Lessons from Q4 to drive year-round marketing activity

When it comes to annual priorities, the months leading up to Christmas often carry a lot of expectation. Driven by retail sales and spurred along by the twin engines of Black Friday and Christmas sales, the final months of the year are often the final sprint for consumer businesses and the focal point of a lot of marketing throughout the year.

However, Q4 provides learnings for the full year, and taking a deeper dive into our audience data reveals some surprising activity, running against established thinking during this key time.

Escape the confines of category – charity content triggers travel trends
It’s very well established that travel advertising peaks around the year end – people looking beyond the winter months and planning their annual getaways. This means we see a lot of travel advertisers asking for Interest & Contextual targeting around “Beachbound Travellers” or “Travel Lovers” and seeking to standout with stunning vistas of dream destinations.

This year, throughout October, November and December one content theme continuously drove engagement for travel, in some cases increasing performance threefold over the average. That topic? Charity.

Whether that charity was focused on health, UK issues or internationally active – travel advertising alongside significantly ahead of benchmarks. When you think about it, it makes sense – there is a lot of crossover between charity donors and those who spend a lot of time planning and investing in travel.

TGI tells us that adults planning to go on holiday in the next 12 months are over 30% more likely to donate more than £250 annually to good causes. Those who spend over £4,000 on holidays per year are more than 150% more likely than average to donate over £250 to charities.

Those who ignore these audience synergies just to ‘stay in their category lane’ are missing opportunities to engage, and in a must less congested territory.

Consider wider audience interests – Soap content cleans up for beauty campaigns
Synergies come up again here. Key year end shopping events often trigger an increase in beauty campaigns, driven by gifting searches and the sales events of Boxing Day and Black Friday as people go bargain hunting.

Usually this is targeted by demographic, and often centred on ABC1 Females. But our synergy audiences revealed a clear link between beauty and TV soaps – a connection that few beauty brands are currently exploring.

Beauty campaigns running alongside our articles on soaps, or targeting heavy readers of soaps content, delivers much higher performance than beauty advertising elsewhere on site – to the tune of over 2x. Heavy purchasers of skincare are over 30% more likely to watch TV soaps according to TGI – and yet this association isn’t widely explored by beauty brands. It goes to show, simple demographic targeting, and doing what they have always done ,could easily prove much less effective than aligning with audience interests.

Food glorious food performance factors
Q4 is often dominated by food. From Halloween to Christmas and beyond, it is a major focal point in the year for food sales and inspiration. That’s no surprise, and may tempt people not to look any further.

In some ways during this quarter, established thinking holds true. For example, Thursday and Friday achieve between 30%-50% higher performance than any other day in October to November, as people plan the ‘big food shop’ for the weekend. Contextual targeting works hard for our food campaigns, with over 50% higher CTR on parenting content and family related topics (such as Disney Films).

But our data shows December is a different beast. Food advertising feeds high performance every single day of the week. At the same time, contextual targeting has a lower correlation with performance – audience appetites are pretty much focused on food, all of the time. This makes creative standout even more important, which can often be overlooked.

In fact, the real lesson to be learned from these figures is that targeting the same audience over and again is unlikely to move the needle. Thinking differently, expanding the boundaries of campaigns and exploring synergy themes might seem like a risk but the rewards can be high.

As always, digging into the data and asking questions, trying an exclusive targeting strategy and creative testing can all spike the standout and performance, even at peak and pressured times.

While it can be tempting to keep following the same well-trodden paths, the motto of our commercial audience data team holds true – thinking differently with data adds much better colour to the campaign and its delivery.

Samantha Eales is head of commercial audience data at Mail Metro Media

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