Are You Ready for Q4?
We're rapidly approaching Q4 and the retail season of the year and that means a lot of things.
It means...
Audiences are in the mood to buy
Advertising costs can expect to increase and demand increases
If you haven't been putting in the hard work to build demand, you may be in a race to the bottom on price alongside your competitors
You should be knee deep in planning for 2024.
Let's take a look at each one in a bit more detail.
As we creep closer to Black Friday weekend and Christmas, many consumers will begin thinking about purchasing gifts and/or what they might try and set their eyes on that may be discounted. But remember, "once a discount customer, always a discount customer" so do not rely on Black Friday to acquire customers with a high or long LTV. They may only buy once, or only buy on sale. However, your audience being in the mood to buy means making sure that all your conversion ads that are set up to push people to purchase (rather than for building awareness or engagement) need to be optimised.
Supply and demand dictate advertising costs. The higher the demand, the more expensive CPMs and CPCs may become. Be aware of this. Work out how profitable you can expect your ads to be (especially for Meta) by working backwards from your CPM and using your average conversion rate to calculate estimated returns.Don't let a lower ROAS put your off though. ROAS will stabalise or even reduce as your begin to invest more but that doesn't mean your revenue is suffering. Take a look at overall revenue/profits generated as a true metric of success.
Ecommerce is becoming more and more competitive every year. If you haven't been building awareness, engagement and community over the course of the year, the only lever you have to pull when demand starts increasing into Christmas, is price. And then you may fall into the promotional cycle where you have to keep promotions running all the time in order to encourage consumers to purchase. If you haven't quite had the time or strategy in place to acquire and nurture new audiences that will always pay full price this year, then try and make that a priority for 2024.
2024 plans should be starting to shape up. Get your team together and start discussing creative themes, your brand's story and which channels you might want to start testing which help engage audiences higher up the funnel. Take a look at your marketing budget and make sure that you haven't allocated all of it to your bottom of funnel sales ads. You will need some Performance Branding campaigns in order to remain competitive and grow!
