blog

How to Thrive This Holiday Shopping Season

As the holiday shopping season approaches, the competition for consumer attention intensifies. This year, digital advertising plays an even more critical role as online and mobile shopping continues to rise. With many factors distracting consumers this year, digital channels are helping brands connect with customers in meaningful ways. In this blog, we’ll explore the factors leading to a condensed holiday shopping season and how retailers can crush their holiday sales goals through effective digital advertising.

holiday shopping

What Factors are Affecting Holiday Shopping?

This year, consumers and retailers are facing challenges surrounding the holiday shopping season. For consumers, time is not as on their side this season as it has been in recent years. Thanksgiving is quite late this year, as we are celebrating it on November 28th. That means there are five fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas compared with last year. But what does this mean? Five days doesn't sound like much. But, when you factor in Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it can make a difference in consumer decisions.

With holidays being closer together, many consumers are less likely to buy for both holidays, they will stock up on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or wait until closer to Christmas. It is almost like having your birthday around Christmas, those two gift-giving days merge and people buy less.

On top of the shorter time frame between holidays, consumers have a major distraction that is sapping away precious attention from gift planning this year: the presidential election. October and November are peak gift-planning months, but a lot of that is getting drowned out by the race for the presidency.

Many consumers, of course, see the presidential election as more important than Black Friday deals. For retailers, this means people are thinking about who to vote for, not what to buy. During the last presidential race, around 11% of voters were undecided two weeks out from the election. That's 17.1 million people. With the election on November 5th, retailers are losing nearly an entire month to the presidential race. Once that is over, attention will shift back to the holidays.

Cutting Through the Noise

With a myriad of factors distracting consumers from their holiday shopping this year, how can you cut through the noise? It starts with brand awareness. You want your ads to be in front of consumers as often as you can. They might not act on those ads immediately, but when the time comes to buy, your brand will be the one people remember. 

To stay top-of-mind, El Toro recommends hitting your target audience daily in a combination of digital ads with IP Targeting and physically with El Toro's direct mail services.

Speaking of target audiences, El Toro has multiple ways to engage your target audience to keep those daily engagements achievable:

If you have your own CRM list, we can use our IP Targeting to match the home addresses you have to IP addresses to reach all the devices in the home. But what if you don't have a list of people to target? Or do you want to expand your list? El Toro offers solutions for that as well. 

We recommend focusing on a consumer base that is more likely to resonate with your product/service/brand. People looking to buy their spouse new golf clubs for the holidays will remember your golf club ads if you put them in front of them. But how can you be sure you are reaching people looking for golf clubs? Or looking for anything for that matter? El Toro has a solution to this, which is called Intent-To-Home.

Intent-To-Home works by ingesting millions of data points and using large language models to categorize web activity based on interest-based topics, which we call "Intent-To-Home." Intent-To-Home allows us to find specific households who likely have purchase intent in any of over 21,000 custom topics we have identified. This data can be overlayed with additional data sets and filters to refine an audience that is right for you. We have a full breakdown of Intent-To-Home in our most recent blog post here.

With the right digital advertising strategy, anyone can navigate through the distractions and stand out this holiday shopping season. Leveraging IP Targeting and Intent-To-Home, brands have the ability to reach their target audience with precision and consistency. Whether consumers are caught up in election coverage or pressed for time, a well-timed and relevant ad can make all the difference when they’re ready to shop. If you are looking to crush your holiday sales goals, contact us.

 

Share

Related Blog Posts
  • 4 Tips for Retail Advertisers

    Setting Retailers Up for Success this Peak Sales Season By: Jeremy Sneed Retail peak season is almost upon us! According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), the holiday season is responsible for 20% of the...

  • Boost Your Brand with IP Targeting During the Holiday Season

    The holiday season is almost upon us, and for businesses, it’s a time for opportunity. At El Toro, we are here to help you boost your brand awareness during this festive time of year. Here's...

  • Engaging Consumers with IP Targeting this Black Friday

    While Kris Kringle might still hold the title for the best time to shop, nothing quite compares to the chaos that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Fun fact: the first ever Black Friday was...

El Toro Logo Bull

Ready to Run With the Bull?

Contact Us