5 Holiday Marketing Tips to Prep Your Campaigns for Success

The season for holiday marketing has already begun. Twenty-four percent of consumers begin holiday shopping as early as August or September. Another 26% start in October. That means you need to consider your strategy even now, and the holiday marketing tips below are a good place to start.

Holiday Marketing Tips to Drive Your Campaigns 

The sales season once focused primarily on Black Friday and Christmas, but not anymore. Now, the holiday marketing calendar stretches from pre-Halloween campaigns, through Black Friday and Cyber Monday (AKA Cyber Weekend) to Christmas and New Year. If you include back-to-school marketing in late August and early September (a very lucrative time for many retailers), it’s clear why digital marketers are so busy for almost half the year!

That makes today the perfect time to kick off your marketing planning session in time for the holiday frenzy ahead. Here are some holiday marketing tips to help you:

1. Create a Full-Funnel Strategy across Multiple ‘Touchpoints’

As the cost of living increases, consumers are becoming more selective about how they spend their money. Coupled with the digital revolution that provides consumers with more information, choice, and access to products, businesses need to nurture customers across all points of contact:

• Brick-and-mortar store
• Online store/ website
• Mobile site or app
• Email
• Social media
• Google search
• Digital ads on the open web

Instead of immediately targeting consumers with direct offers, start your early campaigns by engaging and educating consumers about your products and services across all your touchpoints. This significantly increases your chance of converting them when they’re ready to make a purchase. 

Clarins, the iconic French beauty brand, did just this with the release of its Double Serum Eye product, generating qualified traffic via Outbrain ads before targeting consumers with direct offers. The brand used Outbrain’s automated bidding tool to optimize campaigns based on user engagement from the landing page, enabling better targeting of users most likely to interact with its content.

By reaching an engaged audience at scale and retargeting those users further down the funnel, EBS enabled the brand to eventually double its sales!

2. Reach New Audiences who are Not on Social

Yes, people love social media, but they spend a lot of time online outside of the closed walls of social networks.

• More than 124 million U.S. adults, or more than 6 out of 10, read newspaper media each week.
• 58% of adults aged 18-34, and more than 6 in 10 adults aged 35+, read a newspaper.
• 70% of households with income above $100K are newspaper readers.
• 63 million adults access newspaper content on their smartphone or tablet.

By advertising on the open web, and not just on social media, you can extend your reach far wider to audiences on news, sports, and entertainment sites. Customers browsing the web and visiting their favorite websites are typically in discovery mode, and open to learning about new products and brands, so it is the ideal moment to capture their attention.

Furthermore, people tend to prefer ads on editorial sites compared to social media ads. In fact, 68% of people say they trust ads in editorial environments compared to 55% on social media. This makes native advertising with Outbrain a solid choice for the marketing leadup to the holiday season.

3. Try Contextual Targeting

Google has rocked the industry by pivoting its approach to third-party cookies (yet again!). Now, they claim they won’t remove cookies after all. However, with the ongoing drama around the issue, a shift towards contextual targeting is still a good idea. 

Whichever way it happens, a privacy-centric future is on the horizon. Start building a media strategy that will serve you now and in the months and years to come. At Outbrain, our native platform is designed for interest targeting, contextual advertising targeting, and engagement targeting, rather than just relying on third-party cookies. 

Leverage Outbrain’s contextual data to auto-optimize your native campaigns and hit your holiday marketing performance goals.

4. Repurpose Your Social Ads for the Open Web

The ad formats and campaign objectives for Outbrain campaigns are very similar to social, which is great news for you. You can use the social ad creatives you already have, expand your reach significantly, and gain a presence on the open web by promoting them with Outbrain. 

How? Simply repurpose the existing ad copy and images with just a few tweaks and run them on native. This is a great way to squeeze more out of your digital marketing assets and get a better return for your advertising investment.

5. Automate Your Campaigns 

With so much going on over the holidays and the rising market competition, creating effective marketing campaigns is often easier said than done. Our guess is you’re running multiple campaigns through many different channels, and making sure you’re getting the best ROAS (return on ad spend) out of each is a big task to handle.

This is where automation comes to the rescue. The efficiency of digital advertising efforts have increased significantly thanks to AI-driven tools, helping you save precious time and effort. And there is no time better to make use of such tools than during the busiest time of the year.

Try our automation solutions and achieve real results, without the heavy lifting:

• Conversion Bid Strategies (CBS): Optimizes your campaigns towards conversions. There are 4 CBS modes to choose from, depending on your goals. 
• Engagement Bid Strategy (EBS): Optimizes and adjusts bids to achieve your engagement goals – no pixel required.
• AI Titles Generator: Built-in tool to automatically generate ad headlines, making it quicker and easier to A/B test Outbrain ads and optimize for better performance.

Marc O’Polo, one of the leading casual lifestyle brands in the premium segment, deployed Outbrain’s CBS tool to maximize the number of online sales. CBS adjusted bids to target the audience most likely to convert, thereby eliminating the need for manual adjustments. Over a few months, Marc O’Polo achieved ROAS of up to 1500%, significantly increasing its revenue.

And this is just one of many examples of how marketers were able to maximize the impact of their native campaigns using Outbrain’s automated solutions. 

Start Engaging Your Customers Now, Just in Time for the Holidays

Web searches for Christmas-related items tend to increase steadily from August onwards. Don’t wait till October. 

Leverage the holiday marketing tips above, before the highly competitive advertising season begins and CPMs (cost per 1000 impressions) become too high. 

Add Outbrain native advertising to your holiday marketing mix, and stay ahead of the competition in four key ways:

• Start engaging and creating awareness, at the top of the funnel.
• Pay only per click, when a potential customer shows real interest in your product or brand. 
• Easily create audiences to remarket in the coming months. 
• Avoid banner blindness with native ads that fit in with the look and feel of the web page they are on.

Getting started with native advertising takes just minutes. Here’s the process:

1. Open an Outbrain account for free.
2. Implement the Outbrain Pixel and start building high-quality audiences for remarketing and Lookalike audiences.
3. Whenever you’re ready to launch, our automation solutions for optimization (CBS and EBS) can help you reach your KPIs – the heavy lifting is on us!

Be one of the thousands of brands maximizing their results for holiday season 2024.

And happy holidays!