December 13th, 2021
The holiday season and calendar year are nearing their end, however, there is still time to see more success and bring in additional revenue before the ball drops into the new year. Here’s how you can win during Q5, from December 25-31 with your post-holiday campaigns.
The 2021 Advertising Gauntlet
It has been quite the eventful year for advertisers with new challenges such as Apple’s iOS 14 software update and its significant impact to Facebook Ads and tracking, to global supply chain issues, shipping delays, and an earlier start to the holiday ecommerce shopping season. Throughout it all, it has been interesting to see the ways we have pivoted, further increased our appetites for testing and future-forward strategy development, in order to find success for our clients, brands, and their campaigns that we manage and consult on.
Why Advertise During Q5?
If you can, jump in, as there are several reasons why brands should leverage this brief period at the end of the year. Once the holidays wrap, the advertising landscape will shift back to the pre-holiday version of itself where there was less competition for impression-share, thus lower costs, which can stretch your budget further. Seize this opportunity to get in front of people that perhaps didn’t want to spend money on themselves for the holidays and use this as that opportunity to entice them to shop, guilt free, for themselves. If you have remaining inventory that you want to offload before the year ends, especially if it’s seasonal, run a sale if your brand supports that. If you offer services, get a head start on getting people to book them at the start of the new year. If you offer B2B services or SaaS products, get your ads in front of decision makers that may still have some 2021 budget available and could use some more write-offs.
Messaging For Q5
Not quite sure what type of messaging to use for Q5? If you work in ecommerce and your brand can run a sale to do some end of the year clearances, here’s your chance to stand out. Use copy that shares brief, yet detailed information about your sale (% or $ off) as well as run dates so prospective customers can understand the limited time offer – urgency helps close deals and opens wallets for purchases.
Other effective Q5 ad copy ideas can focus on the prospective customer not getting what they wanted for the holidays as gifts and this is an excellent opportunity for them to get what they truly want. With the new year just days away, you could also take the fresh year approach by stocking up on certain products, signing up for services that would improve someones life, be it personally or professionally. This brief period of time is optimal for people to reflect and focus on themselves. The gift-giving season is over and the psychological mind-set of consumers shifts during Q5. Many people want to treat themselves, possibly splurge on something they’ve had their eye on all year, and others look into personal development with incoming New Year resolutions.
Tools for Inspiration
Facebook recently launched it’s exciting, new, and helpful new Campaign Ideas Generator. If you haven’t had an opportunity to explore it, here’s your chance and might I recommend, bookmark it. When it comes to Q5, you can select your industry, such as automotive, ecommerce, education, health, retail, travel, and more as well as the holiday or event and it generates ad copy recommendations, allows for creative asset downloads, provides data, and other resources that can help inspire and inform your strategy. One of the events you can select is Q5 so check it out and see what ideas is brings about.
Another excellent tool for inspiration and competitive research is Facebook’s Ad Library. See what other brands are running in similar and different verticals. While checking this before Q5 may not give you fifth quarter specific ads, you may get other ideas that you can incorporate into your campaigns as long as you change them to suit your brand so it’s genuine. One way we often use the Facebook Ad Library is to see what large brands are doing as they have more resources and budget. We then can find inspiration in some of the elements of their ads such as messaging, promotions, value propositions that may also appeal to our target demographics, and creative asset execution. This can help you save time and money as you brainstorm what you may want to use that you may already have in your copy and/or creative repositories and revise to suit your Q5 campaigns. If you can repurpose something, do so! If you don’t have assets, develop new ones or use other tools such as stock images and Facebook’s Video Creation Kit to turn static images into videos with subtle motion and overlay text to captivate users.
Set Up Now, Relax When It Matters
If you haven’t set up any campaigns, ad sets, and/or ads to test for Q5, now is the time. Set up your campaign assets ahead of time, schedule them, and catch your breath before the new year – you’ve more than earned it after the year we’ve overcome when it comes to advertising – but set a reminder to confirm they are in fact approved and activated when it’s run time. While this post focuses on Facebook Ads, these ideas can certainly be used across other mediums and platforms, just be mindful of character limits and creative specs. It’s wise to diversify your efforts, so create some content for your social ads, incorporate some into paid search, add a banner to your website if applicable, and test it in your email newsletters drip campaigns, too.
Wishing you success on your year-end campaigns and a happy, healthy, and wealthy new year!
Have you run Q5 campaigns and ads in prior years? What worked well (or didn’t) for you? Leave a comment below as we’d love to hear.
Share:
