Digital

Five Ways To Optimize Campaigns For The Last-Minute Shopper

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According to Cardlytics, the largest holiday shopping segment is the Last-Minute Shoppers, a group of consumers who make up 36 percent of total holiday shoppers and do their gift buying between December 11 and December 31. The Last-Minute shoppers spend more than their counterparts and visit stores more frequently, as the holiday deadline looms. Last-Minute Shoppers contribute to 34 percent of overall holiday spending, with an average transaction of USD 64.34.

Targeting Last-Minute Holiday Shoppers

Use Social media posts to engage last-minute shoppers. Make your posts relevant with imagery and offers that resonate within the context.

Search Advertising

Optimize your search campaigns for the last-minute shopper. Google has introduced the possibility of announcing business hours for last-minute shoppers. The Structured Snippet allows you to target users with an automated messaging that can be customized.

Structsnippet

Structured Snippets are different from Call-outs. Use Call-outs for highlighting special announcements such as free shipping or extended business hours, while structured snippets are used for what you have on offer. You can also look at adding business hours for days where the store traffic is likely to be higher.

callouts

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TrueView Shopping Campaign and Video Content Optimization

TrueView for Shopping ads allow merchants to show Shopping ads for their own products in their own videos. Related products are shown dynamically, pulled from advertisers’ Google Merchant Center product feeds, and are now available for advertisers.

TVS

Unboxing videos have become a growing phenomenon, as people turn to YouTube to inform their purchase decisions. In 2015 alone, people in the U.S. watched 60M hours of unboxing videos on YouTube, totalling 1.1B views.

Optimizing your Brand Campaign and Video content for discovery requires marketers to look at the factors that impact the discovery of video including Title, Description, Channel experience and Meta Tags.

Retargeting

Retarget audiences who have visited your site for offers and deals earlier in the holiday season. Google offers Search advertising with RLSA and Bing’s Remarketing campaigns.

Google has extended remarketing capabilities to both shopping ads (PLAs) and local inventory ads (LIAs) with shopping remarketing lists. Now you can optimize your shopping bids to re-engage high-value customers the next time they shop. For example, when those who’ve abandoned their carts on your sites or your loyal customers shop again on Google on desktop or mobile, you can use remarketing lists to tailor your shopping bids and reconnect with them at a more cost-efficient ROI.

App Store Optimization

Include Keywords in your app’s title, for discovery during the holidays. Revise your description to include relevant text, or any special holiday features and promotions your app may offer. It’s important to list these “above the fold” or just before Apple and Google cut off the description with a link to “Read More.” Change your App’s screenshots to include visuals that bring Holiday Offers and Gift Shopping up-front. For example, make your callout “Holiday Savings” or the seasonal keywords and phrases you targeted. Any core features and special offers can be highlighted visually in text and as a screen capture.

To know more about optimizing your app, click here.

Ten Ways For Brands To Use Instagram For Holiday Season

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Instagram with its user base of 500 Million users and numerous photos shared per day, may prove to be an ideal network to attract your target audience this holiday season. Advertising on Instagram has given boost to advertisers with increase in Ad recall; and with newly added features Instagram is the go-to network for visually-engaging campaigns.

Here are Ten Ways Brands can promote on Instagram.

Create Seasonal Posts introducing a new product or promotion highlighting the key product attributes in a visually engaging format.

Present your Gift Card Customer Value Proposition in a static frame of a video or an image, as an image and caption the post with an emotional connect.

Engage Social Media Influencers that can get your proposition noticed with visuals that engage your target audience.

Create a Video Loop that places your brand logo in a seasonal context in a creative manner as can be seen for Pepsi’s post for Art Dome at an event with the help of an artist.

Use Instagram posts as a style guide to create a Visual LookBook for the holiday season.

According to Shareablee, Oreo generated 120 percent more engagement on Instagram with holiday themed campaigns, compared with the same time in the previous year, capturing more than 376,000 total actions (likes and comments).

Oreo highlighted the seasonal pack that uses creative layouts depicting interaction, which is the point of engagement with audiences.

Ask a question linked to the post. Krispy Kreme introduced Santa Belly doughnuts with a simple question.

Engage audiences with reposts from your followers with a seasonal theme.

Share Content that audiences find useful such as DIY and recipe ideas, One of the most engaged posts on Twitter was a dessert recipe shared for Thanksgiving by Jell-O.

Highlight any special offers that you are introducing during the season, or share a window display that highlights your brand’s identity as seen for Nordstrom’s Holiday post.

View this post on Instagram

We've decked the halls! #🎄 #holiday

A post shared by Nordstrom (@nordstrom) on

6 Steps For Your Facebook Campaign For Holiday Season

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socialmediavisits

As per Merkle’s Q3 Digital Marketing report, Facebook drove 61 percent of site visits driven by social media in Q3. Here are six steps to planning your Holiday Season Facebook campaign.

Know Your Audience
Use audience insights to gain information about your audience so that you can target effectively. Understand the demographics, location, purchase behavior as well as interests, attitude. and Lifestyle.  With Audience insights, you can effectively tailor messaging for effective targeting.
Identify Your Key Audiences

Once you know your Target audience, you can create audience segments and effectively target segments with messaging that is most likely to resonate with each segment. An effective way to segment is to take an email list of your existing audience and use them as custom audience segmenting them based on their past purchases. You can also take existing audience and build lookalike audiences for your campaign.

 

Plan your Holiday Spend

Plan your holiday spend for different objectives. Facebook recommends you plan your Holiday Spend for Brand Awareness objectives to create an engaged audience for offers and deals. Start with a Brand Awareness campaign that builds awareness for your products. Later in the season, you may want to switch to Direct Response ads that target audience with promotions, deals, and offers for Cyber Monday, Black Friday or any other limited time promotion such as Coupons, Free Shipping or discount codes.

Retargeting

Add a Facebook Conversions pixel and Custom Audience pixel to your site for retargeting. Adding the pixels to your site can help you retarget the audience on Facebook- if they visit your site and do not make a purchase.

 

Optimize For Mobile 

Optimize your creative for Mobile, as during the holiday season as more than half of online shopping traffic is from  mobile. According to Facebook, “Use your time before the holidays to test your ad campaigns and creative on mobile and optimize your mobile web and app purchase experiences so that they align with an audience on the go. In addition, consider separating mobile and desktop campaigns, and set specific bids for each.”

Test Your Creative

Test your creative and ad formats prior to the holiday season shopping days. Test different creative and calls-to-action in addition to ad formats and creative, so that you can select the best performing creative prior to the holiday season. Include your bestselling products in the test, so that you are ready for the holiday season.

Here is a slideshare for different metrics for Facebook advertising:

 

 

Predictions from Forrester’s 2017 Report

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With the business dynamics changing in a customer-led digital world Forrester’s 2017 predictions require CEO’s and organizations to change their strategic thinking.

In a bid to get closer to customer, organizations will abandon siloed approach to function with matrix structures that leverage shared functions  to prioritize efficiency and control. The change in structure is taking place on account of two factors

• Get closer to the customer.

• Avoid the complexity — and marginal results — of trying to deliver experiences to multiple customer segments across multiple products.

CMOs will need to follow The Whole Brained approach, using the left and right side of brain, using analytics to deliver personalized contextually rich technology experience, while delivering engaging experiences. The focus will be on skill set that drive digital business transformation, design exceptional personalized experiences, and propel growth.

CIOs will take the lead position in shaping the Digital strategy of the organization.

The new leadership places emphasis on three dimensions ;

  • Understanding and personalizing engagement with customers.
  • Running a digital business.
  • Knowing what’s needed to win in a customer-led, digital-centric market.

 

CEOs need to know what is needed  to propel their company forward in a customer-led, digital-centric business.

In 2017, CEOs will continue to strengthen and normalize their leadership teams, and temporal roles created to fill the gaps such as Chief Digital Officer will either fall out of fashion or be calibrated (down) to drive the key digital, data/analytic, and customer programs

Customers are driving Revenue risk. “Today’s customers reward or punish companies based on a single experience — a single moment in time. This behavior was once a Millennial trademark, but it’s now in play for older generations. It has become normal.”

To read the full predictions, click here.