These 5 proven tactics will rock your holiday campaign

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, and the holiday season upon us, it’s necessary for marketers to start planning, optimizing and reporting like a pro. So, we’ve put together a list of tips to help your holiday season campaigns succeed!

Lookalike audiences are a must

With lookalike audiences, you can expand to new people who are likely to have an interest in your business, even if they are not already familiar with you. You can engage new prospects who have the potential to become leads or customers for your business.

Ensuring you have a lookalike pixel in place on your site BEFORE you launch your Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaign will capture site traffic and build an audience that you can leverage for your December holiday campaigns. The best part? Since these are people who have visited with intent and interest, they are ideal prospects, so you should get the best performance from your ad budget.

Learn from your Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns

The holidays kick off with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the biggest shopping week of the year. To put some muscle behind this big event, keep track of any and all optimizations you make to your campaign while it’s running. Take note of the best performing audiences, creatives, devices with highest conversions, geographies that performed best, and time of day/day of the week that your ads were best received. This will arm you with proven tactics to be utilized in the rest of your holiday campaigns.

Utilize multi-targeting tactics

As shoppers spend more time shopping online they will use more than one channel to research and purchase—mobile peaks! They even browse their phones while they browse the aisles. This is why it’s so important that you don’t forget about targeted mobile ads in your campaign strategy. Holiday shoppers are more comfortable with mobile purchasing, and without targeted mobile ads, you will be missing out on a key opportunity.

Have a foot traffic measurement tool in place

Holiday campaigns are more likely to have an element of foot-fall traffic that needs to be tracked. You want to be sure you’re capturing conversions from your campaign both online and offline. That’s why it’s a great idea to have a location intelligence platform, like Cuebiq, to measure foot traffic lift to your brick and mortar locations after a prospect sees a digital ad.

Switch up your creatives

Banner blindness is something all digital marketers contend with, but over the holidays it’s even more important you switch up your creative often to keep audiences engaged. Be sure to tailor your ads to your target audience—and not just the content, swap out the creatives too! For attention grabbing tactics, try using motion and HTML5 interactive ads to get more engagement.

There are several learnings to be gleaned from campaigns centered around tentpole events, like Black Friday/Cyber Monday and the overall holiday season. Applying learnings from past campaigns to future strategies is a way to continually improve performance and make ad budgets go further.

Vitaly Pecherskiy, co-founder and chief operating officer, StackAdapt

StackAdapt are a partner of The Drum's Agency Acceleration Day US. Tickets for the event are available to purchase now.