Holiday Trends You’ll Want to Buy Into

As overall retail holiday sales increased 4% from 2015 to 2016, online and non-store sales increased 12.6%. Setting your client up for success and capitalizing on this consumer shift from in-store to online is vital – and it starts right now.

Understanding consumer behaviors and trends in the marketplace is essential to keeping your current customers engaged, while enticing new customers to experience your brand. Salesforce released their 2017 holiday predictions, and below is a breakdown of how it will impact your brand:

It is important to understand when your customers are shopping. You can find peak purchasing hours for your accounts from Google Adwords and Facebook Ad Manager to create a custom dayparting schedule that flexes spend by adding bid modifiers during your top converting hours. The most popular online shopping time for website visits and orders is from 8 pm to 10 pm.

Likewise, you can understand when your shoppers are not buying, and pull back your bids or even go dark during certain hours of the day. Everyone wants to get the most bang for their buck – be smart and make sure your bids are up to date and data-driven now. Look back 1-18 months (ideally be looking at performance from last holiday) to decide how and when to bid. Behavior could differ by channel, so be diligent – it will pay off!

The shift to mobile is real, y’all. Make sure that you have mobile bid modifiers in place and that you are utilizing a cross-channel mobile strategy. Although demand on mobile may not eclipse desktop this year, people are constantly researching products from their mobile phone – especially during the holidays. Grabbing their attention along the way will be crucial to set your brand up for success.

We’ve all been on the move at one time or another during Holiday, looking for that must-have item while sitting in the passenger seat driving from mall-to-mall. Keeping your local inventory feeds updated will help inform customers whether they can try that item on at the nearest location, or whether they need to purchase it online. The linkage from online to in-store will be huge this holiday, make sure you are buttoned up now, so you don’t lose potential customers to your competitors when it matters most.

According to the report, 40% of millennials will use auditory chatbots (Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, etc.) to research an item before making a purchase. This medium has grown substantially in the last couple years. Optimizing local searches and potentially enhancing customer service by using bots is a great way to engage your consumer on another platform.

Despite a desire for more personalized experiences, 63 percent of consumers feel like retailers don’t truly know who they are. Understand your consumer – talk with them, not at them. According to the report, millennials are 2.5x more likely than baby boomers to say that a personalized digital offer based on their purchase history would appeal to them. Utilizing customer data and understanding buying behavior and history can help bridge the disconnect and allow the brand to resonate with their target market.

PMG uses its proprietary AMP tool to leverage, segment and target customers based on their traits and history. Across several clients, we have found these pools to be more relevant than ordinary pixel retargeting. Additionally, we can utilize this data to create similar audiences – based on users with like traits and behaviors – enhancing prospecting pools across paid search and social programs.

When prospecting, it’s important to segment users into pools and message them differently. Although an 18-year-old fashionista and 45-year-old mother may be in the market for the same product – you wouldn’t necessarily want to serve them the same message. Similarly, someone in Florida likely won’t be interested in a wool coat, but that customer in New Jersey sure will.

Digging down at the demographic, affinity, and in-market levels can help to silo your audiences and increase the chances that you serve the perfect (click-worthy) message, to the right customer at the right time.