Your Holiday Strategy Guide To Maximizing Q4 Roi
Each year, our team looks forward to the holiday marketing playbooks that each social media platform releases come Q4. These help us optimize our strategy through the busiest season of the industry and ensure we best position our clients and their holiday campaigns. Well, it’s finally that time — Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok have finally released their playbooks and they’re PACKED with valuable information on navigating the holiday season.
Unpacking these playbooks can be a time-consuming task, we know. To ensure our strategies are in top shape for our clients, we’ve dissected each platform’s strategy guide and compiled our top takeaways into one tidy blog for you all. Read on to discover our top takeaways for maximizing our clients’ ROI and success in Q4.
Q4 STRATEGY GUIDE: META
Meta’s strategy guide laid out everything marketers need to know to amplify Q4 sales by emphasizing four key marketing elements:
Reels
AI tools
Holiday dates
Reels
To start, Meta recommends marketers leverage short-form, engaging video content to capture their audience’s attention. We’ve done this leading up to Q4 with several of our clients, including Derma Health Skin & Laser. To build anticipation around the grand opening of their newest location, we created short-form Reels that teased the location and gave our audience an inside look at their new space. This content was a great way to capture audience attention and build excitement for the upcoming opening.
When it comes to Reels, Meta also recommends you put a face to your business, and use this feature to do so. This helps add a familiar face to your brand and fosters stronger relationships with your audience. We’ve done this with our client, RAYVI, by collaborating with their founder and Registered Dietitian, Robyn Spangler, to create a Reel all about their upcoming launch. This not only helped humanize the brand, but it also encouraged the community to engage, feel informed, and excited.
AI Tools
Another recommended way to enhance your Q4 strategy is with Meta's newly integrated AI tools, which elevates your ad creation and audience targeting efforts. While these features are fresh to the platform, now is the perfect time to get ahead and learn how to customize them to align with your brand's specific advertising goals.
Meta’s AI tools include:
Background generation to add behind product images. This helps you tailor your ads to different audience segments.
Image expansion to seamlessly edit content to fit different aspect ratios like feed posts and Reels.
Text variations to automatically generate variations in copy to better target different audience segments.
Key Holiday Dates
As always, planning is KEY! Meta shares this starts with mapping out key dates and aligning your campaigns accordingly. At our agency, we use our Q4 Promotion Planning Guide to develop a strategic game plan for each client, ensuring their promotions launch seamlessly. Not only does this help us get ahead of the holiday promotion noise, but it also enables more efficient budget allocation.
By using auction trends and setting aside a larger ad budget for high-volume days, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you can reach more people when buyer’s intent is highest. Tools like automated budget allocation for top-performing ads can also help you maximize your ad spend during these important periods.
💡 Pro-tip: To maximize your efforts, block out any holidays or events that may lead to an inactive audience on social media. To learn how our agency is navigating digital marketing in an election year, download our Q4 Promotion Planning Guide!
Q4 STRATEGY GUIDE: PINTEREST
It’s no secret that Pinterest is a platform made for inspiration, making it a must-have in your Q4 holiday campaign strategy. Pinterest proved this in their holiday playbook, noting that its users spent 40% more on holiday shopping than non-users, making Pinners a marketer’s dream target audience!
So, how do we best target this audience? By leveraging the platform’s own tips, of course! Pinterest broke down their Q4 strategy guide based on the stages of the marketing funnel:
👀 Awareness: Awareness campaigns are essential for building relationships and expanding your brand’s reach. By running image, idea, or video ads, you can introduce your brand to new audiences. Starting in early Q4, focus on creating top-of-mind awareness while showcasing your brand’s story to forge stronger connections with potential customers.
🤔 Consideration: Next, once users are familiar with you, use carousel or collections ads to help users compare products. Pinterest is excellent for visualizing product bundles or holiday aesthetics.
🔁 Conversion: Then, ramp up shopping ads during the holidays to make a seamless shopping experience. Shopping ads feature direct links to items being advertised, so the user doesn’t have to go searching for a product and can easily find (and buy) exactly what you’re showing them. Fun fact: brands using Pinterest’s shopping ads saw 60% higher ROAS in Q4 2023.
📆 Post-Holiday: Switch back to awareness campaigns after the holiday season to maintain momentum going into the new year.
Additionally, to enhance customers’ shopping experience, Pinterest shared that Urban Outfitters found success implementing their direct links feature, which makes it easy for customers to click on an ad and complete a purchase. As a result, brands like Urban Outfitters saw 50% more conversions at 57% lower costs than the previous year. According to Chris Worthington, Head of Marketing & Ecommerce, the UO campaign felt like a curated treasure hunt for Gen Z, blending inspiration with must-have gifts. The campaign made it easy for shoppers to act quickly by providing direct links whenever they discovered the perfect gift.
Leveraging Pinterest for organic exposure can benefit your Q4 strategy as well. As shoppers scour the platform to find ideas and inspiration for gifts, party supplies & decor, and more, it's crucial to optimize your organic content to reach the right audience. We ensure our pins are equipped with targeted keywords, detailed pin and board descriptions, relevant hashtags, and direct links to the *exact* products being promoted. This approach makes the Pinner’s experience—and their path to conversion—as seamless as possible!
Q4 STRATEGY GUIDE: TIKTOK
Last but not least, small and medium-sized businesses — you’ll want to tune in for this one! 📣 Any digital marketer is familiar with TikTok Shop. It’s revolutionizing e-commerce by allowing users to purchase products directly in-app, with shop links embedded in the videos featuring the products.
In their holiday playbook, TikTok recommends:
Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and provides a smooth shopping experience.
Leveraging Spark Ads and Catalog Ads, which personalize product recommendations to your target audience based on their behavior, to drive traffic and conversions.
Focusing on Video Shopping Ads to push users from TikTok to checkout. In their playbook, TikTok boasted that 70% of users say it is easy to purchase through the TikTok shopping-related ad they saw. Making shopping as easy as possible for consumers makes them more likely to follow through with their purchases! Don't forget to use retargeting campaigns for those who abandon their carts.
Using TikTok’s in-app creative tools, like video editing (for speed, sound, etc.) and video templates, to create engaging videos that attract shoppers. This will further boost sales and ensure TikTok’s algorithm pushes your content to the right audience
We hope our holiday strategy guide gave you some guidance on how to effectively execute your Q4 campaigns on each social media platform. To keep up with all the latest social media news and trends, follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
Chat soon!
xx,
The Homies
