Why You NEED To Start Preparing For The Holiday Season ASAP!

Everyone is doing really well today. I want to tell you guys a little bit of a story, and hopefully this will prompt you to actually start getting ready and preparing for the holiday season right now. I know that there's a long way to go. I know that we're middle of August, and I know that we're talking about, you know, end of November, December, and all that jazz. But when it comes to advertising, it's better to be prepared. Here's what I mean. For a couple years ago, actually, I was working with a client, and one of their highlights of the year, I would say, in fact, the number one month, the number one date, and the number one revenue-generating season for them was the holiday season. And what happened is that they put together some crazy offers for online products. They didn't even have, you know, physical products. This was an online education company. And they put these amazing, amazing, uh, offers out for holiday season— Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas. And they basically did their entire year worth of revenue, uh, during those 2 months. It was crazy. It was insane. Like, then they had another really big month during July with the 4th of July sale. But Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then uh, you know, Christmas were by far the biggest months, uh, ever for their businesses. And sometimes they would even like, you know, make, I don't know, 70, 80% of the entire revenue for the year during those 2 months. So what I learned by working with those guys is that there was a couple of things that they did way before the holiday season that basically set them apart. And the reason behind it was because that, as you know, if you have been advertising for a while, you know that November and December are really expensive seasons to advertise. Why? Because big brands— I'm talking about world-class brands, brands that have millions of dollars of budget to spend— they tend to pour a decent amount of that budget during November and December. So we usually start seeing an increase in cost to acquire customers, an increase in CPMs, an increasing cost per click on Facebook and YouTube and whatnot. Uh, when at the beginning of October, okay, so at the beginning of October we start seeing that. But what happens is that the peak, it's at, you know, November. So 15th of November and whatnot, it's basically the most expensive season of the year to advertise on Facebook. And then there's another peak at the end of, you know, December, and then it trails off at the beginning of January. So beginning of January, it goes back to quote unquote normal. So what, what I, what I learned from working with these guys is that they, they prepare well in advance. They were preparing already, you know, like 2 months ago for the holiday season because again, it was so big for them. And here's how they did it, and here's what they did. They spent a lot of money, or this amount of money, an advertising budget on 2 main things. Number one, on building that email list. All right, building that email list, putting out those lead magnets, putting out those, uh, lead generation campaigns on Facebook and whatnot, building that email list and start nurturing that email list. Why? Because they knew in advance that during November and December they were going to hammer that email list like crazy. They were going to pound that email list to the ground. Okay, so that's the number one thing. So they will build their email list way in advance and they will build relationships with their subscribers way, way in advance before getting into the holiday season. That would be number one. The other thing that they did, which I think was pretty clever, and this is something that I helped implement as well, is that they spent anywhere between 25 to 30% of their advertising budget on pushing their content, especially on Facebook and Instagram. Okay, they would put out really cool videos, really, you know, helpful content, whatnot, and they would push it out on these networks. Why? Because then what we would do is we would create custom audiences. We create custom audiences out of people that have consumer content, have visited our website, have consumer videos. They would engage with the page, they will click on our ads and all that stuff. So at the end of the day, what we had was 2 main audiences. We had a big email list and we also had custom audiences. Now when you switch, and then during the holiday season we will basically turn off all of the advertising that has to do with cold prospecting ads, meaning people that they haven't heard about us yet. So we will turn them off completely during November and December, and we will focus on retargeting. We'll focus heavily, heavily, heavily on retargeting. And that's why they spend so much money and so much time on putting out content, creating these audiences, and, and building them and whatnot. So Those 2 things, building their, their email campaigns or their email list way in advance, number one, and number 2, building and nurturing those audiences within the social media platforms, especially on Facebook and Instagram, would give us a tremendous edge when it comes to getting traffic to the offers. Because at the end of the day, during the holiday season, people want to spend, right? Number one. But also number 2, they're looking for deals, right? And you want that traffic, you want those eyeballs, you want people to come in and buy your stuff. But you cannot get to those people if you're paying $20 per click because everyone else is advertising to acquire cold traffic. So again, if you want to kind of do this, uh, the 2 things that I would recommend is put out that lead magnet, put out that lead generation campaign, start building your email list right now if you haven't yet. If you are, double down on building that email list and then build those audiences within Facebook. I talk a lot about branding campaigns on my, my YouTube channel and whatnot. If you want to learn how to build a branding campaign, go to scaledriven.com/class. There's a link somewhere around here, or you can type in scaledriven.com/class. It's a free class that I put together. It's around 90 minutes. Just want to warn you, it's around 90 minutes long, and there's a lot of value in that class, especially on stage number 2, or phase number 2 in that class, or secret number 2. I talk about how to build content-heavy campaigns. And in fact, I talk about how to lower your cost to acquire customers by using content, which is something that we deploy for all of our clients, especially before the holiday season. Okay, so something that you want to start preparing for the holiday season is right now. This is when you start getting ready for— not in September, not in October, and of course not in November. Okay, you want to start brainstorming about offers that you can give to your list and to the audiences that have been consuming your content throughout this period, number one. But also number 2, you want to keep on building your audiences because during those periods it's much more expensive to reach somebody, to reach eyeballs, to reach to a user that hasn't necessarily been in touch with your brand. It's much cheaper, much, much more cost-effective, and at the end of the day, more profitable, more you know, more profitable to go ahead and use the audiences that you have been building throughout this period. Okay, so this is something that we're doing for all of our clients. Again, if you want to learn how to do this for free, go to scaledriven.com/class. scaledriven.com/class. It's a free class. It's 90 minutes long. It's a masterclass on what's working right now with Facebook advertising. And I hope that you enjoy it. Nothing to pay for. Completely for free. And, uh, yeah, I hope that this is helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Uh, we also put together a new Facebook group, so you can go to hernanvasquez.com/facebook, hernanvasquez.com/facebook to join our Facebook group. It's pretty cool. I just went live there explaining a little bit what's going on with the algorithms and how things are changing, uh, for the advertising world. Thank you guys for watching this. Again, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I'll talk to you guys