Last year, Cyber Monday became the biggest day in U.S. online shopping history. This year, Google anticipates that ecommerce holiday sales will grow 14%.
Naturally, the influx of online shoppers
leads to an increase in market competition. If retailers want to stay ahead of their competitors they will need to advance their marketing strategy to cater to the needs of holiday shoppers.
I’ve compiled a list of four ways every marketer should be using search and digital tools to gain the attention of hungry holiday shoppers.
1) Tailor ad copy to
highlight time-sensitive listings for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. An example would be to include Cyber Monday in your title and description such as “Nike Shoes - Cyber Monday
Sale” & “20% Off This Cyber Monday Only.”
2) Ad customizers. Ad customizers adapt text ads to what a shopper is searching for, factoring in their
device, location and even the date, time of the day or day of the week.
Marketers can use ad customizers to insert a price, a countdown (aka the time left before a sale ends), number of
products left in stock, and any other information that they feel is a valuable selling point
For example, a countdown ad customizer could include a line of text that says "Hurry, Black Friday
sale ends in 5 hours!"
Countdowns can be built out through specific parameters that dynamically update ad copy according to either the retailer’s time zone, or the shopper’s time
zone.
3) Automated rules. Marketers can use automated rules to schedule their ads to appear at specific times of the day to reflect the changes in their ad copy. This allows
retailers to set their ad copy ahead of time to reflect the shift in promotions throughout the holiday weekend.
For example, a retailer might want to run a Black Friday discount until midnight
on Friday, but the next morning (Saturday) it could run a “Black Friday Hangover Special” (from 12am to 12pm).
Same goes for Sunday, when shoppers might be looking for a
“Pre-Cyber Monday Deal” that would transition into a “Cyber Monday Deal” at midnight.
4) Ad extensions. Ad extensions such as sitelinks, call-outs and
structured snippets can be used to feature additional information about your business.
Sitelinks are clickable and can direct shoppers to a specific Black Friday page or a top-seller product
page.
Call outs are not clickable but include attractive offers such as “Free Shipping - Black Friday Only."
Structured snippets are also not clickable, but allow retailers to
feature a topic on the left side listing three coinciding words or product names. For example, a retailer could feature “Brands: Nike, Adidas, New Balance.”
When the competition is
fierce, it’s critical that retailers cater their ad copy to fit the needs of shoppers, who are guaranteed to be on the lookout for hot deals.