It’s time to start planning your eCommerce marketing strategy for the holiday season. We’ve collected tips from Pinterest, Samsung Electronics, and Tinuiti on the best ways to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
With the holiday season one week shorter this year, being ready for Black Friday and Cyber Monday is critical to retailers having a successful fourth quarter. To get ready, ensure your advertising infrastructure is in place and ready to take advantage of the increased interest in looking for gift ideas.
For Pinterest, this means retailers should upload their product catalog and add the Pinterest Tag to their website. This creates the opportunity to show the perfect product to 300M+ users when they are in a shopping and discovery mindset. In fact, 50% of Pinners frequently use Pinterest to shop, which is over two times higher than the proportion that uses other media platforms to shop (TalkShoppe, Personalization and Relevance Study, Jun 2018). Every Pin on Pinterest is a starting point for shopping and having a catalog from retailers makes it easier for our users to go from Pin to purchase.
Rob Ulveling – Product Marketing, Shopping
Pinterest
To truly succeed over this year’s Black Friday sales period, my absolute top-tip to all advertisers is to develop a truly omnichannel strategy. It’s not ground-breaking, but it’s also not that simple to achieve – especially for larger-scale advertisers.
If you are emailing your contactable database early in November to pre-register for early bird deals, ensure these same customers receive these deals not just via email but also when they visit your website and when they see your digital marketing across Google or Facebook. If you are refreshing your brand’s tone of voice for this entire period, ensure this is reflected across all owned, earned and paid touchpoints. If you are advertising any products across digital on Black Friday itself, ensure you have the available stock to fulfill any potential orders through your brand website and deliver in a timely manner.
These are just 3 examples…but whatever you do this Black Friday period, make sure that all touchpoints associated with your brand are aligned as much as possible. In a period when consumers are more ready than ever to part with their hard-earned cash, ultimately your job as a marketer is to make it easy for them to hear from you, see you, trust you and buy from you.
Michael Durey – Head of CDM & Digital
Samsung Electronics
As you may be aware, 2019 will be even more intense than 2018 due to the shortened holiday season.
So plan now if you haven’t already!
Aside from the obvious must do’s (getting your feed into tip-top shape using a fantastic feed tool like Feedonomics), I would recommend finalizing and committing to your budget and flight plan for November through early January.
This is simple and crucial to a successful holiday because it helps ensure your programs do not overspend/underspend during important dates or fall mercy to in-the-moment human decisions that could be very costly after the fact.
Complete your analysis of last year’s performance (lost impression share, revenue, CVR, spend, ROAS); review this year’s trending performance (auction insights, competitor landscape, retailer/client goals); and compile a daily run rate/flight plan for planned spend that accommodates the shift in timing for 2019 vs. 2018.
Linda Yonemoto – Strategist, Shopping & Feed
Tinuiti
See more tips from Merkle and Yahoo.
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
