially critical during the holiday season. So, how can marketers set themselves up for success?
We’ve collected the best holiday tips from Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Bing, and Yahoo, as well as a few of our own pro-tips for Skai™ users.
Tip #7: Efficiently Prospect with Lookalikes
Reach lookalike audiences across Google, Yahoo, Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram. Lookalikes will help you reach new high-potential customers since they’re similar to your existing customers.
Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest
Marketers on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, and probably already using lookalike audiences and seeing great results. But be sure to employ a nesting strategy to avoid audience overlap and inefficient spending!
Google and Yahoo
Search marketers may have less experience with lookalikes but can also take advantage of this audience type to reach those higher value prospects. On Google and Yahoo, lookalikes are usually referred to as similar audiences. Add multiple similar audiences to an ad group and use audience bid modifiers to bid up on your top performing audiences.
Skai™ Pro Tips
For Skai™ users, use Intent-Driven Audiences to harness consumers’ Google search intent to auto-build custom audiences on Facebook. Co-developed with Facebook, Intent-Driven Audiences help engage audiences seamlessly across channels.
Not surprisingly, Skai™ clients have seen great success with Intent-Driven Audiences. Craftsy, a leading online destination for crafters, is just one example. Craftsy used IDA to re-engage users, that clicked on their Google ads, with visually immersive creative on Facebook. Their results were great! They saw an increase in click-through rate of 50% and reduced their cost per lead by 25%.
Tip #6: Influence Consumers Early
According to the National Retail Federation, 54% of consumers begin researching for holiday purchases in October. Marketers need to take advantage of the months leading up to the holidays to influence consideration of their brand for these purchases.
Keep in mind that influencing takes time. Getting in front of consumers early – before they’ve committed to a brand or product – can give you an edge against the competition.
What are the best ways to influence and engage consumers this holiday season? Invest in ad experiences that are visual and interactive to promote the discovery of your brand. Consumers that engage with your ads can later be retargeted with more direct-response ads.
On Pinterest, drive discovery with Promoted Pins, highly visual ads to reach the over 200 million people who come to Pinterest every month looking for inspiration and planning their lives.
Facebook and Instagram
On Facebook and Instagram, use the Collection Ad format to make it easy for consumers to discover, browse and purchase your products and offerings in a visual and immersive way.
On Google, use Showcase Ads to effectively reach consumers with broad search queries. Then engage these consumers with an immersive, visual ad experience that marries branding with shopping.
Skai™ Pro Tips
For Skai™ Search users, leverage Dimensions to quickly assess the performance of these ad formats and optimize accordingly.
For Skai™ Social users, quickly compare the performance of different Facebook and Instagram ad formats with the Analysis Grid, a powerful and flexible pivot-like table to easily slice and dice your data. Assess which images or videos are working well within you’re creative and optimize accordingly.
Now let’s transition to tips that help you maximize the value of consumers you’ve successfully influenced and engaged.
Tip #5: Re-engage Existing Customers
According to Marketing Metrics, the probability of converting a new consumer is about 5-20%. But, did you know that the probability of driving a purchase from an existing customer is triple that? An existing customer has a 60-70% likelihood of purchasing again.
This is because your customers are already familiar with your brand making them more likely to convert and spend more. Keep these customers engaged, by remarketing to them with personalized ads that promote complementary or premium products.
Google, Bing, Yahoo and Pinterest
Across Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Pinterest, use remarketing lists to cross-sell and upsell. Create remarketing lists to promote new offers and complimentary products to these high-value customers based on what they’ve already purchased.
Facebook and Instagram
Similarly, Dynamic Ads on Facebook and Instagram are a great way to re-engage your existing customers with cross-sell and upsell campaigns to maximize customer lifetime value.
Skai™ Pro Tips
For Skai™ Search users, use audience bid modifiers to optimize bids for your higher performing audiences.
For Skai™ Social users, use Personas to save time by creating, reusing, and updating your most valuable audiences in bulk. Personas can also be created and dynamically updated from your CRM audiences. Create a Persona for loyalty program members to target these VIP clients with special promotions and offers.
Tip #4: Leverage Existing Campaigns
To effectively scale campaign creation across publishers, reuse existing campaigns and fine-tune them. This way you spend less time on tactical tasks, and more time strategizing.
Google, Bing, Yahoo and Pinterest
You’ve invested heavily in building and testing your Google search and shopping campaigns. Use that knowledge to reach new audiences and drive incremental revenue on Bing, Yahoo, and Pinterest more quickly.
Facebook and Instagram
Across Facebook and Instagram, save time by duplicating ads, ad sets and campaigns in bulk from prior holiday seasons, then make updates to ad settings in bulk.
Skai™ Pro Tips
For Skai™ Search users, use Keyword and Shopping Campaign Mirroring to instantly extend campaigns to Bing, Yahoo (search only), and Pinterest in just a few clicks. You also have the option to keep them automatically synced.
