As the seasons change, so should your social advertising strategy. Taking advantage of seasonality gives you a high chance to optimize your ad performance. It also allows you to take advantage of trends, topics of awareness, or even a month- week- or day-long nationally-recognized event. Every business is unique and has different times of the year when advertising is stronger than at other times based on the company’s sales cycle.
Three Ways to Boost Social Media Advertising
The three tips that follow are by no means THE best way or THE know-it-all rulebook for each business’ advertising strategy. This blog will be a more general approach to how you can think of new ways to increase your business’ performance through paid social advertising.
1. Advertise During Low Competition Periods
My first suggestion is to advertise during the times of the year when there is not high competition. For example, almost every single business is most likely advertising strongly during the months of November and December. As we know, this is the prime time to advertise your biggest sales for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Cyber Week, and Christmas. However, the cost to advertise rises significantly during this time of year due to the number of other advertisers also trying to get their ads in front of your customers’ eyes.
Focus your social advertising efforts when it’s cheaper to do so, during slower periods of the year. This doesn’t mean you should not advertise during the months of November and December, but if you promote some of your biggest sales at another point during the year with less competition, your ads will stand out against other businesses.
Let’s be honest – customers are ALWAYS looking for a deal, sale, or promotion. If they see an ad that speaks to a sale and then a competitor ad that does not, most of the time, they are going to buy the product that is on sale unless they are brand loyal to the competitor.
Let’s get into what you, as a business, can do to take advantage of sales and promotions during “normal” times of the year. One way to promote your business during “normal” advertising periods is to create your own type of sale.
For example, we have a client who wanted to do a test with promotions. This client came up with the idea of hosting a weekly sale for their products and named the sale “____ of the Week.” They chose some of their best-selling products each week for four weeks that they gave a percentage off discount for, with a PROMO code. Since each product was only advertised for a week, it was important to iterate in the ad copy and the creative that the sale was for a limited time.
Taking advantage of these types of callouts urges the customer to complete their order now rather than later. The results from this four-week-long campaign strategy were: 201 purchases, $5,088 in revenue, and a 3.68X ROAS. Without these social ads, the performance would have been: 38 purchases, $993 in revenue, and a 2.81X ROAS.
What are your top-selling products, and how can they be utilized to bring in additional revenue for your business?
2.Tailor Your Social Advertising Strategy to Seasonality
My second suggestion is to tailor your advertising strategy to the seasons. As we go through summer, fall, winter, and spring, allow your social ads to reflect the season! For example, during wintertime, focus your advertising strategy on your winter-related products. Of course, this will look different for every business.
As an example, JumpFly works with an outdoor and indoor furniture client. You might think that you should solely focus on promoting indoor furniture during the months of November through February, but actually, our client promotes its outdoor furniture starting in January! The reason is that this is when they typically gather their highest number of sales since people tend to get ahead of the seasons and buy outdoor furniture before it is even warm out.
Some text overlay ideas that you can include in your creatives are “Dreaming of warmer days ahead? 💭” or “Grab the hottest styles for this summer NOW before they’re gone!” Again, I always encourage you to promote a sense of urgency in your messaging to initiate a customer to checkout now rather than later. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a good strategy to include bigger promotions during times you think won’t be as busy for your business.
Going back to the furniture client, an example of specials, promotions, or discounts can be something along the lines of “Shop now & stock up for summer with our early bird discount! Get up to 70% OFF now for a limited time only.” The sense of urgency is there, and you are making the potential customer feel special, as if they are getting a better deal now than they would during the summer season. Think about the product or service that you sell, and try to lay out a marketing plan for each season. This will help optimize your ad performance if you have promotions and ads planned out well in advance!
3.Promote Sales During All Holidays & Important Events
My third and final suggestion is to ALWAYS make use of any holidays or events that are happening nationwide. Tailor your ads to speak to the time of year and the holiday that may be approaching. There are so many holidays out there besides Thanksgiving and Christmas, including St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Martin Luther King Day, and the list goes on and on!
There are also many months that are known to recognize something of importance, such as Women’s History Month, National Book Month, Teacher Appreciation Month, and many more. These types of nationally recognized events may give your business a better chance of higher ad performance since most advertisers will not tailor their product or service to the event.
Let’s go back to our client that held promotions for Sale of the Week. This client decided to run ads for the New Year in 2022 and 2023. 2022 was the first year that they ran the promotion, and the results are as follows: the ads brought in 36 out of 374 total purchases, $978.49 out of $9,645.80 in total revenue, and an 8.96X out of a 4.31X total average ROAS. In 2023, the New Year promotion ads resulted in 155 out of 237 total purchases, $4,410.83 out of $6,590 in total revenue, and an 8.48X out of a 5.05X total average ROAS in the campaign. As you can see, the ads performed much better and proved to result in over half of the campaign’s stellar performance in 2023!
What holidays will you use to promote your products in hopes of increasing your revenue, ROAS, or other KPI?
I hope that these three social advertising strategies gave you some ideas as to how you can optimize your ad performance when you take advantage of seasonality. I challenge you to think outside of the box and to create a marketing plan for each quarter so that your creatives and ad copy are ready to go and can get a better chance at converting a customer. See our previous blog post, Paid Social Advertising Predictions and Trends for 2023, for even more ways to boost your social ad campaign performance.
