During the festive season ,it is obvious that every brand wants to promote its products and services.The competition is high and the bidding is very high.It is a challenge for the 90% of digital marketers to increase sales by 50% and yet optimize the campaigns to lower the CPL,CPM and the cost per purchase.
Most of the marketer fail here.They either have a broad targeting ,average creatives or unclear festive offers which lead to a rise in the CPM and CPL.
In this blog, let’s discuss the strategies you can follow to lower your CPM,CPL and Cost per purchase and boost your sales amidst high competition from big brands.
1. Refine Your Target Audience
During festive seasons it would not be appropriate to target a broader audience as this can result in a high cost.Narrowing the targeting to the high intent audience can make your campaigns more efficient.
Strategy:
Buyer Persona: With the past data ,analyze which buyer persona resonates closely with your product during festive seasons.This will help you to target that specific buyer persona to get more sales and to reduce conversion costs.
Retargeting Segments: By retargeting people who have shown interest in your previous ads or your products or added to cart you can get conversions because these people are likely to get converted and are of high intent.
Lookalike Audience: By identifying your best customers whose lifetime value is high ,you could target 1-2% similar audience to get best outcomes at optimal costs.
Example:
A brand who is into corporate gifting,can define a buyer persona from past data and target those audience during the festive season.It could be higher officials working for corporate companies.It could be people who have engaged with your ads in the past or you can create a lookalike to your previous Corporate customers.
In this way you can avoid wasting your budget and use it to target the right audience who convert.
2. Optimize Ad frequency and Placement
Ad fatigue can cause CPM to rise.A Controlled ad frequency can help to reduce CPM
Strategy:
Limit Ad frequency: Limiting the number of times the ad is shown to the target audience can help to avoid overexposure that causes a hike in the conversion costs.Limit the frequency on meta and google platforms to gain visibility without causing ad fatigue.
Automatic placements: During festive times,it is better to use automatic placements as Meta optimizes the campaigns on placements that work well during high competition.
Prioritize High Performing Placements:
With the past data you could identify the placement that gives more conversions and prioritize those during a festive season so that you don’t waste money on impressions from the placements that do not work for you.
Example:
An E-commerce brand who is trying to promote a particular brand or category of its products can limit the frequency to twice a week so that people are aware of the offers but don’t get bored on seeing too much of these offers. Also opt for automatic placements during festive season so that the platforms promote your products on high converting placements.
3. Innovative Creatives
Creating interesting and eye-catching creatives during a festive season can help your ads get more engagement.The more the engagement on the ads is the less the CPM would be.When the quality of the ad copy and creative is high the CPM gets lowered.
Strategy:
Rotate seasonal Creatives: Prepare a set of fresh creatives and rotate them twice a week so the audience sees fresh creatives and engages more.
User Generated creatives: These creatives are authentic and they help to create trust among the audience.
You could ask your customers to share their experience with your brand and products and run ads on it.This will increase the engagement of your ad and lower the CPC.
Festive Specific Offers: Giving offers like Diwali Discounts or Limited time festive offers.These offers will attract more people during festivals and if our value is more than the price then we are sure to hit more sales with high CTR and Low CPL.
Example:
During the Festive season,E-commerce giants like Flipkart and Amazon have their festive offers with visually appealing creatives.
Competing with their ads with average creatives will not be enough.Create fresh and innovative creatives to gain more engagement and to lower the CPM.
High quality product images should be used and User generated creatives with testimonials to boost credibility could be used with high quality graphics and images to attract customers and compete with big brands.
4.Geo Targeting and Dayparting
Focusing on where and when your ads should run can cost you less with more engagement.
Strategy:
Geo-Targeting: Using Geo Targeting you could run ads for only the regions where your products are on demand.
If your past history shows more conversion on Tier 1 cities then use these locations to target during festive season.
Dayparting : If it is obvious from the analytics that your audience is active during particular peak hours of the day and if you get more conversions during that part of the day then it is more appropriate to run ads during that time.This will save your budget and lower CPL.
Localized Campaigns: Running campaigns pertaining to a particular region focusing on their cultural sentiments can improve engagements on your ad and lower CPM.
Example:
You are a cloud kitchen based in a particular metro city.Your main objective is to target office goers who work between 10 am to 7 pm.During festive seasons when there are very less food stalls ,you could provide service for these office goers on weekdays or during festivals at a particular time.
Geo targeting and day parting can help you deliver quality services to a quality audience.Also if you provide localized services only in a particular region,you can easily target only that region for orders.
This will help you target the right people whom you aim to serve and it will avoid wasting your budget during inappropriate times when you don’t provide service.
5. Optimize Bidding Strategy and Budget Allocation:
During the festive season ,choosing the right bidding strategy and adjusting the budgets manually can prevent you from overspending.
Strategy:
Manual Bidding: Use manual bidding instead of automated bidding to prevent sudden spike in Cost per purchase during high competition.
Higher bid for Retargeting: Retargeting audience are the ones who have already engaged with our brand and are likely to convert.Applying a higher bid for retargeting audience during Festive times.
Adset Budget Optimization: Allocating more budget for high performing ads and reducing the budget for underperforming ads could be a good approach during high competition.
Example:
You run an Healthcare E- commerce store. During the festive season you can optimize your budget such that your best sellers get more budget than other products.
During the festive season, when your competitors are bidding high, you can avoid the spike in the CPM and CPL by using the manual bidding.
Also by optimizing the budget for the best performing ad set you can save your budget from being wasted on under-performing ads.
6. Enhanced Landing Page Quality
A perfect landing page can reduce your CPL and Cost per purchase and increase conversion rates.
Strategy:
Responsive Landing Page: The traction on mobile id high during festive seasons.So make sure your landing page is well optimized for mobile users.
Load Speed : The loading time for a landing page should be less than 3 seconds.Ensure your landing page is not too slow as it will increase the bounce rate and affect conversion.
Clear CTA : Make sure your landing page has a clear CTA and minimize the distraction that might prevent the visitor from taking action or converting.
Example:
A clothing brand has an E-commerce website.During festive season the number of people purchasing from mobile devices will be more.So the company should make sure its landing page and the checkout procedure works well on mobile devices to ensure more purchases and less drop offs during high competition.
7. Valuable Festive offers and discounts
Providing valuable offers can boost the engagements and lower the cost per purchase
Strategy:
Time bound Offers: Providing time bound offers like Limited Offers can create an urgency and a fear of missing out FOMO among the visitors and helps them to take decisions quickly increasing the conversion rates.
Bundle Products: Providing offers on product bundles instead of a single product can get your ad more engagement.It will increase you AOV and decrease the Cost Per Purchase.
Discounts for best customers: Providing discounts based on the purchase history can create a sense of interest among your customers and this will increase loyalty towards your brand and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Example:
You are a Footwear Brand.Festive season can be a cherry on your cake.You can make maximum profit if you give valuable offers to your customers.The offers could be a BOGO(Buy one get one free offer) or FLAT 50% off on all products or Purchase for RS.3000 and get 1 footwear FREE offer.
Any offer that is time bound and or that creates urgency can make your customers buy without having a second thought and thus increase engagement on your ad and lower CPL.
8. Advanced Tracking and Attribution
Festive campaigns are usually run in different channels so advanced tracking and attribution has to be set up to identify which channel gives the most ROI.
Strategy:
Implementing Multi Touch attribution: Google analytics 4 allows multi touch attribution so that you can attribute the touchpoints that led to conversions.
UTM Parameters: Using UTM parameters help to precisely identify which ad copy,creative and campaign is high performing so that optimization becomes easy.
Offline Conversion Tracking: If your purchases are done online as well as offline, setting up conversion tracking for offline store purchases can help to attribute the online campaigns and its effectiveness.
Example:
You are an Edtech company who provide online courses on Digital Marketing,Programming courses and soft skills.You might have to run ads on various channels like Instagram, Facebook,Linkedin and Twitter to target various segments of audience. During festive seasons you can promote your courses with special festive offers.
Tracking the ad campaigns on different channels and identifying the channel that brings more leads is as important as running ad campaigns on omni-channels.
9. Interactive Ad formats:
Regular monitoring of ad metrics is important during festive seasons.Making fine data driven adjustments can help your ad to perform well.
Strategy:
Short Form Videos: Short form videos get more traction on Instagram and Facebook. High CTR can lead to Low CPM.
Carousel Format: Brands with a number of products or product categories can make use of this carousel format to showcase different products or one product in different angles.
Poll ads: These ads can be used to increase interaction on the ads.Based on their responses we can segment the audience to use in the future ads.
Example:
You are a small business who sells jewelry on Instagram. Competing with big brands can be extremely costly during festive seasons.In this case, you can make use of different ad formats which are suitable for your products to attract customers.
You can promote videos of your best jewelry collection or use carousel format to showcase different designs.
10. Analyze and Optimize Continuously
It is advisable to analyze the metrics regularly during festive seasons and make quick adaptation to changing data to ensure performance of the ads.
Strategy:
Monitor campaign metrics: Regularly monitor metrics like CPM,CPL and CTR and if there is a rise in CPM change creatives,pause underperforming ads and change bids.
AB Testing: The creatives, ad copy and CTA can all be tested to find out what small changes can impact conversions.
Example:
If you are a brand who wants to identify your target audience and scale ads for a high converting audience then you have to analyze and optimize continuously.
Keep experimenting with different types of targeting and keep doing AB testing to identify the best working target audience,creatives or ad copies.Then you can scale that particular high performing ad set and get more leads.
By adjusting and adapting to changing CPM and by regularly optimizing your ad campaigns you can achieve your target numbers at minimum CPL.
Conclusion:
Running ads during festive season could be a challenge as well as an opportunity for the marketers.Use strategic targeting,Fresh creatives, BId adjustments and monitor continuously to get a high ROI keeping CPL,CPM and Cost Per Purchase Down.
This will help you get more ROI and increase brand visibility during the festive season.
