With the holiday season upon us, it is important to be strategic in your marketing approach. The fourth quarter creates heightened competition requiring businesses to leverage new, innovative strategies to capture their target audience’s attention and loyalty. This year, AI will provide a unique digital advertising experience to help brands create a memorable user experience.
AI-powered video creative can quickly and easily transform a static, one-dimensional brand experience into an immersive, interactive one. Through AI/ML image recognition, advertisers can make relevant objects featured within the video immediately shoppable and explorable – offering a powerful solution that not only engages customers on a personal level but also guides them toward conversion.
IPOS recently reported that one in three consumers will spend more this holiday season, and half say they will do more shopping online. The time to get in front of these audiences is now.
Let’s break down a few tips to maximize your ROI this upcoming holiday season:
1. Prioritize targeting towards attention-based metrics.
Consumers will always keep their attention on what is entertaining them. Interactive video invites the viewer to engage with your content in the ways they want, immersing them in their personalized, entertaining experience.
There is a sea of new metrics measuring attention from measurement companies and ad-tech providers. When it comes to proxy signals, there are two ways to measure them:
- Probabilistic signals detect engagement activity at the device or page level and have historically been used to imply user attention. These metrics have evolved from impressions to clicks, above-the-fold placement guarantees to video views & completion rates, to the more recent viewability scores.
- Deterministic user signals can be a more accurate indicator of active attention. These signals provide a unique snapshot of true user engagement and activity at the object-level inside the i-frame of the video creative.
The takeaway: look towards metrics that provide actionable data. Of course, we’re biased, but KERV’s Active Attention Index provides a snapshot of how a campaign is performing and enables optimization.
2. Power personalization with custom creatives all season long
Stay relevant throughout the holiday season by utilizing dynamic creatives that update your messaging and product promos throughout the media plan’s entire flight schedule (!), so your promotions stay current and relevant from Black Friday to New Year’s Eve.
AI/ML and powered technology can do all the heavy lifting for you and your team with ‘set it & forget it’ features like:
- Dynamic pricing: adjusts in real-time to show the latest price drops, sales events, and more
- Dynamic messaging: Custom CTAs can change to match inventory and deal changes, ‘sneak-peaks,’ or exclusive offers
- Dynamic product feed: automatically refreshes featured products by availability, new releases, or location
- End frame product menus: Earn additional time spent and move folks down the funnel
3. Don’t waste ad dollars on wasted impressions.
Use first-party data to analyze who interacts with creatives before launching retargeted campaigns. This way, you ensure your marketing strategies are as effective as possible and optimized to reach the most qualified audience.
Compared to static ads, interactive ads see a significant performance increase in upper funnel metrics like brand favorability (+45%)* and inspire mid-funnel action like search intent (+76%*), giving you a deeper understanding of where your audience is most focused and engaged.
Recently, one retailer was gearing up for a Cyber Monday sale. To seize this opportunity, they partnered with KERV on using first-party data for strategic retargeting capabilities to great success: “When preparing for the Cyber Monday sale, the plan was to leverage first-party interactor audience segments strategically, retargeting based on intent. This resulted in close to a 4% CTR, with time spent on the creative being 13.3 seconds, a whopping 32% above the benchmark.”
Having this type of data in real-time, as it’s happening, will give you a deeper understanding of:
- The objects and products driving engagement
- Your audience
- Which products captivate their interest
Aligning your campaigns with products and features your audience wants to see will increase your performance and help you achieve your lower funnel goals. For example, one broadcast client wanted to drive subscriptions and interaction among targeted demographic audiences to increase time spent engaging with the brand. Using KERV’s AI-powered retargeting tactics, this advertiser brought their CPA down 8x.
4. Adjust your campaigns according to what’s on the shelf and adjust accordingly.
Another way to leverage AI is to adapt your holiday campaigns in real-time to reflect the current in-store inventory. During 2022’s November-December season, retail sales jumped 5.3% over 2021 to $936.3 billion, meaning inventory moves quickly.
To prepare for any potential in-stock changes throughout the holiday season, utilize dynamic creatives that can pull in real-time information about product availability. Adjusting your campaign to match inventory levels means fewer ad dollars wasted during the holiday shopping rush.
5. Retarget your audience with sequential messaging based on previous user interactions.
Sequential messaging involves a strategic approach to communicating with your audience by delivering a series of messages over time based on content they have previously engaged with. This approach is highly effective during the holiday season, as it allows businesses to guide customers through the buying journey, addressing their specific needs and concerns. AI can supercharge this strategy by creating customized creative (imagery, copy, CTAs, etc.) that offer additional information based on the objects that the viewer has engaged with previously. Alternatively, it can identify complementary products or upgrades, enabling businesses to cross-sell and up-sell effectively. This approach is particularly valuable when customers actively seek gift ideas during the holiday season.
By harnessing AI and automation in your holiday marketing campaigns, you can create a more meaningful and profitable holiday season for your business. Take advantage of leveraging this cutting-edge technology to enhance your holiday marketing efforts and maximize your success.
Contact us today to get started!
Source: https://magnaglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MAGNA-Verizon-Interactive-Effect.pdf