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As an advertiser, it’s a wise decision to leverage seasonal marketing strategies for increased sales and customers.
The trick to leveraging seasonal marketing strategies in Google Ads is to be subtle. Avoid overwhelming customers with loud, overly-friendly discounts, and instead, understanding which professional strategy to implement.
By following the strategies outlined in this article, you’ll be able to increase your sales for seasonal campaigns:
Qualitative learning helps your buyers understand what drives them to purchase items during a particular season, like Christmas or Summer holidays.
You can use this technique to communicate with your customers who have purchased during peak season. Ask them what they were doing off-season. Then, speak to customers who bought items throughout the off-season. These responses should generate ideas.
Depending on the time of year, seasonal businesses generate different conversion rates. If more users are searching for a specific product, they’ll have more search intent, which will increase the conversion rate at some level.
Competition increases during busy seasons for seasonal businesses. For proper revenue and cost forecasting, you should account for this increased competition.
Furthermore, customer lifetime value varies depending on the services and products you offer in each season. As a result, quantitative learning is often vital in gaining the insights you need for a successful seasonal campaign.
With your basic research done, you have the groundwork ready. After that, there is a lot you can do to improve your chances of success. Here are some things you need to keep in mind when planning and executing a seasonal campaign.
A successful PPC campaign typically isn’t built overnight. Many require time for keyword and bid strategy fine-tuning, so it’s best to start early. This early start will help you gain more exposure. It also takes a bit of time to approve the campaign. For instance, if you’re creating a campaign for “Black Friday,” start it earlier than November as Google will need to approve the campaign ahead of time.
Season campaigns that come with retargeting strategies always have enhanced results.
For instance, if your summer campaigns had high conversion rates and you’ve generated your loyal customer list from it, you should target those customers throughout your winter campaigns to see if you get the same positive results.
Target customers who are interested in purchasing seasonal items through combined audience targeting. For increased audience relevance, exclude certain people.
For instance, a campaign for “Christmas Gifts” with combined audience targeting allows you to target customers interested in Christmas gifts, to begin with, while excluding buyers who are traveling abroad over the holidays and therefore don’t intend on buying much.
Most purchases during seasonal holidays revolve around finding the perfect gift. Usually, buyers know what the recipient is like and how old they are, but it’s difficult to know what to buy them.
Common phrases to add to campaign content are:
Changing ads to speak to your potential customers’ mindset is ideal. Display a sense of urgency to help them along with their seemingly big purchasing decision.
The countdown feature in Google Ads is a must-have as it automatically creates a countdown that produces this sense of urgency among potential customers.
Two situations that work best during high season:
Last Chance for On-Time Packages – If you have an e-commerce store, you should have a final day for shipping packages to arrive at customers on-time. Including a countdown such as, “Purchase within two days to get before Christmas” will work wonders.
Sale End Countdown – This is a common use for countdown customizers. If used right before a sale ends, it can lead to a significant conversion and sale increase.
Ad extensions don’t come with additional costs. However, they can bring in higher CTR and land more clicks with a lower CPC. Depending on your products and targeted customers, the following options could be useful:
There are more ad extensions available and main benefit of ad extensions is to catch the more focus of customer towards the ad.
The Dynamic Ad feature helps market ads effectively. All you need to do is include seasonal additions to your site. Then, based on users’ search query intent, Google will crawl through your website and generate headlines and the landing page dynamically.
For instance, if you’re creating a campaign related to Christmas, you should include relevant content on your site. This is because Dynamic Ad feature isn’t based on keyword selection but relevant search results.
In summary, make sure to plan ahead for your seasonal marketing strategies to take advantage of the holiday search query increase. Observe your historical performance to determine when your traffic peaked, then raise your budget caps (especially when using Target ROAS Smart Bidding or Smart Shopping) to capitalize on this demand. Time-of-day bid adjustments should be enabled to display ads throughout the hours with the most traffic.
You might often have a question when you should you use automated bidding so seasonal campaign is one of the answers. Google’s machine learning program for paid search bid automation is Smart Bidding.
Marketers and advertisers can set Smart Bidding parameters to support their conversion goals. This setup helps maximize conversions and generate a specific cost per action. It can also manage keyword search volume by locations all year-round.
The result many marketers find is bid optimization and more time for marketers to work on other factors besides manually adjusting seasonal changes in their campaign.
Seasonality adjustments inform Smart Bidding of any expected conversion rate changes for future sales or promotions. As an advanced tool, these adjustments work well for shorter events (1-7 days). However, they may not work as effectively for extended periods (anything over 14 days).
For instance, if you expect an increase in your conversion rates by 50% throughout your Christmas sale, you can simply create a seasonality adjustment that automatically increases your conversion rate by 50% during those specific days. By the end of the promotion or sale, Smart Bidding automatically readjusts to pre-sales behavior without any additional changes.
This option is available only for Display and Search campaigns. However, Shopping campaign support is expected to be released later in 2020.
As your landing page is so crucial, we’ve decided to go the extra mile in this post so that you must know what is required to make good landing page. Here are some practical tips you can take on board when you’re creating your landing page for your seasonal campaign.
If you have an e-commerce business, your order form should be one click from a product. For service-oriented businesses, feature a conversion form immediately on your landing page. A system that requires more than a few clicks to the point of conversion will increase your bounce rate.
Online businesses need to make it simple for users to access information that gives them more information to find more targeted offers or content.
Include landing pages that include holiday-specific themes and images.
Before your seasonal marketing campaign launches, leverage your social media marketing. This includes spending time creating social posts all year-round. This generates interest around your products. Consider these strategies:
One of the great things about seasonal campaigns is that they allow you to focus on reliable customer emotions and needs. Create a personalized experience for your customers on your landing page and switch your logo to match the season. Keep in mind your customers’ pain points and develop methods to make stressful holiday shopping experiences more enjoyable. Lastly, maintain a friendly tone throughout your promotions.
Testing different offers can help you develop a better understanding of what works for your audience and how to sell smarter. For example, Uber provides discounts to potential new customers on seasonal and special occasions.
So, we’ve covered a lot already. However, as with most things in Google Ads, there’s always more to learn. Let’s explore some of the common questions people have about seasonal marketing strategies and campaigns.
Keeping these points in mind, you’ll be able to generate well-thought-out and effective seasonal marketing strategies. However, keep in mind that during these seasons, your CPC may be increased since many of your competitors will also be targeting similar campaigns. This means the competition will be strong, and you’ll need to pay more to reach top conversions and impressions.
Since users search more about specific seasonal accessories during this time, it also means your budget can drain quickly. However, as long as you maintain a determined and educated approach to your strategy, these mild offsets will hardly be noticed.
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