Valentine’s Stats.
Valentine’s day is just around the corner and consumers are ready to spend. $19.6bn to be more precise. The great thing about this is that consumers don’t limit their buying to just flowers. Jewellery, lingerie, travel, experiences, gift cards, candy, perfume, even home appliances are bought as a sign of love/romance to respective partners.
Jewellery - $4.7bn
Going out - $3.7bn
Flowers - $2bn
Candy - $1.8bn
Clothing - $2bn
Greeting cards - $894M
Gift Cards - $1.5bn
Not only that but it would seem that pets are not left out. A whopping $982M is spent on gifts for pets during this time with an average price of $5.50.
Family members and friends also get a chance to feel the love. Although $12.1bn will be spent on significant others, $3.5bn will be spent on family, $991M on classmates and teachers, $982M on friends, and $654M on co-workers.
Age is definitely a factor when it comes to buying gifts for loved ones. People aged 25-34 spend more on Valentine’s gifts followed by 35-44 and then 18-24. Men across all these groups spend the most with an average of $191 on gifts in 2015. Apparently, chivalry is not dead after all.
Peak days for Valentine’s day purchases are between February 7th -14th and increase as users get closer to the day.
Tips.
So, with all of these stats and experience, what can we learn about advertising to get sparkling Valentine’s day’s results?
- Men truly are the romantic sex (or at least they spend more). Gear a larger amount of your budget toward men aged between 25-34 where possible seeing as they are the ones with a larger budget and buy more.
- Use smart creatives. Make sure your creatives are appropriate for each part of your audience. This tip follows from the first. It would be a mistake to assume that all of the male consumers in your target audience are in a relationship with a woman. Don’t automatically alienate some of your audience and potentially lose out on sales.
- Valentine’s day doesn’t have to be for couples alone. In fact, Single Awareness Day is sometimes celebrated on the 14th or 15th. You can encourage consumers to purchase gifts for friends, family, pets or even themselves. Actually, for this group, women are more likely to buy gifts for people other than their significant others. Put together creative that is Valentine’s day related or anti-Valentine’s if you want to focus on Single Awareness Day.
- Spend your budget accordingly. You can use the start of your campaign to adjust your targeting and once you have the right people targeted you can ramp up spend for reminders because most consumers buy gifts at the last minute last minute.
- Optimize your targeting. If you have various products to sell then use interest targeting to serve the right gift option to the right gift-giver at the right time.
- Extend your customer pool. The decision time for purchasing a product or service is lowered for some consumers during this time. You can go after cold traffic during this time and then mix those leads with lookalike and relevant targeting.
- Leverage user time. Half the journey of getting consumers to buy your product is getting them to notice it. However, once you have their attention, use carousel ads to showcase more products and services.
- Don’t lose potential customers. Use DPA to up-sell and convince visitors to purchase products that they left in the check-out.
- Use Urgent Ad Copy. A lot of consumers will want to purchase gifts at the 11th hour. Use Ad copy to plays on this sense of urgency and where necessary offer deals to get them you by now.
Valentine’s day is the perfect time for people to find gifts for their loved ones. By creating smart ads, you will have the opportunity to provide relevant services and products and become a matchmaker of sorts. All of the listed tips will help you to build, thoughtful, relevant and smart campaigns.
