Nasser:

Welcome to Shift Happens, I’m Nasser Sahlool. Today I’m joined by Melis Ciner, vice president of media at DAC. For many brands, the holidays bring the year’s biggest surge in attention and intent. The sale matters, the customer you keep matters more. Brands that make the most of the seasons start before the deals do. They build demand early, make themselves easy to find and trust, and enter peak season ready to invest behind the products, services, and locations that can deliver. Today, Melis and I are talking about how to turn the holiday rush into a customer acquisition engine and seasonal attention into year round growth. Melis, welcome to Shift Happens.

Melis:

Thanks for having me Nasser. Excited to be here.

Nasser:

So Melis, it’s the last day of summer today, and we’re sitting here in Santa hats for anyone who’s listening. Why the loss of dignity in our everyday jobs?

Melis:

I do like Christmas, I will be open with you about that. So you know, this isn’t actually misaligned in terms of my timing of when Christmas begins in my household.

Nasser:

Everything about you screams Christmas, I love that very much. So Melis, I feel like as soon as one season ends, in fact, even before one season ends, the next one begins. Why does it feel like every season we’re getting we’re starting earlier and earlier?

Melis:

Well, I think we’re all old enough to remember the door crashers of old?

Nasser:

No, not every listener is old enough.

Melis:

No, they’re really not. And, you know, that’s their loss. But, back in the day, this all used to happen, obviously in store with people lining up outside of the store to crash through the door to buy the large screen TV right? And now what we’re experiencing is that as e-commerce has grown and grown and grown, much of it doesn’t really need to happen in the store. And so the brands that we are working with can easily just take that and extend it backwards, backwards, backwards, backwards and kind of have a much more, steady pace to their revenue throughout the season as opposed to having this one make it or break it day. Which is basically a risk management strategy.

Nasser:

So if brands approach the holidays as a customer acquisition opportunity rather than just a short term sales event, how would that change their strategy?

Melis:

This is kind of a difficult conversation to have with a brand because it’s a very novel idea, and it is absolutely an opportunity to treat it for customer acquisition, for future revenue growth. That being said, if you were to tell any e-commerce manager that they’re sacrificing revenue in order to ship their money to customer acquisition during that time, they would probably strangle you. But it’s important to strike a balance between those two things, right? So we understand that revenue acquisition is important for brands during the season.

We also know that many of the customers who are coming in during the season are potentially valuable customers for the future. And so how do we make it so that we’re not just operating at the very bottom of the funnel and just scraping and scraping and scraping that. How do we make sure that we’re getting in front of new people, that can then benefit the brand going into the next year and the next year and the following year?

Nasser:

Now you use an important word there, I think, which is season, right? Black Friday as an example, they’d stretched into a season with weeks of promotions leading into Cyber Week, which even of itself, the fact that it’s a week now as opposed to just a singular day. By the time the main event arrives, are people shopped out? I mean, is there any real meaningful value left at that point?

Melis:

Well, what we’re seeing is that a lot of the time, the warm-up leading into Black Friday involves limited offers that are category specific. So if you think about, a clothing retailer, for example, there will be a 25% discount on shirts only, a 20% discount on bottoms only, etc., etc. So on that big day, usually people are expecting some kind of all-store event, that’s a bit of a steeper discount. And some brands do them nowadays, some brands don’t. But most of the time the challenge during this season is understanding how much of your revenue is going to occur prior to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And how much of it is going to hit on the day, depending on how you’ve structured your promotions. Most of the time, if you do have a big promotion coming up during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and you’ve done that in years past, the customer will know that. So, they’re not really buying from you until the day arrives.

Nasser:

Right, so this whole kind of discounting mindset where you’re training your customer to wait for those deals, how do you combat that? How do you stop them from basically not buying from you until that season arrives?

Melis:

Well, I think it’s a case of gradual weaning off of the promotion. So you can make the promotions on Black Friday less and less and less dramatic and space out your revenue throughout the year. And this ties back very well into what we were just talking about as far as customer acquisition strategy right? So if gradually you turn your strategy during Black Friday/Cyber Monday to be one of acquisition as well as revenue, you are hopefully increasing your bottom line throughout the year. And it doesn’t just become a one-day thing or a two-day thing on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So effectively what you need to do is acquire customers, become less promotional or mildly promotional during Black Friday/Cyber Monday, acquire customers who are less promotion seeking.
And then throughout the years, follow up with these customers to make sure you’re putting what they want in front of them. And that could be via targeted email strategies. It could be via, you know, any other kind of audience usage in your paid media. Once they see that you have what they like, they’re going to come back and naturally buy from you without necessarily a deep promotion, right? So it’s really just about making sure that that one day isn’t your make it or break a day, and you’re making sure that you’re getting, consumers who can also buy on a non-promotional basis throughout the year from you.

Nasser:

So talk to me from a very practical perspective. How do you build audience in a way that doesn’t immediately appeal to the people who are seeking for promotions at a time when people generally are looking for those promotions?

Melis:

I think you’ve got to know the audiences that your brand appeals to very well. So at the outset, what is your audience strategy here? Who are you going to target? And who is the person that your brand appeals to so much that they’re willing to buy at full price? So that’s where we begin. Second, we then make sure that our paid media strategies, as well as any internal email targeting that you have going on, is razor sharp targeted towards acquiring these customers throughout the year. And then by the time Christmas arrives, hopefully you’ve already made some money. But now this is the beginning of another critical customer acquisition phase. Many, many people are researching, they’re looking around a long time before they buy. So we’re talking about the promotional period extending backwards from Black Friday/Cyber Monday, but the research is extending even further  into, I would say maybe even, dare I say it, August.

So you’ve got to make sure that timing wise, you are in front of the correct audience with not necessarily offers that are phrased as a Christmas offer, but you’re putting products in front of them way before the Christmas gift shopping season arrives. And you’re doing your branding and your homework with them before we even get into this rush. Then when the Black Friday/Cyber Monday season arrives, hopefully you will be able to trigger them to shop from you. Hopefully they will mostly be first time customers, as well as people who are returning to bring you that lower funnel revenue right? And then in the following year, the homework continues. So now you’ve got to make sure you’re fostering a relationship with them so that they continue to come back and buy.

Nasser:

So when we think about selling to people in a very distinct way, and especially use that word research right? They’re researching earlier, how does that impact and influence the media mix both from within the paid space, but also the integration of paid and organic, and especially as you consider the emergence of large language models and those kinds of things.

Melis:

Yeah, so this is a huge topic right now. I think a lot of brands are still focused in on revenue. The bottom of the funnel, the very end of the consumer journey when they hit click to buy. And it’s almost like a drug where they can’t get off of it. And that’s all they are investing in. I think effectively what you need to do is make sure first of all, your organic strategy, knowing that takes time to build infrastructure for online infrastructure for, let me put it that way. You need to get going with that, like, now, if you haven’t already. What I mean by that online infrastructure is a lot of these LLMs, are basically using social mentions and conversations about your brand online as a source to inform how they are talking to the user. So if you haven’t gotten going on this, you need to start building that conversational infrastructure that powers the LLMs about your brand, now.

The other aspect of this is that in paid media, again, we talk about like scraping the bottom of the funnel, right? Like at some point you need to break that habit and make sure that you are investing in the top part of the funnel, at the very beginning of the consumer journey to supplement what the user is seeing on those LLMs. So it all works together. If you think about it as sort of a self-reinforcing loop. They go to the LLM, they ask about options broadly at the beginning. Maybe your brand surfaces, hopefully it does. And then after that, what they do is maybe they go to Google and they do a search. And so at that point, are you showing up in front of them with some kind of, you know, ad that pulls them in? Then maybe they’re seeing your ad on social media.

So now you’ve got to make sure that you’re investing in social media to make sure that you’re reinforcing the loop, to pull them back to your website so that they can browse. So it’s all we talk about a funnel a lot, but it’s not even really a funnel anymore. A lot of this is compressed and it’s a very convoluted consumer journey. And really you need to be present in surfaces where research is taking place.

Nasser:

Sounds super easy. Kind of like just stick a Santa hat onto everything and you’re good, right?

Melis:

Yeah exactly, just like us.

Nasser:

That’s it. So we talk a lot about e-commerce and retail and all of that sort of stuff. And it’s easy if you’re on the outside looking in, and not in the retail and e-commerce space, to think that this time is not for you. So a lot of businesses, for example, are in the lead generation space. How should they be handling this time of year?

Melis:

A very good question. And often, lead gen advertisers are so overlooked during this time, and indeed, it might not be the space for you at the moment. Of course, if you’re selling snowmobiles, then you should continue doing that. You have no choice but to continue to do that. However, if you’re not really selling a seasonal product, you have to understand that a lot of the ad services you are competing on are going to be taken up by retail advertisers. So you need to make sure that, your investment is planned appropriately for the end of the year. And maybe you’re not pegging your hopes to much on getting the majority of your revenue in October, November, December.

You just need to make sure that you are pulling out of those spaces as the retailers are more and more buying in them during the season. I think another important thing to think about also is that, do consumers have money for your lead gen business at the moment? Probably not, right? Like they’re spending their money on Christmas gifts. It’s mostly retail. And so if you do have a lead gen business that’s based on maybe an experience and it can be a Christmas experience to or, you know, holidays based experience, then again, that’s fine. There’s exceptions to this rule. But for the most part, again, you just kind of need to plan your budget so that you’re out of there before the hordes of e-commerce advertisers come in.

Nasser:

So that’s interesting, because there are, of course, lead gen businesses that are “need it” now. Plumbing, for example right? That plumbing emergency is not going to wait until the holiday season has gone past, thankfully. So what you’re basically saying for that type of business is not necessarily get out, but understand and anticipate that, the media space is going to be more crowded. And because a lot of people don’t target very well, and the platforms are liberated to make more money in those environments… even your ad spaces are going to see inflation in them at that time of year. Is that correct?

Melis:

That’s correct. So I think while we’re talking about customer acquisition for e-commerce, perhaps it’s not a great time for lead gen consumers to be thinking about customer acquisition in this moment, because what I’m saying is your branding advertisement probably needs to happen earlier in the year. Now there are many, many different types of advertising surfaces. If we’re talking about something like the the SERP (the search engine results page), that you are probably okay to be in, because obviously if an e-commerce retailer is advertising shirts, you’re advertising plumbing services right? So that’s okay. You don’t need to be pulling out of that. But if you’re doing broad display advertising to get knowledge of your product out there before a plumbing emergency happens, maybe think about doing that earlier in the year.

Nasser:

Okay. So, given all of this complexity and seasonal thinking and the extension of these individual holidays into seasons, even bleeding over into the previous seasons, what are three practical things that marketers should be thinking about and doing right now to prepare?

Melis:

Well, we talked about the need for informing the LLMs so that the LLM can inform your consumers. So the work on that again, if you haven’t already started on it, needs to begin now so that you are active and a player on platforms such as Reddit, and other online forums and social media.

The second thing is I would say making sure that your budget has been planned properly. A lot of brands miss this. We often do not see annual budgets that have been planned out month by month that are open to flexible revision. And I think you need to get that annual budget plan in place and work with your media agency to make sure that flexible adjustments are being made to it throughout the year.

And I think a third thing is making sure that you have the infrastructure in place to follow up with the consumers that you’ve acquired after the acquisition. Because if you take those people and then you just let them sit in your CRM, they go stale. They’re not really going to remember who you are anymore or care about you come April.

Nasser:

Yeah. My wife often tells me I go stale after a while sitting there.

So here’s the shift: holiday growth shouldn’t disappear with the decorations. A holiday customer is only seasonal if you treat them that way. The opportunity starts well before Cyber Week with visibility, trust and demand building and continues long after the first purchase. The brands that make the most of the holiday can use the season to earn new customers, learn what matters to them, and create a reason for them to come back.

Now make it happen. Follow Shift Happens, leave us a review and share this episode with your team. You’ll also find our complete playbook for getting ready for the holidays on our website. If you have any questions for the podcast, email us at shifthappens@dacgroup.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Melis, thanks for joining us on the last day of summer. Otherwise apparently known as the most wonderful time of the year.

Melis:

Thanks for having me.

Nasser:

And thank you from me, I’m Nasser Sahlool.