How to boost your Black Friday and Holidays sales with Native Advertising
In 2020’s new normality, consumer habits and eCommerce trends couldn’t stay the same. Now that Black Friday and the holidays are coming up and the main thing on every advertiser’s mind is increasing end of year sales, in collaboration with our exclusive partner Taboola, we have prepared the ultimate best practices guide for 2020 and a hands-on webinar, to help brands capitalize on Native Advertising and close the year with a bang.
Native Advertising represents the 3rd pillar (next to social and search) of every successful online business strategy, with global leader Taboola getting the lion’s share of the investment. Native Advertising enables advertisers to own consumer “moments of next” by creating meaningful branded content engagements, in moments when people are actively looking to consume new content, experiences, products or services.
Turning any content asset at hand into relevant ad-experiences, brands can reach their audience at scale within Project Agora’s top publishers. With the use of Taboola’s recommendation technology the engagement is getting personalized and happening at the exact right moment to bring real business results.
This was and still is no ordinary year. With consumer behaviors having so drastically change due to COVID-19 circumstances, planning for campaigns has become quite difficult for brands. Focusing on data and insights and tracking consumer and readership trends is this year more important than ever. Based on Taboola data these are the three key trends brands have to consider in their campaign strategy this year:
1) Going big on eCommerce
It’s no surprise that the COVID-19 crisis has given eCommerce a big push – and, therefore, this Black Friday, we can expect a lot more consumers to be doing their shopping online, as opposed to in brick and mortar stores. Obviously, this is good news for advertisers.
COVID-19 has affected Global eCommerce revenues, and is likely to continue to impact them into the future. As you can see in the graph above, where the dark blue shows pre-COVID revenue predictions, revenues are actually predicted to be 10% higher than initial prognoses, both in 2020 and in 2021.
According to a Statista poll, in the UK specifically, many shoppers are making purchases that they would normally make in person, online. In the poll consumers were asked whether they had purchased any of a range of products or services online instead of offline as a result of the pandemic. It has to be noted that this poll is from the end of May, but at this point, many consumers were already switching to online purchases, in particular for Food and Drinks and perhaps more surprisingly, Clothing.
This is a great opportunity for DTC and eCommerce brands to capitalize on.
2) Getting holiday shopping done earlier
The second trend we’re seeing this Black Friday is that shoppers are going to be looking to get their holiday shopping done earlier – and brands need to be in line with that. Whereas, typically, many consumers might leave shopping to the week before Christmas, or make last minute dashes to the shops on Christmas eve, this will be more difficult this year with continuously changing restrictions and many consumers feeling uncomfortable going into crowded shops.
Add to that the fact that the increase in online purchases ahead of the holidays is likely to cause overwhelm to delivery services – both Amazon and the Royal Mail have already put out a call to hire thousands of extra personnel to cope with the demand.
And this is something that consumers are reading about – on Taboola’s network in the past two weeks, there has been an increase in pageviews of 75% around topics related to delivery services and the Royal Mail.
As a result of all of this, we can expect consumers to be looking to get their shopping done earlier this year, and receive their deliveries with plenty of time to spare – that means brands should start promoting their Black Friday offers as soon as possible, and consider extending their offers beyond Black Friday and Cyber Week to give consumers more time to take advantage of those offers.
3) Use current trends to steer your campaign
Finally, whereas in any other year, previous years’ data could be used as an indication of what is to come, this year 2019 data cannot be used as a proxy for 2020.
These are the most recent trends on Taboola’s network, in regards to readership and images, which brands can use to make their ads more engaging.
Based on the above trends on readership and image impact, here are a few examples of how you should optimize the images you are going to use in this year’s campaigns.
Last but not least, to put theory into action don’t miss our hands-on webinar on Wednesday 11 November, 3PM GMT+2, where best practices and insights will be further analyzed, along with a practical, hands-on platform tour focused on Black Friday & holidays sales.