FT Holiday Guide 2021: How to use FieldTest to Connect with Holiday Shoppers
The holiday season is upon us and with it comes the single highest volume shopping season of the year. This is the time that marketers and brand owners of all types put together their most aggressive marketing plans, often a substantial chunk of their annual marketing budgets, and put their best foot forward in order to reach out to their customers and rake in those sweet end of year sales. Unfortunately it’s also often a hectic and challenging time for marketers. Not only is the pressure on to perform well and take full advantage of the opportunity in front of you, but this year presents unique challenges both with the remnants of the COVID-19 pandemic and the various supply chain concerns it leaves in its wake. Luckily for you, FieldTest is here to help.
If you’re reading this you already know that the FieldTest platform is the simplest way to promote your products to your customers with digital ads, and we’re constantly working to make it a better, faster, and more full-featured experience (keep an eye on the FieldTest blog for more news on this on the coming weeks) but when marketers face challenges as particular as the ones they’ll face this year we think it’s important to step in and showcase just how our product can be used to overcome them. This week we’ll discuss how brands can take full advantage of this year’s Holiday Season and tackle the challenges this year presents head-on. Let’s get started!
1: Control the narrative with custom creative
Every marketer knows that the holiday season calls for custom holiday creatives. We’ve discussed on the blog before how important it is to ensure that your promotional copy and imagery matches the needs of your customers - particularly in seasonal promotions - but this year presents unique challenges. With COVID still looming and supply chain issues affecting brands’ inventory, this year is looking like a particularly demanding one for holiday marketers. Luckily FieldTest is here to help.
With the ability to fully customize your creatives and update them on the fly, FieldTest puts you in control of the narrative around your brand, even if it hits a stumbling block. By anticipating certain challenges that come part and parcel with the holiday season and creating custom banner ads to cover for them you put yourself at a distinct advantage over brands who do not have access to the tools FieldTest provides.
One FieldTest client, for example, anticipated a shortage of its top-selling product in the second half of the holiday season of 2020. They knew there was a good chance that if sales continued the way they had been that they were going to run short by the end of the shopping season. This would potentially let down customers who had seen their ads and were excited about this top-selling product and leave them less confident in purchasing in the future. That's when we helped them draw up a plan. Using the FieldTest ad builder they designed a round of custom creatives, not to excuse themselves for running short of their top-seller but instead to direct customers attention to another, similar product that could divert their attention until the top-seller was restocked. Customers reacted to this strategy in an overwhelmingly positive way: The secondary product sales went up, the top-seller got restocked, and the customers stayed happy and confident in the brand.
As you go into what is sure to be a particularly demanding holiday season, think about ways that you can take control over your messaging and ensure that your customers are having a positive brand experience when they turn to you for their holiday shopping. That level of control is only available to you with the power of FieldTest.
2: Anticipate your customers’ needs
The holiday season is a time of togetherness, of family, of friends, and consumers are looking for brands to get excited about as they begin the process of gift giving. This is a powerful opportunity to present your brand in a way that connects deeply with customers and leaves them not only coming back for more of your product for themselves, but wanting to bring you home and introduce you to their friends and family. This relationship building starts with your marketing.
Sometimes it can be easy to forget while mired in holiday sales projections and campaign performance spreadsheets that your marketing is, at its core, a conversation with consumers. Now more than ever it is important to remember that behind every impression, every click, every sale is a person, one with intentions, motivations, needs and desires. FieldTest gives marketers a unique ability to have a conversation with these consumers, to present their products in just the right way and exactly when they need or want them most.
Consider this when you are building out your holiday ad campaigns, are you just selling your product? Or are you trying to sell your product to your core consumer? That extra care, respect, and consideration to anticipate the needs of your customers can take you a long way. Another FieldTest client, for example, knew that their core customers were environmentally-conscious and ecologically minded. They had built their brand around environmental responsibility and understood that in order to continue to connect deeply with their customers they had to continue to message to that core identity, the one that left their customers with a feeling of trust in their brand. Their holiday creatives didn’t focus simply on the fact that they had a nice, high quality product. Rather, they messaged to these consumers an opportunity to give a gift that allowed them to feel good about themselves - that they had made the right choice for themselves, the gift recipients, and the environment. Their sales went through the roof.
Keeping your customer at the center of your thinking about your marketing is vital to building lasting, positive relationships. Don’t think of your audience as simply numbers on a dashboard, these consumers are people and people want to feel as though their needs and desires are being considered and respected. This holiday season ask yourself just exactly how you can show your core customer that you care, you’ll be glad you did when you look at your sales figures.
3: Put a holiday spin on your top performing messaging
We’ve talked a lot about how you can build out brand new creatives going into this holiday season, but the truth of the matter is that sometimes brands just know what works best for themselves. We love when brands who already run high-performing campaigns try new ideas, test out new creative concepts and approach new audiences in order to unlock new potential for their brands, but we also respect the old adage that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
If your brand is already well-established with a relationship with your customers already built and high-performing campaigns already running, often the best strategy is just to continue with what is already working. Have a campaign with skyrocketing sales? An ad that’s by far your top performer? A particular awareness message that seems to be resonating well with your customers? These can all be used in new holiday campaigns on FieldTest.
That isn’t to say we recommend just copying and pasting your high performing summer-specific ads into your winter campaigns. We still find across thousands of campaigns that the ones that perform best are the ones that feel the most relevant, current, and speak most directly to the consumers’ needs and during the holidays that means certain particular things. Consider taking your top performing ad and adding a slight holiday twist on it. A photo of your product with some gift wrap, a holiday-specific twist on a top-performing headline, and so on. By leveraging your current successes in the upcoming holiday season you’re sure to find that you have one to remember, regardless of any broader setbacks the world throws at you.
Get in touch to find out how FieldTest can help your brand build a holiday ad campaign for the record books