How to Make the Most of Your Q4 Digital Marketing Strategy

Are you an ecommerce brand and planning to exceed sales goals and generate majority of your revenue in Q4 also known as the festive season?  Have you started planning your Paid Social holiday marketing strategy for your digital marketing agency or company?  If not, now is the time! With the influx of revenue-driving holidays coming up quick, now is more important than ever to button up your entire holiday digital  marketing strategy so you’re ready for a smooth, ROI focused campaign launch.   Not sure where to even begin for the holiday shopping season? Here are my top five tips to maximize ROI and make this holiday shopping season a total success!

Prep Now

Solidify your holiday marketing campaign with holiday promotion offers, paid media ad creative, audience segmentation, and campaign builds now.  The sooner you can get your audiences warmed up to your brand and engaging with evergreen content, the better.  This marketing effort will also be a key driver in building up your retargeting pools across paid media channels to ensure your sales funnel is completely buttoned up before the official holiday campaign launch on November 1.  You don’t want to be testing too many new audiences and tactics the week of Thanksgiving without understanding the metrics and success behind them first marketing effort. Come November 1, start including holiday sales messaging across your ecommerce site, emails, organic social media channels, and your paid media advertisements.

Leverage Cross-Channel Marketing Tactics

Don’t just rely on one holiday digital marketing channel to generate revenue, especially because ad real estate is going to get expensive.  CPCs and CPMs are going to skyrocket as we get closer to the Black Friday/Cyber Monday rush. Best way to combat this issue on your paid channels is to lean into email marketing, organic social channels, and Pinterest to combat the rising CPCs.

When it comes to paid social media specifically, I would highly recommend investing in Pinterest as a first touch for prospecting new holiday shoppers if your brand falls within one of their robust verticals of Fashion, Home Goods, Health & Wellness, Food, Parenting, or Design.  Think of Pinterest has your brand introduction to prospecting new users and getting them to your site. From there, lean on the other marketing channels to capture them in your retargeting pools. Despite the challenge of driving a high volume of conversions through Pinterest, it is always a home run when it comes to some of the other supporting KPIs like CPCs, CPMs, CPEs, and Impressions.  You can even build out a mini funnel through Pinterest by incorporating retargeting in your campaigns to increase conversion rates as people will be familiar with your brand’s holiday sales & product line.

Another way to utilize cross-channel holiday marketing is to start building your email list now! Start incorporating email capture campaigns into your Facebook Ad strategy.  I would also recommend adding a subscribe “pop up” to the site as well so you can capture any new users coming in through organic or your paid media channels. One of the huge benefits to collecting emails, is that you’ll also be able to nurture them throughout the entirety of the holiday season which will likely increase AOV and customer lifetime value. Best way to capture emails quick is to offer an exclusive offer prior to the Black Friday/Cyber Monday Madness.

Simplicity is Key

There is nothing more confusing than a convoluted promotion when ad real estate is already congested.  Keep your promotion simple! Offer a % off or coupon code to make understanding the promotion easy. I would recommend 30%+ as a starting offer to keep your offer most compelling when most brands are running hefty sales.

Keep the Momentum Going

Even after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’ll want to keep the momentum going throughout the rest of the holiday season until the New Year.  Leverage other ecommerce holidays like Green Monday (12/10), Free Shipping Day (12/15), and the post-promotional period (12/26-12/31) to squeeze out every last opportunity to maximize Q4 revenue.

Use Different Ad Formats + Placements

You’ll absolutely want to utilize different ad placements as you start to deploy your holiday paid social campaigns to support secondary KPIs.  If some of your KPIs include CPM, CPC, CTR – you’ll want to test different placements like Instagram Stories, Marketplace, and Instant Articles. By choosing these placements, you’ll capitalize on cheaper ad real estate and then drive a higher conversion rate on the Facebook/Instagram Feed placements through your retargeting campaigns.

Additionally, leveraging holiday marketing ideas like adding an Instant Experience format to your ads can elevate brand awareness and click-through rates. Instant Experiences are also a great workaround if you’re in need of a fresh Landing Page for the site to support your holiday efforts. I would also highly recommend using video as much as you can during the festive season to maximize your retargeting opportunities as well. You’ll want to make sure you’re retargeting your email lists, site traffic, and video viewers to get your ads in front of the most qualified audience.

Lastly, I would dark post all of your holiday campaign ads to build a high volume of social proof in a very oversaturated market.  If you’re an ecommerce SMB, you will definitely want to create that social proof to make your prospecting traffic ads as compelling as possible.

I hope that this roundup of tips give you the guidance you need to make a huge impact on your business revenue goals as we close out 2021.