Maximize December's Shopping Days with DPA (Episode 2)

Welcome to The Catalog Cult, your go-to podcast for mastering catalog advertising and dynamic ad strategies. Hosted by Dan Pantelo, CEO & Founder @ Marpipe, this episode reveals how to maximize every shopping day in December and drive success beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Did you know December features eight shopping days bigger than Cyber Monday? With a shorter shopping season this year, these days are crucial for your holiday marketing strategy.

Key Highlights:

1. December’s Eight Cyber Mondays

Most marketers focus on Cyber Monday, but eight December days surpass its sales. With five fewer days this season between Cyber Monday and December 31, maintaining daily visibility is critical.

2. Dynamic Product Ads (DPA) for Consistent Results

DPAs allow you to adapt to changing inventory, keeping your campaigns running seamlessly. Instead of creating one-off campaigns, catalog ads help you engage shoppers every day of December, ensuring maximum profitability.

3. Self-Gifting: A Key Trend

Surprisingly, 41% of holiday shoppers buy gifts for themselves. Incorporating messaging for self-gifters can drive significant engagement.

4. Inventory Management Made Simple

With tools like Marpipe, dynamic catalog ads automatically adjust to inventory levels, highlighting in-stock products and creating urgency for low-stock items.

5. Creative Strategies for the Holidays

Exclusive sales messaging works well for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Tools like Marpipe let you apply similar strategies to catalog ads, driving performance with minimal effort.

Why Catalog Ads Are a Must

Catalog ads ensure consistent visibility, adapt to shifting behaviors, and provide a scalable solution to maximize sales throughout the holiday season.

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This holiday season, stay present, adapt to consumer trends, and crush your goals with catalog ads. Thanks for tuning in—let’s thrive this Q4!

Transcript

Dan Pantelo: 0:00

There's eight separate shopping days in December. Just regular days in December that surpass Cyber Monday sales in 2023. December has 8 Cyber Mondays sprinkled throughout it as far as shopping days. And I feel like we put all this attention on Cyber Monday and we're not talking about how are you going to be present for those eight days in December that are bigger than Cyber Monday? Welcome to the Catalog Cult where we unlock the secrets of catalog advertising and dynamic ad strategies for E-commerce brands. I'm Dan Pantelo, and today we're diving into how catalog ads can powerfully support your holiday campaigns by ensuring consistent visibility, engaging self shoppers, and maximizing really every shopping day in December. If you're a brand marketer that's focused on driving results all season long without relying on just one big sales day, this episode is going to be for you. We'll show you how catalog ads can help you stay top of mind through the holiday season, adapt to shifting shopper behaviors and most importantly, drive profitability. So let's get into it. The first piece here is a lot of people don't realize that there's a lot of days in December that are bigger online shopping days than Cyber Monday itself. There's eight separate shopping days in December. Just regular days in December that surpass Cyber Monday sales in 2023. December has 8 Cyber Mondays sprinkled throughout it as far as shopping days. And I feel like we put all this attention on Cyber Monday and we're not talking about. How are you going to be present for those eight days in December that are bigger than Cyber Monday? And so maintaining daily visibility in December is crucial. This December, we actually have a shorter shopping season. This year, there are five fewer days. In between Cyber Monday and the end of December so that's just how the calendar works out this year. There was a bigger shopping period last year. This year it's compressed by five days that span between the end of December and cyber Monday. So it's crucial that you show up and be in the game, so to speak, every one of those days you're going to put a bigger numbers on these random eight days in December. Then you will in Cyber Monday. One of the best ways to stay in the game and top of mind and everywhere where you need to, whenever you need to is dynamic product ads. Because instead of making this one blowout campaign. Where you do all of this creative that's specifically focused on the Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale, right? Doing that overall December long holiday season sale is going to take, it is really going to give you much more bang for your buck, take you a lot further, right? You don't need to call out that there's like this one spec of course, it's good to call out Cyber Monday on Cyber Monday, but for the rest of December catalog ads can do that heavy lifting for you. Make sure that you're appearing in all those places where you want to be and where consumers will be shopping. With catalog ads, you can be everywhere where the consumer is. When you need to meet them there as opposed to just like single one off Cyber Monday focused campaigns obviously just have a quick pop and they die on that Tuesday morning. So when you are focusing on that Black Friday, Cyber Monday messaging and you have that strong one time or limited time offer being able to nail that copy and really emphasize that the sale you're running is going to be the only sale that year. It's going to be exclusive. It's limited. It ends on a certain day. Messaging that in your creative is obviously crucial. And so with video ads and image ads, that's really straightforward. You've been doing this for years, right? So you already know how to launch image and video ads that talk about this is our exclusive sale and you know how well those perform because you're including that sale messaging in the creative, but when it comes to your catalog ads. I bet you haven't been doing that with your catalog ad creative and you should be right. That's a huge opportunity are you messaging that you're having a one time exclusive sale in your catalog creative? Probably not. Cause that's really difficult to do without a tool like Marpipe. So if you are a Marpipe customer, I know you're already doing it, but if you're not, you should consider using a tool like Marpipe. To be able to apply these dynamic creative overlays to your creative that can emphasize and drive those points home, everything that's on sale on Black Friday and Cyber Monday should be labeled with Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale. Or whatever the promotion is on those days for your catalog ads with a tool like Marpipe, really easy to just. Turn that on, set it and forget it and you'll see not only a performance pop with just your regular image and video ads, but you'll see it with your catalog ads too. So just important the same creative treatment, the same way you think about creative for this holiday season, for your regular video and image campaigns, you should be doing the same thing with catalog ads. Let's talk about inventory management. Things go out of sale all the time on Black Friday ideally right now, that's where you want to be. You want to be selling out of things on Black Friday. and obviously if you have like a hero product or a certain bundle or offer that you're focusing on. ideally it goes out of stock. Ideally you sell out. but that's going to be a major inventory turnover day. And that's where things can get unpredictable with the warehouse, with the 3PL, and so with dynamic product ads as things go out of stock, that creative will stop serving so SKU number 74, which is your whatever product that might be, if that goes out of stock in the warehouse, it's going to stop delivering in your DPA campaigns, meaning that the performance of your DPA campaigns is not contingent on like the inventory that you have. The DPA campaign will still continue running as normal, but serving ad creative for the other things that you do have in stock. But further to that, one of the coolest things you can do with DPA if the stock is being tracked in your feed management platform, using a tool like Marpipe, you can visualize if something is on low stock, right? So if something is running out of stock, or even if you have 3 items left of this SKU, in stock, you could actually use a tool like Marpipe to visualize that in your DPA creative and do this sort of like countdown or to just visualize that something is all running out of stock or almost gone. And we can do that in real time because with dynamic product ads, we're monitoring your inventory. And so if it goes below a certain point, boom, we can activate, an overlay for that specific SKU that'll visualize the stock levels of that SKU, which drives further urgency, which allows you to sell out of more stuff quicker, which is the goal. But when you do sell out of those things, catalog ad campaigns are still going to keep ripping because they're just going to serve the other stuff. That's still in stock. So you could really focus on selling the things that are still in stock often the case when you run out of stock, your video and image ads are still driving traffic to something that's out of stock. Ideally you're on top of your campaigns enough that you're not at that point. but, with DPA and catalog ads that is just set it and forget it. It allows you to stay on top of your inventory in a way that doesn't make you need to turn things on and off in your ad account all the time. That's another reason why people could lean on catalog ads as a way to really drive performance, like without much effort during the holiday season. Side note, one really cool thing that I came across was that when it comes to holiday season shoppers, 41% of holiday shoppers are actually buying for themself gifters meaning that they're looking, they're shopping for gifts for themselves rather than other people, which was shocking to me. By the time I buy gifts for everyone else, I'm already tapped on the reserves. It's a cool takeaway just from a messaging perspective. If you're including. messaging, around gifting, it could be cool to also test out an experiment with messaging around self gifting. This isn't so much a catalog ads thing. Obviously you can do that when you use a tool like Marpipe to control the creative of your catalog ads. of course you can message for gifters and self gifters in your catalog campaigns, but you should also be testing that and doing that across your like regular video and image ads too. One other thing I would flag this as a word of caution this is really the first holiday season. This is the first Q4 where gen AI and creative AI is like a massive prevalent factor that everyone is aware of and has probably in some way worked into their workflows. It's exciting because it's this is the first really advertising super bowl season where everyone, as comfortable and can use creative gen AI tools that are actually like good enough to start including in marketing. and so obviously there's going to be a big temptation to use those and lean in there and as there should be. That's just something we should be like experimenting, playing with testing. But although the temptation will be there to lean into these tools, to be able to scale all of your gen AI, like all of your creative efforts so you're going to need to make a ton of creative this holiday season. using gen AI, you'll be able to do that very efficiently. However, be careful because if you really lean into that strategy a lot and you don't have like really good, solid like QA and like quality controls on the outputs of the gen AI, there's going to be some wonky stuff that ends up making its way out because we're like, we're really not there yet. As far as having a high level of brand control when it comes to gen AI, creative outputs at scale, right? So if you're making hundreds of creatives and launching them. It's important to have good QA and solid brand controls with something like Marpipe that becomes easy to use because we have templated systems that give you that assurance that when I apply this filter to a hundred thousand SKUs, all of them, all the outputs will be brand compliant. So with us, easy. We've seen some people come to us with some horror stories about Hey, we did this thing where we rendered out tons of creative variants, using gen AI. And we launched it all. And we saw some like crazy stuff out the other end if you're going to use gen AI this season, pay attention to the QA, or use like templated systems that give you much more control where you're not really surrendering all that brain control, to like the GPT gods just a word of caution there that's it for today's episode of the Catalog Cult. Guys, catalog ads are a powerful strategy during the holiday season, you want to be leaning into this, hopefully you want to lean more into it after listening to this with DPA, you're going to be able to capture sales every day. Be present every day where your consumers need to see you, you're going to be able to cater to diverse shopper motivations and you're going to be able to automatically stand on top of really sophisticated and automated inventory efficiency. If you're ready to make the most of every single shopping day, this season, check out our resources or more insights on maximizing catalog ads. Don't forget to subscribe to our Catalog Cult newsletter for more strategies on mastering catalog ads. The link to sign up can be found in the show notes. So thank you guys for tuning in and until next time, keep testing, optimizing and thriving with catalog ads. Link to sign up can be found in the show notes, so thanks for tuning in. And until next time, hoping you guys have an awesome Q4 holiday season. Hoping you guys crush your goals. Hit us up if you need any help. We're always here.