Welcome to this issue of The DTC Insider newsletter. 👋
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In this newsletter, you'll find:
💠 DOs and DON'Ts for Black Friday
💠 Meta started rolling out AI features for ads
💠 Simplifying e-commerce operations & what nobody tells you about Black Friday
DOs and DON'Ts for Black Friday
Black Friday presents a great opportunity for e-commerce brands to scale aggressively even though it’s often more costly to advertise during this high-volume time of year.
Here are a few things to consider when planning your scaling strategy on Meta during Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM).
DOs:
Define your goals and your offer, yesterday. People are already researching, so now’s the time to start.
Be clear. People will be exposed to countless deals during BFCM, so make sure you are clear about what you offer.
Stand out. The target audience is not the king anymore, the ad creatives are. Your ads - and more specifically, your creatives - should get people’s attention immediately.
Don’t forget about warm audiences. It’s great to target cold audiences, but also but keep in mind your engaged audience (i.e. social engagers, website visitors, email subscribers, people who’ve recently abandoned the cart, and previous buyers).
Increase your ad budget. CPMs will increase, so getting eyeballs will be more expensive. If you don’t spend more, you won’t get more.
Build traffic before BFCM starts. Create campaigns so people are already lined up when your deals go live (i.e. lead generation campaigns to grow an email list, Reach/Awareness campaigns, etc.)
Create email marketing campaigns. Email campaigns will raise awareness and keep you at the forefront of your audience’s mind.
DON’Ts:
Scaling the ad budget aggressively: If you start early, you can scale at a good pace before BFCM begins.
Turning off your “always-on” campaigns: Depending on the ad platform and how your “always-on” campaigns are working, we recommend keeping them on to maintain the learning you’ve acquired when BFCM ends.
Offering the same deals as you do the rest of the year: This may sound obvious, but many brands don’t offer anything different during BFCM, and then they wonder why their strategy didn’t work.
Using only still-image ads: Although image ads work well, your brand can unlock many more opportunities through video ads too.
Starting promotions on BF and ending on CM: You should start days or weeks before BF, and end days or weeks after CM, depending on your industry.
Complicating your offers: Having a complex, hard-to-understand offer will make it difficult for your audience to know what your deals are. Keep it simple. Otherwise, you’ll lose opportunities.
Meta started rolling out AI features for ads
It’s happening…
A few months ago we told you that Meta was including some AI features for ads.
Now, they started rolling this out.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, a few months ago Meta announced the AI Sandbox for advertisers.
Think of it as their testing playground for early versions of new tools and features, including generative AI-powered ad tools.
For now, they started rolling out the following tools:
📝 Text Variation: Generates up to 6 versions of text based on the advertiser's input, including emojis and hashtags. You can manually select which of these text variations to use.
🎨 Background Generation: Creates background images from text inputs, enabling marketers to expedite the process of experimenting with different backgrounds and broaden the range of their creative assets. This was added to Advantage+ Creative and will automatically generate multiple background variations for some of your images. This only applies to Advantage+ Catalog ads, and you won’t be able to break down performance by creative variation.
✂️ Image Outcropping: Adjusts creative assets to fit different aspect ratios across multiple surfaces, like Stories or Reels. This was also added to Advantage+ Creative, but it’s for the manual upload ad setup. Meta will automatically expand images to fit different aspect ratios by auto-generating new pixels to fit the space.
Although there are third-party tools that currently do this, these features are now embedded into the ad creation screen.
Making it way easier for advertisers to access these tools without paying for them.
Simplifying e-commerce operations & what nobody tells you about Black Friday
Do you often find yourself spending too much time to understand how each variable impacts your business?
Fortunately for e-commerce brands, Alon Partuk designed a great solution.
As a DTC founder, he was struggling to get a clear picture of the Operations area of his company, wasting a lot of time and money.
That's why he started Octup: the one-stop solution that VPs of Operations were waiting for.
In this episode of The DTC Insider podcast, he shares his unique perspective as the founder of both a DTC brand and a tech company in the e-commerce space.
We discussed:
👉 Exploring the Challenges of Tech Companies and DTC Brands
👉 Decoding the Essentials for Thriving DTC Brands
👉 The Story and Purpose of Octup
👉 Understanding the Benefits Octup Offers to Brands
👉 Spotlight on Octup's Most Beloved Feature
👉 Tips for Black Friday
👉 Apricoat's Winning Channels and Customer Acquisition & Retention Strategies
🎧 Tune in to our latest episode: https://thedtcinsider.com/
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