3 Facebook campaign ideas for Christmas

With the holiday season fast approaching, you may be wondering how to get the best out of Facebook advertising. If your priority is selling products over the festive season, it can be hard to see where Facebook fits into your marketing strategy.

Sure, we all know it’s great for branding, but how does this help push products at the most important time of the year?

Well, it’s a good question. And to help answer it, we’ve got three Facebook campaign ideas for the holiday season – all of which generate real buying intent.

#1: Inspire people with gift ideas

When people know what they want to buy they go to Google, Amazon or a specific retailer. However, when they don’t know what they want, these options are no good to them. And, guess what – Christmas leaves half of us wondering what on Earth to buy for all the wonderful people in our lives.

Here’s where Facebook offers something none of its rivals can, because Facebook users don’t have anything in mind when they open the app; they’re just scrolling through their News Feed until something grabs their attention.

In other words, they’re open to any ideas that crop up in front of them, which makes this the perfect place for you to provide that spark of inspiration – the ideal gift they never would have thought of on their own.

#2: Target the family members

Christmas is a time where we’re supposed to be buying for others, not ourselves. So, if your target audience is normally women aged 30-55, you may want to tweak your targeting options in the run up to Christmas

For example, create ads targeting married men in that age bracket with the aim of reaching these women’s husbands instead. Or, if you think your products are better suited to mothers, start by targeting age groups whose mothers would be of a similar profile to your target audience.

Combine this with our first suggestion and you could be offering up the ultimate gift idea for mums everywhere this Christmas.

Note: Don’t apply this kind of targeting to all of your campaigns. This is also a time of year for giving strong hints to our loved ones about what we want for Christmas – so keep targeting your usual buyer persona as well.

#3: Delve into Facebook product ads

We constantly make the point that people don’t come to Facebook to buy products. This isn’t Google Search and it’s certainly not Amazon. However, Facebook’s product ads are closing the gap between its News Feed and consumer purchases.

Two ad formats that really standout are Multi-Product Ads and Dynamic Product Ads.

Multi-Product Ads create a carousel of products to appeal to a wider range of tastes:

Facebook Product Ads Carousel

Then we have Dynamic Product Ads, which creates ads based on your product range and show the most relevant items to specific users. You simply import your products feed and Facebook takes care of the rest for you.

The key to turning these ads into product sales is targeting users who have already shown an interest in similar products. There are various ways you can go about this with Facebook targeting – and we’ll have more on this in future posts.

As always, the key to Facebook advertising is to remember it’s a social network, not a shopping channel. You need to create that desire to buy through strategic targeting and branded content.

In many ways, this gets easier during the build up to Christmas because everyone’s buying intent is so high. So take full advantage and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need more Facebook campaign ideas for the upcoming holidays.

Related reading

Forget the AdWords vs social ads debate: Use both or lose out

Andy King profile picture
Andy King

Andy is a PPC specialist at Vertical Leap and has worked in marketing since 2012. He manages PPC projects from strategy through to implementation and management, using multiple platforms including Google Ads, Bing Ads, YouTube, Twitter, Gmail, Facebook/Instagram, LinkedIn and Amazon Ads.

More articles by Andy
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