Christmas can be 'the most wonderful time of the year', but for marketers the onslaught of additional activity that Christmas campaigns bring can make them feel more like The Grinch.
According to ABS figures in 2016, October is really the month where Australians start thinking about their Christmas shopping. If you haven’t started building out your Christmas campaign yet, never fear. We’ve got our six top tips to make sure you don’t end up on Santa’s naughty list:
Get Christmas Creative
Relevant advertising always cuts through. Make sure you review all your campaigns and give them a festive creative touch up for the Christmas season. I would recommend having at least three different variations of each ad and switching your creative at least once a month to avoid ad fatigue.
On looking at our top performing campaigns in 2017, we’ve noticed ads with negative space, images of landscapes and bright colours have performed the best but it’s good to test your own ideas. Best practices are only useful for a limited time but something that is authentic to your brand will always speak to your customers.
Highlight your best features, your customers
Highlighting what your customers think helps build trust in your brand. Start to collect reviews, photos and quotes, and showcase your customers throughout your social media campaigns. According to Yotpo, people who look at user-generated content (ie. content made by your customers) are 161% more like to convert.
If you want to keep people talking, also think about running some sort of competition or giveaway across social media. This will encourage people to keep engaging with you and keep sharing over the Christmas period.
Optimise where your customers land
Marketers think about the ads they’re showing but not necessarily the destination where they are driving their customers. If you’re bringing people back to your site, make sure you send them somewhere relevant.
Make sure that your page descriptions are clear. This will help your customers find what they’re looking for and also help your SEO activity.
Run A/B tests on what images, copy and landing page combinations are driving the highest conversion rates for your brand. Make sure that FAQs, shipping policy, user reviews and live chats are easy to find. This will lower your bounce rate and also help improve conversion.
Be Dynamic
My favourite Christmas tip is to incorporate dynamic ad formats into your creative.
If we learnt one thing at the IAB MeasureUp! Event, it was brands need to put the customer first. This means personal advertising and beautiful creative. Dynamic creative allows brands to make it easy for customers to revisit products they were looking at or inspire them with gift ideas. Based on AdRoll customers in 2016, dynamic ads saw a 50% lower CPA than static ads.
But remember, you don’t want to annoy the customer. Keep it short and relevant, videos should be less than five seconds and keep refreshing your creative so it doesn’t become stale.
Measure Success
The most important tip I have for Christmas campaigns is put KPIs in place and communicate them. If you have measurements from success in place from the start, it becomes much easier to judge the success of a campaign later on, report back to the business on your impact, and most importantly, learn how to improve on your campaigns for next year.
Making sure your KPIs are communicated to all agencies and partners that you’re working with is absolutely crucial. Being completely transparent with all your partners will ensure that they’re working towards your business goals and the success of your campaign.
Don’t turn the (Christmas) lights out
A lot of marketers get to the end of Christmas and take a well-earned rest. The problem is post-Christmas is when everyone is on holidays and they have more time to be engaging with your brand online.
My top Christmas tip is a post-Christmas tip. Think about your campaigns post-Christmas. CPMs stay low all the way through to mid-February so get a head start to the new year, lock in campaigns for January and February now to ensure you start 2018 with a bang.
By VP & MD APAC at AdRoll, Ben Sharp