Modifying your PPC strategy for the festive period

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Modifying your PPC strategy for the festive period

We’re nearing the end of the year, which means 2 things: holidays and gift shopping. The festive period ignites a huge amount of sales and is a period earmarked by all marketing departments and professionals.

It’s the exact same scenario in the world of Digital Marketing. Optimising your ads to maximise traffic and exposure during the festive season should be an important part of your marketing strategy.

If you’ve yet to figure out your PPC (Pay Per Click) strategy for the upcoming festive season, don’t worry! This guide will bring you through the steps you can take to make the most of the holidays.

Check your previous year’s performance

Reviewing and analysing the results from last year is a great starting point. Which channels and campaigns worked? Who’s content had the biggest impact? What audience sector was the most receptive, and to which promotions?

If your campaigns from 2017 were very well received and garnered plenty of traffic, well done! Don’t fix what isn’t broken.
On the flip side, trying out new strategies and tactics can attempt to arrest low traffic and poor responses.

Conceptualise your campaign mix

Building your audience in time for the festive season can give you a good idea of how to move each prospect through the sales funnel. Consider your existing audience, and who you’d like to bring in over the festive season.

Visitors who have viewed a wish list, a gift guide, previous and repeat buyers and recent visitors to your landing pages are all audience categories you should be looking to build upon.

You can’t ever do too much in identifying channels to engage audiences and how you can keep track of their performances.

Engage buyers from previous festive seasons

The holidays can often introduce traffic that is not usually in our target market or audience.

While they may not be frequent repeat customers, and not remarketed to consistently, it’s worth the effort to include them in your target market during the holiday season.

Expand your keyword lists

A wider audience during the festival can allow you to expand your keywords to a wider area than you usually target. Including keywords that are related to gifts might not be on your typical keyword list. But you can pair them with an audience you’ve targeted as gift givers just for the festive season.

Tailoring and modifying your PPC campaigns, by changing your keywords and audience targeting can help you fully take advantage of the market dynamics of the festive season.

Promotions

Just like how companies boost employee performance and wellness with incentives and corporate gifts – customers require the same kind of push. In other words, it means that each customer is driven by different intrinsic motivations. Some seek cost-savings, some look for the highest perceived value of each product and some just don’t mind spending the money. You need to create different ad campaigns to appeal to the type of customer you are targeting, or you could even periodically swap your target market with your ad sets.

Time-restricted promotions like early bird specials, storewide discounts, free shipping, or even discounts for people who sign up to email lists are examples of the promotions you can run. Include them in your creative ads for PPC and ensure keyword lists highlight these promotions.

To conclude, the festive period is a very active part of the marketing calendar, and your PPC strategy should try to take advantage of it to the fullest extent.