3 Ways to Help Maximize Your Holiday Media Buys
With the next holiday season right around the corner, it is important for businesses to be prepared and enter the season with an online holiday media buying strategy; so when Santa comes down the chimney at the end of the holiday season he is carrying sacks of money instead of coal.
Every company is unique; and because of this, everyone’s media buying strategies are different. There is, however, some common steps that every media buy should possess to ensure success during the holiday stretch, whether your business is connecting people with applications or selling computers. The holiday season is the highest traffic time period on the net, which means it is important that you have a marketing strategy to best help promote your company or product. If you wait until Black Friday or Cyber Monday to start running your campaigns, you’re going to play catch up and have a tough time being competitive and maximizing your ROI. All this traffic in such a short period of time means there will be a lot of online inventory available. It is important to have a strategy in place so you are putting your product in front of the most valuable and qualified user instead of throwing your money away like leftovers after Thanksgiving.
Below is a graph indicating the increase in traffic during the major holidays. It proves that you need your strategy in place in order to get the best ROI on your media buys because the traffic comes fast and drops off even faster.
Graph provided by http://www.google.com/trends
Goals
With any good strategy and a holiday media buying strategy in particular, goals must be in place. In order to create accurate goals for your campaign you must set some benchmarks. Do your research and ask yourself these questions: What worked last year? What didn’t? How much was spent? What channels were effective? Was it paid search? Display? An affiliate program? What were the rates? CPM, CPC or CPA? If you can answer these questions, it will not only help you optimize your campaigns with efficiency, it will also help you in determining the precise and most effective window of opportunity when starting and ending your campaigns. The goals you implement into your marketing strategy this year must be based on last year’s results. If you are a startup company and you are approaching your first holiday season, it is important to document and track everything you do this season so you will be firing on all cylinders next holiday season.
Test, Test, Test
Testing is a vital part for any media buy especially during the holiday season. Starting your tests early will give you and your team time to analyze the results and build historical data. It is important to choose which KPI’s (key performance indicators) are important to the particular buy. Once you have chosen which KPI’s to measure you will then need to determine what to test. There are many variations of tests you can run so that’s why it is important to test early.
Deploy and Observe Vigilantly
Deploy and monitor campaigns before the holiday season enters its peak period. This is essential for a variety of reasons, most notably because consumers are beginning to shop online earlier than ever before, according to Shop.org. Prior to the season, identify the newest and hottest trends (examine user browsing behavior, wish list activities, or whatever is important and pertains to your business or product). Observe your buy closely so you can be prepared for any shifts, and you can optimize at a moment’s notice. This is especially important when running display campaigns because they tend to take more time and effort when optimizing.
No Guarantees
There are no absolutes to creating the perfect holiday media buying strategy or any media buying strategies for that matter. These three tips are not the magic bullet and will not guarantee a successful holiday season on their own, but if you add them to your holiday media buying strategy you will definitely increase your chances for success.
Mitch Bain, Marketing Manager; W3i, LLC
Mitch has 4 years experience focusing on Display Advertising, Search Engine Marketing, and Mobile Marketing, in the Integrated Interactive Media industry.
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