It’s time to start planning your digital campaign strategy for the holiday season. We’ve collected tips from Digital Room, LLC, Circa Interactive, Site-Seeker, and Simply180 on the best ways to prepare for Black Friday and the holidays.
It’s important to identify the most and least profitable targeting audience/visitors/customers for your marketing project of Black Fiveday Weekend. Due to the competition within the online advertising marketplace, it’s very important to understand the different types, interests, and behaviors of the audience or existing customers. Data-driven segmentation methods help marketers target specific groups of customers with different promotions, pricing options, and product placements that capture the interests of the target audience in the most cost-effective way. The most widely used segmentation methods are logistics regression, tree-based algorithm (such as decision tree and random forecast), k nearest neighbor, etc. Besides that, the unsupervised learning algorithm such as K-means are also very useful. Therefore, don’t waste your database and start mining your data to shape your holiday marketing strategies.
Lyla Yang – Marketing Analyst
Digital Room, LLC
In order for your brand to connect with the audience and gain momentum as it approaches the holidays, the best practice recommendation is to plan and build assets for your campaigns and deliver the promotional messages in the form of paid advertising and email marketing as early as 3 weeks prior to the Black Friday & Cyber Monday and as often as possible. With inboxes getting crowded and social media ads populating the newsfeeds, it is crucial to get ahead of the competition early in the game. Teaser ads with lucrative incentives will be very effective for clothing, tech, toys, smart-home gadgets, and travel. Remember to be aggressive and clear. If your discounts are lucrative enough or your incentives are complex to understand, people will by elsewhere.
Here are a few tips to ensure you can get the most benefit from the Black Friday’s buyer rush:
- Plan early & get ahead of the curve
- Put your retargeting tactics in place for site visitors and abandoned shopping carts
- Take advantage of the limited-time window (i.e Last Day or offer valid until today by 3:00 PM EST)
- Set your analytics to track your success
- Personalize your messages. Offer different deals to different customer groups.
- Extend your offers throughout the entire 5 days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday.
Farzin A. Espahani – Director of Paid Media
Circa Interactive
The best advice I can give when preparing for the crazy days following Thanksgiving is to strategize well in advance and have your digital ads submitted for approval before the week. So many retailers and brands submit the week of, that review time from the ad networks takes a lot longer than normal. You need to make sure you’re already approved and your ads will hit on the date and time, as planned. Also, competition is extra fierce that week. You need to be even more creative than normal to have your ads stand out. Consider dynamic or interactive ads using fresh new visuals and fun copy. The cost will likely increase because so many ads are competing for consumers’ attention, so you need to make sure you are getting good results from your effort and spend.
Thomas Armitage – Team Lead
Site-Seeker
There are only 26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. This means retailers have one less week to sell than usual. As a result, I expect more retailers to offer deeper discounts and get the word out much earlier than Black Friday. Retailers should tease their deals now to build momentum and help shoppers mentally bookmark the deals to jump on.
David Haut – Chief Marketing Officer
Simply180
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.
