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ARTICLE

A Guide to Make the Most of Your Holiday Targeting

November 20, 2014 — by MediaMath    

This guest post is by Peer39 by Sizmek, a MediaMath OPEN partner.

With the holidays just around the corner, marketers should be thinking about more strategic ways to connect with their audience. We know that consumers are spending more time online, leading directly to more online purchases: according to IBM’s Holiday Readiness Report, online shoppers spent over 10% more per order during 2013’s holiday season than they did just two years earlier. With growth expected to continue in 2014, this is a great opportunity for retailers and other brands to place their product or offer in front of potential buyers, precisely at the time and place where they are considering their holiday shopping needs. Peer39 by Sizmek, a MediaMath OPEN partner, offers an easy solution for doing just that in TerminalOne: Seasonal Targeting.

Each year, we see more and more content published around major holidays and seasonal events such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and New Year’s Eve. Peer39’s contextual algorithm identifies these pages in real time, examining nearly 50 million impressions per second and classifying them into these respective categories to help you boost ROI. Targeting to this content at this time of year is easy and extremely scalable, with millions of pages classified on each seasonal topic, each day— over the two weeks before and after the holiday, daily averages last year on MediaMath alone clocked in at 55 million, 80 million, 60 million, and 7 million, respectively. What better a place to promote your product than alongside articles already discussing holiday gift ideas?

Here are a few strategies to consider:

• Target to content about Black Friday/Cyber Monday so consumers see your product when shopping is already top of mind. If your brand offers sales or special offers around this bargain-hunting event, let interested consumers know. Plus, creating that association at the right time can help differentiate you from your competitors.

• Around Thanksgiving, consumers are often online looking for great holiday recipes. If you’re a food/beverage provider or a CPG marketer, this is a great opportunity for you to align seasonal products with the holiday food content consumers are already engaging with.

• Holiday shopping guides are a seasonal staple; they are published around the clock during the weeks leading up to Christmas. The readers of these guides are actively looking at ideas for the perfect gift for the special people in their lives, so it’s an opportune time to promote your top gift offers alongside content related to holiday gift guides.

• New Year’s Eve is riddled with parties and folks hitting the town. It’s the perfect time for restaurants and venues offering shows or special events that evening to align their brand message with content around the holiday. It’s also great for any company providing beverages, party food, and party supplies to grab attention as readers make their seasonal plans.

For an even more relevant subset of consumers, you can combine seasonal targeting with any of Peer39’s 300+ contextual and quality categories. For example, use gender categories to find the right demographic, or target pages with low ad count to maximize your share of voice. This is an important time of year for many advertisers, and with the right tools, they can certainly get the most out of their holiday budgets. Peer39 by Sizmek can help with additional recommendations; don’t hesitate to ask.