Paid Social Media Holiday Marketing
What Not to do with Facebook Ads
What’s your paid social media holiday marketing plan for your motorcycle company? Below are some holiday sales ad strategies that often make the difference between a profit and a loss.
First, you or your social media marketer must know your biker target audience. Your social audience and website tools can help in this area.
Importantly, it is better if your social media marketer rides and knows the biker world. You will find that marketers who are riders have more knowledge than passengers. This gives them more insight into your products and target audience.
If you don’t know your target audience, doing paid ads during the holidays isn’t the time to find out. One of many reasons is that you are bidding on this limited number of ad spaces. And during the holidays there is the most competition. Therefore, this is when your cost per impression (CPI), cost per engagement (CPE), cost per click (CPC), etc., are the most expensive.
In addition, your search and website consultant must be an expert on the social platform’s advertising software you plan to advertise. If they aren’t, you can lose big.
Next, if you still want to try social ads, start with a low advertising budget. Remember to A/B test your ads; this will give you data on which ads are the most profitable.
Then, when your ads are dialed in, and there is data to support doing more ads, you can make decisions based on facts. Besides that, the data might also show where improvements can be made in the ads.
This can be in your targeting, product or service ads and other areas. Plus, you don’t want your profit on one social media platform to be canceled out by the loss on another, or you’d be spinning your wheels.
Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
Here’s sound advice about your company’s paid social media content. It is about the mix of your posts and their timing.
Importantly, your social marketing efforts for holidays can’t start right before the holiday. If you’re trying to advertise to first-time customers instead of repeat customers. And the reason is that you’d be disregarding the fundamentals of the buying process. Here are the four stages of the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness – Your target audience must know your company and product even exist.
- Interest – Your target audience must learn about your motorcycle products or services to become interested.
- Decision – Next, your prospects look for a solution that meets their needs and budget.
- Action – Finally, your target audience is ready to make a purchase. Your buying process must be simple and easy to finalize the sale.
Paid Holiday Marketing Error
Here’s one common and costly error. It relates to your company’s paid social ad strategy, putting out last-minute ads with discounts.
Yes, this strategy can work if your target audience is limited. If, for example, you’re only advertising to Facebook followers, it can work. For this to work, your social media marketer must regularly do a solid job with quality strategies.
One reason is that these riders know about your company. Another reason is that they’ve learned about, or at least seen, your products or services.
What does not work well is trying to reach a new, broad audience during the holiday that has never heard of your company or offering. Mistakenly, you can’t skip the fundamental stages of the buyer’s journey.
As you can see above, it also makes sense that people aren’t considering or buying a product until they know about it.
Workaround for Holiday Social Ads
Is there a way around the above issues? Let’s say your company regularly posts two to four monthly posts. Well, it isn’t ideal, but it can work. However, if there aren’t regular posts on your motorcycle company’s social pages, the information below can help.
You’d need to start marketing a month or two before paid holiday sales. Furthermore, the focus would be building awareness and providing information to gain interest in your company and products. Note that ads to create awareness and engagement are less expensive than ads with a conversion goal.
Also, a month or two before the holiday, you don’t want “buy now,” “huge sale,” “discounts,” etc., types of ads. Yet again, it is time to build awareness and interest. In addition, it is time to differentiate between your company and products and your competitors.
Different Types of Products
Next, your success with paid social media ads will be influenced by your products. For instance, let’s say your company sells closed-face motorcycle helmets. Most riders aren’t in the market for a new helmet, so they are most likely not interested in buying one.
Let’s say the price range for your helmets is from $150 to $650. At this price, many bikers won’t purchase a helmet unless needed. Even a 10% to 30% discount or free shipping probably won’t make them buy something expensive that they don’t need. Note that large or frequent discounts can impact the perceived quality of your products and business.
As you know, a motorcycle helmet at this price is not an impulse buy. Now think how this differs from if your company sells a revolutionary motorcycle product. In addition, let’s say this revolutionary product has no competition; plus, it is only $10. Many more riders who know little about your company or product will buy.
Motorcycle Ad Result’s Expectations
Another issue arises when you’re an employee or marketer. Often, your boss or the company owner won’t understand the above. Instead, they might tell you, “Get on it and get the ads live.” So, setting expectations and discussing last-minute ad strategies early is important. Hopefully, with the above information, you can start the discussion with your boss two or three months before the holiday.
Facebook “Learning Phase”
Another item to discuss is how some social ads work. Facebook is a good example. When your Facebook marketing expert sets up ads, there is a “learning phase.” During this period, Facebook’s algorithm is dialing in what audience will accomplish your ad’s goals the best.
It takes 50 goal conversions (you set the goal of your ads) within seven days to get through the learning phase. During this period, the ad cost for your biker company is higher. Note that if your set goal is not getting 50 conversions in a week, there are two things to do:
- Increase your budget.
- Make the conversion goal easier to accomplish. Let’s say your preferred goal is sales. But you can lower the goal level to get the needed goal conversions. So, you could set the goal for the number of times items are added to carts or just visitors.
*If you make significant changes to your ads during or after the learning phase, your ads can go back into the learning phase. And this means the cost per your ad’s goal goes back up, so your net per conversion goes down.
After enough ads have gone through the learning phase, you can use Facebook’s lookalike audience ads. With these ads, you can allow Facebook’s algorithm to find people with characteristics similar to your existing customers or those who meet other criteria.
The above is another item that should be discussed with your boss or the owner of your motorcycle company. Ideally, it should be done months before your holiday ads start. First, you’d want to let them know in general. Also, you’d do this to get approval to do paid ads to build awareness and interest before the holiday. Hopefully, your boss or owner will see how important the marketer’s input is.
One final note: during the holidays, many companies are overwhelmingly busy. Subsequently, their shipping and client service aren’t as good. However, giving excellent customer service will help your branding stand out in the short and long term.
In summary, for most motorcycle businesses, you must have the awareness or start an awareness campaign before advertising. If you don’t, it can waste a lot of money on ads. Plus, you will miss out on that year’s holiday sales season, which will cost you money. Finally, you can read an overview of motorcycle marketing or learn about other digital marketing on our blog.
