There are seasonal periods throughout the year, that bring with them additional offers and promotions!
Easter bank holiday weekend in the UK is no stranger to this.
Most eCommerce brands will be running offers and incentives, to try to drive additional customers through their stores.
Bigger discounts means increased buying propensity and therefore opportunity to capture sales.
Facebook ads are a great go-to for getting front and centre with your target audience.
One of the challenges with paid social though, has always been getting the campaign out of the learning phase and delivering return.
This can become even more challenging when it’s a seasonal campaign that will likely run for only 2-4 days and then end.
It’s ok if you’re a big brand with huge budgets as you will hit the conversion volume threshold quickly and the algorithm will kick in for you.
What to do for small to medium brands though?
I’ve used this approach for a number of years and seen it work for multiple businesses. It keeps your data aggregated which makes learning faster, which allows the best opportunity to drive results. Of course, nothing is ever ‘the only way’, it’s worth exploring though as a principled approach.
Campaign Structure
Create one conversion campaign, then split your audience types into separate ad sets.
Ad set 1: Remarketing (i.e website visitors)
Ad set 2: Interest audiences
Ad set 3: Lookalike of purchase event
Add exclusions to avoid overlap, i.e website visitors from interest.
Enable budget optimisation at the campaign level, this means that spend will be distributed where it’s most likely to work.
Initially, remarketing will be preferred as it’s most likely to convert – given that the user has already interacted.
Then what happens is the broader audiences are preferred, once enough data has come in to ‘paint a good picture’ of what a customer looks like to the algorithm.
This means you are likely to maximise volume which your remarketing audience can’t offer, while also covering off those who are ready to buy and have come to visit previously.
Messaging
The other benefit of this campaign structure is that you can tailor your message and creative to each audience type.
This has two values, both of them come back to engagement:
- It keeps you from being disingenuous to those who have previously interacted with your brand in your remarketing audience, recognising that they have interacted and calling it out
- It enables you to go in with something that will evoke emotion in your other audiences who may be yet to have heard of you or visited your website
Evoking emotion works because the limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses works much faster than the rational thinking part.
“The limbic system processes information 200 times faster than the cognitive brain..”
If you can trigger this fast response, you’re likely to stop the scroll on the feed and have a chance of the user digging into your ad a little further.
Try using the start of your copy and your creative to capture engagement.
Ad set 1: Remarketing – Still looking for a new xyz? …
Ad set 2: Interest audiences – Do you have xyz pain points?
Ad set 3: Lookalike of purchase event – Do you have xyz aspiration?
It’s not just enough to evoke emotion though, this is something that I think gets taken a little too black and white.
You need to do this to get the engagement, what’s likely to happen though is as soon as that reaction has taken place, questions start to arise to follow:
“I haven’t heard of you, are you a trusted company”
“When will I get it if I order now?”
“It’s quite expensive, I want it but how can I afford it?”
“What if I get it and I don’t like it”
You need to address the core purchase objections to account for the rationalisation process that comes with making a purchase.
Anyone who’s worked in face-to-face sales will tell you that people buy on emotion and then rationalise the decision after!
We can do this simply in the body copy, under our engaging first line that doesn’t get truncated.
Here are some examples to our objections:
Rated Excellent on Trustpilot
Same day dispatch before 12pm
Buy Now, Pay Later with Klarna
30-Day, No Quibble Return or Exchange
From a competitive and commercial perspective, engagement rate is one of the key factors that is considered in the auction in terms of who shows in the best placement and also how much they pay for the same impression / click as another advertiser.
Getting this right means we’re competing in the auction as best we can.
Need more actionable tips? Explore this guide to Q4 paid media planning.
Summary
Give this campaign format a go and see if it works for your business!
The most important thing to takeaway is the overarching principle of thinking customer-first.
We need to be thinking about who the user is in each audience that we’re trying to target?
How are they related to the product?
What would motivate them to buy?
What objections do they have?
If we can address this, we’re serving relevant, engaging content to our potential customers, which adds value to the brand outside of performance.
Interested in hearing how we can help to grow your business? Get in touch with us below.
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