Everything is available on demand, with more variety and more buying options than ever before. This has made the “shop floor” practically infinite, as customers’ choices are no longer bound by space on the shelf. It’s left many advertisers wondering, “How will people discover and eventually purchase my product or brand?”
This holiday season, the answer is to stand out via simplification.
Brands need to make shopping simple for busy holiday customers. This year, that means showing up where customers are online. It means delighting them at unexpected times. And it means leveraging the trust of creator partnerships and cutting friction from the shopping experience at every turn.
Let’s explore these fundamentals and how to put them into action this holiday season.
Drive demand through discovery
During the holiday season, shoppers are engaging online all the time, but often they aren’t actively shopping for products. For brands, these are opportunities to create personalized moments of discovery that deliver the inspiration and spontaneity people are seeking during holiday shopping moments.
In fact, 52% of consumers want to find brands and products they haven’t heard about but align with their shopping preferences. Coming across products and brands that customers weren’t necessarily looking for creates a serendipitous shopping moment. Through Discovery Commerce, brands are tapping into an “always-on” shopping mindset where people are ready to learn about their business at any time.
Reach customers where they are
It’s time to think beyond individual holiday campaigns optimized to a specific objective in the marketing funnel. Brands need to support the complete customer journey—where people are always shopping and where shoppers can go directly from discovery to purchase in a few taps.
People engage in so many ways online during the holiday season, and each presents a unique opportunity to create and deepen relationships. Think about actionable opportunities where you can show up in the places and ways that customers like to interact.
Automation tools can help you simplify the ad creation process and reach the right audience, creating a unique experience for each customer. Solutions like Advantage+ shopping campaigns can eliminate the manual steps of ad creation and automate lots of creative combinations at once. This kind of approach can help you quickly learn what ads are working, while making the most of your ad budget.
Leverage peoples’ trust in creators
There’s a lot of value in making holiday shopping simple for customers by bringing content to them through people they already trust and follow. In fact, 36% of holiday shoppers found brand/product recommendations by creators helpful in finding gift inspiration.
Partnering with the right creators can help your brand convert new, highly engaged holiday audiences. Meta has seen the results with clients: Adding Branded Content ads to business-as-usual ads results in a 53% higher clickthrough rate and a 19% reduction in CPAs.
Make checkout simple and seamless
If you’re helping customers easily discover and connect with your brand, you’ve already done a lot to create simple, impactful experiences. But, once a customer has discovered your products, it’s equally important to provide them with a fast and easy path to purchase.
For example, 63% of holiday shoppers value frictionless/seamless checkout experiences across their online shopping destinations. When that doesn’t happen, 82% of shopping carts are left abandoned. Make sure your destination page loads quickly so people stick around and discover more. After all, 53% of mobile consumers will leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.
Another great way to reduce friction this holiday season is to leverage social commerce. This approach can help you create seamless shopping experiences directly in places where people are already spending their time—creating more opportunities to discover, browse and buy.
Brands can choose to drive customers from their shop to checkout on their owned website or in-app on Facebook and Instagram if they’ve enabled checkout. Having a seamless/frictionless social shopping experience combines the best of online and in-store shopping: discovery and browsing, live shopping, augmented reality try-ons, messaging and in-app checkout. For example, Jane, a boutique marketplace, increased its sales with social commerce—generating $365,000 in sales last holiday season.
Now is a great time to define your holiday strategy. And there are so many ways to delight your customers and make their holiday shopping easier this year. Begin by identifying opportunities that you can act on now—that head start could make all the difference for your brand this holiday season.
