Mina Salami

Account Manager

Authored Posts:

Paid Social Holiday Strategies for Standing Out

It goes without saying that the next several weeks are crucial for eCommerce brands. 2020’s events have spurred two major headwinds:

In this overly competitive holiday season, eCommerce marketers are seeing an even more saturated ad space. There are significantly more players in the field as a new crop of in-store only businesses have been forced to move online.
Major retail players like Target, Walmart, and Home Depot are leading the charge on Black Friday trends, and this year the deals have already started. With the “Cyber Five” holidays now looking like a “Cyber Season,” advertisers are battling more competition than ever.

Whether you’re using the holidays to recover lost revenue or seize more market share, fortune will favor the bold. With an analytical approach to creative testing, marketers can confidently reach in-market and target audiences through Paid Social holiday campaigns. Opt in to new ad units, emerging platforms, and data-driven strategies to stand out this holiday season with an expanded marketing mix.

Emerging Platforms in Paid Social

TikTok

In 2019, digital marketers targeting Gen Z were given a gift when TikTok debuted its own bidding platform for advertising. Since then, it has rapidly grown its user base and proven to be a viable contender beyond the Gen Z audience.

This is a platform known for inspiration and authenticity that belongs in your prospecting playbook. Users on TikTok routinely find new products on the “For You” page and further influence others to purchase.

As a TikTok Agency Partner, Rise is uniquely positioned to introduce you to the platform’s unique ad units and targeting capabilities. With 42% of unduplicated users on Facebook and Instagram, we strongly recommend considering TikTok for Business as a net-expansion to your audience reach.

The number one reason people come to Reddit is to be informed, which opens the door for smart marketers looking to help their target audience. With genuine messaging, you can reach relevant audiences in a learning mindset ready to learn about your product. Ditch the sales pitch here and take a conversational approach to your ad copy.

Why test on Reddit now? For products and services with a strong differentiator, this is the ideal medium for urgently communicating with valuable buyers. Redditors make purchasing decisions 9x faster than other platforms with a 15% higher AOV. Furthermore, the platform just released an alpha (as of this month!) to create lookalike audiences based on your first party data, a significant expansion to their audience targeting capabilities.

If you’re looking for incremental revenue this holiday season and have historically relied on the visual-heavy platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, we recommend testing your ad copy into Reddit.

New Ad Units

Twitter User Polls

With a spike in users engaged online, the holidays are an ideal time to build out your upper funnel for incremental revenue through the next year. Ad units with high engagement rates can be used as effective bait for your remarketing pool.

Consider Twitter’s Promoted Polls ad unit, where you can add 2-4 poll responses for users to choose as well as a brand image or video. Responders can be added into your remarketing pool for upcoming campaigns to drive incremental revenue.

If your holiday strategy is already finalized, consider adding on a tactic like this to impact Q1 and Q2 performance with an engaged audience.

YouTube TrueView for Action

In 2016, YouTube released TrueView for Action ad units, which they have since continued to improve in functionality. It has proven to be one of the platform’s most compelling ad units.

These ad units can be leveraged in two important ways right now:

Similar to the Twitter Polls, users who engage with these ads can be considered high-intent prospects for early 2021 remarketing campaigns.
Drive revenue from last-minute shoppers with YouTube’s intelligent audience targeting. As a property of Google, eCommerce marketers have a wealth of audience options on YouTube. Review historical holiday performance to determine your audiences with the highest propensity to convert and zero-in on those demographics in this ad format.

YouTube Action ad units are a strong contender for your holiday media plan. In addition to the opportunities above, consider the massive increase in video viewership that 2020 has brought. To match, YouTube has ramped up the Action ads sophistication by including (and smartly resizing for) multiple devices including smart TVs, and algorithmic enhancements to draw even more conversions. This ad unit is a game-changer for any eCommerce digital marketer.

New Strategies

Reduce Audience Overlap

As you test into emerging platforms and new ad units, don’t let your granular audience structure go to waste. If you’re segmenting your audience by demographic, intent, previous engagement, or more, you’ll need to intelligently exclude these groups from one another to make your creative mapping efficient. Read more about audience granularity and the power of exclusions in our step-by-step introduction to reducing overlap.

Sophisticated Cross-Channel Remarketing

These ad unit remarketing opportunities aren’t only for your social program. Mapping your remarketing pools in a cross-channel strategy can be a quick win for nurturing customers closer to conversion.

Search and social remarketing pools can be routed over to Display and Native campaigns for more engagement. From there, be sure to track page visits on the programmatic landing pages to keep narrowing additional remarketing segments.
Use landing pages on YouTube ads in a similar way for remarketing. Pixels on these pages can add to your remarketing pool on search, social, and programmatic.

This holiday season is yours to take if you approach it with a data-driven strategy and agility. For more information or to learn how an agency partner can turn these insights into revenue, reach out to Rise.