8 Facebook marketing tips for the peak season!

It’s no secret that for most businesses, sales spike in the fourth quarter. The cost of Facebook advertising will increase for every business, and the advertising expenses of big brands will rise even more. According to a report released by Facebook at the beginning of the year, which showed nearly $300 million in advertising expenditure (globally) during 2018, the monthly CPC trends in this analysis are as follows:

As shown in the chart above, CPC advertising costs are cheaper at the beginning of the year, then gradually rise and remain stable during the summer, and then continue to rise again during the fourth quarter holiday season.

The average CPC in December doubled compared to January, which is why you need to have a solid marketing strategy in place to save on advertising costs.

1. Use other ad placements

As mentioned before, Facebook ads work exactly like an auction house. You’ll be competing against all the other advertisers on Facebook, and Facebook will then show your highest paying ads to your target audience.

While this is common, it can be tricky during the holiday season when more advertisers mean more competition.

To solve this problem, you can use ad placements that are less used by other advertisers. All in all, Facebook offers about 16 different ad placements, which means there’s plenty of opportunity elsewhere on the page, like the right column, Instagram Stories, Audience Network, and more.

If you’re not sure which placement to choose, try using the automatic placement option. However, you will need to monitor the performance of each placement to ensure that you don’t burn through your budget without generating any revenue.

Tip: Use Instagram Stories

Most advertisers are wary of Instagram Stories, usually because they have limited time and budget. This is especially true for larger brands that aren’t as savvy with video production.

While it’s easy to overlook Instagram Stories ads, if done right, Instagram Stories can be very profitable, especially during the holiday season.

2. Create a test campaign

While some advertisers run ads throughout the year, some only run ads in the fourth quarter.

If you’re only running Facebook ads during the winter holiday season, you should create a test campaign at least a week before your ads go live to make sure everything is running smoothly.

You don’t have to publish your ads, just go through the process and make sure your ad account and pages are in good shape.

You need to check the following items:

Have you updated your payment method?

Have you accepted all terms of service updates?

Do all team members have the necessary access permissions to ad accounts and pages?

After you’ve checked these things, you can start creating your campaign.

3. Create a custom audience

The goal of this method is to allow you to segment your audience and start targeting active audiences (people who have interacted with your business) to get better results. For this purpose, I recommend you use custom audiences.

You can find custom audiences in places like Import customer email addresses, people who have visited your website, mobile app, Instagram profile, or even people who interacted with a specific video on your Facebook page.

Any of these audiences are active and can be used for your targeting, and will perform better than inactive audiences.

Tip: Make sure you find the right person

You want to make sure that your audience's customer information is updated in a timely manner. You can use some data sync tools to help you automate this process by syncing your CRM with Custom Audiences.

Another problem with using custom audiences is that it can cause ad fatigue, where the same people see the same ad over and over again.

To solve this problem, you need to use retargeting ads to segment the types of ads your users see.

4. Offer attractive offers

To stand out from other retailers during Black Friday, you need to offer simple, direct, and attractive deals.

To participate in Black Friday or Cyber ​​Monday weekend sales, your product or service must be discounted by at least 20%. Be aware that this can easily erode profit margins and harm your business, so use it with caution.

As an alternative to straight discounts, you can try offering freebies or additional services, such as giving away a low-cost item for free. Products that come with free gifts work better than discounts that are everywhere. For example, if you’re selling sunglasses, you could give away a case for free. If it’s a sports supplement, you can give away free protein powder shakers, etc.

Although these are items that can be purchased at a low price, they are very useful and of much higher value to your customers.

Tip: Don't forget to expedite delivery

Some consumers will shop very late, so the closer you get to the last shipping date in December, the better consumers will respond to free expedited shipping. It is recommended that you do not forget to include it as one of the promotional offers.

5. Check your ad account spending limits

It’s important to check your ad account limits. Normally, your ad spend during Black Friday will be much higher than your normal budget, which means you may reach your spending limit quickly.

This may result in your campaign being shut down until you top up your ad account balance. Many advertisers rarely even realize that spending limits exist, as campaigns often end before they even approach the limit.

So you need to reconsider and reset your spending limit (raise the bar) and keep a close eye on it.

Tip: Use the Facebook Ads Budget Calculator

What you need to do is to figure out how much you need to spend to get the results you want. You can use the Facebook Ad Budget Calculator to enter your metrics and calculate the budget you need to spend. Once you've calculated your budget, go to the Billing tab in Business Manager and set a new spending limit. You can change, delete or reset it with just a few clicks.

6. Schedule your campaigns in advance

In normal times, many advertisers are accustomed to booking campaigns close to the start time, because ad approval is usually automated and takes only a few hours at most.

However, this is risky because Facebook may manually review your campaign, and the long approval cycle may delay the execution of the campaign.

Facebook provided the following information:

Manual review takes 24 hours, usually less, but during peak holiday season it can take 48 hours because even with the additional staffing, Facebook's approval team is stretched to its limits.

When booking a campaign, you specify a start date for your campaign, so you’ll want to work two days in advance during the holiday season to give yourself plenty of time to get approval before your campaign starts.

7. Your images should be 20% text-only

Facebook prefers that images used in ads contain no more than 20% text, and this also applies to video thumbnails. A high proportion of text may not be a problem during normal times, but this is not the case during holidays.

Advertisers may wonder why the same ads didn’t get the correct budget spend in Q4, the reason being that when ad capacity is limited, Facebook may penalize any ads that cause delivery issues.

There is an easy way to fix this problem though, all you have to do is remove unnecessary text from your image and video thumbnails.

As you can see in the picture above, this image is normal and therefore will not attract any penalty.

There are some exceptions to the 20% rule, such as product images, event banners, and book covers.

Facebook also mentioned that there are exceptions for content such as graphics, magazine and newspaper covers, movie and TV show posters, and legal texts.

Tip: Use Facebook's text overlay tool

You’ll want to make sure you check your ad content ahead of the holidays using Facebook’s text overlay tool and get as many “OK” marks as possible.

8. Study Facebook's official guide

Every year Facebook publishes a holiday planning guide for advertisers to help them develop their marketing strategy.

Facebook’s 2019 Holiday Guide for Advertisers is packed with insights, key dates, and even a campaign planner that you can use to build campaigns at every stage of your sales funnel.

It also covers the four stages of the holiday season on Facebook, such as planning and building momentum, increasing sales, and making the most of post-holiday marketing.

Author: Hugo.com APP

Source: Hugo.com APP