Everyone is excited about the upcoming holidays, including marketers and business owners. Every marketer is ramping up their Facebook ad strategies for holiday sales.
What does that mean for you?
It means a heck of a lot of competition.
Maybe that leaves you shaking in your boots ?? All that competition might seem too scary. But it doesn’t have to be scary.
In this post, we’ll break down the top 5 Facebook Ad strategies to help you stay ahead of the competition. Try them and see if your sales skyrocket!
1. Experiment with different placements
If you’ve ever been to an auction, you know they can be a lot of fun. And it’s pretty exciting when you win the bid!
What’s that got to do with Facebook ad strategies?
Facebook ads bidding is like going to a huge worldwide auction ? You’re competing with hundreds of thousands of competitors to buy what Facebook is selling, which is real estate for your ad in places like your newsfeed.
Your ad goes up against all other ads on Facebook, and the winning ad is shown by Facebook to its target audience.
It’s not too much of a problem throughout the rest of the year. But during the holiday season, ? it’s a bit more challenging, because of more advertisers equal more competition.
Here’s where you can change your Facebook ad strategies. Choose the road less travelled? Instead of placing your ad in the newsfeed, try other placements that are used less often by other advertisers.
Facebook has about 16 different placements you can choose from. You can use the right column, Instagram stories, audience network, and more.
If that’s confusing, ? try using the automatic placement options. Monitor your results for each placement you try. Experiment and see which work best for you.
2. Make sure you schedule your campaigns in advance!
Typically, outside of the holiday season, marketers book their campaigns at the last minute because usually, approval is automated and only takes a few hours.
But sometimes Facebook may decide to do a manual review of your campaign. If you book a campaign last minute instead of it taking a short time, up to 24 hours or less, your campaign can take as long as 48 hours before it’s approved. The facebook team is super busy during this time of year.
So to ensure your ad will run on time, you have the option to schedule your ad ahead of time ⏰.
Don’t take that risk of not planning ahead. Facebook even suggests to plan ahead, especially in the holiday season, and schedule your ad. Specify the start date and always work two days ahead. That will leave lots of time to get approval before the start date.
3. Add custom audiences to your Facebook Ad Strategy
You want to have your target audience segments already set by the time the holidays roll around. It’s not time to start testing who your buyers are and wasting ad spend on people who haven’t yet shown interest in your products or services.
Use Custom Audiences and target people ? who have already shown interest in your business. These can be either from your email list, or people who visited your website in the past, or your mobile app, Instagram page. You can create an audience of people who watched specific videos on your Facebook page.
That’s a lot of options to target ? Those are your ‘warm’ audiences, and you will have better results with them over the holidays than a cold audience (people who don’t know you yet).
4. Make sure to test your campaigns
Many business owners only advertise during the last quarter of the year. If you run ads for holiday marketing alone, it’s best if you create a test campaign about a week before you want to start running ads. You want to be sure everything is running smoothly.
You don’t even have to publish it. Just go through everything to be sure your ad accounts and pages are in proper order.
Check the following:
- Update your payment method if you have to.
- Check to see if you accepted all the updates for Terms of Service.
- Be sure your team members have all the access they need to place ads for you.
If everything is in order, start your real campaigns! ?
5. Check out Facebook’s official holiday guide!
Facebook provides a holiday guide ? for advertisers every year to help with your Facebook ad strategies. It’s a must-read and very useful.
The 2019 guide contains lots of insights. It also includes a campaign planner that helps you map out your campaigns.
Follow these 5 steps to prepare you for your Facebook ad strategies for the holiday season. You may end up having the most profitable season yet. Don’t let all that competition keep you from missing out on campaigns that bring in more sales ? and profit for you this year. Be sure to test everything you do. You don’t have to rely on guesswork for your ads.
Are you going to step out and create some holiday campaigns this year?