The Essential Post-Holiday Social Advertising Playbook

It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

Or is it the busiest time of the year?

For digital marketers, the holiday period is critical to the year’s performance. So once you have planned, built, launched, and delivered your campaigns, your work is done for the year, right? Wrong. For savvy marketers, the fun is just getting started. Follow the steps outlined below to give your future self the best holiday gift of all – a social media holiday playbook.

As covered in this blog post, there are still plenty of chances to maximize opportunity after the holidays. What we will cover here are five basic steps that you need to fully capitalize on the holiday investment. Specifically, we have outlined audience insights gained in social media marketing and how to leverage them in the future. Read through – you’ll thank yourself later.

1) Audience Building 1 – Set up Facebook Website Custom Audiences to build remarketing pools for future use

It is important to ensure these are set up to dynamically create audiences based on interaction with your site – if there is a chance that these have not yet been created, stop reading now and make sure they are configured! These will be key for future remarketing opportunities.

2) Holiday Purchaser Persona – Evaluate performance by breakouts

After the holiday push is completed, it is critical that you break out performance data by all of the available options on Facebook. What did your purchaser group look like? How is that different than your year-round purchasers?

Often, you will see gift-giving personas as different than you might expect, and certainly different than your general audiences that purchase for themselves. How else might behavior differ for gift-givers? Are individuals purchasing more heavily through their mobile devices when purchasing for others?

3) Promotional Creative – Understand which promotional language resonated with your audience

Half Off? 50% Discount? Save up to $300? All of those may be the same offer, but which resonated best with your audience? Did we see a higher purchase conversion rate for one type of messaging? A higher average order value? Looking at this type of information will be critical for future promotional periods.

4) Audience Building 2 – Build and save holiday custom audiences

Understanding that your holiday purchasers are a unique cohort will be crucial for future holiday cycles. First – those who have purchased your product for others know how great it is. We’ll want to remind them next year and make their holiday shopping easy. Second – we can leverage these lists to create lookalike audiences. These purchasers are great, let’s go find more like them.

5) Timing, Timing, Timing

Here you need to look at conversion rates and volume. When did customers start purchasing more often? When did purchasing behavior slow down? Likely there is opportunity to build up momentum through social media marketing earlier in the year and opportunity to capture more of that intent through lower funnel tactics like remarketing and search campaigns.

By effectively executing on these five steps, you will know who to advertise to, when to do it, what message to deliver. This information will prove vital to your 2019 promotional marketing periods.

Not currently getting these crucial insights? Not sure how to build holiday personas and effectively speak to them? Contact Metric Theory to learn how you can consistently learn the most from your marketing investments!