As advertisers ramp up their spend and customer intent reaches its peak, it’s crucial to adapt your marketing approach. We explore various tactics, from scaling up investment in conversion campaigns to leveraging audience data and optimizing your creative.
Plus, we discuss the importance of streamlined paths to purchase, the power of shoppable ad formats, and the opportunity to capitalize on lower media costs. Get ready to unlock the secrets to a successful holiday season on social media.
Peak Season on Social: Our Secrets to Success in 2022
Written by:
Katie Burns
Head of Social, UK at Brainlabs
Peak retail season has been difficult to navigate the last few years. In 2020, COVID had many countries in lockdown, and in 2021, we saw the first ever year-over-year drop in e-Commerce sales and revenue (see our previous write-up here). After all this instability, everyone was likely hoping for a little more ‘normality’ in 2022, but unfortunately this year’s peak retail season is set to be an even more tumultuous one. The cost-of-living crisis and high levels of inflation are impacting consumer confidence, with households cutting discretionary spend. Meanwhile, a rumoured ‘second Prime Day’ and the clash with the World Cup is likely to inflate media costs through increased competition. And let’s not forget, this is all set against the backdrop of weaker data signals due to an increasingly privacy-centric ads ecosystem.
In another article by Brainlabs’ Strategy and Planning team, we pulled together strategic recommendations for how brands can navigate this unpredictable time. In this article, we are going to deep-dive into how these recommendations can come to life on social. We recommend the tactics and actions to implement over the next few months, to maximise every pound spent on social and see success from your social marketing over peak in 2022.
Launch peak season campaigns early, across the social platforms consumers are using for inspiration and research during their gift-buying search
The UK festive shopping season now starts earlier than ever. Reddit reported a 9% rise in holiday shopping and gifting conversations from the first week of October in 2021 1 (see Figure 1), and where we previously saw steep peaks in Google search demand on Mega Sales Days themselves, demand is now spread out over a wider time period.
This year, this trend is even more extreme, with search terms for Black Friday starting to rise earlier than previously – 33% increase YoY for H2 to date 2 (see Figure 2). This is likely driven by the cost-of-living crisis meaning purchases are even more considered than previous years, and with a stronger focus on value and discounts.
What does this mean for social advertisers?
This means launching peak season campaigns early, in order to be present during consumers research phase, but also thinking carefully about the platforms and objectives being used too:
Platforms
Pinterest is the number 1 platform for inspiration, among peer platforms 3. People come to the platform for inspiration for things to do and buy. In fact, 97% of festive season searches on Pinterest are unbranded 3, reflecting this early browsing behaviour. Meanwhile, Reddit is one of the top platforms for product consideration and research. Where previously, product research happened exclusively on Google, customers now look for crowd-sourced recommendations. 1 in 3 Reddit users turn to the platform when seeking reviews on products or brands for a Christmas gift 1. Think about how you can use these platforms to reach early Christmas shoppers.
Objectives
Consideration campaigns should be your go-to here. During this period, rather than looking to drive immediate sales and revenue, focus on running engaging creative which stops potential customers from scrolling past, and directs them off to your site. Your goal is product discovery and audience-building – remember you can build ad-engagement and site-retargeting audiences for use later in the peak season. Consideration campaigns also typically see lower CPMs than Conversion campaigns, amplified by the higher auction efficiency seen earlier in the festive season (see Figure 3).
As customer intent peaks, scale up investment in Conversion campaigns, supercharged by the wealth of audience data gathered during early festive activity
Throughout November and December media costs increase, as advertisers ramp up spend. Brainlabs’ aggregated client data demonstrates this trend, with the absolute peak in CPMs reached on Black Friday itself (see Figure 3). However, customer intent also increases throughout this period. Once single day sales, now Black Friday and Cyber Monday are month-long affairs, with brands running discounts across the peak period. This means that the higher media costs do not directly translate into higher CPAs, and now is the critical opportunity to maximise sales and revenue.
So how do we do just that?
At the most simple level, you need to be scaling investment in Conversion activity. Until now, budget will have been more heavily weighted towards Consideration campaigns, but now that customer intent is starting to peak, it’s the time to push more spend through Conversion campaigns.
One way of doing this is by capitalising on the wealth of audience data generated by your upper-funnel campaign types. You are likely already retargeting customers who have clicked through to your website, however, consider expanding the recency of these audiences. For instance, if you usually retarget site visitors within 7 days, expand this to target customers who have visited your site within 30 days, to capture those early shoppers now your sales are live. All digital marketers will be acutely aware of the impact of iOS 14.5 on the size of your retargeting audiences, and expanding the recency also serves to mitigate for this. However, also maximise your use of in-platform indicators of intent, to complement your Pixel-based retargeting audiences. Build ad-engagement audiences to reach the early shoppers who have seen or engaged with your Consideration campaigns.
Creative is also incredibly important over November and December.
Users are looking for easy, stress-free holiday shopping experiences. Showcase shipping timelines, ease of checkout and last Christmas delivery dates in creative, in order to maximise convenience. When surveyed on which attributes were the most important to shoppers when deciding which retailer to shop with, delivery and shipping process came out top, with 56% of respondents choosing this as the most important 4.
As campaigns will be running for at least 6 weeks, make sure you have a bank of creative available to refresh your campaigns. Ad fatigue will set in if the same creative is live for too long; monitor your performance (frequency, CTRs and first-time impression ratios) to understand when it’s time to change your creative. Often resource for creative production is limited. A good solution is to outsource this to Creators. Not only will this facilitate creative production, but Creator content usually outperforms traditional advertising – found to be 2x more inspiring in a recent study 5.
However, do remember that ad approval times can increase over the peak period, so make sure you plan accordingly and upload new ads at least 48 hours in advance of wanting these to launch.
Streamline path to purchase where possible, with shoppable ad formats
Dynamic Ads should be a key component of all retailer strategy across November and December. Powered by a product catalogue, Dynamic Ads are an incredibly easy lift, allowing advertisers to serve the right product, to the right customer, at the right time. Retargeting site visitors with Dynamic Ads is an easy way to drive customers down the funnel to purchase. However, consider using Dynamic Ads for prospecting too. Dynamic Ads for broad audiences is a Meta solution which allows advertisers to find new customers, in-market for similar products, at high efficiency. Testing of DABA across Brainlabs’ clients has seen up to a 40% increase in sales 6, vs Dynamic Ads for retargeting audiences alone.
Across Brainlabs’ clients, we’re supercharging the performance of our Dynamic Ads campaigns through integration of each platform’s Conversions API solution. An increasingly privacy-centric ads ecosystem has reduced the effectiveness of traditional ad tracking and campaign optimisation. Conversion APIs are server-to-server connections which mitigate for some of this data loss, feeding more customer data back into the ad platform, improving optimization and reported performance. We’ve seen a 15% decrease in in-platform CPAs, in the weeks following the implementation of CAPI.
Don’t stop at Christmas – capitalise on cheaper media costs and stay top of mind into the New Year
Across Brainlabs’ clients, we see the same trend each year. Roughly 7 days before Christmas, CPMs start to drop; in 2021, we saw a 22% drop in CPMs WoW (see Figure 3). Generally, this correlates with last Christmas delivery dates, with advertisers scaling back their media spend when customers can no longer order ahead of Christmas. This presents a huge opportunity. If you are an omni-channel retailer, take advantage of the cheaper media costs by pivoting your creative strategy to direct customers in to your physical stores, where they are able to continue to shop. Alternatively, if you offer Click & Collect, call this out in your creative.
It’s not just in the final week leading up to Christmas where CPMs are low. This trend continues over the Christmas period, until New Years Day (25th Dec – 1st Jan) – a time period which has been coined “Q5’’.
At Brainlabs, we’ve seen CPMs fall a further 28% over this period, a whopping 44% vs the 2 weeks prior (see Figure 3). Brands launching Boxing Day Sales can see incredibly efficient performance over this period, with lower media costs and high conversion rates leading to some of the strongest CPAs of the year.
For brands without a Boxing Day Sale, we still recommend taking advantage of the cheaper media to switch your campaign strategy back to upper-funnel objectives of brand awareness and consideration, in order to build up your engagement and retargeting capabilities for use again later in the year.
Related Content
7 Reasons for Advertisers to Leverage Custom Algorithms in Programmatic
Find out more
Contact
APAC
- Gyn Ang
APAC SVP
gyn.ang@brainlabsdigital.com
EMEA
- Leo Jennings
UK SVP, GROWTH
leo@brainlabsdigital.com - Rachelle Risner
VP, NEW BUSINESS
rachelle.risner@brainlabsdigital.com
North America
Sources
- Reddit: UK Holiday Seasonal Moment 2022
- Google Search Trends H2 2022 vs 2021 for term ‘Black Friday’
- Pinterest: Inspire festive shoppers with Pinterest, July 2022
- Meta: 2022 Holiday Guide CPG-Retail
- Meta: Insights LIVE – Unwrapping Growth
- Chi Chi London: Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences Success Story
Figures
Figure 1: Weekly volume of holiday shopping & gifting conversations on Reddit 1
- + 9 %
- + 18 %
- + 41 %
- + 32 %
- + 97 %
- 27/9/21
- 4/10/21
- 11/10/21
- 18/10/21
- 25/10/21
- 1/11/21
- 8/11/21
- 15/11/21
- 22/11/21
- 29/11/21
- 6/12/21
- 13/12/21
- 20/12/21
- 27/12/21
Figure 2: Volume of Google searches for “Black Friday” in 2022 vs 2021 2
Figure 3: Aggregated CPM data from Brainlabs clients over peak season in 2021
- September – October 1
- 2
- 3 November – mid December
- Mid December – early Jan
