The Secret all Top Brands Use to Win: Weather-Based Campaigns

Let’s face it – people are tired of the same, boring ads, messaging and creatives we all see each day.

In order to stand out in the overcrowded marketing world (especially if you’re in the apparel industry), you need to make your ads are engaging.

One of the best ways to grab consumers' attention and make them visit your online store is making your ads personalized based on their current weather conditions.

Just think how amazing it would be to show consumers a “winter-based” ad featuring jackets, and in the next two hours, when the weather changes, you present them with your amazing trousers that are suitable for both cold and warm weather.

It’s a fact when we say that personalized Facebook ads convert better on paid social. As mentioned above, even Facebook confirmed this.

Now that you know about weather-based campaign targeting and the amazing results it can bring, let’s see how you can create such a campaign.

In this article, we will cover the following: 

Let’s get started.

The Benefits of Using Weather-based Campaigns on Facebook and Instagram

So, you’ve decided that your next paid social campaign is going to be weather-based.

The main idea is to get a personalized creative, and one of the ways to make that happen is to use weather data to get weather-appropriate ads for any time of day (as the weather changes at a particular location).

Pinpoint audience needs based on accurate weather-based paid social campaigns. 

Weather-based paid social campaigns are extremely effective for the apparel industry, since you can easily contextualize products in terms of the current weather conditions. There are two main reasons why you should use weather-personalized campaigns:

• Weather-based ads allow you to easily engage with your consumers.
• Geotargeting – the weather is constantly changing in different locations – making your weather-based ads change automatically will significantly improve your sales.

For example, let’s say that you run stores both in San Francisco and Chicago. San Francisco might be sunny – so in order to engage with your local consumer in the best way, you want to show them shorts and T-shirts.

At the same time, however, it’s raining in Chicago. It doesn’t make sense to show consumers in Chicago your summer products, right? Instead, you want to show them raincoats, jackets or waterproof shoes.

Now, imagine that you have stores in over 100 locations, or you have an e-commerce store that targets the entire USA. It would be amazing to show different ads based on the weather for all locations, right?

But the question is, how exactly are you going to do that?

In short, you need a campaign that’s fully dynamic when it comes to creatives, which means that it automatically generates new types of high-quality creatives. In other words, creatives need to be automatically personalized according to the current weather conditions.

In contrast, your campaign needs to keep adapting to the current weather at a particular location. The best and most scalable way to execute this is to have a particular system and process that runs ads like this.

Let’s see how it works.

How to Create 1000+ Weather-based Ads for 100+ Store Locations That Convert – in No Time

In a nutshell, there are three different ways to create weather-based campaigns that bring results.

1. Change Your Campaigns all the Time

One way to do this is to re-render the ads every hour. Mind you, there are some problems with this approach:

• It takes too much time (you need to manually create hundreds of different creatives)
• This results in getting stuck in Facebook’s review, so your ads will be everything but personalized (by the time Facebook reviews every ad, the weather will change).

So, this is definitely a no-go.

2. Prepare all Your Ads in Advance

The second way is to have all ads prepared and paused inside your Facebook Business Manager. Although this is a doable strategy, there are problems with this approach too:

• Again, it takes too much time and resources to manually create multiple ads for various locations based on different weather conditions (it sounds complicated, right? Imagine how hard it would be to make all those creatives)
• You will need to manually go through the Facebook business manager and start/pause different ads. You will need one person to work full-time just to go through this process the entire day through and change the ads based on the current weather for multiple locations.

Although this approach might be good if you are targeting only one or two locations and have a total of six to ten ads, it definitely isn’t scalable for bigger brands.

Why?

Well, let’s say that you pre-select products based on the weather conditions they fit. Divide your products into three different categories – suitable for cold, sunny and rainy weather.

If you advertise only one product per weather category (let’s say one jacket, one t-shirt and one raincoat), and you have 15 locations, how many ads is that? The answer is 45 different ads.

Now imagine how hard it would be to go through 45 different ads all the time and start or pause each one. But, what if you want to sell more products? If you have different types of jackets or raincoats?

The total number of ads is over 100, maybe even 500 – for just three types of products. So, as you can see, this strategy will take forever.

3. Use the Dynamic Creative Approach 🤘

This approach is similar to the previous one (at least to some extent). What you need to do is to contextualize the products within weather-based ads (like we did in the example above – divide different types of products into different weather-based categories).

Just prepare a simple spreadsheet and list all of your products. There’s a media platform that creates and manage 1000s of different ads in a single click.

This means that you can create thousands of ads, for hundreds of products and hundreds of different locations, all in a fraction of time and without spending $10.000 and more on designers’ costs.

However, the thing that comes after is what makes this approach best for both the weather-based campaigns and your future sales. Dynamic creatives automatically run your campaigns based on the different weather types of multiple locations.

You won’t need to spend a minute of your precious time going through the Facebook business manager, checking the weather for multiple locations, and starting or pausing different ads.

Ad-tech creative & media platform like Hunch does this automatically.

How Sport Vision Personalized 820 Ads with Weather-Based Campaigns

In order to stand out, a leading sportswear retailer Sport Vision launched a truly unique campaign.

To promote their new products, they used personalized dynamic content in real-time that’s based on the time of the day, weather and different locations.

To accomplish this, Sport Vision and the Popup agency partnered with Hunch.

There are two types of data that we used to do this:

• 1st party data from Sport Vision – such as products, product images, discounts, pricing, user behavior data, website tracking data, and more.
• 3rd party data from Facebook, Google and Hunch – such as the locations, time of the day and weather in different locations.

Sport Vision’s data was used to segment products by weather conditions and popularity. Later, we merged this product data with the local weather data for every day and every hour.

Utilize segment asset customization to segment your products according to different weather conditions. 

This is something called Segment Asset Customization and it enabled us to deliver personalized and relevant offers at every moment and send customers to Sport Vision’s online store. 

To maximize sales, visitors who engaged with the offers but didn’t buy the products were targeted with personalized recommendations for running, hiking, summer sports or casual wear, depending on their interests. This reminds them of the current best reasons to purchase.

Our final output was over a thousand creatives across all Facebook and Instagram formats, with 70 highly personalized creatives active each hour.

This campaign ran live for two weeks, and there were 20.160 updates within the campaign (the weather in the ads was updated every hour of every day).

Just imagine doing this manually. It would be impossible, right?

In the end, Sport Vision got the following results:

• 15 individual locations targeted
• 6 weather types with day/night conditions
• 820 personalized ads created
• 20.160 automated campaign updates

This is an example of a true, data-driven dynamic social that brings real results.

The Bottom Line

Engaging with your consumers through paid social doesn’t have to be boring. In fact – you can drastically increase your results by using contextual campaigns. One way to do that is to use weather-based campaigns.

However, you don’t want to spend 10 hours every day designing creatives and manually switching your ads on or off inside Facebook business manager, right?

So, if you want to personalize and contextualize your campaigns, sign-up for a free strategy call with Hunch’s team.