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Strategy

Spice up Holiday Campaign with personalized Social advertising

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Despite the pandemic and social distancing, emotions are here along with the holiday spirit, which promises hope and the fun of exchanging presents.

Do you know the lyrics of that famous song from the movie Love Actually?

You gave your presents to me, and I gave mine to you. I need Santa beside me, in everything I do.

But, when it comes to your eCommerce business:

  • How can you and your brand become everyone’s Santa this year?
  • How can you improve your AOV, besides having a 140% increase in CPM on Facebook?

Or in a nutshell, how can you get more sales on paid social without draining your budget?

That’s what we’re going to show you in this article.

We will take a look at how you should plan your next paid social holiday campaign and achieve amazing results using personalization.

So let’s get started and see how you can become the favorite Santa this season, without having to give huge discounts.

Prospecting – Warm up your audience with Data-Driven videos

Data-driven video ads are great for building audiences in the prospecting phase of your campaign, two to three weeks before the launch of the actual holiday campaign.

It’s a great way of increasing engagement, gathering data, and warming up your audience for your holiday offer blast.

Not to mention that you’ll be sure that your ROAS will turn out great, even if you are in the prospecting phase.

We recommend making a selection of the most attractive products for your holiday campaign. Furthermore, you can filter your data by the price range, previous engagement, purchase data, and even real-time Google Analytics top-selling products. Once you make your selection, you can create dozens of dynamic video ads in a fraction of time.

This way, you’ll have a lot of creatives to test without wasting your design budget and time. Additionally, you’ll be able to engage with your audience early on and prepare them for your future offerings.

Once you get users’ attention and collect enough website events and video views for custom audiences, you’re ready to build contextual storytelling retargeting journeys.

Contextual Storytelling – Take your Holiday campaign to the next level

You’ve probably heard that customers want to feel special when interacting with your brand, but what does that really mean?

Triggers such as text, discount, animations, and arrangements all matter. Additionally, stickers, colors, and countdowns are core components of how you direct your storytelling.

It’s not surprising that customers that feel strong emotions towards your creative have a much higher chance of converting to paid customers when shown your ad on Facebook and Instagram.

E-commerce brands who understand the role creatives play in the ad creation process are likely to see many happy customers return this holiday season.

Reach the right audience with sequential storytelling

The customer journey is unique to each customer and during the holiday season, when it comes to the buying experience, that’s truer than ever, and that’s why you have to make the experience as personalized as it can be.

By using methods of personalization which we’ll discuss, you can easily identify the elements that drive the biggest impact on your holiday campaigns.

Additionally, storytelling can be used to a great extent to truly improve the buying experience and overall brand identity.

Sequential storytelling is the concept of showing ads throughout the user journey. In our case, using a predefined strategy and narrative, we’re applying a system that relies on users’ self-selected interaction with the brand to boost the effectiveness of both storytelling and personalization. You can use this data to develop an awesome personalized holiday campaign for your customers.

Additionally, using a video or image ad will significantly improve performance metrics, especially if combined with 1st party data or dynamic creative templates. Not to mention, it’s so easy to get started and implement them right away.

Dynamic ads save a tremendous amount of time and are also useful when combined with real-time data streams. Dynamic creatives allow you to create hundreds of highly personalized ads that incorporate time-based data, behavioral messaging, geo-data, demographic data, or CRM based data for high impact messaging.

Use all the available data you have about your products and visitors to effortlessly craft beautiful and dynamic ads for Facebook and Instagram.

Hunch Creative Studio preview
Enhance DPAs with product name, before-after price, urgency stickers, or percentage off value

We are certain that Santa will appreciate it, too!

Holiday Dynamic Creative Tips

Here are few quick tips you should follow to dominate this Christmas season:

1. Slay your holiday goals with story ads.

According to Shopify Black Friday 2019 stats, 69% of sales were made via mobile. The story format is a Mobile-First solution.

Stories are an excellent way to inspire creativity as they go beyond the conventional square-shaped format, as they take up the full screen. Vertical storytelling will ensure that your creative receives the attention it deserves. Craft your vertical space using different layouts designed especially for this format.

2. Run Creative A/B Tests

To determine which creative engages your customers more and has a better conversion rate, you can run tests for a whole week, picking out winners from losers.

AB Testing with Holiday Creatives
Determine which color engages your customers better.

Santa recommends picking creatives with at least 10-15 conversions per ad.

E-commerce brands that historically used both image and video ads saw a higher rate of conversions compared to brands that used only image-based ads or video ads, in general.

3. Create the Sense of Urgency and a Strong CTA

Santa advises the use of phrases such as “Limited offer, don’t miss out” or using time-based data (days left counter) to create a sense of urgency. Additionally, include the past pricing together with the mentioned tips for maximum results.

Strong CTA on ad example
Create a sense of urgency based on data from product feed

Don’t worry, Santa says scarcity is totally part of the Christmas vibe.

Holiday rush takeaways

No, don’t worry. Santa isn’t going to take away your presents.

As an e-commerce marketer, you know that the holidays are your time to shine! It’s not uncommon for US advertisers to spend more than $57 billion on digital advertising and furthermore, half of it will go to digital ads on social networks. We can’t stress this enough: getting your holiday campaigns just right is crucial!

Testing out dynamic creatives with our e-commerce clients during the Black Friday rush has helped us get a much clearer picture of the kind of creatives that resonate the most with our audiences. It gave us a deeper understanding of the importance of creative testing and its powerful use.

Also, do you know how easy it is to switch from static designs to dynamic creative ads using Hunch? Seamlessly easy!

If you would like to find out how to set up dynamic creatives for the upcoming holiday campaign, schedule a free strategy call with our customer success managers.

Hunch and Santa wish you a successful holiday season! 🎅