Despite conflicting predictions about the holiday season’s potential retail success, now could be a good moment for marketers to take a closer look at the wide array of new tools and strategies offered by the most prominent social media platforms in recent months.
This is especially true for businesses that see social media as a promising market as it offers ease of effectively expanding advertising campaigns.
Thank goodness, platforms like Meta, YouTube and Pinterest have included interactive shopping tools with their own twists to push holiday shopping for businesses. Instagram and TikTok have also released advertising guides with helpful guides for brands looking to maximise their holiday sales and marketing efforts.
We’ll go through some of the most important new features on popular platforms that businesses should try out to for a shot a skyrocketing holiday sales.
TikTok’s Holiday Marketing Mini-Site
The new holiday marketing microsite from TikTok features resources including case studies, advertising advice, creative tools and more that can be used to plan out a holiday marketing strategy.
The site includes ad solutions on increasing sales, generating leads and attracting shoppers. It also provides creative tips on creating holiday entertainment, finding perfect collaboration matchups with creators and showcasing how a product is used in the real world.
It further recommends creative storytelling formats which they call the “Holiday Gift Guide,” “Steal My List,” “Holiday Fit” and “ForYou Holiday Decor.”
Meta’s Advantage+Shopping
Meta introduced “advantage+ shopping campaigns” to help business owners boost ad performance and reach more prospects this holiday season through automation.
By handling audience targeting and ad creative elements, the campaigns are designed to streamline the process of making advertisements.
The user needs only to choose the campaign dates and budget and upload creative assets, then the machine learning-powered algorithms of Meta take over from there.
According to Meta, “Advertisers can use Advantage+ shopping campaigns to personalise ads at scale through machine learning and show people personalised products from your catalogs in a privacy-safe way.”
This is a great way to help consumers get personalised shopping experience based on their unique interests and preferences.
YouTube and Live-Streaming Shopping
YouTube has been working to increase the popularity of live-stream shopping as a method to increase app income and give creators new options to make money off their videos.
Relatedly, YouTube has introduced a number of features—including product tags, ‘merch alerts’ and augmented reality try-on videos—that are all geared toward this change.
After realising the potential of live-streaming as a key factor in driving in-app buying activity in Asian countries, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are now all attempting to develop their own live-stream commerce aspects.
Surely, live-stream shopping will grow even more in the future but nothing stops brands from making the most out of it for this year’s holiday season.
Pinterest also Goes Live-Streaming
With Pinterest TV now available in Canada, the social media company got a new window of opportunity to promote its live-stream shopping capabilities in the run-up to the holiday season.
Live-stream shopping has indeed become the next big thing for social media marketing as direct sales via live-stream shopping in China are expected to reach over $US180 billion, up from $US67 billion in 2019.
To further assist its users in finding the perfect holiday presents, Pinterest has also teamed up with a number of reputable publishing houses to create “gift guides” for the Pinterest app.
Instagram Shoppable Content Tips
Instagram has recently released a holiday shopping checklist for entrepreneurs scrambling to get their IG store ready for the season.
The gram recommends (1) experimenting with tagging products in Reels, Stories and more to reach people in different places on Instagram; (2) review shoppable post insights in Commerce Manager to learn what people are engaging with most; and (3) to turn their best-performing shoppable content into ads to reach more customers.
As the holiday spirit fills the air, brands are getting more and more competitive and creative in going after prospective customers. The proper use of these platform developments will surely give a business an edge one way or the other. So check these changes out now at each of the platforms’ online portals.
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.