It’s no secret that October typically marks the start of the holiday marketing season, but even if small or independent retailers have yet to roll out a strategy, it’s not too late. Anyone can still get in on the online advertising action in time for Cyber Monday – which was the heaviest online spending day in history last year, leveraging social as a secret weapon. In addition, for most businesses large or small, Q4 is the highest time of profitability, but that’s only if you have a solid marketing strategy for capturing online leads and sales. Incorporating social ads into your overall marketing plan is not just smart, it’s critical for a higher success rate.

What may be surprising is that with 92 percent of social advertising occurring on Facebook, only 9 percent of digital spend is happening on the platform. Why? The largest social audience resides on Facebook, the average person spends over two hours per day on the social network, and Facebook’s user base has even surpassed the population of China! The problem lays in the complexity involved in navigating the world of social advertising. So how can marketers get it right in time to reap the benefits of the season? Below are the five tips to success using Facebook ads before the holiday ship has sailed:

#1: Ditch your non-converting mobile keywords

Too many advertisers neglect to take action on low-converting mobile keywords because they assume these words are contributing to untracked offline or cross-device conversions. While this may be the case for some of these terms, businesses with smaller budgets who are struggling to meet their cost per action (CPA) goals cannot simply “hope” these terms are making a positive impact on their account. Rather than playing this mobile guessing game, advertisers should ditch keywords that aren’t producing conversions on mobile devices. By eliminating these keywords from their mobile strategy, they are cutting out pricey, useless impressions and clicks, which create an immediate uptick in overall mobile conversion rates.

#2: Target your ads to the right audience

Facebook offers a level of audience targeting granularity is unprecedented. You can literally target President Obama or the Prime Minister of France. Whether by behavior, interests, demographics, connections, age ranges, languages, or locations, you can dig pretty deep with these targeting capabilities and layer them upon each other to ensure you’re getting rid of any questionable, out-of-market clickers. You can literally target audiences on Facebook with a dozen different ad formats and thousands of possible ad targeting parameters.

#3: Pay attention to Relevance Score

Relevance Score is to Facebook what Quality Score is to AdWords. Basically, the higher your relevance score, the more visibility you get for a lower cost. You absolutely cannot ignore relevance score because it’s essentially the score of how much Facebook likes you (and you WANT Facebook to like you!). If relevance scores are low, don’t panic, but do adjust to up your ad engagement, which will in turn improve your score. Whether by more specific targeting, varying ad text, new images, or stronger calls-to-action, test out variations of what you’re already doing to boost scores, pay less, and get more engagement and visibility.

#4: Improve your ads

Everyone likes to believe that their ads are great, but sometimes they’re just not, and you may not even realize it. You’ll find proof of this in your metrics including low relevance scores, low CTR’s, and low conversions. No professional photographer on staff? No dedicated copywriter? Your ads can still be of quality and here are a few simple guidelines to ensure they are:

• Make sure your images are the proper size. Facebook recommends 1200 X 627 (also only 20% of text is allowed).
• Don’t use boring stock images! Find compelling, interesting images that match your company’s brand.
• Use easy-to-understand, conversational language within your ad copy. Remember this is a social platform so take off your corporate hat and have some fun with it.
• Include a strong call-to-action. Your ad has an end goal, right? What is it? Tell your audience what you want them to do.

#5: Modify your strategy for the holidays

Properly strategizing and executing for your seasonal peaks can make a serious impact on your chances of outselling your competitors during the most profitable time of the year. For many marketers (especially those in retail), this is very true during holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but these seasonal spikes can also range for several months (October until end-of-December). Obviously this fluctuates from business to business, but for those looking to kill it for the holidays, it’s especially true now.

Ensure that you’re properly prepared for your businesses seasonal peaks by:

• Upping your budget for high traffic times.
• Expanding your audience to reach the higher mass of people in shopping-mode.
• Tweaking your ads with holiday and seasonal promotions to spur action.
• Creating an automated ad schedule to show your ads during the most high-profit times.

It’s not too late to ensure that your business wins the holidays by leveraging Facebook advertising, and these tips are a good first step toward success.

WordStream is a digital marketing agency.

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