Your Social Media Holiday Advertising Guide

The holiday season can be the most lucrative time of year for advertisers, it’s also the most competitive.

Every marketer out there will be using Facebook and Instagram to drive traffic to their online stores and increase their profits, especially after a slow few months due to the pandemic earlier in the year.

It’s important to know what you can do to help tip the scales in your favour. So to help you out, below is a list of our seven best tips you can do today to ensure your holiday advertising efforts this year are a smash hit.

Increase Your Budget

AdEspresso analysed millions of dollars of Facebook ad spend from around the world and found that CPC prices rise significantly in Q4 of each year.

In fact, average CPC prices in December are around double what they are in January.

This means it’s vitally important to endure you have an adequate social media budget leading into the holiday season.

The last thing you want is for your campaigns to run out of budget and stop showing midseason.

Start by analysing what you spent in Q4 last year, what you made in return, and how much you’re willing to spend to increase that this year.

Increase Your Visibility

Lots of people shop online in the lead up the holiday season. That means there’s a lot more potential eyes on your ads. But the same is true for your competitors.

This is the season to increase your visibility more than ever. And one of the best ways to do that is by utilising other ad placements that your competitors aren’t.

Depending on your goals, you can choose to show your ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network.

If you’re an e-commerce store consider adding carousel ads or placing ads on Instagrams ‘Explore’ page.

If you’re a small business who can easily create videos, consider using video ads or Instagram stories to catch shoppers attention.

The possibilities are endless. But just remember to keep a close eye on your numbers to figure out which one is profitable, and don’t hesitate to cut underperformers to save cash.

Use Custom Audiences

The ultra-competitive holiday season is the time to get laser-focused on your best prospect.

By now you should have collected some data from previous campaigns, previous holiday seasons, and your Facebook Pixel.

Build custom audiences based on this data that target your most engaged audience.

You can do this in a few ways:

• Importing a list of your customer’s email addresses to create a ‘lookalike’ audience
• Harvesting pixel data to create a list of people who engaged with your site
• From people who’ve interacted with your app, or
• From people who’ve engaged with your Facebook or Instagram pages

These audiences are already warm, which can give you a big leg up coming into the competitive holiday season. What you don’t want is to be wasting any of your budget showing your ads to unengaged or cold prospects.

Create a Compelling Offer

So you’ve already got a great product, but how can you entice customers to buy from you during the hyper-competitive holiday season?

Well, you can do more than just offering a discount. SpendMeNot reports that the average Black Friday saving is a huge 37%.

Great news for shoppers. But that would eat into a lot of smaller businesses profit margins.

Shipping is a big priority this time of year. For example, shoppers often want items to arrive before Christmas day.

You could potentially offer free expedited shipping to your customers, and even guarantee they’ll receive items in time if they order before certain cutoff dates.

You can also add bonus items if you’d prefer not to discount heavily. Think of other valuable items you can bundle together to add value or even for re-gifting.

Run Holiday Giveaway Campaigns

Who doesn’t love free stuff?

A great way to increase engagement on Facebook and Instagram over the holiday season is by running free giveaway campaigns.

Ask your followers to like, comment, tag, and share your posts for the chance to win products or vouchers they can use online and in-store.

The aim is to get as many eyes on your business as possible. And free giveaways are a great way to attract new prospects relatively easily.

Schedule Campaigns in Advance

With the increased competition over the holiday season, Facebook and Instagram will be flooded with advertisers looking to advertise online.

That means there is potential for the ad approval process to be slowed down. You don’t want to leave your campaigns to the last minute and get held up with a manual review.

Start planning to have your campaigns live well in advance of key dates like Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Black Friday, and New Years.

Facebook even breaks it down month by month in their Festive Advertising Guide.

A good campaign will start by building awareness early, cultivating engaged prospects that have your business top of mind leading into the holidays, and then enticing them to take action around key dates.

Don’t leave such an important period in your advertising calendar to the last minute.

Have a Crisis Response Plan

Lastly, always ensure you have a back-up plan if things go wrong.

If you run out of budget, or your ads get disapproved, or any number of nightmare scenarios play out, you’ll want to ensure all your eggs aren’t in one basket.

Supplement your social media campaigns with Google ads. Create a dedicated campaign for your email list to turn leads into customers and then repeat purchasers. Encourage customers to come in store, especially after holiday shipping cutoffs have passed.

The holiday season is often a make-or-break time for small businesses. So ensure you have multiple strategies up your sleeve and you’ll be well on your way to a profitable season.

And don’t forget, if you need a helping hand to make sure your campaigns are a success, we’re just a call away.

Speak With A Google Ads Expert At Yes Digital Today

Here at Yes Digital, we help create and optimise Google ad campaigns for our clients.

If you want to see how an optimised Google ad campaign can help you bring in a flood of holiday traffic, get in touch for a free no-obligation Strategy Session today.