Are you ready for the holiday season?

Facebook has released its Holiday 2020 Campaign Planner and the 2020 Facebook Holiday Package. Regardless of where you fall on the hate-love spectrum when it comes to the platform, these documents are chock-full of interesting insights and tips for businesses of all sizes to use across other platforms too, including Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat.

Let’s start with the key dates:

Most businesses may have these already circled in their calendars but for those that tend to feel that the holidays keep sneaking up on them or for new and small businesses, this gives a good overview of what’s coming up.

Another interesting, and potentially eye-opening, schedule is this breakdown of how early businesses are advised to begin their holiday planning and roll out:

Does this feel overwhelming?

Believe me, you’re not alone, especially if you’re a small or new business, freelancer or solo enterpreneur, or an organisation that struggles with its digital marketing. Large organisations tend to be better prepared for the holiday season as they have dedicated marketing and advertising teams or retainer agencies.

Here are some tips to get started, even if it seems like you’ve had a late start.

Make sure that you’re properly set-up for e-commerce

An average 85% of people globally are shopping online, averaging over 80% of Gen X and Boomers, according to Facebook’s research. Businesses that have e-commerce features embedded in their websites or are set up on e-commerce sites like Etsy are benefitting from the rising shift in people’s shopping habits. Those that haven’t pivoted beyond their brick-and-mortar premises are missing out on getting their products / services in front of more people.

If you have online shopping available on your website then a word of advice: make sure that the shopping journey is seamless and that your site doesn’t experience a lag or breakdown. This is particularly important to keep in mind during the holiday season where there’s going to be a larger surge in online shopping this year due to the pandemic.

It’s never to early – or late – to start your holiday messaging campaign

Take some time to figure out what’s the best way to raise awareness about your business and any potential offers or special products/services you’re planning to roll out for the holidays.

Let’s breakdown this table:

• Increase awareness and discovery aka get more people to find out about you and your products/services.
• Drive consideration and action aka encourage people to visit your website, buy online or visit you in-store
• Objective aka your digital marketing goals: get your brand in front of a wider audience, whether it’s just to become more well-known (top row) or get people to buy something (bottom row)
• Ad format aka standard style: videos, images, stories (top row) or ads that appear across social media platforms or even the internet, such as animated ads that in a square size, vertical length, as carousel posts [multiple frames] etc. (bottom row)
• Placements aka think ads you might see in the Facebook feed or at the columns on the side, as pop up ads on websites and in mobile game apps etc.
• Target Audience aka who are your ideal customers?
• Buy Type aka the type of ad that you’d like to run. This is a tad complicated because it’s based on the goal of your advertising campaign. Do you want to manually set how your ad money is used or do you want the platform to automatically do that, which can result in fluctuations in how your budget is spent?
• Optimisation aka how do you want to enhance your ad? Do you want to focus mainly on getting stuck in people’s minds (i.e. awareness) or do you want to trigger/encourage them to take the next step to pay for something/ visit your website/store?
• Measurement aka how do you want to judge whether your advertising campaign was successful or not? By the number of people your ad reached? The number of people who interacted with it, took the next step [clicked to visit your account, website, buy something]? What type of report/what information do you want to receive once your ad campaign is over?

 

Figure out the types of messages you’d like to incorporate

While we tend to focus on purchasing gifts for others during the holiday season, this year in particular has seen a rise in people purchasing little gifts to uplift their spirits.

So it makes sense to incorporate ‘For You’ ads and messages along with the traditional categories of ‘For Him’, ‘For Her’, ‘For Mom’, ‘For Dad’ etc.

One way to make your campaign stand out is by having little ‘easter eggs’ that could appear in visuals or captions of your ad posts or as pop up AR elements [think Pokemon Go], showcase people using your product/service and give testimonials, create emotional or immersive video ads or Stories.

There’s a lot of options available depending on your budget. If this sounds complicated, don’t worry!

Contact me and I’ll walk you through it or help you set up your digital ad campaign, including content creation.