Every year Google is impressing on us the importance of being mobile first, the importance of understanding our target audience and their behaviours and the way that their ever-improving automation allows you to take advantage of it. There’s the new interface and their new responsive ads to implement.
All of these new changes could lead the average person to take their eye off of the bigger picture that is the “golden quarter” that is approaching.
We know that there are seasonal events approaching with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and of course Christmas but what we often see from businesses is that their Christmas campaigns start running in November / December and that’s simply too late.
Search volume for Christmas starts to increase from the 1st of September, gradually increasing and peaking several times on it’s way through the seasonal events mentioned above. In other words, your online marketing campaigns for the end of the year needs to be running in September (but it’s still too early to put your tree up!).
Black Friday
Black Friday was adopted by us here in the UK several years ago and has continued to increase in popularity as the years have rolled by, peaking with a £1.4billion spend on that day in 2017 with more expected this year.
As the popularity of the day increases, so does the spend but also the length of time that “Black Friday” influences sales decisions. Although Black Friday is technically just a single day, the influence of the day actually maintains over a week-long period so you will need to ensure that your budgets are raised in order to take advantage of the increase in search volume and intent.
A really important thing to remember is that intent will increase during this period so an improvement should be seen (particularly for retailers), but as search volume increases so will your media spend and it’s important that you’re flexible with your budgets to take advantage.
Finally, Google tells us that Black Friday offers are generally bought as “selfish” buys, when the UK spends their month on Black Friday it’s often on items that we want for ourselves and not to gift to others.
Christmas
We all look forward to Christmas (so much so that the UK spent £220 million on Christmas jumpers in 2017) and as we’re quickly closing down on the festivities it’s important that the correct campaigns are in place at the right time. Keeping your brand message & ad copy updated as we transition through Halloween, Black Friday / Cyber Monday and on to Christmas.
Relating your ad copy/images to the relevant times of year has a really positive effect performance and you should certainly be looking at ways for you to really hit your target audience in the seasonality sweet spot. All of the major brands have wholesale ad campaigns, costing millions of pounds during major world events such as the World Cup but a simple change in tone and message can really get into the minds of your target audience.
Summary
In Summary, plan your end of year campaigns early and get them implemented in good time, taking advantage of the £1.4 Billion + that is spent on Black Friday. Ensure that you’re not missing out on additional sales by operating with a limited budget where possible and finally, grab yourself a bargain!
