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If you're not sure where to take your marketing for the holidays, we're sharing 4 holiday campaign roadmaps that you can use during the coming festive months.

In our previous blog that you can find here, we talked about the importance of getting your holiday marketing campaigns started early, and it's a great companion piece to this blog if you missed it!

In this week’s episode, Dan, Producer Matt, and Sachita go over 4 holiday campaign roadmaps and show real-world examples we have used here at Honeypot. How will you be approaching your campaigns for the coming holidays?

Be sure to ask the Bees any questions you might have about what campaigns might work best for your business, and how to work around roadblocks.

Check out the video or podcast above. 👆 Subscribe to our weekly live stream on Facebook, or take it on the go with a podcast, on your choice of platforms. Keep up-to-date on news, trends, and tips in the world of digital marketing and join in on the conversation.

What's New?

Instagram is finally rolling out their in-app shopping cart that they've been testing for over a year now. This is big news since it will allow users to browse and purchase products without leaving the Instagram app. You can read more about it here:

Instagram brings in-app shopping cart to all US businesses

Another new update comes from Google My Business that now allows you to tell customers if you're providing online services. This is great, considering how many brick and mortar retailers have had to pivot to online sales.

Customers will now be able to see if you are offering online services immediately when you come up in searches. If you don't have GMB set up, get on it - it's free! You can check out our guide on getting set up here.

What's Working?

It's a good idea to look back at previous years and analyze what worked and what didn't. You may have content that you can repurpose, and you can save time and resources by learning from the strategies that did not perform well.

When you're getting started, you also want to think about what elements will require help from other teams, like creative assets, and get those started first. If you're going to have any backend functionality changes, you'll want to get that on the roadmap, too.

Here's a snapshot of the holiday campaign roadmaps we'll be looking at:

• Use Video Ads To Promote Holiday Specials
• Build a Custom Audience
• Limited Time Offers
• Promote Targeted, Creative Free Guides (Lead Magnets)

Let's dig in.

#1 Use Video Ads To Promote Holiday Specials

Video is by far the most effective type of content you can post on social media. Compared to text and images, video generates 12x the engagement and shares.

Check out these staggering statistics on video:

• 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.
• Mobile video consumption rises by 100% every year.
• By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15x higher than it was in 2017.
• Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text.
• 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video.
• Social media posts with video have 48% more views.

I could go on. There are pages of these statistics. Just check out this article on Biteable: 55 video marketing statistics for 2020.

Interestingly, the majority of videos are watched on mobile devices, so if you haven't realized that you need to have a mobile-first approach yet, it's time to get on the bus or you're going to be left behind.

When posting on social, don't just post a YouTube link to a video. Native videos on Facebook have 10x higher reach compared to YouTube links.

Let's take a look at a Facebook Video Ad we've created here at Honeypot. We start by posting a teaser on social media or through email to let our audience know when holiday specials will be announced.

Then we use remarketing audiences and add offers or discounts. In this case, we offered a discount of $5 off your order.

Even with a modest budget, you can get results. For less than the cost of a large pizza, this ad got thousands of impressions, a handful of sales and potential repeat customers, who might also tell their friends.

#2 Build a Custom Audience

Custom audiences let you retarget people who have engaged with your business. This can be anyone who has liked or commented on your posts, purchased from your store or visited your website.

A major benefit of marketing to custom audiences is knowing exactly who you're marketing to, which of course gives you the ability to really focus on specifics and tailor your ads with much more precision.

We've mentioned it before, and it still stands true: the better you know your audience, the better your ads will perform. It's that simple.

Facebook Custom Audiences gives you the option to select from a wide variety of parameters to get very specific about who you target, which allows you to create better, more optimized ads.

Some more benefits of using custom audiences include:

• Growing your Facebook audience.
• Upselling existing customers.
• Targeting customers abandoned their carts.
• Selling to active subscribers.
• Getting feedback from customers.
• Building your email list.

By targeting people who are already familiar with your brand, you'll increase your conversion rates and get a better ROI.

If you want a step-by-step walkthrough that details how to set up custom audiences, check out this blog by Shopify:

Facebook Custom Audiences 101: A Starter Guide for Ecommerce Businesses

Lookalike Audiences

Once you have set up custom audiences you can take it a step further and target people who have not previously purchased from you or visited your website.

Lookalike audiences use the parameters in place for your custom audiences and finds people who share the same or similar interests to build new audiences you can reach out to.

It's important to note that you need at least 100 people who all reside in the same country in your custom audience to create a lookalike audience.

You can also take it a step further and create Value-Based Lookalike Audiences. This allows you to get very specific with your targeting by assigning an indicator identifying the highest-value customers on your list.

This helps expand your audience only to people who are the most likely to generate a high lifetime value as customers.

Lookalike audiences are best used to target new cold audiences at the top of your sales funnel. For example, you could run top-of-funnel content campaigns to all of the lookalike audiences you build. This would start to warm them up as you take them from the top of the funnel to the bottom.

Here's a great article that walks you through some different tactics for building your lookalike audiences:

4 Ways to Build Facebook Lookalike Audiences to Expand Your Targeting

#3 Limited Time Offers

A great way to capture the attention of your target audience is to create a sense of urgency. The longer someone thinks about a purchase, the more likely they are not to make a purchase.

You can easily create a sense of urgency in a variety of ways, such as:

• Setting a deadline, or using a clock, timer, or countdown.
• Use FOMO by creating scarcity in your inventory.
• Using time-related words - hurry, now, quick, instant, last chance, before it's gone.
• Offer a bonus incentive if they buy now.

Making people feel like there is a sense of urgency is a great way to increase conversion, but remember to avoid fake urgency or scarcity. Creating urgency can be very effective, but abusing it will hurt your business in the long run.

Scarcity tactics do not perform well when they are seen as manipulative.

Let's take a look at an example of 2 ads we crafted at Honeypot, and how adding a sense of urgency affected performance.

In the first ad example, there is no sense of urgency, and the cost of acquisition was $93.69.

In the second ad example, we simply added a "Limited time offer" to the beginning of the ad copy. With such a small, simple change we got 10x the conversions and look how drastically it changed the cost of acquisition.

You can also use personalization, warm colours, numbers to quantify and establish authority, and powerful headlines to help enhance your urgency-driven offers. It's a game of psychology and the smallest of details can sometimes have very dramatic effects.

#4 Promote Targeted, Creative Free Guides (Lead Magnets)

Interest in gift guides spikes every year during the holiday months. We've all used them. With time constraints and limited budgets, we need to find gifts quickly and easily, and gift guides come in many convenient forms, offering deals and inspiration in one place.

Considering that nearly 50% of consumers start their holiday gift research as early as October, now is the time to start putting together your campaigns so that you'll have assets ready to roll out as soon as people start looking.

Some ideas to consider:

• Segment your audiences and email custom gift guides for each segment.
• Offer early access deals to get VIP customers shopping early.
• Offer holiday bundles.
• Keep customers coming back with different deals every week, or even every day.
• Have tiered discounts to increase customer spend.
• Offer free gifts with a purchase.
• Start an advocacy campaign that donates to a charity for select purchases.
• Be prepared for mobile purchases.
• Create gift guide boards on Pinterest.
• Use SEO keywords when writing content for your guide.
• Use high-quality, captivating images.

The goal is to help people find gifts for their loved ones, as quickly and easily as possible.

Once you have a guide put together, you want to start promoting it everywhere you can. Share it on your website, on your social channels, through segmented email lists, or through paid ads. Share it everywhere.

You're not limited to just gift guides, however. Any type of guide can work, but you want it to relate to your brand in some way. For example, let's take a look at a guide we put together for a client at Honeypot:

Here we created a guide for saunas that outlined the benefits of a sauna and DIY sauna kits. It's not directly promoting the clients product, but it educates potential consumers and helps move them down the funnel to a more informed, confident purchase.

Here is how it performed:

By using paid ads to promote the guide, we were able to achieve a pretty impressive reach and tons of conversions, all from one piece of content. The value here speaks for itself.

Also, take note that the only information asked of the customer is their email address. That first stage in the checkout process is where 40% of customers leave, so no matter what the price point or offer is, you need to ensure the process is as easy as possible.

Best Practices for Lead Gen

Lead generation can be tricky. In fact, 61% of marketers think generating high-quality leads is one of their biggest challenges.

You can have the best product on the market, but if you're not generating leads, it could be dead in the water. You need to define your audience and proactively reach out to them.

The tricky part is simply that both quantity and quality are key to a successful lead gen program. So nurturing your leads through the funnel is just as important as attracting the leads in the first place. You want that quantity to turn into quality.

The good news is that the difficulty also presents opportunities. If you're embracing emerging technologies, you'll be a step ahead of the marketers that are trying to stick to traditional methods.

There are plenty of ways you can generate leads. Here are a few options to get the ball rolling:

• Live Chat - a great way to connect with your customers and capture contact info.
• Interactive Content - create a quiz that answers common questions about your product or service and people will be compelled to sign up to find out the answers.
• Use CRM software - In today's market, CRM tools are essential for generating leads.
• Encourage online reviews - word of mouth is the most trusted form of endorsement. Take advantage of it. Let your customers share their experiences with your brand.
• Invest in targeted PPC ads - the top 3 paid ads on a page get nearly half of the clicks for the entire page.

As usual, I could go on and on, but you get the idea. If you'd like to dig deeper, check out this great article that goes into more detail on these points, plus more:

21 Lead Generation Ideas and Practices to Boost your Strategy

KISS

Keep it simple.

The holidays are a stressful and chaotic whirlwind of festivities and spending. Make things as easy as possible for people and they'll thank you with their hard-earned cash. Get straight to the point and make the value of your offer immediately obvious. The fewer steps to engaging with an offer the better.

And that's a wrap of our holiday campaign roadmaps. As always, here are some great resources we ❤. Check them out!

• 4 Retail Holiday Marketing Stats You Should Know for 2020
• Clever Holiday Marketing Strategies for 2020
• How to Get Your Paid Ads Ready for the Holiday Season
• 9 Ways Facebook Creative Hub Will Energize Your Social Ads
• 19 Brilliant Examples of Holiday Marketing Campaigns
• How to Crush It This Holiday Season with 12 Creative E-Commerce Campaigns That Work