As mentioned in our previous post, 2020 Holiday Season Unwrapped: Start Your 2021 Holiday Planning Now, having a solid paid social strategy in place for the 2021 holiday season is crucial for any advertiser. From preparing audiences and creatives to testing and optimizing campaigns, your business should make sure that it is leveraging paid social channels to their full capacity this year.
Here are four tips to help your business dominate the 2021 holiday season:
1. Be Extra Efficient
Audience, creative, and budget liquidity are essential to help produce the most efficient campaign results. Having broad audiences can maximize the benefits of machine learning. This will give more power to the algorithm to find the best audiences to show your ads to. With broad audiences comes broad creatives.
Testing dynamic creative options allows the platform to mix and match your copy, creative, and headlines to create an ad designed for each individual user, based on what content they are most likely to interact with. Competition will be high during these holiday moments, so ensuring your social ad campaigns are built for optimal efficiency can help keep costs down and performance up.
2. Create Compelling Content
As always, ad content and creatives need to be compelling and inspiring. Whether it is eye-popping images, thumb-stopping videos, or powerful influencer content — strong creative will always push to a higher purchase intent. The use of “advertainment ” styled content will continue to be a strong driver for discovery this year. In 2021, we will see an increase in influencer content across all social platforms – this type of content not only provides social proof but also stands to spark inspiration. Take the time to invest in a solid influencer strategy.
Whether it is video or images, all creative should be designed to delight and surprise consumers this holiday season.
3. Promotions that Pop
Sales happen all year long, and shoppers have come to expect sales to stretch beyond the traditional holiday season time frames. They will be expecting deals to start earlier and last much longer than they typically do.
Make sure your sales and promotions are competitive – savvy shoppers will be quick to browse other sites for better deals. Having these offers prepared for your social campaigns can help maximize business opportunities during these peak sale moments.
4. Test, Optimize & Repeat
2020 was a year of learning and adapting. Advertisers were tasked with the challenge of finding new strategies to meet business goals — and this will continue well into the 2021 holiday season. Testing and optimization have always been a crucial part of social media marketing. Now more than ever, it is important to begin testing different campaign objectives, bidding/budget strategies, creative, ad copy, and targeting. The sooner you begin testing, the quicker you can learn and optimize your campaigns.
There are several measurement tools available to social advertisers. Facebook has a directory of vetted measurement partners they recommend that can be found here. Although these come at a cost, measurement partners can help simplify the complexity of campaign optimization and measurement. Utilize these tools to determine how your marketing tactics impact your business and discover new ways to optimize more efficiently.
Give your business the best chance of thriving through the 2021 holiday season and beyond by following these four tips. It’s never too early to start thinking about the holidays. After all — they are right around the corner!
