The ultimate guide to your

most successful Q4 yet

CONTENTS 01 Introduction

02 Strategy/Planning

03 Email

04 Social Media

05 Digital Tactics

06 Paid Search

07 Creative Consideration/Messaging

08 Backend Monitoring

09 Summary

01 The early bird

gets the sale

It’s never too early to start thinking about

your year-end sales push.

Why?

Aside from it being a perfect reason to connect with

customers, the holiday season gives you an opportunity

to flex your digital, social and mobile skills.

Introduction

Shopping habits are changing.

Customers are buying earlier across every screen and channel.

Digital is now a major player.

Online shopping has steadily increased over the past five years.

Competition is growing.

Do you know how to rise above the noise?

We do. And in a minute, so will you.

Social pressure rules!

It’s changing everything, but we have a plan.

Because the truth is:

Source: Google Trends

Here are some helpful tips to get

ahead of your year-end competition

and drive home sales and success.

02 Strategy/Planning

Before you dive in, review what worked and what didn’t from your 2014

holiday season:

Overall: How did your creative and messaging perform? What calls-to-action worked?

Paid Search: Best keywords, landers, calls-to-actions and bidding strategies.

Also consider if you saw any quality score issues

Email: Review subscribes/unsubscribes, open rates, clicks, clicks-to-conversions.

Which email had the highest engagement?

Display: How did your creative and offers perform?

Social: Top performing content, offers and targeting

First things first.

8

Talk to your agency partners and

get the ball rolling.

Plan out holiday schedules for offers/promotions,

landing pages, seasonal ad copy and creative

updates. Don’t forget to strategize bidding

budgets for SEM.

Start right now.

9

Your customer base expects

consistency in your messaging

and appeals; they don’t care

about your internal silos.

So give ‘em what they want:

Align email, paid SEM, SEO, social and

display initiatives — and don’t forget offline

efforts like in-store, catalog, direct mail

and broadcast.

Get it together.

10

Use your end-of-year campaign as a launching pad

for big spring events/campaign rollouts.

When you start building your brand’s awareness during the holiday season,

you can hit the ground running with your spring campaign at the start of the

year and ramp up quickly

Spring forward.

11

03 Email

Email marketing has become the

primary channel for Black Friday,

driving 27.3% of sales.

Cyber Monday yielded similar results, with email

marketing driving 23.9% of orders, free search

18.8% and paid search 16%.

Think inside the mailbox.

13

Use Send Time Optimization to send email to individuals

based on engagement patterns.

You can even send emails to recipients when you know they are reading

their email.

Timing is everything.

14

It’s more important than ever.

In 2014 alone, 33% of eCommerce

sales occurred on a mobile device.

On April 21, 2015, mobile SEO became a

Google ranking factor. Make sure your site is

mobile-friendly so you don’t get penalized.

Optimize your site for mobile.

15

04 Social Media

A whopping 92% of customers deeply value word-of-mouth

recommendation above all forms of advertising, and 89%

say testimonials are most effective in influencing purchase

decisions.

Encourage users to share your content by offering incentives, providing clear

calls-to-action and sharing links within emails and landing pages.

Help customers share the love.

17

Your social content should appeal

to users at every point on the path

to purchase.

In fact, 87% of social interactions occur

midway. Fine-tune your strategy and offer

relevant content that educates and engages

your fans throughout the buying cycle. Bottom

line: Give your fans a reason to follow you.

All social media content is not equal.

18

You may run into an unhappy customer.

So be ready to respond to complaints and questions

quickly on social media. Add extra staff so you can be

fast and relevant, with fewer machine-driven answers.

Be nimble. Be quick.

19

Social media ad spending in the United States will approach

$10 billion in 2015.

In North America, paid social will make up 35% all digital display spending.

Maximize paid social’s granular targeting abilities with personalized, real-time

content to reach and engage all of your audience segments. Tap into

programmatic social advertising for creative personalization at scale.

Pick paid social and display early.

20

05 Digital Tactics

Remarket wisely.

22

Remarketing should be part of any

robust media plan.

But even if someone abandoned your site on

a particular product page, you shouldn’t stalk

customers across the Internet for weeks at a

time. Think about what else they’d be interested

in, and give them options.

Black Friday isn’t just one calendar day anymore.

In fact, the days around it can now outperform it. Cyber Monday online sales

were a whopping 30.5% higher than Black Friday in 2014.

Cyber high-five!

23

The key is to get in front of local shoppers.

Work with your agency to create a hyperlocal campaign

with SEO, SEM, display and social media.

Local love.

24

Incorporate enhanced site link, callout, call and location

extensions when applicable to make your ads more

attractive and drive holiday sales.

Extensions are now factored into the Quality Score, so they’re crucial to

the overall health of your search campaigns. Pay less. Get more.

Utilize the SERP landscape as much as possible.

25

Go beyond Amazon and consider

partnerships such as ShopRunner

(free for shoppers with an AmEx card).

And don’t be afraid to promote them to your customers!

Partner up.

26

Optimize or create your Google Shopping campaign

to promote your individual products and offers online.

Don’t overlook beacons, visual search and local inventory ads.

Show your product feed some love!

27

06 Paid Search

Be aware if the season is negatively impacting your

business.

If your SEM campaigns are wasting dollars on non-qualified matches, adjust

your negative matches accordingly. Is your unqualified traffic at an all-time

high? Set display retargeting campaigns to require more than one page view.

Sensitivity and SEM.

29

Google’s Demographic Bidding allows

you to bid for age and gender demos that

resonate most with your brand’s products

and/or services.

Use Google Demographic Bidding for search.

30

Integrate email and other mailing lists to make the most

of targeting in paid social and display advertising.

Use your current lists to reach customers on Twitter and Facebook —

and create lookalike audiences to attract new ones.

Mix it up.

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07 Creative Considerations/Messaging

These days, it doesn’t take much convincing to keep

shoppers at home, clicking away in their jammies, instead

of battling the lines in-store.

So, remind them – or better yet – give them an incentive to shop online.

Skip the lines! Shop online.

Free shipping (expedited is even better)

Free shipping & returns.

The convenience of reviews and comparison-shopping

Shop our largest selection of [BRAND] products

Stay on the couch, potato.

33

Sometimes, shoppers don’t know where to start.

In fact, 57% of holiday shoppers don’t have a specific product or brand in mind

when they begin shopping, so provide your own! Try product reviews and Top

10 shopping lists as ways to put your brand front and center.

Use reviews and Top 10 lists.

34

Everyone likes a little mystery.

So, don’t offer up the goods in a subject line.

Give customers a chance to open and read, then

click through. Something inside other than the

offer might pique her interest.

Don’t give away the milk for free.

35

Incorporate video on your landing pages

and websites to help sell products via

explanation of features and benefits.

Video is your friend.

36

Think about using countdown clocks,

and mention of last shipping days

within copy.

Push urgency messaging to drive sales.

37

Make your offers unique and timely.

Send relevant content to your email subscribers based on data you have about

them, the time they are reading your email and even their location when they

are checking their email.

Focus on the moment.

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08 Backend Monitoring

You don’t want days to pass before you

discover you’re hitting caps.

Don’t be so busy that you don’t check your budgets

and end up leaving sales on the table.

Establish budgets and check daily.

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December 31st is too late to find out if something’s broken!

So, check for broken links, incorrect ad copy, proper tagging, etc. Mark your

calendar for re-audits.

Audit and re-audit holiday campaigns.

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09 Summary

Well, there you have it: The keys to the success of your business. Remember to track performance

across every single channel.

You’ll find out which tactics were a hit, which need work — and which

you can apply beyond Q4 to raise profits year-round (not to mention lay the

foundation for a smash-hit holiday 2016).

So take these tips and talk to your team or agency about how you can use them

to get your audience's attention and drive sales this year.

If you’re ready to put a particular plan in action and get the kind of creative work,

strategy and media expertise that brings the heat all year round,

contact Rina Cook today at rina.cook@bkv.com!

Got a question or need help? Drop us a line.

Rina Cook

Director of Business Development

404.233.0332

rina.cook@bkv.com