Capturing your audience on Facebook is a great way to boost your online sales over the holiday season. Your customers are primed for buying and are ready to splash some cash. Here’s 3 last minute tips on how you can optimize your Facebook advertising and reach your customers before the holiday season is out.

Stay Warm

No, we don’t mean wear a scarf and gloves. We mean look after your warm leads over the holiday period.  Warm leads are anybody who has already engaged with your brand recently, so could be any of the following:

–       Facebook fans

–       Website visitors

–       Customers and clients

–       App users

The holiday season is all about feeling warm and fuzzy, so heating up those pre-existing relationships and reminding customers about your brand will re-connect you to last minute shoppers just in time. Target these people directly using custom audience by choosing specific segments of your audience that you want to see your Ads.

Optimize for Mobile

This should be a priority for your 2016 holiday campaign. Last year, nearly half of online shopping traffic came from mobile and 56% of in-store sales were influenced by mobile activity. This opens up a tinsel-clad door for online shops this season, providing your ad creative translates well to mobile devices. There’s no point in having beautifully created ads that aren’t optimized to suit the browsing habits of your desired customers. Your ads and landing pages must be responsive to the screen sizes of different devices, so you must be creating different ad sets for desktop and mobile. Call to actions perform differently depending on the device, so this must be taken into account when creating each ad set.

Use the Facebook Pixel on your website

Pixels… sounds a bit scary, right? It’s a little more ‘techy’ than your average advertising method, but the rewards are worth it. Facebook pixel allows you use a single pixel to track your website and optimize your content by providing you with rich sources of data about how people are interacting with your brand online. You can react to this data by re-targeting and optimizing your ads for each individual customer.

For example, if somebody visits your website and is browsing for a new camera but does not purchase, you can automatically re-target them for a camera next time they visit Facebook.

By now, your customers will have a pretty good idea of what they’re hoping Santa will bring, and will have spent some time scrolling through various product catalogues so they can start writing their list. Facebook Pixel allows you to capture this information and respond automatically and immediately. 

“Facebook advertising isn’t just for Christmas, it’s for life…”

Admittedly, that line isn’t quite as compelling when you substitute ‘Dog’ for ‘Facebook advertising’, but the concept is the same. Yes, using Facebook as a platform to drive sales over the holiday season is particularly effective, but as we draw closer to ringing in the new year, you should now be thinking about how you can integrate this into your marketing plan all-year-round.

The way we, as consumers, shop is evolving and the line between online shopping and online socialising becoming increasingly blurred. With the rise of predictive analysis technology and social selling, consumers can sit back, relax, and wait for brands come to them. There’s a huge emphasis on brands using social media platforms to drive their eCommerce sales, and we expect to see this trend explode in 2017.