As the seasons change, so should your social media advertising strategy. By using seasonality, you have a high chance of optimizing your ad performance. It also allows you to leverage trends, awareness topics or even a month, week or day long nationally recognized event. Every business is unique and depending on the business’s sales cycle, has different seasons when advertising is heavier than other times.
Three ways to increase advertising on social media
The following three tips are by no means THE best way or THE know-it-all rulebook for every company’s advertising strategy. This blog is a more general approach to how to envision new ways to increase your business’ performance through paid advertising on social media.
1. Advertise in times of low competition
My first suggestion is to advertise at times of the year when there isn’t much competition. For example, almost every single company most likely advertises heavily in the months of November and December. As we know, this is the best time to promote your biggest Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Cyber Week and Christmas sales. However, the cost of advertising increases significantly at this time of year as many other advertisers are also trying to get their ads in front of your customers.
Focus your social advertising efforts when it’s cheaper during slower times of the year. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t advertise during the months of November and December, but promoting some of your biggest sales at a different time of the year with less competition will make your ads stand out from other companies.
Let’s face it – customers are ALWAYS looking for an offer, sale or promotion. If they see an ad that suggests a sale and then a competitor ad that doesn’t, they will more often than not buy the product that is for sale unless they are brand loyal to the competitor.
Let’s look at what you as a business can do to take advantage of special offers and promotions during the “normal” times of the year. One way to promote your business during “normal” promotional periods is to create your own type of sale.
For example, we have a client who wanted to do a test with promotions. This customer came up with the idea of running a weekly sale for their products and named the sale ____ of the week. Each week for four weeks, they selected some of their best-selling products for which they gave a percentage discount with a PROMO code. Since each product was only promoted for one week, it was important to include a copy in the ad copy and creative that said the sale was limited.
By using this type of notice, the customer is prompted to complete their order now rather than later. The results of this four-week campaign strategy were: 201 purchases, $5,088 in sales, and a 3.68x ROAS. Without those social ads, the performance would have been: 38 purchases, $993 in sales, and a 2.81x ROAS.
What are your top selling products and how can they be leveraged to generate additional revenue for your business?
2. Adjust your social advertising strategy for seasonality
My second suggestion is to adapt your advertising strategy to the seasons. As we go through summer, fall, winter and spring, let your social ads reflect the season! For example, in winter, focus your advertising strategy on your winter-related products. Of course, this is different for every company.
For example, JumpFly works with an outdoor and indoor furniture customer. You may think that you should focus exclusively on promoting indoor furniture during the months of November to February, but in fact our client starts promoting their outdoor furniture from January! This is because they tend to get the most sales at this time, as people tend to get ahead of the seasons and buy patio furniture before it’s even warm.
Some text overlay ideas to include in your creatives are “Dreaming of warmer days in the future? 💭” or “Grab this summer’s hottest styles NOW before they’re gone!” Again, I always encourage you to convey a sense of urgency in your messages to get a customer to checkout now, not later to go. As I mentioned earlier, a good strategy is to include larger promotions during times when you feel your business isn’t as busy.
Returning to the furniture customer, an example of a special offer, promotion, or discount might say something like “Shop now and stock up on our early bird discount for summer!” Get up to 70% OFF now, only for a limited time.” The sense of urgency is there and you make the prospect feel special, like they’re getting a better deal now than they did during the summer season. Think about the product or service you are selling and try to create a marketing plan for each season. This helps optimize your ad performance when you plan promotions and ads well in advance!
3. Promote sales during all holidays and important events
My third and final suggestion is to ALWAYS use holidays or events that are happening across the country. Adapt your ads to the season and the upcoming holiday. Besides Thanksgiving and Christmas there are so many holidays including St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Day, Independence Day, Memorial Day, Martin Luther King Day and the list goes on and on!
There are also many months that are known to recognize something important such as Women’s History Month, National Book Month, Teacher Appreciation Month and many more. These types of nationally recognized events can give your business a better shot at higher ad performance, since most advertisers don’t tailor their products or services to the event.
Let’s go back to our client who ran promotions for the sale of the week. This client decided to place New Year ads in 2022 and 2023. 2022 was the first year he ran the promotion and the results are as follows: The ads brought in 36 out of 374 total purchases, $978.49 out of $9,645.80 in total revenue, and an 8.96x return from a 4th place finish .31x average overall ROAS. In 2023, the New Year ads resulted in 155 out of 237 total purchases, $4,410.83 out of $6,590 total revenue, and an 8.48x out of 5.05x total campaign average ROAS. As you can see, the ads performed much better, driving more than half of the campaign’s outstanding performance in 2023!
What holidays will you use to promote your products in hopes of increasing your sales, ROAS, or other KPI?
I hope these three social media advertising strategies have given you some ideas on how to optimize your ad performance when using seasonal effects. I challenge you to think outside the box and create a marketing plan for each quarter so your creatives and ad copy are ready to go and have a better chance of landing a client. Check out our previous blog post Paid Social Ads Predictions and Trends for 2023 for even more ways to boost the performance of your social media campaigns.
