Right now, your customers are searching for the perfect gift to give people they care about. From Black Friday to Super Saturday, the world is shopping. Don’t miss out what this peak promo season has to offer with these last second advertising ideas.
On average, consumers spend most on Holiday Shopping throughout the year, tied with College Dorm Shopping, so you are in essence finding people with buyer’s intent. Even impulse shopping is buyer’s intent during the season.
I know someone who frequently tells herself, “I want to make 3 grand by tomorrow,” so she emails some product links to her email list and usually comes pretty close to the mark. But she heavily nurtures that email list utilizing all ConvertKit has to offer with segmenting.
Regardless, it’s a great time to send a quick email to people helping guide them into buying the perfect gift for someone… one of the easiest last second advertising ideas.
What to email them?
- Follow up on abandoned carts
- Send a “Christmas Card” with a coupon
- Send your best and latest promotion
- Send a gift guide
- Send Store Updates / News like maybe faster in house processing for the Holidays
Social Media
If you preplanned your campaign, you probably have social media pretty covered in your plans. But you can still hit up your other social media accounts and personal profiles to gingerly share your sales and promotional events.
Any win with your sales efforts, whether you reached a goal or you designed something you’re proud of, share and celebrate with your friends. Any nonprofit endeavor, share about what you learned from the experience.
Think Diary of your Biz. The dreams. The hopes. The life lessons. And of course, any reason to celebrate.
You should also be posting about your sales and promotions on your business accounts.
User Generated Content
This is a great time to show “testimonials” in the form of stories and photos of people who are really happy with your business or product. So anytime you can influence people into sending you their stories that highlight your work, go for it.
But for purposes of last second advertising ideas, my best idea in the form of user generated content is probably to offer a free product of what you already have on sale based on some assignment you give people to send you to share on your social media.
The idea is to
- Get them to post something about you and share it with their friends
- Tag you so that you can share it with yours
- Highlight something you are promoting with a great sale in the process
Get a free thing! Enter by posting your best B-Thing and tag me. Remember you can still get that thing at 60% off until Friday.
So like say you are trying to sell cookbooks… Get a free cookbook! Tag me in a photo of your favorite recipe of mine that you tried from my blog, and you’re entered to win. I’ll be giving away 12 of these cookbooks for the 12 days of Christmas, but don’t worry, they are on sale 60% off for the last 3 days of these 12 days of Christmas.
Last Second Tweaks to your Site
If you aren’t already redecorating your online business (and offline brick & mortar store if applicable) for Christmas to get people in that festive mood, you need to do that.
Christmas colors are not just red and green anymore, and you may be able to find stock Christmas photos in your branded colors. But you’re allowed to change up your entire design just for the Holidays. Just pretend your website is your living room and you’re trying to show up the homeowners association.
In addition, you should probably have, loud and proud, somewhere that let’s people know the deadline to order to receive your product before Christmas.
Christmas Sale
Like you should probably have one of these in effect, but if you didn’t do that, you could.
But here are some last second advertising ideas of sales you can throw together relatively quickly to advertise that’s incredibly festive, appropriate, and gives people a sense of urgency.
Bundle Products
One last second sale you can offer relatively easily is to package several of your products into a perfect gift. Instead of selling one book, you can offer the entire series at a fraction of the price.
Buy a Gift, Get a Gift
Instead of offering a percentage off sale, you can consider offering a free gift card with purchase. But you don’t have to do a gift card. You can offer a smaller product with the sale of a larger product as a free gift with purchase.
Repackage a Product as a Gift
People for the most part are holiday shopping gifts for other people, and one huge deciding factor is “does it look nice enough to give as a gift?”
You see bath and body people do this all the time. Nobody wants to give a bottle of shower gel for Christmas. But put it in a basket with some lotion, body spray and a loofah, and well now that’s worthy of gift giving.
You can consider a little outsourcing and put together a “basket” of your product with other products that you can quickly buy and fulfill like if you are selling cookbooks, maybe a basket that has your Cookie Cookbook, and cookie cutters, some sprinkles, a thing of parchment paper, all on a dollar store cookie sheet lined with festive Christmas wrapping paper, and packaged in cellophane wrap with a huge bow. When you run out, you run out.
You can also do a Mystery Bag or Mystery Box with a red bow.
Of all last second advertising ideas, this one might be too little too late, but people love a product devoted to Christmas that’s already wrapped and ready to give.
Target Multiple Mini-Holidays
We have the Holidays that last roughly from Halloween or Thanksgiving until New Years. But they are a collection of holidays we keep adding to every year.
Perfect Sale Days include
- Black Friday
- Small Business Saturday
- Cyber Monday
- Super Saturday
- Christmas Eve
- New Years
Also, you can have a little fun with a hashtag day such as Cookie Day / Christmas Cookies. Here’s a copy of the calendar members see monthly in the Swanky Membership.
Last second advertising ideas can work around any one of these mini-holidays such as a cookie decorating bake-off on Cookie Day.
Build a Short Event around a Theme
This sounds like a lot of work and planning, but I’ve seen many people throw these together last second.
First of all, my mom only needs a day to meal plan a Christmas party and a week to clean for one. But second, I joined in several blogging related Christmas Events that were quickly thrown together.
Blog Hop
One person did a blog hop for 12 Days of Christmas. All she did was create 12 Christmas related writing prompts and had bloggers write about it. They also promoted each other in what each blog was giving away for Christmas (such as printables). They also shared each other posts. A blog hop is a great and easy way to bring quick eyeballs and get some stamina with sharing.
Give Away
Also, one blogger put together a give away. They found 10 bloggers to donate $10 to be involved. They gave away a $100 gift card (the $10 donation) and required 10 different ways to enter via liking, engaging and sharing. One event per blogger. All bloggers promoted the event on blog posts and social media.
Facebook Event
I’ve seen so many MLM host parties on FB as an event that it’s almost too easy to throw something together for non-MLM sales and happenings.
Last Second Advertising Ideas Theme Ideas include
- 12 Days of Christmas
- 25 Days of Christmas
- Christmas Parties / Virtual Parties
- Christmas Carols / Virtual Carols
- Cookies (Dec 4 is National Cookie Day)
- Stockings
- Ugly Christmas Sweaters
- Letters to Santa
- Holiday Movies / Books
- Christmas Lights
- Hot Cocoa / Coffee / Sweater Weather / Cozy Christmas
- Christmas Dinner planning
- Christmas Cards
- Football
Facebook Ad
Due to it’s steep learning curve, I wouldn’t start out advertising on Facebook as a last second idea, but if you are new to FB advertising, you can easily boost a post during a key time for sales. Aim for a post that has amazing organic engagement and/or shares, edit it to add a link and little sale diddy if you need to, and boost it.
The key is to aim for the right audience. If you know your customer, aim for interests (such as my customer generally loves dogs / puppies, Ellen Degeneres and Harry Potter), or you can upload your email list and create a look-a-like audience or boost to your email list as a warmer audience.
Normally, especially for last second advertising ideas, “Facebook Experts” tell you to appeal to a warm audience who already knows you, but this is a season for impulse purchases if you can gain trust easily. So the best time to attempt hitting a cold audience is right now.
For seasoned FB advertisers, you could easily set up a campaign for where you already have a FB pixel that you already campaigned for in the last year. That pixel learns more and more about connecting your customers to you the more it’s used. I would stick to whatever you used in the past, but if you have an option, I’d aim more for conversions as opposed to traffic for sales purposes.
Sponsored Pinterest Pin
If you decide to write a last second blog post, create a landing page, or add last second products, you can get a good jump on Pinterest by paying to sponsor your post. The important thing with Pinterest is fresh content and keywords, so pick keywords that have more buyer intent, and maybe create several new pins for that page for some A/B testing.
Very Last Second Advertising Ideas such as Super Saturday…
Once you hit a time where it’s too late to ship product in time for Christmas, that’s the time to push digital products or gift cards people can download or email.
Square Up and or Gift Up will help you establish gift cards quick and easy…
You can also consider other digital products like Printables and Ebooks.
Black Friday is slowly morphing into Black November, so people are starting to expect the best deals to hit right now. Make sure you offer the best sale you can muster for gift giving, and try to get the word out with any of these last second advertising ideas.
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