The holiday season is here. It’s time to celebrate and spend time with our families as we close the year. If you haven’t yet made plans, now is the time. We’ve got a few steps listed below that will help you take your PPC efforts to the next level.
- Review Your Results
Take a look at your results from the last season. This is a great place to start. Identify the campaigns and channels that worked. Can they be revisited? Identify the audiences that performed best and the creative that made the biggest impact. Take note of the promotions that increase sales and brought in the most cash. Figure out how it is they were able to outperform your competitors. Look for areas of improvement. See where your competition performed better. Was it in promotions, customer service, experience, or reliability?
If you don’t have this data, it may be time to start gathering it for future purposes. If you have tactics that worked last year, repeat them and find areas of improvement. Remember to replace those that didn’t work.
- Pick your Channels and Test Them
While reviewing what worked in the past is a good idea, you don’t want to be too monotonous. You want to move forward with others rather than stay stagnant with what is working. Digital marketing grows every year and has new opportunities to offer. It’s not advisable to solely rely on tactics that have worked before. There are parts of the past that you should keep, evolve, and grow. Allocate about 5-10% of your budget for testing new strategies, tactics, tools, channels, and platforms. You might find better ways of doing something that worked in the past.
- Build Your Audience
Take note of the audience that you already have. At the same time, consider the ones that you’d like to reach out to over the next months. Potential customers could come from visitors that took a look at your wish list, visitors that checked out a gift guide, logins from loyalty programs, repeat customers, previous buyers, high-value purchasers, the most recent visitors that viewed your content, friends from social media platforms, those interested in content on Instagram and Facebook, and those creating wish lists. After building audiences, think about how the audiences are utilized across different platforms and how their performance will be monitored.
- Grab the Attention of Gift-Givers
As the holidays approach, there is going to be a lot of gift-giving. You want to target those buying your market gifts. While this might be a completely new audience, fear not for there are ways you can grab their attention without feeling lost in your high funnel campaign. With your current audience, find keywords that give you access to broader areas. For example, you could use the appropriate gift-oriented keywords that you haven’t used in your normal campaigns and use them with a gift-giving audience.
Use social ads to target friends and the pages they like. This will help reach their friends and those close to them. Third-party options allow you to target gift-givers in a variety of ways. Most retailers don’t find the tactics specific enough to be used solely. They can, however, be used as observation-only methods in search campaigns. They can identify those shopping for holiday-related things, showing that they are in the mindset.
- Push for Brand Engagement
The holidays provide a great opportunity to push for brand recognition and engagement. Gift-givers will normally be of two types: those that like to do surprises and those that want a wishlist to help them with purchases. The challenge lies in figuring out how to reach both.
User-generated content (UGC) is a great way to create awareness around your brand. It’s highly beneficial because it allows the business to capture the attention of content creators and their friends who may have the same interests. It also grabs the attention of those planning to gift content creators and their friends.
Creating a wishlist for your campaign is also a great method of helping gifters that like specific instructions. Test your most loyal customers. They could be from your repeat buyers, logins from loyalty programs, email lists, or your social media followers. Use their purchasing habits or browsing history to propose items. This will make their buying process easy. You can include promos and deals for purchases of items within the wishlist.
- Be Creative with Your Landing Pages and Ads
Creativity in your ads helps to capture the attention of a person who is totally unfamiliar with your products and brand. It also helps to convince them to purchase something for another person. There are several opportunities that exist in creativity to help build your brand. User-generated content can help those people looking for a gift to keep it a surprise. The tactic has to be reassuring and attractive.
Content can cut across landing pages and can be ad creative. One of the best ways is to be clever and fun. Your audience could be convinced to share the ad as a hint to the other person that they’d like to receive a certain product as a gift. Lastly, customize your ads using countdowns where there are promos, providing promotional information, and collecting audience data that helps provide the right information. For example, differentiate between your gift-givers and target market to deliver relevant content to the right audience.
- Think Through Your Promo Strategy
Discount structures and promotion strategies exist in a wide variety. Remember that not all promos need discounting items. Some are actually upsold while others promise reliability. Start by understanding what your market wants to determine the right promotion. For example, there are those that love cutting as many costs as possible. These ones would like to save money. Others have no problem spending but want to receive the highest value out of what they purchase. Examples of promotions include a percentage off on certain items, free gifts with some items, free shipping, and early bird offers.
Guest post courtesy of Lacy Villanueva of Joel House Search Media