All businessmen, as well as most shoppers, are aware that Black Friday is the biggest single shopping day of any calendar year, and that’s why most businesses offer major savings on their products, so they can attract the attention of shoppers. This fourth Thursday in November is a shopping bonanza for most businesses, and that’s true not only of companies in the United States, but all around the world as well.
In order to get a leg up on the competition, and make the most out of the limited holiday shopping season, it might be to your advantage to consider running Facebook ads which feature offers available for a limited time. You might want to use the seven days of Kwanzaa, the eight days of Hanukkah, or the 12 days of Christmas, but in any case, you should choose some limited-duration period, which will instill a sense of urgency in buyers.
In order to maximize your sales, you should develop a strategy which includes re-targeting ads as well as Facebook videos, so that your offers can be delivered to potential customers automatically. Just prior to the time where your campaign goes live, you should have all the following subjects covered: re-targeting audiences, custom audiences, ad collateral, and Facebook ad campaign approval. Here’s how you should setup your holiday campaign in Facebook.
Design Facebook ad collateral
In order for this to work, you’ll need to have at least one trigger video ad, as well as an additional ad for every day which you will be running your holiday campaign. For example, if you’re running a 12 days of Christmas campaign, you would need a single trigger video add plus 12 other product ads, all of which would need to be designed in advance.
To optimize videos for each of your placements, they should be kept to between five and 15 seconds, so that they can be placed in any location where Facebook would typically run ads. You can also modify your video’s parameters so they can be displayed in square or vertical mode for optimal viewing on Instagram Stories and feeds.
Populate your custom audiences
When you’re using this kind of a promotional ad campaign, it’s usually a good strategy to generate custom audiences via Facebook Ads Manager, so that you can reach the people who would normally be seeking out your promotions. These kinds of custom audiences are those who are already familiar with your products and your brand, and are thus considered to be warmer audiences. That means they’re much more likely to buy from your company than would a stranger who has never heard of your brand.
The quickest way to build a Facebook custom audience which can be re-targeted later, is to generate a trigger ad by running an ad campaign with a video. For instance, a slideshow video which features your upcoming specials for the holidays, would be one terrific way of increasing awareness about your holiday campaign.
You can then save this customized audience based on demographics, customer interests, psychographics, page post engagers, database contacts, or look-alike audiences consisting of existing followers. It’s fairly easy to create a custom audience which includes people who have recently made visits to your website, people who were already on your contact list, people who have watched videos on your Facebook page during the last year, and people who have engaged with either your Facebook or Instagram posts sometime during the past year.
Set up an automated retargeting campaign
It’s very easy to increase the chances of people coming to your website during the holidays, by simply setting up a Facebook ad sequence which is triggered by your first video ad. This type of advertising will generally significantly increase visits to your online store, so that users can see exactly what you’re promoting. Such ads will be placed at the top of your audience’s social feeds, or they will be situated strategically within various apps, games, or articles within the Audience Network.
Your ad sequence begins on the first day of your sale, and it will promote those items which are featured specially for a limited time basis. This means you need to have your website in sync with these holiday price changes, and you’ll need to have coupon codes which are only valid for specific days. These coupon codes would have to be included in your daily ads, or on the product pages for the dates which they are valid.
You have to set up ads for every day of your holiday campaign, and then re-target these daily ads from video views or links that are clicked onto from the landing page or from separate ad sets. Your re-targeting audience size has to be sufficiently large that Facebook will be able to spend your budget, and it won’t be able to consume that entire budget unless your objective is sufficiently broad, or the audience is large enough. Once you’ve run these type of ads a few times, you’ll get a definite feel for how they should be set up and funded.
Have your entire Facebook campaign scheduled
In order to be as efficient as possible, you should have your entire Facebook campaign scheduled ahead of time, so that it can be approved by Facebook. Keep in mind that Facebook can sometimes be a little slow with ad approval, so make sure that you stay within their recommended policies and guidelines.
All your images and video thumbnails should have no more than 20% text attached to the image. You should also allow Facebook at least 24 hours for ad approval, but it’s better to allow even more if you have video ads in your campaign. You’re generally pretty safe if you provide Facebook 72 hours of notice before running your campaign.
Make sure all of your campaign material takes into account age restrictions, for instance any content about alcohol or smoking. If you happen to use the company name Facebook in your ad, make sure it’s displayed with a capital F, and don’t use the company logo itself. If it turns out that your ads do not get approved by Facebook, you will obviously have to take action as quickly as possible, to make whatever corrections are necessary so as to get them approved. If they are disapproved a second time, you may need to contact Facebook support to find out what’s wrong, or you may have to start all over again.
