Hello and welcome back everyone. So this week we've got something really special for you guys. We are replaying in its entirety, a workshop that myself and my team recently delivered to a group of entrepreneurs, preparing them for the quarter ahead for Q4, which is traditionally the. The healthiest most high revenue time of the year for most E eco brands, even those that aren't super seasonal, seasonal, or don't have a sort of gifting element.

It's still usually the busiest time of the year, just because there's black Friday, there's people with a higher propensity to spend. And there's just a lot more going on at this time of year. If you are, whether you're planning to do a sale or not for black Friday, and even whether you're a brand that's traditionally a gifting brand or not, this is a must listen.

We cover all sorts of strategies, both on the Google side and the Facebook and Instagram or paid social side of things that you can implement in your business and be really prepared right now for what you need to be doing now. What you need to be doing in the run up to the, to the busy season, to the peak season, and then some tactics and strategies you can employ during that busy time.

It's really important to remember that this is one of the most competitive times of the year. So even if you aren't a gifting brand, or you're not doing an offer, you need to bear in mind how competitive it will be in the ad auctions on both Google and Facebook, Instagram, and the other paid social platforms at this time of year and make sure you've got a plan.

Even if that plan is to pull back a little bit during that. so without further ado, I'm gonna switch you over to the, to the workshop and hope you enjoy it.

📍 You're here for our workshop on how you can prepare yourself for a fantastic Q4. in e-com, it's the most exciting high revenue time of the year, but it's also the most competitive.

Every year, it gets more interesting. Last year was pretty crazy. We had iOS 14, we had people coming outta lockdown. It was a pretty challenging time. This year is challenging for new reasons. So we wanna make sure you're really prepared and you've got lots of great ideas, strategies, and tactics to really make the most of this time of year.

So in this workshop, we are gonna talk to you about. What we noticed last year, what were the big trends last year? What we think is gonna continue this year, what you should be doing now, what you should be doing by the end of October and what you should be doing dur during the sale and gifting season to take advantage of all of the opportunities that are out there and stay till the end, because we will be saving the best for last, which is actually what you should be doing during that important period.

So you wouldn't wanna miss that. We are a eCommerce growth agency for direct to consumer eCommerce brands. We specialize mostly in paid social Google ads and Klaviyo email marketing. We've been doing black Friday and Q4 and Christmas campaigns for, well, at least four years now.

And we've gotten better and better as the time has gone on. We've had some amazing results, which I'll talk you through in a little bit. But I just wanted to introduce the team here. Charlotte Sargent is, is our head of paid social strategy. I'm the CEO and founder of Webtopia.

And Pedro is our head of Google strategy. So we have put together all of our knowledge from the last few years of running these kind of campaigns so that you can learn from what, from us, what works well

Just so you're familiar with Webtopia, we work with lots of amazing DTC brands, lots of them in the sustainable and ethical space from fashion to lifestyle, food, and drink. Baby brands quite arranged there of premium lifestyle brands. And we had some incredible results last year, despite the fact that it was a pretty tricky time.

Last year, iOS 14 was only six months having happened. And it was pretty competitive. We saw the highest CPMs or cost per thousand. So the advertising costs were the highest that'd ever been. But despite that was really good planning with planning your offers really well, planning your campaigns really well.

Having having a really good set of strategies that you've laid out ahead. Can men can still do really, really well in this period. It may be more competitive, but consumers are much more hungry and much more ready to buy than any other time. So if you plan it well, you can have a fantastic fantastic result.

Like so many of our clients did. So a few examples, just so you know what we are capable of and, and that actually our advice is worth listening to. So for one of our jewelry brands, we increased purchases by. 369.39% with an ad spent only increase by 227%. So paid social delivered a tracked ROAS of 4.5, four times for this brand.

And we know that the tracking is not good post iOS 14. So we expect that the actual return on ad spend was much, much higher for this brand than what we saw tracked. So a. Amazing result there for this jewelry brand. We worked with a dining and kitchenware product that I kid you, not. These numbers are real.

They may not look real that drove store revenue from 63 K in the previous quarter to 3.3 million pounds in revenue. So that was a 4700% increase in transactions. So. What it showed was this is a brand that they had not so much stock in the previous quarter. And they had a pro product that was really great to sell as a gift.

And we were able to massively scale them by having a really great plan by really getting everything ready. And we'll talk to you all about that. Having the creative ready, having the email flows, ready, having all of the the budgets really prepared so we knew what was going to happen. And that was how we were able to get such a massive scale up for that particular brand.

And then also another example of some of our results. Last year, a home interiors brand, we increased their tracked revenue by 171% from 24 K to 65 K while increasing their ROAS by 46%. So actually like more than doubling their results, but actually also the return on that spend was much higher. So even though.

Ad ad costs are much higher at this time of year. If you play your cards, right, you can deliver a much better return on investment than you would in other periods, therefore justifying spending much more during this time. So that's a bit of, a bit of a flavor of what we did last year. Now we're going to dig into how we did it.

So first and foremost I'm going to hand over to my team. So the format of today is I'm going to prompt them with questions, but they're going to talk to you exactly from the horse's mouth, how it all worked for them. And then I'm going to ask extra questions that help you guys to learn more. So first and foremost I'll start with you, Charlie.

So how, what did you notice last year as the key themes? AcROASs the paid social accounts that we were running. So I think you covered some of it there, definitely with those results. The attribution was such a challenge, you know, like you were saying, iOS was kind of fresh in, we know now that there's a lot more modeling, so there's a lot more track data than we had this time last year.

So last year was particularly tricky because it was difficult to see what was working. We could see the revenue going up in the back end, but not in the track account. So yeah, that definitely saw that being a bit of a challenge. But what we did find was with some broader, a. The attribution was actually better.

So when we went with broad or really big lookalikes, that kind of thing, or really, really large stacks of interests audience in interest audiences, those ones we did tend to see a little bit more data there. Although that won't be a problem for this year, I think it's just helpful to, to add. And, and to know that those big audiences, you might see a little bit more data.

Mm-hmm . Naturally CPMs were higher. About 30% we saw last year CPMs were higher. So it'll be interesting to see how that pattern goes this year into Q4. We know obviously CPMs have been rising pretty much year to date apart from the last couple of weeks where we've definitely seen agency wide, those CPMs coming down a little bit.

So that's exciting. And it might mean that actually. Q4 CPMs aren't quite as high as we anticipated. So with everything happening in the industry at the moment, and I know we'll talk about that a little bit more. But also just, you know, economically, I think there's advertisers that are coming out of the auction at the moment.

So those CPMs are lower, which is a great time to start the prep. But yeah, that might also mean that our Q4 CPMs aren't as high as we anticipated, which means better results. Great. And just one final thing I wanna call out for creative. We did find that static image outperform video last year.

That's not to say we'll see the same this year. We would always test everything and just make dynamic decisions based on the data that we get. And we also found with creative that. Great that had some data behind it. Did really well. So when we left the business as usual or the BAU ads running, even though they didn't mention the sale, the, the data and the optimization already built in the ad account really helped those ads to still perform during black Friday.

Slight caveat where that one is. You need to have the offer really visible on the website, potentially a site wide offer. And then you get the, the amazing surprise and delight of sending traffic to your website without talking about an offer, but they find an offer when they get there, which really helps with conversion.

Cool. And what about you Pedro, on the Google side, what were the, what were the key trends you noticed last year? So we noticed that the competition was, was higher for sure versus the previous year and as such with, with higher competition and also less search volumes the, the CPCs were, were also higher which highlighted how, how important it is to, you know, to prepare off season and, and to, and to get all, all your, all your aspects of your campaigns.

Right. And one key learning. We, we noticed as well. Is that extensions on the creative side, extensions perform better than dedicated, say lights, sail lots, which supports the idea that we, you need to keep your evergreen ads running as opposed to cutting over, to, to say lots that we, that we don't recommend.

We also got some, some nice learnings from Google analytics as you know, it allows to. Real time, conversion rates and channel performance on the key dates. And it allowed to, to maximize the composure because that data is real time. So you're not going to be missing out on, on strong conversion rates and strong performance.

Yeah. So this, yeah. Interesting themes acROASs both Both Facebook and Google of the like delayed attribution. I guess the platforms are just experiencing a lot during that time. But also generally we see that anyways, delayed attribution has been a problem because of the changes in data privacy and interesting seeing as well that.

Using ads that are already in existence in the account versus like creating a whole lot of new ads for your sale period seems to be the an important thing acROASs both. So that's really interesting. Okay. Quickly moving on then. What, what should brands be doing now? Like it seems crazy. We're in a heat wave in, in Europe.

We're hot. We're not really thinking about Christmas. What should brands be doing now? And why is it important to act now? I'll start with you, Charlie. On the paid social side. Yeah. I think there is, there's definitely a lot that brands can be doing right now. And that's why, you know, we felt now's the times obviously have this conversation and do this webinar.

So in terms of What brands can be doing right now. I think it's really important to start thinking about building email list up. So, you know, pay social, Google, Klaviyo, email marketing. These are all kind of separate things or can be seen as separate things, but they've gotta be aligned and it's gotta be combined as an overall marketing strategy.

So what we are doing for our clients at the moment is really encouraging starting to grow the. So we can do lead generation ads, or we can send traffic to the page to sign up for email list. And the reason why this is something that can be super effective and really helpful is because the CPMs are lower.

Now, especially as I mentioned with the last couple of weeks, CPMs coming down, you can grow the email list cheaper than ever right now. Like if you save it. To October or even beginning of November, those CPMs are already on the way up. So you'll see those cost per leads increasing, but if brands start going their email list now, then yeah, it's cheaper.

And also they've got longer to warm those brands up. So the caveat with this one, I guess, is make sure that you've got really good flows and automation set up so that anyone who joins your email list will go into some kind of welcome series. Where you can introduce your brand, tell a bit of your brand story and start building that connection right now.

And I think that's really, really important. And actually it's probably never too early to do that. What we saw last year with a few of our brands. So one of the jewelry brands that we worked with, they did. Their lead generation fairly early. And then as they got closer to black Friday, it was about mid-October.

They started sending campaigns out there and the ad creative and the messaging on that lead generation campaign was sign up to our email list to get the first access to our black Friday sale. So that messaging not quite relevant just yet, I would say, but you can definitely bring that in a little bit closer to the time.

And we actually generated over 1,200 leads for them at 87 pencil. So that messaging of get first access, be the, be the first to know, get it while it's hot and really, really worked at growing that email list in a super cost effective way. And we also know that retargeting, those email lists is super profitable.

So one of the confectionary brands that we worked with last year, they got a 9% conversion during the black Friday period on their black Friday ads. So just targeting the entire email list, got 9% conversion. And we also targeted a specific segment of their email list, which was engaged in the last three months.

So that would include all of those people who came in from the lead generation activity. And that one converted in double digits, which was, let me just check my notes there 19%. So that three month engage list got 19% conversion. So the numbers really show that this is super, super effective and can really help.

And that's conversion on the actual ad. That's not conversion on the email campaign, right? Yes. That would, yeah, that's right. In an email activity they're doing would be in addition to what you were doing with the ad targeting. That's awesome. Next step, what you could be doing right now, or what you should be doing right now is really thinking about that offer and planning the offer.

So are you going to do your offer just for black Friday weekend? Are you going to do it for the whole week? Are you going to do it for the whole month there? A ton of options with how you can run these kinds of offers and really it comes down to testing and thinking about what's relevant and what works for your brand.

So as a general kind of rule firm, what we tend to see is that running longer campaigns will work quite well for higher average order value brand. So if you are selling something with a really high ticket value running that campaign for longer, It's kind of advisable or what we would, what we would tend to do because it's a longer purchase decision.

So people need a bit longer to decide if it's a higher value item, they might wanna do some research. Look at competitors, look at UGC or like read reviews. And that decision will just naturally take longer. So campaigns that run over longer period of time can really help that. And what it also does is really gives the algorithm a chance to optimize.

So. Generally with higher AOV, you're going to see higher CPAs. That's natural. So the data is going to be coming into the account much more slowly. So if you are only running the campaign for three days, the, the campaigns aren't going to get much data to optimize and really nail down, you know, the segment of audience and the type of people it should be going after.

On the flip side of that, if you've got a low AOV product and te those barriers tend to be smaller, a bit more of an impulse buy potentially short campaigns work really well there because you can really, really lean into the urgency of black Friday. And like, we're only doing this offer for four days.

You're not going to see this offer again, biggest offer of the year. If you're running campaigns for whole month, it's difficult, a bit more difficult to create that urgency, not impossible. And they're just a bit more difficult. So if you've got the lower AOV Price point, you can really, really lean into that.

And that is super successful. Also about the offer, cuz this is an important one. So I I've got a few points on this one to, for consideration, are you going to do a sitewide offer? So, you know, 20% off everything or are you going to do it on specific products? What we. What we tend to advise our clients is just try not to make it too complicated.

You know, for some brands it's not possible to do 20%, sitewide, you know, the margin might not be there. Or the profitability might just, just not make sense. But what we did find is that when the offer is too complicated, You're battling against everybody else doing offers. You've really gotta cut through the noise, but if your offer is difficult to understand, then people just, you just won't get the clicks.

People will just scroll on by. They don't have the attention or capacity to, to spend time understanding that when everything else in their newsfeed and around them in the, in the real world, as well as digital is, is throwing offers in their face. So, and we had a brand last year, it was a, a female hygiene brand and they offered a free beat.

It was a related product. So it wasn't, you know, Socks or merch or whatever. But they offered a freebie with a spend over 35 pounds. And what we saw actually during the black Friday period, was CPA for those ads was 164% higher. So it was more expensive than the normal BAU ads. So that added complexity had a real knock on effect on that overall performance and that overall results because the BAU outperformed it significantly.

BAU is business as usual. So that means the evergreen, the ads that you had running normally. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The ads that run all year round agency, internal term yeah. Jargon. Is there another thing that you might consider is incentivizing. Bigger purchases for increasing average order value.

So if you really have row as goals or revenue is the goal, then you can really help to up that average order value by giving discounts on multiple purchases together. So one of the confectionary brands that we ran last year, they had a 16% increase in average order value for November during their black Friday sale versus October the previous month.

And that was even with the discount applied. So they were given a really generous discount, but the average order value was still 16% higher because they're incentivizing that bigger purchase and that bigger basket value. Yeah. And then just one final point on the offers. If you don't discount because we do have a few brands that just don't do discounts.

As Jessie mentioned, we work with a lot of sustainable brands and some of them don't have the margin to go really deep on discounts, but it's super important to really just take advantage of this period where people wanna buy. They're literally sat there with their credit. Oh, this is how I like to picture it.

Anyway, sat there with their credit cards, ready to make purchases and they're just waiting for the right person. To get in front of them with the right offer to make them buy. But if you, if you can't do discounts or you don't want to do discounts or if it's not a part of your branding strategy, there are lots of other things you can do.

So one of the brands that we work with, she sells luxury, play mats for, for babies and toddlers, and she doesn't do sales. She, it is just part of her brand strategy. Don't do sales. So what we did was we pushed brand Friday related messaging, but with her normal offer, basically what we did for that brand who didn't wanna discount is we off, we used her normal newsletter sign up discount. So she did do finance for the newsletter, get 10% off your first purchase.

That was generic practice for her brand. So we used that exact same offer. It wasn't a deeper discount. It was the exact same thing, but we just packaged it up in a black Friday message. So we made it. Friday related and what we do with her. And we've been with this client for a few years now, and for the last three years, we've done this exact same strategy for her.

And we actually run the ads prior to black Friday and turn them off for black Friday weekend because we know that those CPMs are just going to be wild. So we make it really clear in the messaging. Like we are not going to be live black Friday. If you wanna get the discount, you've gotta do it. Now offer ends 26th of November.

Be really, really clear. Tell people exactly what you need them to do, and when you need them to do it, And what we saw was the CPMs were 60% lower for the duration that we were running the offer versus the black Friday weekend, which is huge. And this really had a knock on impact on the results. So our CPA decreased by 29% versus the previous month.

So whilst we were running that offer the CPAs were 29% less. Even though it's the exact same discount for the newsletter signup that we've always run. So there's ways to do it. There's ways to get around it. And it's just super important to make sure that you are present. And talking about black Friday, black Friday cyber Monday whilst everybody else is at the same time.

Yeah. Awesome. Anything else to add on Brett? What branch should be doing now? Charlie? One of the other really key things that we do with our clients is really getting to know the numbers. So really understanding what the goals are for that period. So if you really wanna use black Friday to increase your customer base and go out to new customers and, you know, drive growth and PROASpecting for your brand, then that's going to be different goals and different strategies to, if you are really just looking for revenue.

So if you just really, really wanna drive revenue, the strategy might be to go back to some existing customers, use those email lists, use purchasing past purchase the lists and get those conversions in that way. But those two strategies would be really, really different. So it's super important to really, really understand the goals.

And it's then important to align the offer to the goals. So an example of that, let's, let's take the ROAS brand, the, the brand who really just wants to drive revenue and get as much return on their ad spend as they possibly can. And what we would be doing with that brand is like really helping them to figure out what that offer would be and make sure it's conducive to generating higher AOV.

So for the brand who wants rowers and revenue, we'd. Suggesting the bundling, perhaps like, are there any products we can bundle? Can we give a discount? How can we drive the average order value and get that revenue for you? I think and part of that, so I won't go into too much detail on this cuz I end up geeking out and I will just keep on, keep on talking.

But for our clients, we do really in depth forecasts. And what we tend to look at, what we do look at is the, the key three drivers of performance. So this. The cost by click the conversion rate and the average order value. And what we do is forecast that to the best of our knowledge, based on what happened last year for that brand based on the trends that we're expecting to see, and what that does is gives us a, a target CPA and a target rowers.

And then we know kind of exactly where we are. We absolutely don't have a crystal ball. Wouldn't that be wonderful, but we can use the data and our knowledge to really accurately forecast where we think things are going to go and then you know exactly what to expect. And once you've got all of those numbers figured out, you can really start to plan your stock.

So if you can. Predict what the CPA's going to be and you know, how much money you wanna spend, then you've got volume for stock. And that can just really make sure that a you're not left with too much surplus stock because you don't wanna come out of a promotional period with too much stock. Because then you're going to have to go into discount again, but you also don't wanna come out of a promotional period having run out of stock halfway through because the demand was so great.

And you weren't able to fulfill it. So. that part with the numbers and the forecasting is super, super important for overall business health. And just making sure that you can, you can meet that demand. Yeah. And I think as well, if you have a lot of stock and you wanna shift it being flexible in terms of like, okay, there might be an ideal ROAS that you wanna achieve.

But if the market competition turns out to be so high, that actually, if you were to happy to accept a slightly lower return on ad spend, that would unlock a ton of volume. You know, if you're working with an agency or you're doing it yourself, just get really clear on that rather than staying really sticking to this ROAS and therefore missing out on tons of new customers versus accepting maybe slightly less profitability, but a lot more volume.

It's always knowing like where, where that trade off is and being prepared to. Like knowing your numbers well enough to be able to go for it. One of the things we noticed last year is customers buying something during black Friday, but then buying more of it after the sale period was over. So they're trying something out that they then might buy for friends and family.

So if you have a product that someone might buy multiples of later on, you know, giving them that discount, maybe you acquire that customer at, you know, you don't make a profit off them on that first purchase, but if you have a gift related flow, That follows them up straight after they purchase. You might find that they buy, if you nudge them, they buy multiples.

You know, if you delight them with that, with that product. So bearing in mind, it can be a great, the short sharp sale during black Friday can be a great time to acquire customers who do become long term customers. So yeah, so over to your, unless you've got anything else, Charlie, over to you, Pedro, what should people be doing now on their Google account?

A few things I would say start assessing the historical performance also off season and understanding your customer profiles changing and the changing search behaviors expanding the keywords to include the seasonal related queries as well. As Charlie and, and you said earlier, audience building and targeting is going to be critical for seasonal success as well.

And it it it's crucial to cast your. Well ahead of, of the peak period. So you can start bringing users into the funnel and be ready to remarket. When the season kicks in long term remarketing lists can ensure you, you reconnect with pROASpects who engaged with your brand last season or even last year.

And then segmenting those lists into various groups such as recent versus long term or product specific interests, for example those can then be used to create targeted similar audiences as well. From the sourcing and the perspective, which has a huge impact on, on shopping, of course we recommend to fine tune the product assortment and the pricing and you know, any attractive deals or offers for the, for the key season.

This is the time to talk to the merchandise in teams and analyze demand. So you're ready with the right product assortment. And having something we noticed is having a sale annotation added in the feed and coordinating with your agency to ensure that any changes to product priorities are addressed in the shopping strategy is, is essential.

Our kitchenware brand saw a fivefold increase in PPC revenue in November last year versus October and getting the shopping feed and they can ping strategy in a row was crucial to, to achieving that. Absolutely. Then in terms. You know, testing new campaign times types and, and being well in advance of the peak and working out the Kings of your, of your core strategy.

I would recommend to start testing performance max, if you haven't done it yet. And now is the time it's a new for, for those that don't know, it it's a new type of goal based Google ads campaign that allows advertisers to access all the inventory from a single campaign. And you know, it, it comes.

With a lot of benefits because it encompasses all the Google properties in a unified way and allows to track the customer journey in an increasingly complex environment. And with more and more ways to research products and shop online advertises need a comprehensive, automated solution.

Mm-hmm and this is what, what it's doing. Yeah. By reaching more sites, you kind of attract more customers and generate more convers. We have seen in our shopping campaigns grow significantly at acceptable CPA and ROAS levels since we started using performance Macs. Yeah. Early this year. And it's a pretty exciting it's an exciting new channel really.

And like, it's one of these ones where. The more data you can give it now the better it will perform when, when it's more competitive. Right. So setting it up now, getting it working, it takes some time for the data to kind of crunch and for Google to get to know what works for you. So yeah, starting early with it is important, right?

Def definitely. And, and well set up performance. Max campaigns will be an essential part of e-commerce growth. This upcoming invest season. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Cool. Anything else that people should be doing now?

Well I, I would also recommend to, you know, invest in, in your window shoppers. So front load, the front load, the budgets earlier to get ahead of the competition and, and invest in the window shoppers, because you want to, to, to ensure that you're bidding and budgeting early. So getting in front of people and fill, fill their, those your marketing lists, we said earlier Yeah, we were chatting before the call about the fact that it's just so important and a more com we are going to have consumers a little bit more tight fisted this year, less likely to spend on impulse.

And so building that relationship with them and that anticipation around your product. and your brand, particularly having a strong brand and a strong brand relationship is going to, what is going to be, what makes you stay top of mind versus the competition. So I think that's really key. Okay, awesome. So onto the next section, which is, if I have lost it off my screen, hold on, here we go.

What should you be doing? What should you do by October? So thinking about the Christmas season is really like, it kicks off. I. I always think in the UK and Europe it's roundabout, when the, the brands start advertising Christmas, which is usually around the 1st of November. But in that lead up in October, you have early people who are planning, you know, there are people who buy their, do all their Christmas shopping in October who plan ahead.

So what should we be doing as brands on these platforms during that kind of October month prior to kind of sales happening when you're still kind of getting, getting things ramped up over to you? Charlie. Just that, that the anticipation, which name? Who's the, yeah. Sorry. am alternating. So I think something that brands should definitely be thinking about doing, I mean, even starting now really, but keeping it running in that lead up to the Q4 period is get those retar retargeting audiences built.

So Obviously with iOS, some of the more pixel based retargeting, we know there's a little bit of you know, discrepancy there. We know we're not going to have everybody in those audiences. Facebook is doing some modeling, but yeah, we know it's not going to be as accurate as it has been, you know, two black Fridays ago prior to iOS 14.

So what we really think and what we'll be advising our. To do is really build those on platform audiences. We know they're completely unchanged and impacted. So thinking about doing brand awareness campaigns can help you can get that really, really far and wide reach. Another one, which we'll run for our clients, and this is tends to be our go to is the engagement campaign.

So. Really like, you know, making sure that algorithm is going after people who will engage with the ads, whether that be like love, comment, whatever that might be to really build those retargeting audiences of Facebook and Instagram engages. And then the third option would be video views. So if you've got some really nice video content of your brand get that out there under a video views, objective, to start those video view.

Audiences as well. And that really plays into what you were saying Jessie, about how this black Friday is different in terms of needing to building like a relationship with your audiences. And now is the time to do that. You can build that relationship, tell your brand story, tell them what you're all about.

Like get the founder on a video, like really, really connect and, and build a relationship with the people who are your ideal customers. And that will really give you the edge when When these people are being targeted by your competitors, you know, competitor products, there's, there is still going to be, you know, a finite amount of money that people can spend.

My image of people sat there with their credit card as you know, Wishful that might be people aren't going to have lows and lows and lows of money to spend. We know there's a lot of economic pressure at the moment and we know consumer confidence is down. So, you know, you might be trying to get someone to buy from your brand.

You're not just competing with other people in your niche, but you're competing with everybody. Who's trying to get that disposable income from the people in. Feed. So yeah. Telling your brand story, making a connection with people, do that on email, do that on Facebook, do it in Instagram, do it wherever you can just tell the story, create your relationships.

And that can be done super low cost as well because those types of campaign objectives are naturally much, much cheaper than purchase objectives. Conversion campaigns with purchase optimization. So, yeah, right now might not have huge return on investment, but because the cost is low, the risk is also low, but it can have a huge reward when it comes to black Friday.

Definitely. Next step I've got, oh, sorry. Did you wanna add anything to that, Jessie? No, no, go ahead. Next step. I've got, make sure your website is ready for traffic. So you know, Facebook ads is just the first part of the journey or, or or Google or TikTok or whatever paid channel it is that you're doing.

That's just the first part of the journey. When people get to your site, you need to make sure that the site is really, really ready to convert and CPMs are going to be up. You know, Q4 always has the higher CPMs. So, if you're not doing everything you can to make sure that these people convert when they reach your site, then you are leaving money on the table.

So have a look at your conversion rate optimization, have a look at the conversion rate on your site. Is it aligned to industry benchmarks? Do the data analysis now how's your add to cart rate? Are you getting, you know, 20% of people adding to cart? How's your cart completion rate? Are you seeing 30%?

Add Carters completing the purchase. If not, why not have a look at it on mobile? How's the journey on mobile? Does it feel good? Cuz we know that's where most of the delivery happens. In social placements is on mobile. So have you checked how the checkout process is on mobile? Like all of these things will really, really help to prepare you for that.

Back Friday slash Christmas period where yeah, every penny counts. So yeah, CRO do the CRO. Similar concept to above, but kind of related to email. So do your email hygiene, like make sure that you've got your flows there. Ready to go, make sure the automations are there, like work smart are not harder, right?

Like there's no, you don't need to be doing, you know, manual stuff all the time. Set a couple of hours aside, half a day, a day. And make sure your flows are all set up to really keep your audiences warm. And to, again, just not leave any money on the table. A really big one, which is quite often missed by brands is abandoned cart recovery.

So that is, you know, really, really optimized for making sure that there is not a penny left behind for the consumer who added the cart. Then the doorbell rang or they decided. They wanted a cup of tea or the postman came and the dog started barking. You know, these things happen. Life does get in the way people, as much as they are on their phones, they don't live in their phones.

So yeah, that abandon cart series is just, you know, the tip of the iceberg and making sure that you're getting all of that revenue. I know Jessie, you are, you are definitely a lot hotter on the email side than I am. Is there any, are there any other like email flows just, just quickly that you would think are a no brainer and, and must have, I think it's having those specific flows for the period.

So, like I said earlier, like if you are. If you're running a sale, a short, sharp sale during black Friday, for instance, making sure you've got a special flow for those new customers that are coming in from that you could just have it running to new customers, reminding them of your other products or putting in more of a gifting, spin on things.

So really thinking about during this period, like what are the customers going to be different that are coming in and what would they need to, what would suit them in terms of a flow? Another thing to think about too actually is I just remembered this like. The customers who shop from, from you during the gifting period are going to be slightly different from the customers who shop from you other times of the year, because they're buying often for someone else.

So have a look at your, you can look at your Klaviyo list, for instance of people who bought from you. In the same time last year. And you can use that to create audiences and also create campaigns inside Klaviyo or, sorry, I shouldn't say just Klaviyo and your email marketing, but we always recommend Klaviyo not affiliated.

But but yeah, so making sure that you're thinking about that, okay. This is a different group of people. So how, how do my, how does my email change at this time of year in terms of who I'm targeting with what messages and what flows could I set up to really. Take advantage of the, of the different behavior and the different people that are on the site this time of year.

So, yeah. Awesome. Cool. Anything else from you about the, just in that lead up in October? Yeah. I guess the, the biggie really in terms of Actual process, I guess, or, you know, setting the, a Z to run is really making sure that you are considering everything. In terms of copy creative, like don't my advice here is don't rush, you know, take your time with it, get it right.

You know, with copywriting, for example, once that offer is defined, how are you going to package that up? How are you going to talk about it? You know, we really recommend, and we use our copy. To, to really think about, you know, marketing principles, like problem, a agitate solution. Are you going to lean into storytelling?

Are you going to make it, you know, make sure there's U GC in there or testimonials, is it going to be objection, busting, you know, there are so many different ways to package up the offer. So I would suggest, you know, use the time now to get the offer defined and spend some time thinking about how you wanna talk to people about.

Once the copy's done and you've figured out those hooks, you can start to translate that into the creative. So putting the text overlays that, you know, from your concepts or your hooks or your, you know, your sexy, sexy marketing angles, getting that into the creative as well. And again, really take your time with this because you know, there's so many design principles that you can think about to implement and what those design principles do is make sure that you are thumb stopping, make sure that you are.

Piercing through the noise in the newsfeed. So it can be things like, I don't know, like appealing to the reptile brain. So using innuendo or like food to really kind of like get people psychologically attracted to you and you know, noticing who you are. We also had a, I had a conversation actually yesterday with the head of creative and we were talking about how.

On black Friday, a lot of the creative is black. So you'll quite often see black images, black videos, black or red tends to be black Friday kind of colors. So we were having a bit of debate about, is it better to go with black creative? So you are instantly recognizable as somebody coming with an offer.

Or are you better to go with the complete opposite with that and stand out? And we actually couldn't, we were, we were battling it back and forth and we couldn't actually make a decision on that one. And we ended up with test both. So have your creative do one version in black and then one version where you just change the color.

So no additional like design work needed just literally change the color and test them against each other and see what gets the, what gets the interruption. You might see impacts on CPMs, click through rates, conversions, et cetera. So you know, take your time with it and really think about. And if you can get someone in to help you with it, get a professional designer, someone who really understands all of these different principles and concepts, because it's so important more than ever now, especially with iOS coming in and.

You know, targeting is just really different. Broad tends to be what works really well for us. So you do lose a little bit of control in terms of targeting if you're going broad or having those bigger lookalike audiences. So that's where the creative is absolutely vital and could be the make or break of your campaign.

So don't rush it, get some help if you can, if you can afford it. Or, and if you've got someone that can help with some advice there, yeah. Take your time, get it right. And you will a hundred percent reap the rewards of doing. Awesome. Anything else on the, on that early lead up? Yeah, so one sorry.

That's Getting your ads early. Ready is one thing that I would add. So it was a couple of years ago now, but during the week before black Friday, Facebook ads manager broke. You couldn't get in there. You couldn't change anything. You couldn't build ads. So if your ads weren't approved, they couldn't run.

So that's one thing is definitely have all your ads approved and ready. I would say in the account, like a week before. And have as much preprepared creative so that you can just spend your time during the busy period, just switching things on and off and moving things around, but not actually building ads or creating new creative and waiting for it to be approved.

So yeah. Anything else there, Charlie? Yeah, just one, one other tip I guess, or something you could try is if you are defining the offer now, which is from the, what you should do now, section and you can't make up your mind, or you're not sure which way to go. You can use this period between now and October to test different offers.

So you don't have to spend a lot of budget with this, you know, spend enough effort to be statistically significant and to give you some direction. But if you can't decide whether to say 20% off or 20 pounds, For example, like do some campaigns now and just test it. Doesn't have to be big budgets, but you can really start to get a feel for, okay, where are the click through rates?

What gives me a lower CPC then? Where and how does that convert on the, on the back end of that? So you can really get a vibe for what the soft stats and the hard stats are saying for different offers. And again, it's just making sure that you are leveraging this high buying period as much as possible by doing the prep work.

Yeah, exactly. And as we mentioned at the top of the call, like having creative, that's already tested and already working that already has data behind it is going to set you up rather than having launching all your ads on day one of black Friday. And I know we're talking a lot about, about black Friday, but we, we are generally referring to the entire period, the better seasoned and data.

Data back, your ads are the better they're going to perform. So think ahead, how can I make creative? That's going to stand the test of time and work throughout this period because when you get an ad that works, you really don't wanna have to be switching it off. So that's a key thing really think about kind of seasonally Season alleg, generic ads that you can run acROASs the whole period.

Evergreen, if you will, that suit the period. Okay. Quickly in the interest of time, by the way, everyone, we will be trying to finish up at 10 o'clock. So we've got about 18 minutes left. We'll run through the last bits of this, and then hopefully we have a little bit of time for questions at the end.

So Pedro, what should people be doing on Google in the lead app to the, kind of, to the busy period? So I would recommend to, for sure adapt the content, the site and the external assets, especially video having video assets that resonate and uplift the brand recall will give you an edge in your performance, max and shopping efforts.

Because you will be effectively able to reach buyers outside the usual search and social environment. Yeah. Just as a reminder, performance, max has access to, you know, lots of additional inventory informants on YouTube. You know, and as well, G as well as Gmail, the wider Google display network. And so it's, it's a massive coverage and enabled to, you know, you two to capture maybe, and, and identify some of these users that you may have thought were not your usual shopper.

And then having also campaign dedicated assets within search will of course give you an edge in, in a highly competed battlefield. Last year we worked, we worked with our jewelry client on, on consistent add to landing page journeys for the sales. And we saw a great traction from offer out extensions with up to 50% higher CTRs and conversion rates.

Yes. And this, and ultimately this led to triple you know, month and month Google revenue. We great from 35 K to a hundred K and awesome. We are keen to see, to see how far dedicated videos can take us with performance max this year. Yeah. Super exciting performance. Max is, yeah. It's the silver lining to the dark cloud of digital marketing at the moment.

I think so. If you're not getting behind that you definitely should be right. Definitely. And, and then just linked to what you mentioned earlier, you considering how the projected volumes impact the efficiency metrics. So if you're able to be more flexible with your rise, you can capture sizeable demand, peak opportunities in campaigns with smart meeting strategies and open budgets.

Yeah. You know, our home brand was able to capture a hundred percent more 140% more month and month transactions. Thanks to the joint planning process where we anticipated demand peak and agreed on a slightly more flexible CPA target for the, for the season. Yeah. And allowing in that, in the automated bidding settings helps make the most of such increased search.

Yeah, exactly. So allowing Google the control it needs, but giving it the kind of headwind, like headroom to be flexible rather than constraining it with too tight, a too tight, a ROAS or CPA goal. So back to what we talked about earlier about, if you can have a little bit of flexibility, you might be able to unlock a lot, unlock a lot more volume.

And again, it depends on what's important to you as a business, you might have a fixed amount of stock and you wanna maximize the profit, or you might have a lot of stock you need to shift and therefore it's going to. Better off to just shift a lot of volume. So you decide the strategy based on your own in individual business, which is key.

Okay. Anything else on the Google side, Pedro, just, just one interesting trend. And that is that voice search is continuing to grow and even more accelerated based on last year. So it's adding long tail keywords to the campaigns will become more important than never. And writing simple texts for descriptions will allow voice assistance to easily read the website information.

Mm. And so we recommend, recommend to add this variation as well in your creative strategy and put it into rotation. We, we use SEO tools to research such, such keywords as well as Google's keyword planning tool. And then the auto complete feature. Can help you also to get the idea of which keywords people use for searching for similar products.

And yeah, when we, when it comes to a copywriting, we, we have a dedicated creative team that can help you to, you know, to inspire you with marketing cooks that you can use in both your ads and your, and your landing pages. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So that covers the period pre prior. The really busy bit. So then when we're talking about, actually right now, we are in this period, kind of November has kicked off.

People have started flocking to the site. They're looking for offers. What should we be doing Charlie during this crazy time? I've got a bit, I could I try and be a bit more efficient and quickfire with this one cuz I get off on tangents. So I'll, I'll fire off my, my list. I'll fire off my, my thoughts on this one.

So during the period, what we find works quite well is tease the offer before, but not too far before. So maybe like 14 days before you can tease the offer. The caveat with that one is you might see conversions lower a little bit in the. To offers going live. But that's natural. Anyway, that's going to happen whether you tease the offer or not, people do hold out.

So by teasing the offer, you are just really driving the anticipation a little bit more. Change your website and have the offer visible on the website. So that it's really, really clear, really simple, you know, use the real estate on the website, like the banners at the top to make sure it's front and center consider popups.

If that's your thing. And you know, you have a brand where popups feel comfortable and relevant for you just make sure your drawing attention to it. Number three, don't turn off your evergreen ads. As we we've said a few times, you know, things that have built data in the account is where the stability will come.

And if you turn off those evergreen ads, you know, all that time, you've spent perfecting those ads and optimizing them. If you turn them off, even for a few days, that interrupts the learning. So, you know, Black Friday, gifting period is just one quarter. You don't wanna get into January, then have to start all the learning in your account again from scratch.

So keep your BAU ads running. And especially during promotional period, as we said, if people click on an ad that doesn't look like a black Friday ad and then find an offer, that's great. And actually you might see better conversions on those ads and higher conversion rate. Number four test der versus sales.

So der is dynamic ads with broad audiences. So that's really leaning into the, the product catalog and we find these super, super, super successful just all year round. Really letting the algorithm do its thing and finding the right product for the right person gives so many so many positive outcomes.

What we find with DBA as well is because you're giving lots of Control, I guess, or, you know, lots of options for the algorithm we see lower CPMs. So that can be really, really impactful during these really crazy times, especially the back Friday weekend, where CPMs are going to go up. So I would think about doing those kinds of ads versus, you know, your static, creative or video, you know, conversion, objective, purchase optimized with your more traditional creative types, test them, see which one works better and put the budgets wherever you see the best results.

Number five, prepare for slow delivery and massive competition. The algorithms are just sluggish. The auction is super competitive. Everyone's clamming to get into the inventory and the placements and the news feeds and all over the different social platforms. So you might find that you need to get your budgets up a little bit, or increase your budgets to make sure that you can get that delivery.

So. Partly to overcome the CPM challenges. So if your budget's too low, you just won't win the auction and you won't get the delivery. So really need to think about putting them budgets up, especially for retargeting, which as we know, generally, the CPMs are higher, smaller audiences, harder to find, et cetera.

I'm going off on the tangent coming back. So put your budgets up especially for retargeting number six expect delayed reporting. So, you know, we know there's least a three day day to delay most of the time, but especially during this period, we, we do think the attribution is going to be slow. So if you're making optimizations, you know, Q4 is a long time, three months is a long time to to be suffering and making wrong decisions.

So what we would be doing is looking at total website data. So make some changes. Are you seeing actual. Money coming into your Shopify or store, whatever that might be in the back. Number seven, as much as you possibly can try and avoid making really frequent changes to your ads, your bids, your budgets, and, and try to consider longer periods of time to assess performance.

As Jessie said, you know, we're talking Q4 as a whole here with black Friday, specifically, if you're only running it for the, for the four days, the black Friday to Monday cyber Monday, that obviously becomes a little bit trickier, but as a general rule for Q4, just try and let. Try and let things settle.

Let the, the algorithm find its way by not making too many adjustments, hourly and daily performance metrics are going to be super chaotic and really incomplete. So you might end up damaging performance if you're making decisions based on what you're seeing in your account. And then number eight, which is my last one is email and SMS should be a really integral part of your campaigns and should be really aligned with what you're doing acROASs any of your advertising platforms, Google, Facebook, et cetera.

You know, you've got head of paid social head of Google next to me over here, but that's not the full story. Like you can be doing additional things with your email, your SMS. You've just gotta talk to people however you can and find them the best way that you can and make those strategies. Awesome. And Petro, what would what's, what's going to be happening during the busy period over on Google?

How are you approaching things? Well, during the big season, we, we definitely recommend to lean into automated bidding, as we said earlier, because machine learning provides a huge benefit in our complicated journey. You can make it smarter using tools and, you know, using historical data assessment as well.

I would be ready to open up your budgets, adjusting your raw or CPA targets for more gradual trends. So if you're running short term promotions or expecting unusual short term spikes, that's where Google ads seasonality adjustments can be, can be helpful too. Another point is regarding analytics. I think I mentioned this earlier as a learning that, and that's something you should be also leaning into as the platforms record conversions to the day of that click, not the day of the conversion and, and with Google analytics, you can view real time conversion rates and channel performance for your key dates to ensure you're not missing out on real strong conversion rates or, or performance on certain items.

Next, I also have here budget monitoring alerts. So if you're not doing things right. If you, sorry, if you're doing things right with your target pROAS and CPA and open budgets, this may be not necessary, but you may also want to set up depleted budget reports. These are helpful because the worst thing that can happen during your peak season is your best performing campaigns running out of budget early setting up this type of alerts to maximize that brochure and, and, and sees, or, or late during your peak periods as as possible.

And finally channel reporting. So looking into our by hour channel reporting for your key days will show you, you know, overall changes in spent in traffic and conversions and making sure that you're setting up yourself for success for next year. Awesome. Okay. So we've got a few minutes left just to talk about what we expect to.

So we talked at the top of the call about what we saw last year. Like kind of what the trends were. We know this year, the elephant in the room is that we think there's a recession coming. We hope it's not, but it, you know, maybe it'll be here by then. We know for instance, that consumer that inflation is here already.

So people have less money overall to spend. What else are we expecting to see and how we combating that? I'll go, go to you first, Charlie. Yeah, it's going to be a challenging one. Isn't it? I think some of it we've covered already. So I guess the, the real key one specifically for paid social is we know the CPMs are going to be up So the rate to combat this is just make sure that the media buying is efficient as possible.

So, as I mentioned before, use bigger audiences, you can likely see some CPM relief with bigger audiences, the data campaign. So dynamic ads to board audiences. We normally see CPM advantages there and also really make sure your creative is top level. So is next level, sorry. So we always see.

Rewards in CPMs when you have really engaging and really well converting ads, Facebook will always put CPMs up and kind of penalize you on any ads that it doesn't feel irrelevant. Or if the signals on the ad show that it's not relevant. So really making sure your creative is delivering will help to get CPM relief.

So make it clear, make it engaging, make it them stopping. Yeah. Also think, yeah, what might be different this year is we might see like consumer buying patterns being different. So I think last year we were still kind of in the halo of Q4, we were still kind of having the halo impact of increased online shopping in this, you know, almost post COVID landscape where we were in Q4 last year.

So I do think it's likely that we might see buyers shopping in the high street a little bit more than they were last year. So again, going back to what we we've mentioned. Telling the brand story making things making it as easy as possible and reducing all friction to online purchases is going to be super, super important.

I think that really summarizes it. The days of just maximizing your peak period are, are gone and you, you really need to be doing a great effort in your off peak period to make sure that you understand your target audience and the state of your account leading up to the, to the peak. Yeah. Cool. So thank you so much everyone for coming.