Discovery commerce: Successful marketing strategies to maximize sales for your business this holiday season

This is part 2 of a 2-part series. The first post is about the industry opportunity and principles to drive discovery. The second post is about how to bring this to life to maximize sales during the holiday season.

During the holidays, people expect experiences that are tailored to them as individuals. Holiday shoppers want to be entertained and inspired, and they want to discover and try new brands, more than any other time during the year.¹

That's why there's no better time to drive discovery of your products to help reach new and existing customers who want just what your business offers.

Meta offers some of today’s most robust technologies to help connect products with customers.

The Meta Discovery Commerce system offers all the tools to help a business generate demand and grow, including:

• Data integrations to help improve both your performance today and resiliency for the future
• Engaging surfaces that offer a rich canvas for mobile-optimized creative formats
• Advertising and conversion tools to help achieve a variety of business goals
• Measurement tools to gain actionable insights and make smarter advertising decisions
• AI-powered machine learning to increase performance and help you achieve more ambitious goals for less effort at scale

This year, meet shopper expectations with these holiday advertising strategies:

1

Personalization

Personalization can make the difference between feeling overwhelmed or overjoyed. 57% of holiday shoppers surveyed said they valued a personalized shopping experience when shopping online.² To drive personalized experiences during peak sales moments, follow these tips:

• Set up resilient data sources. In the face of an evolving ad ecosystem, the Conversions API creates a direct connection between Meta and your marketing data, helping to optimize ad targeting and personalization, decrease cost per action and more accurately measure marketing results. There are 3 ways to integrate: direct with your own developer resources, via Conversions API Gateway or through a third-party integration.
• Simplify account structures. With every new ad set you launch, our delivery system learns how to drive the best results for your business. Combining ad sets and campaigns gives the system greater access to learn about audiences, driving results for your business.

2

Engagement

Using a variety of creative experiences helps engage and influence holiday shoppers. In fact, a diverse creative mix has been shown to drive 32% greater efficiency with 9% incremental reach.³ To tell a compelling story through our creative solutions:

• Diversify creative concepts. Consider the various motivations for your holiday shopper and offer up a diversity of creative concepts to address customer needs, from appealing to emotions to offering practical information about your product around quality, authenticity, price and selection.
• Embrace video formats.Video has reimagined the way businesses reach new and existing audiences, and there’s a video ad for any business, budget and goal. Inspire and entertain shoppers by embracing multiple video formats and lengths, using longer stories to build brand equity and shorter content to drive reach and action.
• Partner with creators. Creators are a powerful discovery tool, acting as trusted guides that help us connect with new products, brands and experiences. Marketers are collaborating with creators through branded content ads that amplify creator posts to reach and convert more holiday shoppers. An internal study across 15 ecommerce advertisers showed a 19% lower cost per acquisition when branded content ads are added on top of a brand’s business-as-usual campaign.⁴

3

Seamlessness

Reducing shopping friction can help create better experiences for people and move them more easily from discovery to purchase. To support seamless shopping experiences:

• Drive demand and convert it into sales. Shoppable formats like Advantage+ catalog ads, Advantage+ shopping campaigns and ads with product tags help increase discovery and sales of your products.
  • Advantage+ catalog ads leverage your product catalog to match the right products to people. These tips help you maximize performance of your catalog ads:
    • Monitor your match rates to ensure you have a high percentage of products available.
    • Broaden targeting to include prospecting and retargeting.
    • Review product disapprovals to make your full product inventory available for ads.
    • Leverage creative overlays to call attention to your seasonal promotion.
  • Advantage+ shopping campaigns, our latest ad product, assembles the best possible shopping ad for each person to generate discovery and drive sales. Across 31 tests, we saw a 32% higher return on ad spend with the addition of Advantage+ shopping campaigns to business-as-usual campaigns.⁵
  • Ads with product tags enable you to add a product tag on any post, making it shoppable. They drive people directly to a product details page, enabling them to purchase seamlessly. An internal study of 10 conversion lift tests showed a 33% lower cost per incremental conversion using ads with product tags versus business-as-usual ads.⁶
• Generate leads. For some businesses, especially ones with longer purchase cycles or ones where communication with a business is important, lead generation can be an important strategy. Lead generation solutions enable people to connect with your brand through their preferred mode of communication across forms, calls and messages. To get started with lead generation, select the communication channel that is currently offered by your business and consider adding more channels to appeal to incremental audiences.

4

Measurement

Finally, measuring the impact of your marketing is key to knowing what’s working, so you can lean in on the tactics that are most effective. To continually learn and optimize:

• Set up measurement experiments. Experiments help advertisers validate their hypotheses through controlled, randomized testing to improve their campaigns on an ongoing basis.
  • Does investing more during the holidays help capture incremental sales?
  • Which seasonal promotions are resonating with customers?
  • Which tactics are driving the most efficiency?

Advertisers can run experiments using A/B tests or conversion lift tests depending on their needs.

For more guidance and holiday marketing tips on maximizing the holiday season, download the 2022 Meta holiday marketing guide.