Earlier this month, Facebook announced a number of new marketing tools to help brands achieve more this holiday season. According to a joint study conducted by the social giant and Ipsos, finds that more than half of consumers start shopping for Christmas in November, which makes this a good time to get familiar with the new tools.
So let’s take a quick look at what Facebook is rolling out and what they have to offer for your holiday marketing efforts ahead of Black Friday and the build-up to Christmas.
Customisable story templates
The first new tool Facebook is rolling out is customisable story templates, which cuts down the amount of time it will take you to produce vertical story ads for Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
Here’s what Facebook has to say about the new tool:
“We know businesses have limited resources and time, and it may not always be possible to create new assets for ad campaigns. So we’re making it easier for businesses of all sizes to create vertical, full-screen assets by introducing customizable templates for Stories, available across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.”
Essentially, the new tool automatically turns your images into ad stories with all the necessary formatting for the social network. You can choose from various templates that appear in the ad builder and then customise formatting, text, backgrounds and various other design aspects.
As Facebook says, manually creating ads can be time-consuming and this tool is going to save businesses a lot of time. In theory, you can simply use this to instantly turn images into stories ads but this isn’t recommended, as your ads will end up looking the same as everyone else simply using the templates without customising anything.
The tool will save you time but you’ll still need to work on differentiating your ads.
New automated features for Messenger and Instagram Direct
Customer communications are more important than ever during the holiday season. From fulfilling orders, confirming items are in stock, dealing with customer request and turning queries into paying customers is a priority for every business. To help business deal with this during the busy festive season, Facebook is rolling out new automated features for Messenger and Instagram Direct.
“Since businesses may not always be available to respond to customers right away, in the coming weeks we’ll be rolling out tools like instant replies to let businesses automatically respond to initial messages and give people more information about their business or let them know their typical response time. Businesses can also set up an away message for when their business is closed or on vacation and create saved replies to answer commonly asked questions.”
By taking out the manual workload of dealing with customer interactions, these new features mean businesses can deal with any number of communications without potential sales slipping away.
Christmas marketing tips from Facebook
Aside from the new tools Facebook is rolling out ahead of the festive season, the social giant also wants to offer up some Christmas marketing tips for businesses. In its Four Ways to Build Momentum for the Holiday Shopping Season piece, it explains how to use its new features for Christmas campaigns to achieve four key marketing objectives:
- Increase discovery of your brand
- Turn inspiration into action on Instagram
- Build and scale your audience
- Drive store visits
Facebook also wants people to take a look at its 6 Tips to Get Your Business Holiday-Ready article. It provides visual examples of holiday campaign ideas, including: creating gift ideas, campaign for gifts in different price ranges, creating visual ads and getting customers to share their holiday joy.
Facebook’s new holiday marketing tools are still rolling out so don’t panic if you can’t find them in Ad Manager yet. They should be fully rolled out in the coming weeks, which gives us just enough time to get familiar with them before the holiday marketing seasons kicks off.
If you need any help with your festive campaigns in the meantime, get in touch with us on social media or pick up the phone to speak to our PPC pros.