Ask the Experts: Top Holiday Campaign Mistakes

Ask the Experts: Top Holiday Campaign Mistakes

by | Nov, 2019 | Content, Native Advertising

Holiday shopping campaigns will kick off before you know it (if they haven’t already). Before it’s too late, we asked our fellow Bidtellectuals the top mistakes they see clients make during the holiday shopping season that prevent them from getting the results they want. From under-spending to over-exhausting creatives, here’s what to avoid – and do differently – for a rockin’ holiday season. 

You are More Than Your Deals:

“Big mistake: Brands push empty Holiday offers and discounts instead of the value of their brand and how they can enhance a consumer’s holiday experience.”

– TJ Kryzanowski, Director of Account Management – East

Don’t Stoop to Display Standards – In Creative and Budget

“Make sure your images don’t have copy on them. While it’s great to push a holiday offer or discount, you don’t want your images mimicking a banner ad when the goal is for your content to blend in with the content in the feed. Use an image of a person enjoying your product or offer.”

– Missy Steiner, VP of Marketing 

“The biggest mistake is focusing on standard display formats for Black Friday & Holiday Pushes! Go Native.”

– DJ Virtue, Director of Sales and New York Manager

“The audience gets tired of seeing the same ad over and over again. Switch it up! Start off with awareness creatives, then lead the audience to consider, and then complete your campaign flight with conversions. I see clients immediately start off with lower-funnel in the earlier stages of holiday planning months – BORING!”

– Yeni Gordillo, Sr. Creative Marketing Manager

It’s the Most Competitive Time of Year: Price Accordingly

“Some clients expect CPMs to stay the same over the holiday period and complain about performance going down. You have to price competitively to stay competitive!”

– Jonathon Burden, Director of Sales, West Coast

“One thing that comes to mind: clients don’t always take seasonality into consideration when determining their rates (bid prices). There’s a lot of competition in the market near the holidays. If you don’t have high enough rates, scale becomes an issue and it impacts delivery and performance.”

– Rachel Richardson, Senior Strategic Account Manager

Communicate and Plan Ahead

“Plan ahead. Communicate in advance if support will be needed on holidays like Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday for retail accounts. We prep and ask, but often we receive an emergency email during Thanksgiving dinner saying we need to increase spend, etc.”

– Terah Bocchi, VP of National Sales

Trendy Doesn’t Always Mean Best-Performing

“Don’t fixate on trends. Clients always want the latest “new” thing (carousel, for example) even though it might not perform. Don’t sacrifice performance for aesthetics.”

– Andrew Sugrue, Senior Ad Ops Specialist

Celebrate All the Holidays!

“Creatives pertaining to only one specific holiday limits your audience. Include all celebratory holidays! Make it relatable to everyone!”

– Yeni Gordillo, Sr. Creative Marketing Manager

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Top 4 Forbes Round-Up: Bidtellect CEO Offers Actionable Advice to Implement Now

Top 4 Forbes Round-Up: Bidtellect CEO Offers Actionable Advice to Implement Now

by | Oct, 2019 | Content, Native Advertising

Bidtellect CEO Lon Otremba has offered a healthy share of advice on Forbes the last couple of weeks on everything from bad advertising to holiday campaigns. The bottom line? Stay truthful, know your audience, and test early. Here’s a round up of Lon’s October Forbes Features with actionable advice you can start implementing now.

1) Why Consumers Hate Your Brand’s Advertising

First, the bad news: consumers probably hate your advertising. Good news: Forbes tapped the experts for not one, not two, but 13 reasons why and how to fix it. But as Lon proves, sometimes good life advice is applicable to advertising advice. If you can stick to this, then all of your other tactics will fall into place, and your brand’s image will be beloved in no time. But you have to keep in mind that while coming up with different advertising strategies, you should be careful of how much you are spending on them. You don’t want to be spending a fortune on the ones that do not work. To help you out in this matter, you can consider using digital marketing budget management software like the one provided by EDEE AI.

Lon says: Not Being Truthful

I’ve found the quickest way for consumers to hate your advertising is to feed them something not genuine or truthful. Consumers can spot a phony a mile away, and when you lose credibility — as with anything in life — it is nearly impossible to win it back.

Read more: 13 Reasons Why Consumers May Hate Your Brand’s Advertising (And How To Fix It)

2) How Marketers Can Tell Compelling Stories

What’s the key to all good marketing, advertising, and content marketing? Good storytelling. This helps a brand to depict its true image in the minds of the customers. In general, storytelling is used to show how a company’s products or services can solve crucial problems very easily. It is common for companies to hire dedicated marketing firms that specialize in their industry to tell a compelling brand story. As an example, if you have an HVAC repair company, you may find it beneficial to hire a company like Scorpion (if interested, look at scorpion hvac marketing strategy) to develop effective marketing techniques.

Lon says: A Compelling Story Is Stronger Than Any Pitch

The first storytelling lesson I ever learned was the most basic of all: a story is much more engaging than a pitch. So, rather than making good pitches, tell compelling and engaging stories. These are my four components of engaging stories: specific detail (not generalities); emotion; proximity (make it close and personal); having a point — a loss is as compelling as a win if there is a point to make.

Read more: How Marketers Can Tell Compelling Stories: 13 Valuable Lessons

3) What Are the Most Important Content Marketing Metrics?

And while we’re on the topic of content marketing, Forbes’ experts agree on 13 crucial metrics to determine the quality of your content marketing strategy. Marketing strategies are not only important to boost sales, but they’re also foundational in managing the growth of your company. There is already a debate regarding demand generation vs lead generation, figuring out which works better, so if you’re not careful with your marketing, you might end up biting off more than you can chew. But there’s one metric that will inform all your other goals.

Lon says: Audience Engagement

Tracking audience engagement is the most critical metric because it measures interaction with your brand. Developing an informed set of engagement component metrics that you can synthesize into one measurable metric is the goal. Every advertising platform (like Facebook and Google) tends to have metrics that can assist business owners to track their customer engagement and sales generation. Since these platforms often produce sales analytics individually, it might be tough for planning and execution teams to formulate a standard plan based on the statistics of various portals. Therefore, it is recommended to adopt the marketing mix modeling technique to quantify the impact of several marketing platforms on sales by combining numerous metrics.

Read more: 13 Crucial Metrics To Determine How Good A Content Marketing Program Really Is

4) How To Ramp Up Holiday Marketing in the Fall

Finally, maybe you’re reading this because you’re in the middle of/already planned/are stressing about your holiday campaigns. Yes? No? Regardless, we are sure that you are here for some juice that can help you amp up the game. One tool for that matter is SEO. Try using some top-notch SEO strategies, possibly with the help of a reputed Online Marketing Agentur, right before the holidays start, so that you can get the result you desire right on time. On top of that, Forbes offers 12 tactics to get your holiday campaigns in tip-top shape before the first echoes of holiday music pipe through speakers everywhere. According Lon, testing optimization strategies ahead of time should be top priority:

Lon says: Test Optimization Strategies Early

Use fall season to test optimization strategies. Test out different creative combinations and personalization tactics based on your key performance indicators. Consider placement level optimization, dynamic creative optimization (DCO), contextual targeting and retargeting, as well as ad types and devices. The holiday period will be your chance to reach far and wide — you don’t want to lose budget to error.

Read more: 12 Tactics To Ramp Up Your Holiday Marketing During The Fall Season