With online shopping so prevalent in today’s retail scape, businesses are now poised to develop marketing strategies around the influx of eyeballs on digital platforms. A recent report has shown that the ratio of online purchases to total retail sales in Singapore is the highest compared to any other market in Southeast Asia, while other markets such as Indonesia are also seeing rapid growth rates.
Consumer spending tends to soar before and during these periods, whether in-store or online. Timing is everything, especially when it comes to holiday digital marketing campaigns. In the build up to a particular festival, consumers go online in an attempt to find information that includes festive recipes, gift and event ideas, flights and promotions. Their online activities give marketers insights on their behaviour, and marketers can use these to their advantage – targeting an audience that is actively searching for answers.
Saurabh Dangwal, Vice President, APAC, MediaMath, discusses four steps marketers should take to ensure that their festive online marketing campaigns are best optimized to capture the largest share of the wallet.
1. Focus on your goals
Festive seasons are the best time to drive sales by adopting a performance-driven campaign that focuses on return-on-investment (ROI), conversion and cost-per-action (CPA), rather than a brand awareness-driven strategy. It is important to consider specific actions that will move customers from awareness to purchase, and then align your strategies accordingly.
For example, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, shoppers are looking for perfect gifts for the special people in their lives. This is an opportune time to promote top gift offers. With a strong call-to-action, alongside content related to holiday gifts, marketers have the perfect opportunity to bring the solution straight to someone looking for it.
2. Start with your current customer lists
The fastest path to revenue is through your existing customer base. Having a targeted remarketing initiative for a specific holiday season will engage customers who are already familiar with your brand, lessening the need to create awareness. This also creates an association at the right time, which can help differentiate you from your competitors.
If you have a new product coming out during a holiday season, develop product-specific campaigns with strong call-to-actions to drive product awareness and top-of-mind recall amongst existing customers, ahead of the season.
3. Present your customers’ wish list
Consumers want advertisements that matter to them. At the same time, they are either becoming increasingly numb to online ads or out rightly rejecting them due to a proliferation of unwanted advertising on their screens. The use of dynamic creatives in display and video ads allows marketers to personalise content and imagery in order to resonate clearly with individual customers’ specific wants.
New Year’s Eve is riddled with parties and people eating out. This is the perfect time for restaurants and venues to align their brand message with content around the holiday. With today’s technology, marketers are able to target a specific person finding answers to an activity, based on their online behaviour, and flash promotional content to drive sales and brand awareness during the festive period.
4. Segment customers by their behaviour
As a marketer, today it is vital to understand your customer’s online behaviour, which is easily enabled through technology. Using collected data, brands will be able to retarget individual consumers accordingly to develop personalised campaigns that resonate well with them. Use brand-oriented campaigns to drive customers back to your site, product-specific campaigns to reach out to customers who have visited product detail pages, and promotional campaigns to drive shopping cart completion and increase conversions.
On top of that, your advertisements can leverage as peripherals, providing an answer or suggestion to a customer’s question. For example, when a customer searches for flights to Europe for December, brands selling winter wear can place ads on travel sites. All this is done by analysing consumers’ online behaviour in real-time to provide a more well-rounded and satisfying online experience.
Each year, we see more and more content published around major holidays and seasonal events such as Chinese New Year, Hari Raya, Deepavali and Christmas. Marketers can take full advantage over their competitors during the holiday seasons by using programmatic advertising technologies to target, bid and place creatives that matter to consumers, all in real-time. Targeting this content during these times is easy and extremely scalable, with millions of pages created on each seasonal topic every day. There has never been a better time to improve sales conversions!