3 Holiday Marketing Tips to Increase Sales in 2022

The season for holiday shopping has already begun. In fact, 25% of consumers  started their holiday shopping in August or September, as Bankrate reports. 

With the retail landscape continuing to shift after the pandemic, and economic uncertainty impacting consumer habits, we’ve prepared 3 tips to help your business navigate the 2022 holiday season and maximize the impact of your holiday campaigns.

1. Share of early shoppers is rising – don’t sleep on the opportunity 

Since the pandemic shifted consumer habits, customers are shopping online more frequently and earlier.

As reported by eMarketer, during the pandemic, many customers started their holiday shopping early to prevent having their orders arrive late, and several retailers are expecting this trend to persist. With 25% of shoppers already beginning their holiday shopping in August or September, another 25% are expected to begin in October, while only 40% plan to start shopping in the final two months of the year.

With this in mind, make sure to start your promotions early to pull holiday sales forward and not risk missing out on the opportunity to reach those early shoppers. Starting promotions early not only helps meet the trend of consumers shopping earlier, but also helps brands to avoid backorders and bad customer experiences with delays, ensuring timely deliveries.

2. Consumers are more indecisive than ever – don’t put all your eggs in one basket

As inflation continues to drive up the cost of food and other essentials, consumers are becoming more cost-conscious and selective with how they spend their money. Coupled with the digital revolution that provides more information and more choice for consumers, making it harder for them to decide what to buy, businesses need to focus on maintaining multiple touchpoints with their customers. 

Instead of immediately targeting consumers with direct offers, make sure to start your early campaigns by engaging and educating consumers about your products and services to increase your chance of converting them when they’re ready to make a purchase. 

Take the example of Clarins, the French brand and leader in high-end skin care in Europe. For the release of its latest ‘Double Serum Eye’, Clarins used the strategy of generating qualified traffic before targeting consumers with direct product offers.  

To achieve its goal, the brand used Engagement Bid Strategy (EBS), Outbrain’s automated cookieless bidding solution that optimized their campaigns based on user engagement from Clarins’ landing page, enabling better targeting of users who were most likely to interact with its content.

By reaching an engaged audience at scale and retargeting those users further down the funnel, EBS enabled the brand to double the amount of sales later on.

3. It’s the busiest time of the year – leverage automation to save time & maximize sales

With so much going on over the holidays and the rising market competition, creating effective marketing campaigns is often easier said than done. Our guess is you’re running multiple campaigns through many different channels, and making sure you’re getting the best ROAS (return on ad spend) out of each is a big task to handle.

This is where automation comes to the rescue. The effectiveness and efficiency of digital advertising efforts have increased significantly thanks to AI-driven tools, helping you save precious time and effort. And there is no time better to make use of such tools than during the busiest time of the year.

This is exactly what Outbrain’s Conversion Bid Strategy (CBS) is designed to do. Outbrain’s automated optimization tool leverages algorithms and machine learning to optimize your campaigns, taking the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids to maximize ROAS. 

Marc O’Polo, one of the leading casual lifestyle brands in the premium segment, deployed Outbrain’s CBS tool to maximize the number of online sales. CBS adjusted bids to target the audience most likely to convert, thereby eliminating the need for manual adjustments. Over the course of a few months, Marc O’Polo achieved an ROAS of up to 1500%, significantly increasing its revenue.

And this is just one of many examples of how marketers were able to maximize the impact of their native campaigns using Outbrain’s automated solutions. 

Considering the holiday shopping season is already in full swing, it’s important to take the opportunity and leverage the latest consumer trends to prime your audiences and create a winning holiday season strategy for the holiday season.

For more recent consumer trends in various industries, supported by up-to-date data about consumer activity from Outbrain’s global ad network, download The Marketer’s Guide to Boost Sales in 2022.