OMG, It's Omicron! How to Stand Out with Your Winter PPC Advertising

As global fears of a holiday wave of the newest Covid-19 variant ramp up, businesses need all the help they can get to come out of this season in reasonably good shape. Here’s one way: how to make the most of your PPC campaigns this season. After all, if the most dire predictions play out, more people will be shopping from home online.

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday now past and Christmas/New Year’s just around the corner – three of the biggest selling events of the year – businesses must look at ways to fine-tune their online marketing strategies, including their PPC campaigns, to ensure they’re effectively capturing the attention of their target audience.

The biggest thing to keep in mind nowadays is that everyone will be looking to harness the power of these retail events for their own gain, whether it’s home repair, fast food brands, nursing care, or massages and spas. This means competition will be fierce, and the environment will be crowded with every type of ad you can imagine – shopping ads, text ads, responsive ads, and display ads, to name but a few. Consumers’ attention will be divided between many competing businesses, including yours.

The biggest thing you can do is dare yourself to be different. Because while these holidays and events remain popular, most of the existing marketing tactics used this time of year have been exhausted. One way you can do this is to personalize your ads – not just to your target audience – but to demonstrate how different your brand is compared with the competition.

Coupling strong and compelling content with eye-catching imagery that reflects your brand’s unique persona – while effectively advertising your products or services, of course – can be just the thing you need to diversify your content from the standard ads consumers are so used to seeing during this time of year.

It’s also important to remember that consumer behaviors have changed massively with the pandemic, something you must take into consideration when putting together your winter marketing campaigns.

For example, the most notable change is the dramatic shift to online shopping, with the online purchase penetration rate hitting 87% in 2020, highlighting the increasing expansion of the ecommerce sector here in the U.K.

While this is good news for e-commerce businesses, it also exacerbates the need for standout marketing campaigns and deep data integration of product, stock, and price data by brands in every sector.

Another way to diversify your brands is to go above offering standard discounts and instead add extra offerings such as free shipping and returns, bonus schemes, and customer loyalty points.

With the same standard discounts from brands (e.g., 10% off your purchase offers recycled and reused every year), it can be intriguing to consumers to be presented with different types of incentives from your brand.

The power of remarketing

Over the years, the attention span of online consumers has dwindled. Combined with the today’s human attention span of 8 seconds, brands must get savvy to capture the attention of their audience in such a small window of opportunity.

Remarketing is the perfect solution. With so many variations of remarketing, brands can increase their chances of placing their brand name in front of intent-driven consumers in important, peak seasons. For example, by incorporating remarketing into your winter campaigns, you can target consumers who may have paid frequent visits to your site without converting. Combining this with a discount or incentive can encourage them to finally make that conversion.

Consumers are as much as 70% more likely to convert after seeing and engaging with a remarketing campaign – which can increase overall sales by 20% or more.

Not only can remarketing be incredibly valuable in your winter PPC campaigns, it also can improve overall metrics such as conversions, traffic, revenue, and average order value.

When looking to remarket to your target audience, also consider cleansing your existing database to ensure you’re reaching genuine customers who have a higher chance of converting. Older contacts may no longer be interested in your promotions and campaigns, which is a waste of time and resources.

By cleansing and building back up a new database, you can ensure that you’re reaching out to valid prospective customers, which can increase your deliverability and ROI.

Finally, in preparation for winter, brands should remind themselves that it’s never too early to begin campaigning. By launching earlier – even for post-holiday specials – you can get your brand in front of your audience first, before the mad rush and intense competition fully begins.

The likes of Amazon worldwide and Gymshark here in the U.K. have found this method to be particularly successful, often promoting “early Black Friday deals” ahead of the big event. This not only gets their promotions seen first, it also gives their customers a sense of exclusivity, which goes a long way toward encouraging brand loyalty.

By incorporating some of these tactics into your winter campaigns, your business will be better placed to maximize profits during an incredibly important time of the year, while also improving on key performance metrics that are vital to business growth.

Nate Burke is CEO and founder of U.K.-based Diginius, a software and solutions firm focused on helping businesses achieve maximum impact from their online sales and marketing activities. An early e-commerce pioneer and entrepreneur, he launched his first Internet business in 1997 and is a two-time Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year nominee. For more information, visit their website.