It’s that time of year again when shoppers are eagerly waiting for the deals and discounts that come with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It’s important for marketers to build effective campaigns to make the most of this shopping season. With a rapidly changing digital landscape, having an effective strategy is key to a successful holiday season.
Understanding the end-of-year shopping landscape for 2023
This end-of-year shopping season is marked by inflation and economic uncertainty, making the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend a major commercial event for consumers and marketers.
While the single day of Black Friday remains an important part of this shopping season, some retailers are extending it over a period of seven to 10 days. This extended timeframe provides both opportunities and challenges for marketers looking to take advantage of this key shopping event.
According to a study by NAB Australia, in 2022, Australians spent more than an estimated $7.1 billion across the four-day Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping event, up 20% from the week prior. We’re expecting this number to keep growing this year, as consumers are increasingly open to taking advantage of deals across multiple days than waiting for just one day.
Another factor impacting the end-of-year shopping landscape is inflation. With rising prices on goods and services, consumers may be more focused on finding ways to save money during their holiday shopping and switch their consumption preferences and attitude toward their favourite brands.
These four tips will help you navigate this landscape to effectively engage consumers across every channel and make sure your Black Friday and Cyber Monday ad campaigns hit their mark this year.
1. Engage consumers early and across every channel
It’s crucial for marketers to begin gaining consumer attention and reinforcing that connection as time goes on. Rising prices are driving many shoppers away from brands they once adored. According to recent studies, 65% of Australian consumers said inflation has driven them away from brands they were previously loyal to.
So, more than ever, you must anticipate and invest in your brand awareness campaigns earlier to effectively engage customers.
Consumer behaviour is increasingly digital and omnichannel. On average, Australian consumers spend 57 hours 39 minutes on mobile and tablet per month, and 51 hours and 14 minutes watching connected TV.
As the content available to consumers on multiple devices and channels continues to grow, consumer attention is more fragmented than ever, making it increasingly difficult for marketers to capture their attention. It will be key to your success to develop digital experiences that seamlessly engage your audience across different screens.
2. Increase efficiency with deals and inventory packages
To optimise effectiveness and efficiency, more marketers are turning to direct deals and open-market inventory packages to streamline access to curated inventory—particularly in streaming TV. Transacting through private marketplaces means you can buy clean, exclusive omnichannel inventory while also measuring what drives conversions and campaign effectiveness.
This holiday season, work with your preferred partners to curate supply across the open market with inventory packages or use one-to-one deals to take advantage of direct agreements with strategic media owners. Reach audiences based on audience data, content category, device type, format, and more, to engage relevant shoppers on the right channels throughout the season.
The early part of this shopping season is all about capturing attention to make the most of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Building on the success of these upper-funnel brand awareness campaigns can also help you drive conversions later in Q4.
3. Refine your approach to addressability
The digital advertising industry is well on its way to a privacy-centric future that doesn’t depend on third-party cookies or device identifiers. Already, more than 35% of web browsing is already happening on cookie-restricted websites. It’s increasingly important for marketers to test and scale alternative addressability solutions, like universal IDs, to reach hard-to-find audiences and deliver compelling digital experiences.
Authenticated universal IDs provide all the advantages of people-based marketing, allowing you to connect with customers on multiple devices, set user-level frequency capping, and evaluate cross-device activity, while protecting consumer privacy.
You can extend your budget by using universal IDs to target audiences in cookie-restricted browsers like Safari, Firefox, and Edge, where CPMs are cheaper than in Chrome. This can result in improved performance and a more cost-effective reach.
4. Invest in sustainability initiatives
Sustainability is increasingly important to consumers: 63% of Australian consumers say they think very highly of brands that are environmentally friendly.
While there are many factors contributing to brands’ sustainability efforts, the environmental impact of digital advertising is significant. Every step in the lifecycle of an ad, from creation to delivery, produces carbon emissions.
Take your sustainability efforts up a notch by incorporating Index’s Green Inventory Packages, which are Scope3-certified carbon-neutral media, into your advertising initiatives. With the help of a single deal ID, this curated selection of media won’t only enable you to keep track of the carbon in your campaigns, but also help you make decisions based on data and decrease your carbon footprint.
To learn more about the opportunities to make your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign a success, contact us.
