2016

Holiday Planning Guide

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Let’s dive into Holiday Planning!

03 Introduction

05 START YOUR HOLIDAY PLANNING (NOW - JULY)

Preparation Checklist

10 DURING THE HOLIDAYS (OCTOBER - DECEMBER)

Maximize Sales

08 BEFORE THE HOLIDAYS (AUGUST - SEPTEMBER)

Build Momentum

12 POST HOLIDAYS (JANUARY)

Keep Your Customers Engaged

04 4 Phases of Holiday Success

13 Tactical Plans for the Holiday Season

14 Closing

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Summer is Here!While most people start daydreaming about beach vacations and backyard barbecues, successful marketers start planning for the holidays.

Holiday season is one of the biggest times of the year for retailers, accounting for as much as 20% of annual sales for some.1 Given the importance of the season, early planning and preparation is key to maximizing your success during the holidays.

While the joy of gift giving during the holiday season is a constant, the consumer journey to holiday shopping is fast changing. Mobile devices increasingly play a pivotal role during the holiday season, and 62% of consumers report using their smartphones more than previous years to research holiday shopping.2 Mobile’s impact on both online and in-store sales will continue to grow, making it a key marketing channel for retailers.

Consumers are very active on Facebook and Instagram throughout the holidays. Time spent on Facebook starts accelerating in early October, reaching a peak around New Year’s Eve, making it prime time for you to reach your audience, drive discovery of your products and grow your business.3

In this guide, we will share tactical plans to best prepare for the holiday season and make the most of your ad campaigns across Facebook, Instagram and the Audience Network. Grab your favorite summer beverage and let’s get planning!

1. Source: US Census Data, monthly retail sales, 2015. Holiday season consists of sales from November and December2. Source: IPSOS Holiday Survey (commissioned by Facebook), US general population aged 18-65, Dec 2015-Jan 20163. Source: Facebook data, 7-day average Oct 1 – Jan 15, 2016 (accessed April 2016). All US consumers aged 18+

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1 P R E PA R AT I O N ( N OW - J U LY )

Before the holiday rush hits, take this time to set up the right tools, study your target audience and test your creative strategy.

2 B E F O R E T H E H O L I D AY S ( A U G U ST - S E P T E M B E R )

Take advantage of these less-promotional summer months to build momentum, get your brand message out, grow your customer base and capture intent data from your website or mobile app.

3 D U R I N G T H E H O L I D AY S ( O C T O B E R - D E C E M B E R )

Your pre-holiday campaigns will do the heavy lifting, preparing you for the holiday season. With the right tools in place and a larger customer base, you are ready to break through the clutter and focus on customers who already expressed interest.

4 P O ST H O L I D AY S ( J A N U A RY )

After the holidays is an excellent time to deepen your relationship with the customers you worked so hard to acquire during the holiday season and convert them to repeat buyers with the right demand generation and cross-sell programs.

4 Phases of Holiday SuccessWhile planning for the holiday season is key to success, it is important to divide your marketing strategy into these four phases to focus your efforts and use your resources effectively.

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01. START YOUR HOLIDAY PLANNING (NOW - JULY)

Preparation Checklist

Build a strong foundation. These technical tasks will set up a seamless user experience for your potential customers and give you the right foundation for effective re-targeting during the holiday season.

Invest in mobile: 60% of consumers say that they plan to buy more often from smartphones or tablets than last year.4 To capture this growing opportunity, you need to start investing in mobile marketing, measurement and shopping experiences. Take this time to create an optimized mobile purchase experience from your ad creative to your check-out experience.

Add the Facebook pixel to your website and the Facebook SDK and App Events to your mobile app: The Facebook pixel and SDK are pieces of code for your website and mobile app that enable you to measure and optimize, as well as build audiences for your ad campaigns.

Get started with the Facebook pixel here: www.facebook.com/business/a/online-sales/conversion-tracking

Get started with the Facebook SDK here: developers.facebook.com/docs/app-events

Make sure you are set up for cross-device retargeting: Dynamic ads allow you to automatically promote your product catalog to people across devices.To take advantage of this format, make sure that your product catalog is ready for Facebook and you are using standard events to report which products from your catalog are being viewed, added to cart and purchased.

Get started with dynamic ads here: www.facebook.com/help/1614292432221509

You have big goals for the holiday season. Your primary objective now should be setting up the foundational tools and insights to serve as the backbone of your holiday campaigns.

2x increase in return on investment

2x lower cost-sales ratio

German fashion retailer dress-for-less used dynamic ads to retarget customers with unprecedented relevance.

4. Source: SIGNAL, “The Signal Retailer’s Guide to Understanding the 2015 Holiday Shopper,” July 2015

Facebook Case Study, June 2015

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Get to know your audience. The more customer insights you have, the better you are equipped to sail through the holidays with the best campaigns tailored to them. Here are key steps to building the right campaign for your audience.

Identify key audience segments: Start planning by determining which audience segments you will want to reach during the holidays and the best ways to connect with them. For example, you may want to set up different campaigns for potential customers versus high lifetime value customers or category purchasers. With this segmentation, you can tailor your ad campaigns, creative and messages to what resonates with them.

Leverage Facebook’s strategic insights about your customers: Use Audience Insights to dive deeper into the demographics, location, interests, psychographics or purchases patterns of your current and potential customers. With this information in your back pocket, you can further craft your campaigns.

Learn more about Audience Insights here: www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights

Know your customers’ conversion path: At this point, you have already implemented the Facebook Pixel and Facebook SDK and App Events, and you can review the cross-device conversion paths in ads reporting. You can use this data to accommodate your customers’ behavior in your marketing plans. For instance, if your customers browse on mobile and purchase on desktop, you can draw their attention with a video on mobile and a strong call to action on desktop.

For more information on cross-device conversions visit here: www.facebook.com/business/news/cross-device-measurement

Test, measure and test again: This is a great time to test your creative formats and bidding strategy. For example, your high lifetime value (LTV) customers may respond to link ads with video but new customers may convert better with link ads with a product image.

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To get more reach this holiday season,

advertise across Facebook, Instagram

and the Audience Network.

Set up your auction and delivery strategy. Start budget planning early to ensure you are allocating your resources for always-on campaigns and big holiday moments.

Plan how you’ll measure.

Explore Facebook Marketing Partners.

Allocate your budget: Design a budget for always-on campaigns to drive sales during the holiday season. At the same time, plan for key high-volume days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as well as key holiday pushes and free shipping deadlines.

Consider manual bidding to hit your conversion goals: Auctions get competitive during the holiday season. Consider manual bidding to maintain control over your conversion goals while ensuring delivery. For dynamic ads, utilize automatic bidding to maximize efficiency.

Be mindful of the audience overlap: Ensure that your campaigns do not have overlapping audiences to hit your delivery goals. If you are seeing an overlap, consider consolidating these campaigns or refining your targets.

Start planning for measurement: When planning any successful marketing campaign, you also need to think about what key metrics you’ll measure. Did your ad campaign drive awareness for your brand? Did it drive additional sales on your website? Did it increase foot traffic to your store? To answer questions like these, we have a suite of measurement tools, based on people, that will help you measure the true value from your ad campaigns — no matter the objective.

For more information on Brand Polling: www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-brand-polling

For more information on Conversion Lift: www.facebook.com/business/a/conversion-lift

For more information on measuring store visits and offline conversions: www.facebook.com/business/a/multi-location-ads

If you need an extra set of helping hands during this holiday season, Facebook Marketing Partners can be a great resource to supercharge your holiday marketing efforts. They can help with anything from adding scale to reaching new audiences to buying media more efficiently.

Learn more about Facebook Marketing Partners here: facebookmarketingpartners.com

P R O T I P :Set your budget to account for anticipated conversion rates during the holidays.

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How to Meet Your ObjectivesBRAND AWARENESS

Reach your target audience to increase awareness of your brand, products and services to become top of mind for their holiday wish list.

Audience Segmentation: Create segments based on demographics and psychographics. Leverage Audience Insights to understand how these segments perceive your brand to tailor your messaging.

Targeting: Build your key audiences using demographic, geographic and behavioral targeting.

Ad Formats: Visual formats that draw attention work best for this objective. Consider video, Carousel or Canvas ads to create an immersive experience with your brand and showcase your products.

Creative Strategy: Make sure your creative is noticeable and your message is emotionally relevant to your audience.

Optimization: Optimize using reach and frequency buying to drive brand metrics that matter.

Measurement: Use Brand Polling to determine if your ad campaign drove an increase in brand metrics such as ad recall.

28 seconds on average spent on Canvas

6.7x return on ad spend

To inspire young homeowners, home improvement chain Lowe’s used Canvas to share their renova-tion ideas.

Facebook case study, April 2016

02. BEFORE THE HOLIDAYS (AUGUST - SEPTEMBER)

Build MomentumTake advantage of the less promotional summer months to build momentum before the holidays. With back-to-school shopping in full swing, the end of summer can be a great time to boost brand visibility, grow your customer base and capture more intent data from your website and mobile app.

P R O T I P :Consider booking inventory in the reach & frequency buying tool as early as 6 months in advance to secure inventory.

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DEMAND GENERATION WITH NEW CUSTOMERS

Jumpstarting demand generation will allow you to have a healthy buyer base to set you up for the coming months.

Audience Segmentation: Identify specific segments that you would like to acquire more of, such as high lifetime value customers or category purchasers.

Targeting: Leverage lookalike audiences to find more of the prospects you identified as desirable audiences.

Ad Formats: Highly engaging ad units such as video link ads, carousel link ads, and Canvas will allow you to showcase multiple products and offers in a visually compelling way. Consider lead ads to build a high-quality email subscriber list that you can follow up with during the holiday season.

Creative: Since these are new buyers, educate them with rich information that demonstrates value and highlights key benefits.

Optimization: Choose optimizing for conversions to generate the actions you care about such as a purchase.

Measurement: Use Conversion Lift to determine how much additional business was driven from your ad campaign to your website, mobile app or store.2x increase in leads

66% lower cost per acquisition

The national medical spa, Sona MedSpa promoted its services by offering people a free consultation using lead ads.

Facebook case study, December 2015

P R O T I P :Remember to exclude your original customer list to reach new people.

4.4% sales lift

35.1% increase in new website visits

3.2% increase in new customers

The heritage lifestyle brand Lands’ End used Facebook carousel ads to increase online sales and attract new shoppers to its website.

Facebook case study, October 2015

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03. DURING THE HOLIDAYS (OCTOBER - DECEMBER)

Maximize SalesHoliday season is a big focus for every retailer, making it a highly promotional period on Facebook starting as early as August. This is the time where all your pre-holiday planning will pay off in spades. With the right tools in place, and with your brand top of mind for your key segments and a larger customer base, you are in great shape for retargeting customers who are already familiar with your brand and who have demonstrated interest in your products and services.

How to Meet Your ObjectivesDRIVE SALES

The most cost-effective way to advertise during the holidays is focusing on people who are already familiar with your brand to drive them to purchase in store, online or in your mobile app. So let’s get right to it!

Audience Segmentation: Build your campaigns around customer segments such as single category purchasers, members of your loyalty program, recent purchasers or past holiday purchasers to create a conversion path specific to them.

Targeting: Use Custom Audiences to reach people who have been to your site, used your app or purchased from you before.

Ad Formats: Leverage ad formats that will allow you to showcase your products and services such as video link ads, carousel link ads or Canvas ads.

Creative: Make sure you are showcasing your best-selling products to your audience segments and illustrating the key selling points to build interest. To boost conversions, create urgency with limited time offers, shipping deadlines and timely promotions such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Optimization: Optimize for conversions to maximize the delivery of your ads to people likely to purchase.

Measurement: Use Conversion Lift to determine how much additional business was driven from your ad campaign to your website, mobile app or store.

HOLIDAY SHOPPING IS STARTING EARLIER

40% of consumers report starting holiday shopping by Halloween

Source: National Retail Federation Survey, Jan 2016

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RETARGET WITH DYNAMIC ADS

Dynamic ads enable you to automatically promote your entire catalog across devices. Dynamic ads provide you with the power and control over the products you advertise, ensuring that you are reaching audiences who have expressed high intent to purchase with the most relevant products.

To learn more about dynamic ads, visit here: www.facebook.com/business/a/online-sales/dynamic-product-ads

Audience Segmentation: Segment audiences based on their past browsing behavior. For example, you can create audiences of people who viewed or added products to their cart but did not purchase, then retarget them with the same products to increase their intent to purchase.

Targeting: With the Facebook Pixel and SDK, you will be able to automatically build Custom Audiences of your website and mobile app visitors.

Ad Formats: Upload your product catalog to Facebook to reach them with dynamic ads showcasing your relevant products. Consider grouping your catalog by category, best sellers, high margin products and promotions.

Creative: Test different variations of your dynamic creative such as price, brand and description.

Optimization: For each of your audience segments, bid your maximum value for one-day post-click conversion. Consider setting different bids for different behaviors. For example you may want to bid higher for “add to cart” segment than “viewed only” list.

Measurement: With the Facebook pixel and App Events, you can see how your customers are moving between devices before they convert in ads reporting. You can use this insight to understand on what devices people see your ads and on what devices they ultimately convert.

GENERATE STORE VISITS AND SALES

While e-commerce is growing, brick & mortar is still king, generating over 90% of sales.5 96% of holiday shoppers will research products online before visiting store.6 Make sure you are not missing out on the opportunity to drive store traffic and sales with your holiday campaigns.

Targeting: Target people near your business locations to drive them to your stores.

Ad Formats: Local awareness ads are a great way for you to showcase your prod-ucts as well as educate your target customer about where the closest stores are.

Creative: Make it easy for customers to find you by adding proximity-based store maps and proximity based call-to-actions such as call now or get directions.

Optimization: Choosing optimize for product sales or store visits will allow you to ensure you are leveraging your campaigns to drive traffic to your stores.

Measurement: To measure the impact of your ads on store visits and sales, you can set your campaigns up for Store Visits reporting and Offline Conversions API.

32% increase in revenue

27% increase in checkouts

3x increase in return on advertising spend

Lolly Wolly Doodle, the online clothier used dynamic product ads to retarget loyal customers.

Canada-based personalized jewelry retailer Jewlr retargeted website visitors who viewed or added a product to their cart with dynamic ads on both Facebook and Instagram.

1 IN 3 PEOPLE

said they purchased an item from a local business based on an advertisement they saw on Facebook last

holiday season

Source: G/O Digital, “Holiday Purchasing Habits: A Digital Advantage

for Local Businesses, Aug 17 2015

Facebook case study, December 2015

Instagram case study, May 2016

5. Source: US Census, Quarterly Retail eCommerce Sales, May 20166. Source: G/O Digital, “Holiday Purchasing Habit: A Digital Advantage for Local Businesses”, August 2015. 11

04. POST HOLIDAYS (JANUARY)

Keep Your Customers EngagedAccording to Facebook data, shopping does not subside after the holidays. Don’t let your valuable newly acquired customers go to waste! Use this time of year to convert them to loyal customers with new demand generation and cross-sell opportunities.

How to Meet Your ObjectivesDEMAND GENERATION AND CROSS-SELL

Your holiday campaigns have been hard at work to acquire customers and drive sales. Post holidays is a great time to re-engage to drive demand and specifically cross-sell opportunities.

Audience Segmentation: Identify recent purchasers to showcase new collections to them.

Targeting: Leverage Custom Audiences from a data file, your website or mobile app to reach your recent purchasers.

Ad Formats: Use dynamic ads to automatically promote complementary products from your catalog to your website and mobile app shoppers. For in-store shoppers, use carousel link ads to introduce new product lines.

Creative: Since you are building relationships with the holiday shoppers, focus on creative that defines your brand beyond the holidays.

Optimization: Choose optimize for product sales or conversions to maximize the delivery of your ad campaigns to people likely to convert.

Measurement: Use Conversion Lift to determine how much additional business was driven from your ad campaign on your website, in your mobile app or in store.

65%

of shoppers plan to keep shopping after Christmas

Source: National Retail Federation Survey, January

2016

P R O T I P :For successful cross-selling, consider presenting custom-ers with products in the same category.

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Phases Objectives Audience Segmentations Creative Ad Formats Targeting Optimization Measurement

Pre-Holiday

Brand Awareness

Key audience segments based on demographic, psycho-graphic

Attention grabbing, visual

Video, Carousel, Canvas

Key Audience Segments

Reach & frequency buying

Brand Polling

Demand Generation with New Customers

Key audience segments you would like more of

Visual and informative

Video, Carousel, Canvas, Lead Ads

Key Audience Segments, Lookalike Targeting

Conversion optimization

Conversion Lift

Demand Generation with Existing Customers

Existing customers (e.g. loyalty program members, recent purchasers) Website visitors with high intent

Showcase your products, Create urgency with CTAs

Video, Carousel, Canvas

Custom Audiences from your website, app or data files

Conversions, Sales

Conversion Lift

During the Holidays

Retargeting Existing customers (segmented by time spent on site, browsing behaviors...etc)

Your product catalog grouped by category

Dynamic Ads Custom Audiences from your website, app or data files

Conversions, Sales

Ads Reporting

Store visits and sales

Proximity based maps, call to action buttons

Local Awareness Ads

Near your business locations

Store visits, sales

Store Visits Reporting, Offline Conversions

Post Holiday Season

Demand Gen, Cross-sell

Segmented existing customers (e.g. non-converters, high LTV)

Showcase your latest post-sales arrivals

Carousel, Link Ads, Dynamic Ads

Custom Audiences

Conversions, Sales

Conversion Lift

Tactical Plans for the Holiday SeasonHere’s your printable plan for your best holiday season on Facebook yet.

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THANK YOU

Ready to spread the holiday joy on Facebook, Instagram

and the Audience Network?

There you have it — a tactical guide to drive more sales on Facebook during the holiday season. Feel free to tailor this

guide to your business needs and leverage the toolkits to create awareness, drive sales, boost your customer lifetime value —

and build your best holiday marketing campaign yet!

For additional resources to make the most of Facebook Marketing, please visit www.facebook.com/business

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