There are times throughout the year where your business will thrive in terms of sales, leads, and new loyal customers. Depending on what you offer and your customers’ needs, these peak seasons can happen several times throughout a single year. A gym may see peak seasons after major holidays, at the beginning of a new year as part of a New Year’s resolution, or just before bikini season. A shop selling Christmas decorations may only see peak season in October throughout December, it all depends on your industry. As peak season is upon us for fitness and holiday gift clients, it’s time to focus on getting advertising ready. To help prepare we have created a checklist to ensure you are ready for peak season to ensure you get the best possible results.
- Before you create any ads, carefully choose the products/services you wish to include in your marketing materials. Trying to sell everything may cause too much confusion for your customers. In addition, ensure that the products/services you’ve chosen are in your inventory or timeframe in case you see an increased amount of sales.
- It’s never a bad idea to learn from the past. If you have previous sales data, go back and examine everything that you have from last year. See what sold based on your advertisements. If you used Facebook, Instagram or other social media ads, check the general engagement and click-through data to determine what worked and what didn’t. This could save you from making the same costly mistakes.
- There are many components to a single ad. Your image has to be memorable and captivating for your leads, your text has to result in action, your links have to be working, and your ads have to be motivating to beat out your competition. To see the best results, all of these components have to sing together to create the sweetest harmony – and that’s no easy task!
- It’s important to check that your accounts are in working order. While Facebook and Instagram work under the same account, other platforms are independent. These networks can disable, close, or make your accounts inactive if you haven’t used them in a while. Check to see that your accounts are all working properly, as getting them back up and running could take significant time!
- Ads that perform well are often targeted, specific, and address pain points that show a level of understanding. Before you upload your ads to your chosen platforms, make sure you have something to measure the performance against. Sales goals are important and you can have more than one, depending on the number of products you are selling or the number of ads you are running. Getting sales goals and tracking the click-through rate is a great way to measure your sales performance, especially if you are selling within a short window of time.
- Targeting and segmentation are two major factors in getting ad success. Knowing who your target audience is and how to reach them is only one hurdle; understanding how to reach them on major ad networks is quite another. Segmentation is just as important, given the possible size of your target audience.
- Keyword research is still an important factor in online marketing to ensure you reach the proper audience with your ad. Keyword research is still a fundamental step in getting the attention of your audience and capturing those leads.
- Your ad should demand attention and ideally, have some sort of call to action. Another important step in your ad preparation for peak season is planning and creating your landing pages, also known as sales pages. This is where your potential lead will land after clicking on your ad, and it’s your responsibility to get them hooked.
- If your leads enter an email sequence after reacting on your ad, don’t leave those emails to the last minute, especially if you are planning on a strategic lead-nurturing campaign. These require planning, and poor execution could result in your ads failing across the board.
- Lastly, with the growing number of online shoppers and users, it’s important to ensure that your ad and website are not only mobile friendly, but that the new ads appear just as you wish. A single word out of frame or a pixelated image can make the entire experience unprofessional for users, causing them to skip over your ad campaign altogether. Don’t give them a reason to reject your ad. Give them a reason to click on it!
