As shown by the Deloitte report, as many as 25% of buyers start their shopping frenzy precisely in this month. Some want to avoid pre-Christmas stress, others to take advantage of Black Friday promotions. But starting from the beginning… well, how to prepare properly for such a campaign?
Set the goal of the Christmas campaign
Although the goal of the Christmas campaign seems obvious, without its precise definition it will be difficult to achieve the expected sales growth. You need to know where you are heading to properly choose the right tools and develop an effective sales strategy. The goal should comply with the SMART method, so it should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
An example?
An increase in sales in November and December this year by 20% compared to the same period last year.
Or
Acquiring 15% more new customers in November and December compared to the previous two months.
In achieving the goal, an analysis of current consumer shopping habits will help you:
- In the holiday period, they expect easily available products. Delays in delivery often cause them stress, irritation, and even abandonment of the purchase and choice of another store. To avoid this, plan the entire order process well in advance; you may need support from additional employees or an audit of the customer path in the store.
- They pay attention to companies that organize interesting campaigns. The entire purchasing process is accompanied by a holiday atmosphere. Take a closer look at your competition, don’t copy ideas, but you can get inspired by them. Think about what can be done better. Bet on emotions, which during the holiday period very favorably influence purchasing decisions.
- They seek inspiration, specific proposals, answers to questions like what to buy for the holidays for their mom, wife, fiancé, or child. For this purpose, you can prepare a guide or e-book in which you answer these, important from the client’s perspective, questions. You will propose specific ideas to them and thereby increase your chances of sale.
- They count on attractive promotions. This is a time of big expenses, which consumers do not give up, but look for savings. Before implementing the appropriate promotion, however, consider whether it will not negatively affect your company’s budget, i.e., whether you will simply lose on it.
An effective motivation for pre-Christmas shoppers is, for example, a discount for a specific cart value, which will make customers buy more at once, but at a more favorable price for them. In this way, with the increased cart value, you will also benefit from it.
Specify the main theme of the Christmas advertising campaign
Christmas is an extraordinary time. It is associated with family and closeness, joy, but also with a Christmas tree, Santa Claus, snow, and gifts. This is a very broad topic that can be approached in countless ways. Choose a few Christmas symbols that will appear in the visuals of your Christmas advertising campaign. Remember to avoid excess of form over content. The most important is the message, and the right tools are only meant to help deliver it to the customer.
Christmas campaigns are a good time to use marketing storytelling. During this period, human sensitivity is particularly activated in recipients. We like to listen to touching stories – emotional, sometimes encouraging deeper reflections, but also joyful ones.
A good example is Allegro’s Christmas campaign „See in each other what is most important”, as well as Ikea’s „Just a little is enough to change a lot”, in which the message focuses not on material aspects, but on how much joy and happiness they can bring to another person.
Emotions as the main theme of Christmas campaigns have worked very well for many years. Let your ads not be a direct encouragement to purchase, but a depiction of the effect and emotions that the end customer will achieve thanks to them.
Advertising on good principles
Advertising is subject to law and the regulations of specific advertising networks; non-compliance of one event with the applicable rules costs organizations an average of 5 million USD, as shown by data published by Saviynt.
Taking such actions can cost you dearly, especially in the pre-Christmas period, when revenue should be the highest. To avoid this, familiarize yourself with the rules for advertisers, which you will find in the Meta advertiser guide. Knowing them, you avoid the risk of ad rejection and wasting valuable time, which your competition will use well.
Additionally, it should be remembered that the increased number of ads published during this period somewhat forces enhanced control of creations that are on the border of good practices. It is worth analyzing your ads, modifying them or replacing them with others before they get blocked.
Adapt the purchasing process to customer expectations
Good principles are not only law, but also respect for the customer who has their expectations. Instead of trying to change them, adapt your message to them. An analysis of search results in the store will help you with this.
Familiarize yourself with the details of statistics, which products are selected most often, at which ones there are cart abandonments, and which ones generate little interest. Check why this happens. Perhaps some product descriptions do not provide recipients with sufficient information or are not written in the language of benefits? If so, change this before the campaign starts.
Talk, also, with your sales and customer service department, thanks to which you will learn what problems your customers face and introduce changes anticipating problems and questions that visitors to your store may encounter during holiday shopping.
For the modern consumer, detailed information about the product or service and the shortest possible path from familiarizing with the offer to finalizing the purchase are also important. The easiest way to check what the purchasing path in your store looks like is to perform test purchases yourself.
Place a test order both via a web browser on a desktop computer, as well as on a smartphone or other mobile device. Pay attention to whether all buttons are clearly visible, and whether the NEXT button or transition to payment is not too low, which may require the recipient to scroll additionally.
If the order form seems too long to you, most likely the customer will perceive it the same way. Limit such a page then to the minimum information.
Also don’t forget about payment methods. Check if your customer has a choice. It certainly cannot lack a quick BLIK transfer among them, which is increasingly chosen by Polish consumers.
No monotony. Bet on different ad formats
Companies often treat Christmas campaigns as a field for intensified competition. They outdo each other in ideas that are often duplicated or not precisely matched in terms of theme and characteristics of the target group. Moreover, the same visual and textual materials appearing everywhere very quickly stop arousing interest.
Christmas campaigns last about 1 – 1.5 months. Running the same ads throughout this time reduces their effectiveness. They are not sufficiently motivating for purchase, nor do they maintain customer engagement, who expects freshness and often also something innovative that will snap them out of their autumn lethargy.
When preparing creations, bet on diverse advertising materials. In matching them to the target group, the CTR coefficient will help you. It determines the number of clicks in relation to the number of ad impressions. The higher it is, the better the campaign match to the audience group. If the CTR is low, it is a signal that the creation is not bringing the desired effects and appropriate changes need to be introduced.
Different types of ads will work particularly well with a broad audience group. For example, if you sell products dedicated to women and men, prepare a different, personalized message for each group. In such a situation, it is worth using static and dynamic advertising.
The second one – within the Google Ads ecosystem – is based on a text format and appears in the user’s search results. It does not use pre-defined keywords, but instead analyzes the entire page content. This allows for more accurate ad display and saves time at the stage of selecting appropriate phrases. In addition, be active on social media – create posts on social media, but don’t forget about stories and the recently fashionable reels.
Christmas campaigns with influencers
Additionally, engage creators who gather around themselves a community of recipients who may be interested in your products. This way you can increase your chances of reaching a wider group of customers through an additional (someone else’s) communication channel. Moreover, fans and followers perceive their idols as authorities, so they base their choices – including purchasing ones – on their recommendations and reviews.
Choose an influencer whose social media channel best matches the theme of your brand. Their message should be natural and transparent, and their recommendation of your services or products should genuinely stem from their convictions. Therefore, it is good to arrange cooperation in such a way that the creator matched to the store’s offer has time to test the products and prepare a recommendation consistent with their own conscience and the convention of their creativity.
Always at the beginning of cooperation, establish the goal – the influencer must know what you expect from them so that they can adopt a good publication strategy and you can measure the results of such cooperation. It can be a quantitative increase in sales of specific products or general acquisition of new customers, to whom the creator will propose a discount code for your store
Additionally, specify the cooperation rules precisely. Discuss with the influencer the products or services they are to advertise and how they should do it (e.g., showing their effects as part of a specific series of their videos to which your products fit perfectly). Don’t forget about financial issues, i.e., remuneration for the creator – agree whether it will be a specific rate, or perhaps a percentage of sales, or products from your brand sent as part of a barter.
Let's talk about cooperation
Automation as support for the intense holiday time
During the pre-Christmas period, you de facto have little time to conduct an effective advertising campaign.
Moreover, increased traffic does not favor precise control over every area of the campaign and “manual” introduction of changes, especially when we add campaigns promoting special actions like Black Friday or Christmas to branding or catalog campaigns. Therefore, automation of advertising campaigns comes to the rescue.
When planning a campaign in Google Ads, you can, for example, take advantage of the possibility of pausing and resuming ads at a pre-set time.
Meta also offers ad automation in its solutions. For this occasion, you can launch a series of automatic rules that, at a specified, rising ROAS, will increase the budget of a given ad set, and at a falling return, will turn it off. You can read more about automation in the Meta ad panel in our article How we streamline work on advertising campaigns in the Meta ad manager.
It is also worth focusing a bit more on the learning phase. This is the period in which the ad delivery system acquires valuable data about recipients and the areas where content is displayed. Thanks to this, the person responsible for ads will be able to appropriately optimize them based on conclusions from the analysis of the first period of the campaign.
According to the “Guide to the Learning Phase” created by Meta, advertisers who optimized after the campaign’s learning phase ended (including increasing the budget of ad sets that performed better than others) recorded a 17% increase in conversions, compared to those who invested 80% of the promotional budget in campaigns from the beginning and did not verify it later.
As you probably know, brands have already started the autumn promotion period. Some of them have even launched Christmas campaigns. If you are not one of them, do not treat it as a necessity to immediately launch your own.
Do not forget that effectiveness depends on good preparation. Do not skip the planning and testing phase either. It is better to start late, but with a chance of success, than to burn the advertising budget on a poorly thought-out campaign conducted “in a rush”.
If, however, you have a plan, do not wait too long to implement it! Put it into action today, and if you do not fully know how to plan your marketing activities or have doubts about the effectiveness of the plan already in place, get in touch with us.
We will gladly help you prepare advertising campaigns so that they achieve their goal and pay for themselves many times over. Don’t believe it? Visit the tab with our Case Studies and see how we helped our previous clients.
