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.
E-commerce leader Pierce encountered the challenge of expanding their search program to Bing. They used Skai’s Campaign Mirroring to copy and sync over 1400 campaigns from Google to Bing in less than a day. Bing revenue generation started the day after launch. In the first month, ROAS was 671%.
Skai Social‘s creation tools are built to pump out new ads quicker than ever. Easily duplicate existing campaigns, ad sets, and ads, and make edits in bulk! Also, leverage Skai’s naming templates to auto-name your ads and keep everything consistent.
These creation tools were a game changer for Electronic Arts (EA). They needed to expand across 20 new global markets swiftly. They leveraged Skai Social’s efficiency tools to simplify their processes and save time with uploading creative, URL management, audience creation, and overall troubleshooting. The EA team was able to scale their workload by 2-3X without additional headcount
We talked earlier about consumers being everywhere. Across devices, across publishers, and across various stages of the purchase path. Which leads us to tip #3.
Tip #3: Maintain a Seamless Brand Experience
Ensure that you’re creating a seamless brand experience, across channels, to reinforce recognition of your brand and drive consumer engagement. For the holidays, use seasonal & lifestyle creative, along with clear & consistent calls to action.
Google and Bing
For Google and Bing, revisit your holiday campaigns from the previous year to assess which creatives were top performers. Take those insights and apply them to the newer ad formats. For example, convert top performing ads from last year to expanded text ads and add extensions and site links to highlight your holiday sales.
On Pinterest, it’s best to use text overlays sparingly and include your call-to-action in the description.
Facebook and Instagram
On Facebook and Instagram, capture your audience’s attention by including seasonal messaging and call-out of promotional pricing within your creatives.
Skai Pro Tips
For Skai Search, you’ll remember that Skai was first to market with support for expanded text ads. Skai users can easily create expanded text ads based on current text ads and download to make the appropriate changes. Next, import your ads back into Skai, and just like that, your ETAs are ready to launch.
Thanks to Skai’s tailored Pinterest solutions, Skai users can access Pinterest’s Pin Factory to create promoted pins from existing text ads. The Pinterest Pin Factory will take your text ads, scan your website images, and generate promoted pins for you. All you have to do is review and approve!
For Skai Social users, use Creative Manager‘s smart overlays to quickly apply seasonal and promotional overlays to image assets in bulk.
Tip #2: Prepare for Major Sale Days
We all know conversions significantly increase on major sale days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Don’t forget the importance of staying competitive during the surge of research activity (i.e. views, searches and clicks) leading up to those major sale days. Plan ahead to ensure you are engaging prospects during those critical times, relaxing your CPA and ROI goals, and setting hyper-competitive bids.
Google, Bing, Yahoo and Pinterest
Across Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Pinterest manage your budget caps so that you are not blocking yourself from potential growth. Increase bids for your top products to ensure your holiday ads display above the competition.
Facebook and Instagram
On Facebook, increase bids and budgets across your entire holiday program, from brand awareness to direct response campaigns. For Dynamic Ads, bid higher on audiences who’ve shown strong intent, like those who have added to cart versus simply clicking on your ad.
Skai Pro Tips
Skai Search users can employ bulk sheets to efficiently increase budget caps across profiles. Assess all elements in a flat view, without having to manually drill down, and leverage bulk sheets to add or update entities at scale.
Skai Social users can automate optimizations and improve workflow efficiencies with our rules-based engine, Automated Actions. This capability powers marketers to make holiday optimizations at bulk and consistently! Use Automated Actions to:
- Update creative images or videos based on performance rules
- Bid up during peak times of day, or days of week
- Boost ads that meet CTR thresholds
- Pause low ROI ads
Enter Automated Actions for the rescue! Booyah leveraged Automated Actions to update bids based on spend and performance rules. Automated Actions coupled with other Skai features helped Booyah drive114% higher ROAS for their client’s holiday campaigns.
We talked about reaching consumers, scaling campaign management and optimization. That brings us to our final tip.
Tip #1: Measure your Ads’ True Value
Measuring the true value of your campaigns means understanding the entire purchase path, from awareness to conversion, and taking away those actionable insights to better tailor that journey.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram
Keep in mind that 90% of purchases still take place in-store, so bridging the gap between online and offline purchases is necessary! Connect early signals of intent to online and in-store conversions to get the “big picture”.
Additionally, with mobile influencing over a third of offline sales, it’s important to capture early signals of intent, such as visits or registering an email, as well as cross-device conversions with conversion columns.
As noted earlier, consumers are shopping earlier. Employ longer tracking windows to connect research and engagement to conversions. Don’t forget to measure and share insights on performance across channels for a holistic view of your entire program.
Skai Pro Tip
Having the peace of mind, especially during the stressful holiday season, of knowing whether you’re going to hit your goals or not is critical to all digital marketers. Skai’s Heads Up Display (HUD) gives you that and more.
Want to stay ahead of the competition? HUD’s market trends can help you assess your program relative to your industry peers. See how you allocate between ad formats and objectives relative to the market.
Skai Search: Holiday Optimization Strategies Webinar
Finally, we know the holiday season creates special optimization challenges for search marketers. The good news? Skai’s optimization solutions can tackle these challenges.
If you’re a Skai Search client, be sure to join the Skai Research team on Tuesday, October 3rd at 10 am Pacific for a Holiday Optimization Strategies webinar! Register via the email invite, or contact your Client Success Manager.