Digital upskilling

Every year is packed with leverage points for your advertising campaigns and marketing messages. Not all events should be utilised as a message or reason for a sale, but there are some that, if approached smartly, can yield a strong result for your business.

Whether sporting, cultural or just a good old fashioned sale date such as boxing day, 2023 will not be short of dates to latch on to and run with when it comes to your content and marketing.

Highlights in January to September that can work for most businesses to structure marketing messages around include Mothers Day, EOFY, School Holidays, Click Frenzy (multiple dates), Father’s Day and Footy Finals (AFL and NRL).

Q4 however, is unique in that most opportunities, especially for eCommerce businesses revolve around dates designed purely to promote online shopping.

• Click Frenzy – Nov 8
  • Generally a 24-48 hour burst.
• Singles Day – Nov 11
  • Originally a Chinese eComm spectacular, it has since grown to be adopted as a global sales day. Globally, it actually surpasses BFCM in sales.
• Black Friday/Cyber Monday – Nov 25-28
  • Expect other advertisers to begin their sale as early as the first week of November.
  • Expect Cyber Monday sales to be extended to Wednesday the 30th.
• Christmas Gifting – Dec 1 – 11
  • Generic sale period for Xmas presents.
• Panic Saturday (Last Shipping Date) – Dec 12 – 17
  • Last ‘safe’ ordering period to ensure delivery prior to Christmas.
• Boxing Day
  • Expect this to be extended right up until Dec 31 for most advertisers.

General considerations and recommendations for winning Q.

• Get your house in order before driving paid traffic. Any pesky website issues that you’ve noticed or marketers have suggested, get looked at before investing in advertising. It might cost you a one off cost for a developer, but if the impact increases conversion rate by just 1%, this could be substantial.
  • Another conversion rate booster (if not already done), is adding additional payment options such as BNPL providers and Apple Pay.
• Go earlier. Every year more and more eCommerce brands launch their sales earlier and earlier.
• Expectations. Some audiences CPM’s (cost per thousand impressions) and CPC’s (cost per click) across key digital ad channels will rise north of 60% this year compared to 2021 (driven by more advertisers in a limited pool of inventory). The same budget via the same strategy last year won’t achieve the same amount of reach this year on ad channels. This is part of the reason many brands go earlier!
• First party data capture should be a key part of your lead in strategy and then fall in to always on, if it isn’t already.
• Avoid chopping and changing strategy unless absolutely necessary. Meta campaigns will get sent right back into a learning phase they might not come out of. Not where you want to be on key days in Q4.
• Deals don’t have to be a percentage off. Whilst this is generally a winner on the peak days, consider lead in offers such as;
  • Gift with purchase
  • Multi item bundles
• Make your channels work together. The more you can integrate your ads with your CRM (and others!) activity the better. 

Check out our short video on eCommerce sale dates.