If you haven’t been working on your holiday advertising game plan since September, you’re actually late to the party. Many successful marketers start holiday-specific advertising early in the fall to get exposure among users and influence consumer shopping early on, especially on Facebook. In fact, I can recall seeing gift-giving, holiday-related advertisements on Facebook as early as the beginning of September.
The good news is that if you haven’t made any advertising moves yet, there’s still time.
More than half of the people in the United States say Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is somewhat or very influential on their holiday shopping. The platform has become a super spot for e-commerce, as strategic posting and visual ads are wildly successful among users. Here are few ways you can make the most of Facebook advertising over the holidays.
Decide Who You’re Targeting
Having a little clarity about your target audience will help you focus your ads with better precision. Are you going to try and reach your loyal, existing customers? Are you trying to reach out to new customers? Maybe both?
Depending on your answers to these questions, your approach to constructing an advertisement will vary. Get to know the audience you’re speaking to before you actually start speaking to them and you’ll produce ads that yield high conversions.
Retarget, Retarget, Retarget
Retargeting-the practice of advertising to users your brand has previous experience, exposure, or transactions with-has an impressive transaction improvement rate. If there’s one sure way to drive conversions and spike sales this holiday season, retargeting is it.
The Facebook Conversion Pixel and SDK can be added to websites and mobile apps, helping advertisers reach their audiences with specific, targeted ads. There are also plenty of other great retargeting tools that can help you reach your audience.
Use Ad Targeting at Holiday Shoppers
This sounds exactly like retargeting, but it’s a bit different. Facebook actually offers ads that are targeted specifically at holiday shoppers. So, if you have a highly engaged user who browses through content related to holiday shopping, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, you can use that as a segment to target specifically.
Facebook puts together the audience of engaged holiday shoppers, and your targeted ads get displayed to them. Last year, this targeted segment ran from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day and was accessible through the Facebook self-service dashboard>Behaviors>Seasonal and Events.
Be Strategic with Your Facebook Page Maintenance
Now is no time to get sloppy with the upkeep of your Facebook page. To thrive through the holidays, you must regularly populate your business/brand page with compelling content while responding and interacting with consumers as much as possible.
You can make your cover photo holiday related, ensure that your business contact information is updated and clickable, and execute all the musts for an awesome Facebook page.
Republished by permission. Original here.
Facebook Photo via Shutterstock
Build your audiences as Saved Audiences so that your targeting is easily accessible for ad creation and post boosting. These will be the foundation of your success because even a great ad & offer will perform poorly if it’s showing to unqualified people.