Christmas is Coming! Let’s Make the Most of Your Advertising Campaigns

With Christmas right around the corner, eCommerce businesses are in crunch mode. When 76% of holiday shoppers buy gifts online, you can’t afford to run ineffective marketing campaigns.

Fortunately, if you’re running a bit behind on putting together your holiday marketing strategy (or your current strategy isn’t producing the results you’re looking for), we’re here to help. In this article, we’ll take a look at a few different tactics you can use to make the most of the last few weeks of the holiday rush.

Holiday Advertising Campaign Ideas

Ideally, it would be great to sit down and plan out a massive campaign strategy in advance. But, at this point, you don’t really have that option. Instead, it’s time to get scrappy, so let’s go over a few quick and dirty ways to incentivize people to buy…and buy now.

Countdown Timers

Countdown timers are simple, but nothing creates a sense of urgency like a countdown timer (which is why they are used so frequently in the movies). For example, here’s how many days you have left until the holiday rush is over:

Feeling a bit stressed? Don’t worry, it’s natural. More importantly, countdown timers like this one will make your target audience feel a greater need to buy right away.

At this point, the majority of people you are advertising to are last-minute shoppers. The good news is, 9 out of every 10 Americans buys a last-minute gift during their lifetime (some of us do it on a regular basis).

Why? Well, according to RetailMeNot, there are a few reasons:

• 44% aren’t sure what to buy
• 30% are too busy
• 21% want to see how much money they have left…or they forgot

If you include a countdown timer in your ads and give people a quick-and-easy solution (maybe a gift card, the go-to gift of choice for 64% of last-minute shoppers), you have a good chance of bringing in their business!

Offer Discounts

The simple fact of the matter is, at this point, most online gift givers are in a bit of a Grinch vs Santa situation. They want to give gifts to their friends and family, but but funds get kind of tight when you shop last-minute.

Unfortunately, most eCommerce businesses offer fewer deals after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, almost as if they’re punishing last minute shoppers. That being said, if you pay attention to many of the well-established brands, they continue to offer “deals” throughout December.

Now a lot of these “deals” aren’t much better than the discounts or sales they normally offer during the year, but for a time- or budget-limited last-minute shopper, these deals make them feel like they can stretch their budget a lot further.

In the last few weeks before Christmas, taking some of your classic offers and reskinning them as “Christmas Specials” can be an easy way to convince people to buy from you…instead of the competition.

Budgeting

Managing your marketing budget during the holidays can be tricky. You need to be able to keep up with the competition without putting yourself at risk of overspending. Play it too conservative, and you’ll lose impressions on critical searches. Play it too loose, and you can unexpectedly end up wasting thousands on the wrong clicks.

Although managing your budget can be a bit of a balancing act, you need to get it right. People aren’t nearly as loyal to brands as they used to be, so you may have to fight just to get last year’s customers back.

So, if the competition is bumping up their budgets during the weekends, you’ll probably need to bump yours up as well. It may feel a bit like “keeping up with the Joneses”, but when 41% of shoppers buy from a new retailer during the holidays, you can lose out on a lot of sales if you aren’t bidding competitively when it counts.

The good news is, even if you increase your bids to keep up with the competition, that doesn’t mean you have to risk losing a lot of money if something unexpected happens. By setting up daily budgets and a few alerts in your account, you can quickly catch problems before they get out of hand.

Change Up Your Bidding Strategy

Holiday shopping means increased clicks. Having a lot of clicks and conversions opens up some very interesting bidding strategy options.

For example, if you’re using Google Shopping, you can try out Enhanced Cost-per-Click bidding. Essentially, Enhanced Cost-per-Click bidding gives Google the ability to automatically increase your bids on searches that are more likely to produce sales (Google determines this using your click and conversion data, which is why increased volume during the holidays makes this strategy a more viable option).

Enhanced Cost-per-Click bidding can get you 7% more conversions without increasing your cost-per-conversion, so it’s well worth giving a try.

Another interesting bidding option to consider is audience bid modifiers. Essentially, audience bid modifiers increase your bids for people who have met certain criteria. For example, if someone abandons their cart without making a purchase, you might want to ensure that they see your remarketing ads and come back to make a purchase.

With audience bid modifiers, you can set it up so that you bid an extra 10% on anyone who has abandoned their shopping cart. As a result, your ads are more likely to show and they are more likely to come back and actually make a purchase.

Conclusion

You’ve only got a short while left until Christmas comes to town, so now is the time to take advantage of these crunch time tactics to make the most of the holiday shopping craze. Give these strategies a try and let me know how things work out!

By the way, if you’d like me to take a look at your current Christmas marketing strategy, let me know here or in the comments. I’d love to help.

How do you approach holiday advertising? Have any special tactics to add to this list? Let me know in the comments!