5 Tips to Overcoming a Challenging Holiday Season

If 2020 was the year of COVID, and 2021 was a year of political unrest and vaccine rollouts, well, 2022 is proving to be another challenging year for marketers. With rising inflation, lingering supply chain issues, and talk of a looming recession, the bumpy ride is far from over.

Consumer sentiment is shaky, and, faced with higher costs of living, it is hard to predict how shoppers will approach their holiday spending. 

Amid this uncertainty, there is a golden rule that marketers must follow – when it comes to your media planning and advertising strategy, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Rather, using a range of channels as efficiently as possible is the best way to overcome the challenges and maximize your results in Q4. 

Let’s take a look at 5 reasons why native advertising with Outbrain is a must-have channel in your media mix, now more than ever:

1. Be one step ahead of your competition

There are four key ways that native advertising with Outbrain puts marketers ahead of the competition:

• Start engaging and creating awareness, at the top of the funnel.
• Pay only per click, when a potential customer shows real interest in your product or brand. 
• Easily create audiences to remarket in the coming months. 
• Avoid banner blindness with native ads that fit in with the look and feel of the web page they are on.

To leverage all these advantages, it is vital to start advertising natively now, before the highly competitive advertising season begins and CPMs (cost per 1000 impressions) become too high. 

After all, web searches for Christmas-related items tend to increase steadily from August onwards. Don’t wait till October. Launch your native strategy today.

2. Reach new audiences who are not on social

By  advertising on native, you can extend your reach to audiences on publisher sites, like news, sports, and entertainment sites, and when they are not on social media. Customers who are browsing the web and visiting their favorite sites are typically in discovery mode, open to learning about new products and brands. With native ads, you can lean your strategy further into the top of the funnel, and build up solid lead traffic to drive your holiday conversions.

Yes, audiences spend a lot of time online away from social media, and that’s where you should be reaching them:

• More than 124 million U.S. adults, or more than 6 out of 10, read newspaper media each week.
• 58% of adults aged 18-34, and more than 6 in 10 adults aged 35+, read a newspaper.
• 70% of households with income above $100K are newspaper readers.
• 63 million adults access newspaper content on their smartphone or tablet.

3. Let go of third-party cookies and embrace contextual targeting

Cookies are on their way out and every marketer knows it. Why not set yourself up now for a cookieless, privacy-centric future, and start building your media strategy that will serve you now and in the months and years to come? At Outbrain, our native platform is designed for interest targeting, contextual targeting and engagement targeting, rather than using intrusive third-party cookies. 

You can use Outbrain’s contextual data to auto-optimize your native campaigns and hit your performance goals on the open web.

Try our automation solutions and achieve real results, without the heavy lifting:

Conversion Bid Strategies (CBS): Optimizes your campaigns towards conversions. There are 4 CBS modes to choose from, depending on your goals. Learn more

Engagement Bid Strategy (EBS): Optimizes and adjusts bids to achieve your engagement goals – no pixel required. Learn more 

4. Repurpose your social ads for the open web

The native ad formats and campaign objectives in the Outbrain platform are very similar to social, which is great news for you. You can use the social ad creatives you already have, and expand your reach significantly and gain a presence on the open web by promoting them with Outbrain. 

How? Simply repurpose the existing ad copy and images with just a few tweaks, run them on native, and start seeing results right away.

Learn more about it here.

5. Start engaging now with your customers and reach your KPIs

Getting started with native advertising takes just minutes. Here’s the process:

• Open an Outbrain account for free.
• Implement the Outbrain Pixel and start building high-quality audiences for remarketing and Lookalike audiences.
• Whenever you’re ready to launch, our automation solutions for optimization (CBS and EBS) can help you reach your KPIs – the heavy lifting is on us!

Be one of the thousands of brands who are maximizing their results for holiday season 2022

CBR Boosts Black Friday Sales by 66% with Retargeting via Outbrain

Using Outbrain’s premium publisher network, CBR Fashion Group targeted users interested in fashion content to spark interest in their brands and direct traffic to their websites for the Black Friday shopping season.

A month before the decisive weekend, CBR retargeted online visitors from Street One and Cecil’s websites with Outbrain’s Custom Audiences Retargeting.

During the Black Friday weekend, these users were targeted with specific sales campaigns to drive increased sales.

And the results?

The conversion rate (sales) for CECIL’s online store increased by 66% compared to display ads. The higher conversion rate and reduced eCPC improved cost/revenue ratio by 65% for the Street One brand, and 43%  for CECIL.

Register at Outbrain today and get results from native, just like the big brands.