Festive toolkit checklist

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As we run into the festive season, here is a quick checklist you can maintain for your brand to take advantage of the season.

This checklist is industry or category-agnostic.

It is built keeping the nature of Google and Facebook platforms and my experience of running festive campaigns for years now.

Don’t miss out on creating a big top-funnel audience (awareness):

• Invest in creating awareness about your brand at this time, people are receptive to shopping and your festive deal/offer can help your creative to travel to more people.

• Start an awareness campaign about 10 days before your actual sale.

• Leverage short-form videos, 15-20 seconds. no one wants to watch a 1 min video.

• Focus on your core channel. If it’s Instagram, you can limit creating awareness on Instagram. If you have budget, explore YouTube with YT Bumpers.

• Start early and scale with fresh offer creatives as the sale starts.

Drive meaningful traffic on your website (consideration):

• The more audience you have in the middle funnel, the better your festive campaign will perform.

• Here are some examples of creating a mid-funnel audience:

• Swell up your custom audience on Facebook with website visitors, Instagram account engagers, Facebook account engagers, reel viewers, registered phone numbers, and email IDs.

• The more audience you have here, the better the chances for your campaign to do well.

• While running website visitor campaigns, always optimise towards landing page views and not link clicks.

• Carousels and statics typically work better for this stage.

Drive sales (conversions):

• Manual, offer-led campaigns typically perform better than dynamic ones.

• Create a strong look-a-like audience with the most relevant seed audience before the sale and warm it up with LPV campaigns

• Consider using the Advantage campaign budget option on Facebook/Instagram if you create multiple ad sets and if the duration of your campaign is at least a week.

• If you have an offline source of data collection like a physical store, upload that data on Facebook too and run conversion campaigns on them.

• Videos. Videos. Videos. The best creative unit. You can use statics or carousels too, but videos typically outperform others.

• Targeting- If you have done the job of creating consideration well- your conversion campaigns pick up fast.

• Target people who are already in your ecosystem but also run a campaign on new user acquisition.

• Give a shot to Google’s performance max, last year many brands saw the advantage of activating Pmax in the festive season because of a surge in engagement, demand and sales.

• Keep running your regular search campaigns (static or dynamic whichever you have been running).

SEO best practices for festive:

• Create a landing page for each sale

• Avoid creating fresh URL every time. Try to use old ones, especially the ones you created last year, reuse them.

• Create the page early so that Google can index

• Follow core web vitals guidelines for the page

• Link the sale page to the homepage

• Include an HQ image as a banner with proper alt tags (optimised towards your primary keyword)

• Put a short description on the page that defines the sale and is optimised towards the desired keyword

• Actual sale/deal can be added later, get the page re-crawled by Google from the Google search console once final deals are added

That’s it for today, folks!

Wish you get the cash flow you have aimed for this festive.

If you want to run me through your festive media plan, you can book a slot for it from here:

You can block the slot here

We have also opened up the slots for the next batch of A to Z of Digital marketing masterclasses. You can sign up for it here.

Cheers,

Apurv