Gear Up For Holiday Advertisements

The Holiday season is here and it’s time to start thinking about a holiday advertisement to reach the right customer base. The basic thing you need to do is to understand who you are targeting and how to earn their attention. Below are the points which can help to reach your target customer.

Work on your USP(Unique Selling Point)

What is your unique selling point? Price? Convenience? No. of Products? Warranty? Emotional Appeal.

People can usually find what you are selling somewhere else with a quick search and a few clicks. So we need to think why is your company worth buying from and focus on that selling point.

Your unique selling point may not work for everyone, but during the holiday season there are enough buyers that you can focus your advertising by displaying the contents on what makes your business or products special. To do that, it pays to pull out your buyer personas and try to figure out who your target customers are, what they’re looking for and how to effectively target them. For example, if your product is a watch and your USP is your low retail price, then you’re going to target a very different group of keywords on paid search than if you were trying to sell a Rolex.

Personalize your messaging

Given the size of the holiday shopping market, it can be hard to figure out how to stand out  from the competition. Even if you know your buyer personas and what they want, it can still  be tricky to figure out how to win a sale from them. This is where personalization comes in handy. The more personalized message you create for your audience, the more likely you are to get their business. For example, check out the following ads for the search “Diwali gifts” (below).

“If you’re like many of us, the reason you search for “Diwali gifts” is because you are looking for gift ideas. You aren’t the cleverest or most creative person in the world, so you’re struggling to find the perfect gift for someone”.

With the above scenario in mind, which headline seems more personalized to that given context?

“Gift Ideas | 2018 Diwali Gifts – lionblades.com”

“Best Quality with low Price | Diwali Gifts” – Available only at lionblades.com

Put together some video ads

As the holiday shopping frenzy builds and advertising competition rises to match it, you can’t  just run any old ads and hope for the best. You need ads that earn your customers’ attention, ads that they actually enjoy seeing.

The best way to do this is with high-quality, entertaining video ads.

The easiest way to turn an attention-earning ad into a sales-generating ad is using YouTube’s TrueView for Action campaigns. These are almost exactly like a normal TrueView ad, but TrueView for Action ads give you the ability to add a “Buy Now” or “Shop Now” button to your video.

Keep a close eye on your product feeds

There’s nothing more devastating than missing out on sales because of problems in your product  feed. While it might not be the most exciting thing in the world, taking the time to keep your feeds organized, functional and running well pays off big time during holiday season. It can be easy to let small errors build up in your account throughout the year, but leaving these problems in your feed during the holidays is like ordering inventory for a own store and then forgetting to put it out on the shelf.

For the next few months, you’ll want to be extra careful with your feed to avoid warnings,  product disapprovals and especially product feed suspensions. Make sure that your content is honest and fits the requirements of the advertising platform you are using.

Take advantage of Smart Shopping

Google’s introduction of Smart Shopping this year offers a variety of interesting opportunities for holiday advertisers. It’ll be interesting to see how these campaigns pan out this year, but it looks like they will be a good way to boost the performance of your holiday campaigns.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

Start early. Smart Shopping campaigns take at least 15 days to hit their stride, so it’s better to get them started well in advance of big shopping periods like Diwali Celebration. Review long-term performance. Along the same lines as the last point, the earlier you start using Smart Shopping campaigns, the more time you will have to evaluate their effectiveness.  Sometimes, it takes a while to really get a feel for a new type of campaign, so give yourself time to figure things out before Diwali Celebration. Get to know your levers. Your budget and ROAS(Return on Advertising Spend) settings are the only real levers you have much control over, so pay attention to how changing these setting affects your results. Don’t be afraid to increase your budget. The great thing about the holidays is the increased demand, but if you aren’t increasing your budget in response to that demand, you can miss out on some real opportunities. If you start now, Smart Shopping campaigns have the potential to be a real game changer for many E-commerce businesses. The usefulness of these campaigns, of course, will depend on the specific products you’re selling, but if you haven’t looked into Smart Shopping before, now is a great time to start.