Toucan Talks
Toucan Talks is a podcast for Wilmington-area business owners and entrepreneurs who are eager to learn from those on a similar journey. Each week, we talk with an area business owner about their successes, challenges, and experiences in business. Don’t worry – we keep it fun as we bounce from topic to topic.
Toucan Talks
Holiday Marketing Starts Now: Why Waiting Until November Is Too Late
Timing is everything in holiday marketing, and waiting until November might be your biggest mistake this season. Our latest Kickstart Your Week episode dives into why October is the critical month for launching your holiday campaigns and how this simple strategy shift can dramatically improve your results.
Ad costs skyrocket during the Black Friday to Christmas window as competition intensifies across all platforms. Companies that rarely advertise suddenly appear, while regular advertisers increase their budgets substantially. By starting in October, you avoid the most expensive period while your campaigns complete their learning phase. This optimization process, where platforms like Meta determine which audience segments and creative elements perform best, requires valuable time that you can't afford to waste during peak holiday shopping.
The advantages of early campaign launches extend beyond cost savings. October provides the perfect testing ground for different creative approaches – from product images to videos, copy variations to calls-to-action – without the pressure of holiday performance expectations. We share real examples of effective testing strategies, including audience targeting insights that can dramatically improve conversion rates when the holiday rush begins.
Perhaps most valuable is the opportunity to build warm audiences before your competitors even enter the game. Early awareness campaigns create pools of engaged users who have already shown interest in your brand, making them significantly more likely to convert when presented with holiday offers later. As we discuss in the episode, consumer behavior continues to shift earlier each year, with many shoppers already making holiday lists in September and October.
Don't let your holiday marketing become a last-minute scramble. Start today and position your business for a more successful, less stressful holiday season. Your future self (and your Q4 revenue) will thank you.
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Meet your hosts and learn more about Kickstart Collective at kickstartcollective.co
Kickstart Collective is a creative marketing agency based in Wilmington, NC. We offer our clients a creative advantage through creative content and marketing strategies.
Welcome back to another Kickstart Your Week. We are in October now, so we're gonna talk a little bit about holiday marketing and why that starts now and while waiting until November is probably gonna be too late. It'll be better than nothing. But if you can start in October, you're gonna be setting yourself up for success and just making this holiday season a little bit easier for you and your employees and everyone else around you. Um, so what we're gonna talk about today is ad cost surging during that Black Friday to Christmas time frame. Um, our first Kickstart Your Week, we talked a lot about ad budgets for Q4. So feel free to go check that one out. It is on our YouTube channel. We're also gonna talk a little bit about why starting some of your awareness campaigns in October and building the audience is gonna help you moving into that end of the year push. So let's dive right on in. Um again, we're just gonna touch on ad cost. Um, really, it's just the amount of competition that's happening around Black Friday and the holidays. Um people who don't normally run ads throughout the year are running ads, and then people are increasing their budget just to um get in front of people and get more sales as you know the year wraps up and the holidays are here. Um, so really what that is just doing is creating more competition across the board. So when you're bidding on your ads to get in front of people and conversions, it's just all increasing and getting more expensive. Um again, we talked a lot about that in the first video. So feel free to jump back to that one if you want to know more about ad spins and Q4. Um, but yeah, if you want to talk a little bit about more around like strategy side of the awareness ads and campaigns, we can get into the nitty-gritty.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so even if you're doing awareness ads, starting any ad, it takes a while to go through what's called a learning phase. And if you are starting those in November when the competition is really ramping up, then you're gonna be wasting time having your ads optimized when your competition is already out there in front of people that you're trying to target. So starting early means you get that out of the way. You can test different creative, different photos, videos, graphics, whatever you want to use in your ads. Um, test those early, find out what works, what people are responding to, and then you're out in the game along with your competition. You're not falling behind. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, that is a good point because there is, I mean, beyond just kind of the general competition of the time, there is a little bit of playing Meta's game. Well, it's not a game, it's them optimizing your ads to get in front of the right audience. Um finding out what everyone likes. Yeah, including Meta. Yes, exactly. Um, and that usually is a few days, but it, I mean, we've seen it depending on if especially if you have a lower budget or a tighter audience, um, that can take longer. So you don't want to start, you know, the week of Thanksgiving, but you're stuck in a learning phase. Because part of that time frame too is they are serving it up to different audience groups within your targeting, but there's, I mean, that still could be millions of people to see who's gonna convert. So, and they're gonna say, like, okay, so this segment isn't converting, so we're gonna, you know, put it towards here once we're out of the learning phase, but you don't want to waste a time during that precious window of Black Friday to Christmas. Um, but also since it is more expensive, you are if you're testing and all that during the learning phase of you know that Black Friday time frame, you're gonna be wasting money.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And starting earlier just means you have more time to build a warm audience so that you can retarget if you want to around Black Friday. Yeah. Um earlier is just always better.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yep, for sure. Um so yeah, I mean, I think going a little bit deeper into the testing, maybe we can talk about that if we want on this beautiful Monday morning. Sure. Um, so when it comes to testing um for ads, well, you can just talk about Meta. You all this is somewhat applicable to Google and stuff too, but I think um the holidays since Meta is the main, it's not, they're not search ads like Google. Google has some other options too, which have been performing really well, but just for the sake of this conversation, we can stick to meta. Um but you can test your audience groups and then you can test your creatives. Um, so if you, you know, are targeting, I don't know. I clicked on an ad for reef clogs like five times, and I really want to buy them, and I will buy them. Um it might have been something you didn't even know that you wanted or needed. It wasn't. And I was like, oh, those are cute, I want those. Um, but let's just take that as an example because they're doing extremely well. They're retargeting me like crazy. Um, but those shoes are getting targeted to me as a 30-something year old female. I don't think Luke is getting, my husband is getting those same ads. If anything, he's getting male shoes. So, um, and you know what? I clicked on the clogs. I didn't click on the other sandals or whatever it was. And so now all I see is clogs. They knew. They knew they knew you wanted it. They did because I stuck at that ad too long. Anyways, all that to say, you can test audiences and make sure your creative matches them, is really the point I was getting at. Um, but you'll you can test, hey, does like an image of a product or something that represents your service. Um test that versus maybe something with a little bit more of a graphical element to it or a video, whether that's you know, a reel or just something B-roll. Um, but October is a gonna be a good time for you to test all that. And then whichever ones perform best with a whatever audience group, then start retargeting those people with more of that same kind of content. You're gonna want something fresh. Um if you have some sort of incentive or sale or something like that, that'll help as well once you get towards the holidays. But um, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and Meadow makes it pretty easy too to test everything, even including copy and call to action and buttons and everything. They make it pretty easy to to see what works.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um, yeah, and if you're managing your ads on your own, then obviously this is helpful directly to you. But even if someone, like even if we're managing it or someone else is managing it for you, um, it's still good to have those conversations and know like what is gonna be needed for creative um for the copy and then really what are your what are your campaigns um for the holidays look like and go ahead and getting that rolling quickly now so that you're ready. You know, if you can start in October, do it. If it's gonna be pushing November, still now would be the time to get that going.
SPEAKER_00:And to figure out, like you mentioned earlier, if you want to give some sort of incentive or percentage off or sign up for this email to get a first look at whatever it is, you want to figure that out now so that you can start getting people excited and getting them interested in what you are gonna have to offer. Um but again, the earlier the better. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I think what we're talking about, speaking of earlier the better. We were talking about before this, um, was just people are shopping earlier too, and just trying to get things checked off the list. My sister asked me a month ago what I wanted for Christmas. So there you go, she's on it. Um, so if you're targeting Alyssa's sister, you better start dress in July. Um but yeah, even I mean, kind of to your point earlier with different types of content, um, on the awareness side or even traffic campaigns, like doing gift guides, um, doing like promotions for like if it's a service-based business and you know, for the holidays, things that are gonna pique people's interest and that they're gonna show engagement on the ad, or like once they get to your website, Meta is looking at all that as well to just kind of see the quality and then again the quality of the audience as well. So that once it comes time to you know do a harder sell, you have again, you have that warm audience. So um yeah, I mean, I think our main point is start yesterday, start today, start tomorrow, but don't start the week of Thanksgiving. Um but yeah, we'll have you know some of these details in the um in this email, we'll have it up on the website and YouTube as well. So you can do a slightly deeper dive. But I think that was, you know, yeah, as more now in October, I think just getting it getting things going. Or it's too late. Cool. Have a great week.