Are Your Holiday Ads Ready?
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The Power of Managing with Empathy
Dec 04, 2019
The holidays are upon us. If you’re a marketer, it’s very likely you’ve got your marketing plan and ad spend already mapped out for the holidays. But even with the season underway, there’s still plenty of time for tactical online advertising maneuvers you can make to help capitalize on the 2019 holiday shopping season.
How shoppers shop
Shoppers rarely buy in a linear format—they bounce between multiple channels, and those channels increasingly include social and search. According to research provided by Adobe Digital Insights, the average daily online revenue for Holiday 2018 was over $2 billion for the first time ever ($2.1 billion on average), with 26 days of the 61-day holiday shopping period exceeding that mark. The day with the highest online sales revenue in 2018 was, not surprisingly, Cyber Monday.
But with four main time segments for holiday advertising—Pre-Black Friday, Black Friday/Cyber Monday, December 1st–25th holiday sales, post holiday deals—that leaves a LOT of time to run last minute ads. Particularly when, according to Accenture’s 13th Annual Holiday Shopping Survey, the number of respondents who said they’re less inclined to shop on Black Friday or Thanksgiving has grown since the 2018 season.
Cool social ads to try this season
Advertising last-minute deals and offers this holiday season is very easy with several new and existing social ecommerce features:
Collection is an ad format that lets people move from discovery to purchase in a smooth and immersive way. Each collection ad features a primary video or image with four smaller accompanying images below in a grid-like layout. Customers who tap on your collection ad to browse or learn more will be seamlessly taken to a fast-loading visual post-click experience powered by Instant Experience—all without leaving the platform.
Instagram rolled out its native shopping feature globally, allowing business accounts to shine a spotlight on their products in posts and stories. Shoppable posts give your target audience a direct method of buying your products on Instagram. All you have to do is tag products in your posts to let users learn more about your offerings in their feeds. If users want to purchase what they see, they simply have to click on the tag to be taken straight to the product page.
Snapchat
Dynamic ads, which have been in beta testing for more than a year, enable marketers to create ads on the fly. The ads connect directly to product catalogs, which means they’re always up-to-date, and they can also be automatically created and targeted based on a Snapchat user’s past behavior.
Go mobile or go home
And format matters. Mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones, greatly contributed to 2018 holiday sales growth, accounting for 40% of total online sales according to Adobe. So be sure any ads you run are designed with mobile in mind.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s working and what’s not this holiday season, please leave a comment below.