How to Build a Successful Holiday Ad Campaign with FieldTest
Throughout the month of October we’ve been using our blog to discuss the ways that our clients can prepare for the upcoming holiday season. This is your last chance to buld up awareness level marketing momentum to carry you through the final weeks of the year and we have made it our top priority to educate our clients on all the ways they can use the tools available to them in order to drive impressive sales and revenue throughout Q4. The importance of leaning into the holidays throughout Q4 has been a continuous topic of discussion on our blog, but this week we wanted to dive deep into the subject. In this week’s entry we will walk through the steps required to build out custom holiday campaigns set up to make this holiday season one to remember! So without further ado, lets get started.
Take Advantage of Holiday Sales
If you’ve read our blog posts in the past you already know the ways that sales can help push your intenders to convert, and this is no more true than during the holiday season. In the rest of the year a sale can seem like a nice cherry on top of a highly optimized and target campaign, the perfect reason to pull out your credit card and hit the ‘finalize order’ button after a campaign targeted just to you. During the holiday season the dynamic can be a little different, however. Brands will be pulling out all the stops to appeal to holiday shoppers, and this includes offering deep discounts across all products. The competition may seem stiff but the payoff is great, we’ve seen campaigns that offer sales in the action phase increase their sales up to 6x those that do not. Couple this with the increased sales and revenue we see every Q4 and you’ll quickly find that the 20% off holiday sale pill becomes just that much easier to swallow.
Build Custom Landing Pages
Your landing pages are a key element to your marketing campaign success and the Holidays are no exception. By building out custom landing pages and promoting them with digital ads you create an ad experience that is unique to you and creates long term trust in your brand. By creating a continuity between the creative and headline used in your ads and the landing page being linked to, you create a sense of satisfaction in your customers that they have made the right choice in clicking on your ads, a subconscious sense of a promise fulfilled. This sense builds invaluable consumer trust in your brand that will last long beyond when your ad campaign has run its course. The holidays are a great time to try out new ideas with your landing pages, giving you a ready-made opportunity to build that lasting trust.
Still need some ideas for holiday themed landing pages? Let’s go through a couple examples. We talked above about how to use the holidays as a basis for conversion-driving sales, why not create a holiday-themed landing page that showcases all of your sale items? We all know that content ads drive impressive results on the FieldTest platform, why not write some holiday themed blog posts that discuss the people for whom your products are the perfect gift. Still looking for ways to go the extra mile to get in the holiday spirit? Design a new hero image for your site that corresponds to your current holiday marketing. All of these paired with smart holiday creative will help give your customers all the reasons they need to convert throughout the holiday season.
Leverage Seasonal Imagery and Headlines
Custom landing pages are extremely important to creating a sense of continuity with your marketing efforts, but in order to pull that off you must first establish expectations with your ad creative. It might not be a surprise that your holiday campaigns will need to have original holiday creative, but we still receive questions from clients all the time wondering just how to use the holidays to build out their ads in a way that is brand safe and revenue positive. This might be a bit of a challenge, but who said challenges can’t still be fun? This is a great opportunity to explore the possibilities of your brand and the ways you can present it to potential customers. Ask yourself: “How do my brand and products fit into this holiday?” and get creative with the answers. For example: if you sell CBD topical balms, your products are perfect for the person who just got done carving their pumpkin, cooking Thanksgiving dinner or hanging up the Christmas lights and need a way to soothe their overworked hands. If you sell high quality chinos then you are perfect for the people preparing their sunday best for their family photos at the seasonal get togethers. You see the pattern emerging, wherever your brand fits into the shared experience of the holiday shopping season, note that and reflect it in your ad copy and imagery. By doing this you help position yourself as a key part of your customers’ holiday experiences and help build relationships that will last long after the holiday season has come to an end.
Final Thoughts
The Holiday season is an exciting and busy time to run a DTC brand. The holidays are some of the strongest drivers of sales of the year and smart marketers know that the iron is hot to drive home their end of year sales with effective digital advertising. By following these three easy steps we’re confident you’ll find that your holiday creatives are driving more traffic, interest, and repeat sales than ever before.