Top 5 Tips: Planning Your Digital Christmas Campaign
November 16, 2016
The biggest holiday season for online-shopping is soon upon us, and for many this is a critical time to decide and plan Christmas campaigns and promotions.
Now, first you need to sit down and relax and focus on what is just around the corner. To make it a bit easier for you we decided to help out by giving you 5 fantastic tips that you can use when preparing your digital Christmas campaign strategy. Make this Christmas into something special and boost your online sales or inbound leads.
1. Select your marketing channels
Use what you already know. What channels has been working out well? Use your current learnings and abundance of data you have at your disposal and make decisions on where to focus your efforts.
AdWords and Search marketing: This is the most competitive, and therefore most costly time of the year to bid on keywords relevant to your business. Think about the long-tail keywords, and form a strategy that will still capture your potential customers interest in the search for the perfect christmas gifts.
Social Media: Inspire your followers with gift ideas, product offerings, and unique discounts that would make santa’s little elves busier than ever. Sponsor the content that is delivering the best results (engagement such as shares, clicks and likes). Tailor your content and add a christmas flare and feel to it, and remember, this is the silly season – so have fun doing it!
Programmatic Advertising: If you are not fully familiar with programmatic advertising, you can read this blog post to cover the basics.
2. Start early in programmatic
Allow your programmatic platform to collect data, and find patterns in your consumers behviour and who they really are, where they are, what time of the day they are shopping or are engaged with your brand.
Retargeting is great for Christmas advertising campaigns. The data that you have collected can now be used for retargeting those same users (customer who did not convert). Or use this as an opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell customer who already bought one (or more) of your products.
3. Find more customers with Programmatic Prospecting
Don’t base everything on retargeting, leave some space and budget to explore the market for new opportunities too. We know that plenty of consumers that normally dont shop online, are the biggest spenders during Christmas online shopping season. Match2One automatically allows you to build lookalike audiences, based on what we have learned from your campaign, converted customers, and customers who have shown an interest in your brand and products. Typically this is a large group of potential consumer who have not visited your website but share a lot of similarities with your converted consumers.
4. Set a clear goal and campaign target
Make the most out of the targeting capabilities your online advertising platforms offer. Where are your customers geographically? What interests do they have? Set specific optimisation goals to your campaign.
5. Test and optimize constantly
The digital space is a like a snow blizzard, especially around Christmas. Your campaign needs to be as “fresh” and powerful as possible to cut through. Examine the feedback you get from your activities and adjust your strategies accordingly. We know, its easier said than done. Real-time optimization is a task that is best entrusted to machine learning algorithms and for example Match2Ones auto-pilot mode. When letting auto-optimisation steer your campaign, every second, minute and hour is resulting in new learning experiences and they will automatically optimise and adjust the campaign (bids, placement, time of day, inventory etc) so that it will meet your goals and targets. This way you will have more time to focus on the heavy lifting of social media, planning the christmas party, and writing your own wishlist to santa.
If you are curious as to how Match2One helps 100s of other companies, leave your details below and one of our own programmatic elves will get in contact with you and explain more!
