Christmas is just around the corner – literally less than a month away – and all year businesses have been working hard on their Facebook presence, trying to ramp up their engagement, communicate with people, and figure out what makes them tick. The time has come now, to bring in sales for the holidays, and Facebook shows us the way! It’s not an easy task as there is a lot of competition, but if things are done right, the benefits are huge!
Also Read: Holiday Marketing And How To Sell More Stuff [Infographic]
Facebook gives us great advertising tools – it’s just up to us to use them right. To start getting holiday sales, there are three things to start doing – and you better do them well.
Build The Right Audience
You will have to target the right audience, with the right messages you will need to build audiences based on what they are interested in and what they respond to. You need to look at who your most loyal customers are, people who recently bought your product, and who interacts with your messages. Fine-tuning your segmentation of those audiences is paramount – Anyone familiar with Facebook ads will know that you can easily do so with demographic, interest, behavioural and location targeting.
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You should be using a Facebook tracking pixel throughout the year, but if you haven’t this is definitely the time to start. Create Custom Audiences of people who view specific pages or buy specific products. Create Lookalike Audiences – people who are similar to your current customers – to grow your Custom Audiences, find new ones, and vice versa.
Retargeting audiences is a great way to get the “right message, to the right people”. If someone looks at a product and doesn’t buy, you can retarget that product or another relevant one to that person. “Layer” your approach, by creating a storyline that people will follow down the sales funnel. If you use video remarketing on Facebook (on Power Editor), you can build an audience based on who viewed your video. This is very useful if you can produce quality video content.
Use The Right Creative
Using the right creative to promote your products and pass the message along is vital. You will need to create a range of different creatives – always A/B testing them, and making sure you match your audiences with the right one. There are many studies out there that can tell you what colours or images to use in your ads and others that provide insight into the ways in which people think or act when seeing specific ones. Make your imagery relevant but at the same time general enough to appeal to a general audience. You should appeal to people on an emotional level as buying is very much an emotional process.
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Use different advert types and placements, testing your audience and creative across them. Facebook gives advertisers the opportunity to take advantage of things like Link adverts and be straightforward about your message, or use Carousel adverts to get creative by finding ways to weave stories for people. The opportunities are endless.
The right creatives engage people, and that is exactly what you want to do. Keep them engaged, because those who are engaged are more likely to purchase.
Bid Right, Track & Measure
There is a reason that Facebook gives advertisers the opportunity to choose objectives. Choosing an objective changes the bidding options that are available to an advertiser and thus changes the mechanics of how the ad will be shown to people, and how much an advertiser will be charged. Stick to default bidding options and let Facebook “do its thing”.
Track performance on different levels – with your tracking pixel for example. Performance depends on your ability to optimise your campaigns. You cannot optimise your campaigns without tracking and measuring returns based on your objective. ROI is really important here because you can then go back to the first step – and build new audiences based on your success.