3 Best Practices To Get Your Message Heard During the Holidays
Capturing attention during the bustling holiday season is a challenge for any marketer, but capturing the attention of your target audience can be even trickier. That’s because brands ramp up marketing efforts during the holiday season to compete for precious attention. Consumers are inundated, so marketers need to apply targeting strategies to reach those that only have time to give attention to brands that resonate most.
With so many consumers today choosing to do their holiday shopping online (54% of our listeners say they now prefer to shop online during the holidays)[1], getting foot traffic in-store can feel like an uphill battle. However, 64% of our listeners also say that digital ads influence their holiday purchase decisions, so we know it’s more important than ever for marketers to have a strong digital media plan if they want shoppers in their stores come December.
Digital audio is one of the best ways to put this strategy to work. Streaming audio is proven to be one of the most effective mediums to reach masses of busy consumers throughout their constantly-connected, multi-tasking days (aka the holidays!)--in fact, recent research shows us that listening to internet radio has nearly tripled since 2010.[2] But smart marketers know that successful holiday marketing doesn’t end there. Being able to identify and reach your target audience with confidence is the real trick to achieving the most ROI for your budget.
Putting Your Money Where Your Audience Is
Lane Bryant, the nation’s leading women’s apparel retailer for sizes 14 through 28, came to Pandora wanting to drive in-store foot traffic across the nation during the crucial holiday season. Tapping into Pandora’s monthly active listener base of over 86 million, Pandora developed a mobile-first media campaign that reached only the consumers that mattered most to Lane Bryant’s business objectives. By pairing on-platform behavioral signals with off-platform data points from leading data providers, Pandora and Lane Bryant created a custom audience segment tailored to the brand’s target consumer of women’s specialty retail shoppers.
Knowing how difficult it can be for brands to stand out in a landscape where multiple advertisers are vying for the same consumer's attention at any given moment, Lane Bryant’s campaign on Pandora shined above the rest--one that both engaged the brand’s target audience and leveraged Pandora’s position as #1 in monthly mobile time spent.[3]
Have a mobile-first strategy. The average smartphone user touches their phone 2,617 times a day[4], proving that marketers must employ a mobile-first media strategy to be present on the devices that are used the most everyday, but especially during the holiday season.
Activate a multi-product media-mix. Attention spans are short, so advertisers have to use products that speak to our different senses in order to break through and capture engagement. Think about how you can deliver your brand’s message both visually and with sound.
Through a study with Placed, the leader in location analytics, Lane Bryant’s campaign successfully broke through the holiday noise to a 17% lift in national store traffic[5], outpacing Placed retail benchmark of just 7%.
And if you’d like to further explore how to successfully make an impact this upcoming holiday season, download our brand-new white paper, “Music to Our Ears: 2017 Holiday Shopping Trends Revealed.”
