Three Ways to Supercharge Your Paid Media This Christmas

Q4, peak, the golden quarter…whatever your business calls the run-up to Christmas, it’s likely a critical period and it’s already upon us. But it isn’t too late to refine your paid social strategy to ensure you’re best placed to maximise performance for your brand this festive season. 

Our recent consumer insights report Christmas Unwrapped: A Marketer’s Guide to What Consumers Want this Christmas highlights the importance of social as a discovery engine for shoppers during this critical period. In fact, 27% of all consumers said they would be looking at online ads for shopping inspiration, making it the third highest rated source of inspiration behind in-store displays and websites of known brands.

With that in mind, here are three easy-to-implement strategies to supercharge your holiday paid media activations.

1. Craft Winning Offers

Social media advertising’s effectiveness is heavily influenced by the quality of the offers you can present to the market. During peak shopping periods like Black Friday and Christmas, the stakes are even higher as competition increases and potential customers are bombarded with choice. A well-crafted offer can mean the difference between your brand cutting through the noise and winning increased engagement, traffic, and ultimately sales, or falling flat as social users are convinced to spend elsewhere.

There’s cause for cautious optimism this Q4, with consumers in our research placing the average Christmas budget at £426. Black Friday is a prime time for consumers seeking the best deals, and represents the perfect time to test offers and understand what works for your target market. An offer goes beyond substantial discounts, also covering limited time availability and added value, such as free shipping or bundled products. All these elements can create a sense of urgency and exclusivity, compelling users to act swiftly.

Conversely, a bad offer might include minimal discounts, vague terms, or lack of clear value, leading to poor engagement and low conversion rates. For instance, a 5% discount on a high-demand product during Black Friday is unlikely to attract attention compared to a 50% discount or a buy-one-get-one-free deal.

Key variables that make up a great offer include:

1. Discount depth: Significant savings are more attractive.
2. Clarity: Clear, straightforward terms and conditions.
3. Urgency: Limited time offers create a fear of missing out (FOMO).
4. Added value: Extras such as free shipping or bonus items enhance appeal.

2. CApture And Leverage Data

Now is the perfect time to start building buzz and activate your audience for the amazing offers you have up your sleeve. Think about launching teaser activity to capture potential customer engagement you can leverage in remarketing as your offers go live over Black Friday and beyond. If you have the resources to promote exclusive discount codes, holiday gift guides, or early access to sales, you can share these via ads in exchange for email addresses, giving you an even more powerful way of reactivating a customer both on and off social.

Strategically using lead magnets, data capture, and engagement across your paid social advertising efforts can boost your brand’s ability to attract and convert potential customers during the peak shopping weeks.

3. Reactivate and Convert

Reactivating users who have engaged with your brand throughout the year is the simplest of the strategies outlined here to deploy and one you most definitely don’t want to miss out on. In paid media terms it is simply a case of reengaging users with differing levels of intent who have engaged with your brand in some way over the last year.

To do this, you need to build audiences with extended lookback periods. Lookback periods refer to the time frame during which user interactions are tracked for retargeting purposes. By extending these periods, you can re-engage users who have interacted with your brand weeks or even months ago, ensuring they don’t miss your latest offers.

By creating custom audiences based on extended lookback periods of up to 180 days, you’re able to target a broader group of potential customers who have shown interest in your products. Considering who it makes most sense to serve your holiday ads to, in order to reignite their interest, is a powerful means of boosting paid social performance. Think about serving ads to all site traffic, cart abandoners, previous purchasers, email sign up and ad engagers.

When you combine these reactivation audiences with a powerful brand, compelling offer, consistent messaging and strong creative, you will set your business up for success by giving customers what they want this golden quarter.

The author: Rob Lewis is paid social director at WPR. He’s a paid social performance marketing specialist, with a focus on direct response revenue and lead generation, and extensive experience buying media across all platforms for B2C and B2B brands.

For further advice and insight around festive marketing, learn how to get press coverage this Christmas, check out some of our favourite Christmas PR stunts for inspiration, or download our Christmas Unwrapped report to find out what consumers want this Christmas.