As the year draws to a close, we know that marketers – like everyone – are facing a challenging and complex season. The digital landscape continues to constantly shift, presently against a backdrop of inflation, rising costs, the looming threat of recession, and the lingering effects of the pandemic. This leaves marketers currently launching Q4 marketing campaigns to navigate an imposing landscape, but one that holds opportunity as well as difficulty.
To help brands and agencies alike navigate the holiday season, we’ve compiled a new guide for 2022, incorporating updated data and projections, industry insights, and some tactics and tech we’re confident can help any campaign perform to its fullest potential. Below, we’ve highlighted some of our new Q4 marketing guide content to provide a quick reference.
2021 Key Takeaways
- Total US holiday retail sales increased 16.1% to over $1.22 trillion in 2021, representing the strongest retail growth in more than 20 years.
- Ecommerce growth was up 10.4% to $204.20 billion, a gain that was significant against the pandemic-inflated numbers of 2020.
- While falling short of forecasts, Cyber Monday was still the top ecommerce spending day of the season, up 1.1% to $10.90 billion.
- Black Friday fell even further short of forecasts, but still saw ecommerce spending grow 0.3% to $9.03 billion.
- Meanwhile, the pre-Thanksgiving portion of November saw the most significant ecommerce growth of 19% YoY.
Source: eMarketer
Strategies for Q4 Marketing in 2022
Get on Streaming
As more streaming television providers embrace ad-supported models to offer more accessible subscription prices, the Connected TV (CTV) market continues to grow. While many of the largest advertisers now leverage this as an additional channel to their linear TV ad buys, most are still underutilizing this highly-targeted, trackable programmatic channel. With advancements in fraud protection, targeting, and reporting, CTV and OTT represent an opportunity for smaller advertisers to get on screens alongside premium content and achieve a considerable share of voice with a modest budget.
Look Out of Home
Digital Out-of-Home has seen immense growth as a pandemic-weary populace embraces travel and experiences. This channel represents a fantastic opportunity to get your messaging in front of a vast audience, with screens now surrounding us in countless and often unexpected spaces such as malls, gas stations, taxis, on public transit, in airports, on billboards in commercial centers or along highways. With engaging creative formats, intelligent targeting and programmatic technology backed by a sound strategic approach, you can get your message on the right screen at the right time to reach your audience where they are.
Make Your Creative Engaging
Refresh your creative with holiday or promotional messaging to emphasize value and ground your offerings as relevant gift ideas, ensuring your assets are timely for effective Q4 marketing. Consider employing high-impact creative formats, with engaging interactive features such as directly shoppable ads, store locators, galleries, 360° photo or video, gamified units, and more.
While experimenting with updated creative, make sure you keep your branding consistent, which has been shown to increase revenue by 33%.
Personalize Your Approach
It’s always vital to make your customer feel valued and recognized, but especially when facing a landscape as competitive as Q4 marketing. Personalizing creative can be highly effective in improving your ROI, as 48% of people want personalized products and offers, and 77% are more inclined to shop with brands that personalize content across their online shopping journey. Solutions like Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) enable you to personalize assets or messages a particular viewer or audience sees, and can even adjust based on location, date and time, or local conditions like the weather.
Leverage Your Videos
Once you have creative assets developed, think about new ways to implement them. If you’ve got a fantastic video that you developed for CTV placements, consider using it as an in-banner video to boost your programmatic display placements. An adaptive streaming solution like ours, aX Video Stream, can ensure that you get the best video quality for any given user without creating a heavy file weight. Interactive video is another effective option, which adds an interactive layer to any video to engage users, showing them additional information and inviting them to explore your products, services, or your brand directly in a video.
Know Your Audiences
As we navigate Q4 marketing in the face of changing privacy policies, regulations, and public sentiment, it’s vital to respect and protect your users’ personal data and privacy preferences. While some changes to the landscape can make it challenging for some older methods of targeting to perform as they once did, there are advanced solutions available to help. With a solution like Audience Insights that can provide in-depth intelligence to help you learn more about your audience and their journeys, you can tailor your approach to your existing customers and confidently scale your reach with intelligent, custom-built audiences that are far likelier to convert.
On our recent webinar, our VP of Ad Operations, Max Yang, and Gilad Barash, VP of Analytics at our partner Dstillery, examined a bit of the holiday landscape and how Audience Insights can help you better understand and effectively expand your audiences.
Get the Full Guide
These insights, as well as more data, projections, and additional recommended strategies and tactics, are all available in our new guide, Q4 2022: The Performance Marketer’s Guide. Download it now to access more content that we’re sure can help you maximize campaign performance in a uniquely challenging and competitive season.
As always, if you’d like to speak to a member of our team about how we can help improve your campaign performance through sound strategy, integrated futureproof tech and seamless omnichannel media access, reach out for a free consultation today. One of our strategists would be happy to discuss your goals and explore how we can tailor our approach to exceed them.