Christmas is fast approaching, and for most, it will start earlier, with festive planning, gifting, and events starting at the beginning of October.

As a marketer, you will have already planned your channel strategy and media schedules. We imagine that you will have considered multiple bursts throughout the season to capture the most influence across the top five moments for the end-of-year shopping – being Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

This season we expect savvier spenders, who will be less loyal and happy to brand switch. Brands, therefore, need to focus on getting closer to the decision time. As the holiday season approaches, the advertising landscape becomes increasingly crowded. Marketers are not only competing for attention, competing with greater budgets (competitor and non-competitor) and increased buying pressures, but also significantly higher CPMs. 

In this article, we offer our ten recommendations on how to maximise your marketing strategy, create a standout, and increase ROAS during this incredibly competitive time.

1. Plan ahead and set clear goals

To optimise your media budget, planning ahead is crucial. Full funnel KPI frameworks are useful tools for planning – should your business not have one in place, start by setting clear goals and objectives for your campaigns. 

With a well-defined strategy in place, you can allocate your media budget more effectively and ensure that every dollar spent contributes to your desired outcomes.

2. Targeted advertising

To drive efficiencies, focus on targeted bottom-of-the-funnel advertising and set your benchmarks. Identify your target audience segments and tailor creatives to their specific interests and preferences. 

3. Embrace omnichannel marketing

By leveraging multiple platforms like social media, search, and email marketing marketers can ensure a consistent brand message across various touchpoints. Allocating media budgets across different channels and analysing performance is essential to drive successful campaigns.

4. Don’t lose sight of offline sales

Google Ads, Meta, and other platforms allow for offline conversion tracking via APIs. This will also update the platforms on any conversions they might have missed. Make sure that you have a process in place to ingest your offline conversion into your media buying platforms. Not only will this aid paid media optimisation, it will also increase your digital ROI.

5. Monitor and optimise campaigns

Continuous monitoring and optimisation are essential during this busy period. Regularly analyse the performance of your campaigns and identify areas for improvement. Adjust your budget allocation based on the channels or ads that are delivering the best results. 

By closely monitoring your campaigns, you can make data-driven decisions and maximise the efficiency of your media budget. 

6. Elevate your creatives

Design creative assets and copy with your target audiences in mind. Make creatives relatable to each of your audiences. Experiment with different ad formats, visuals, and call-to-action buttons to identify what resonates best with each of your audiences. Regular A/B (or even multivariate) testing can help optimise your media spend by enabling you to allocate resources to the most effective advertising materials. 

7. Maximise the path to purchase 

Recognise that you will be time-poor during this period and focus analysis on your high-value areas within your path to purchase. For example, optimising the right combination of channel and delivery time, or analysis to find the optimal combination of price and offer.

Do this well. Stay focused. Don’t try and do it all.

8. Personalisation

Tailoring experiences to individual preferences enhances engagement, boosts ad click-through rates, increases conversion rates, and builds a deeper connection with your customer.

Personalisation needs to be specific and in time for Christmas. As an example, focus on personalising your brand welcome message – remember that you might pick up lots of new customers during this period. A good customer is for life, not just for Christmas. Start the customer experience the right way.

9. Implement conversions API

Conversions API (CAPI) can help you better measure ad performance and attribution across your customer’s full journey, from discovery to conversion. This helps you understand how digital advertising affects both online and offline results.

To better explain, CAPI is a way to send your sales data so Facebook can do better optimisation. Your setup is critical. Ideally, you want to send rich metadata like order values and sales channels so that Facebook AI can bid more effectively.

If you need help to set this up, get in touch here. There’s still time.

10. Leverage your CDP

Be personalised. Use your CDP to find your high-value customers. Send them a proactive gift recommendation. Don’t wait. Do it now. If you’ve not properly rolled out a CDP, and want to learn more about CDPs and how they are a game changer for retailers, head over to Mi3 for a thorough and comprehensive investigation of CDPs in ANZ. Then let’s talk so that you’re fully prepared for next year.

To briefly summarise, in order to maximise your marketing strategy and create standout, a well-defined strategy and focus are critical throughout this period. 

We’re also here to help. At Noble Five, our mission is to help our customers realise the full potential of modern marketing.  We are experienced in advertising – social, search, and programmatic – providing in-house media services, as well as consulting services.

We’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to schedule a complimentary workshop here as we would be very happy to discuss how our expertise and solutions can help you throughout the festive period, and beyond.