Why Your High Street Retail Business Needs Facebook and Instagram Ads This Christmas

TL;DR? Ads on Facebook And Instagram Could Have Your Shop Full and Your Tills Jingling All The Way This Christmas

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• Shopping habits have shifted considerably in the last two decades as more and more people opt for the convenience of buying online - a trend accelerated by the pandemic

• High street footfall has declined significantly as a result of these changes to the way people shop, down 15-20% since the pandemic alone

• The situation has been made worse by the disappearance of the big name brands, such as Debenhams and Mothercare, that used to attract shoppers into town and city centres, benefiting smaller retailers alike

• Where a prominent location was historically an advantage, now the competition for attention takes place online not just on the streets

• Facebook and Instagram are a cost-effective way for even small retailers to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to websites, and even attract visitors to their bricks-and-mortar stores

• Although the costs of ads on Facebook and Instagram will undoubtedly increase in the run up to Christmas, they are still a very affordable way to reach large local audiences regularly and at scale with offers and incentives to shop

Why Facebook and Instagram Ads Are Such A Good Choice For Christmas Retail Ads

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There are several reasons why you might consider investing in paid social ads on Facebook and Instagram in the run-up to Christmas.

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Reach

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Your organic posts on these platforms will typically only reach a small percentage of your fans and followers.

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When your Page has fewer than 10,000 likes or follows, your posts will reach around 10% of your audience. When your fanbase exceeds 10,000, you can expect it to plummet to more like 1-2%.

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It’s no accident, it’s by design: Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, wants you to feel starved of exposure so you’ll consider spending money on ads. 

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As a result, pay-to-play has become essential when it comes to expanding your audiences.

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You get to choose your ad audience

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The people who like or follow your Facebook and Instagram presence choose you.

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In some ways, that’s a good thing.

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But here’s the problem: a large proportion do so not because they have any intention of becoming customers, but for a myriad other reasons.

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In some cases, it’s because they simply like the look of your business, or the vibe it gives off. In other cases, they’re just looking for inspiration. Others still will be business rivals keeping an eye on you as their competition.

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When you run ads, on the other hand, you get to decide who they’re shown to, and there are some incredibly detailed targeting options available based on;

• Demographics
• Interests
• Behaviours

For instance, want to get in front of men aged 45-54 that are married, with ads that go like this: “No idea what to buy her for Christmas? We’ve got the perfect gift for her, pop-in to take a look, or "Sign up here and we’ll email some inspiration”. 

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Or perhaps you’re interested in mums of children aged 13-18: “Wondering what this year’s Christmas gift trends are for teenagers? We’ve got you covered.”

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You can get incredibly niche and granular.

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Not only can you get your ads seen at scale by people who matter, you can do so at a frequency that means they stick

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Success with ads of any kind depends on several factors.

Scale: You need lots of people to see them, because the more people who do, the bigger the opportunity you create

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Relevance: You need your ads to strike a chord with people, showing how your product or service addresses their wants and needs

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Exposure frequency: You need your ads in front of your chosen audience many times, improving the chances of people paying active attention to them and making them more memorable

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We’ve been running a campaign using ads on Facebook and Instagram to promote the city of Preston as a Christmas destination. Our awareness ads have been seen more than 100,000 times by around 60,000 local residents, something we could never achieve with just organic posts alone - not only would we never get in front of so many, we simply couldn’t post often enough to make sure we’d keep getting our content seen by them. Ads work around the clock on autopilot once running.

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Facebook and Instagram ads can be visually striking and compelling

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Search engine ads shown only to people who are already looking for your products or services, or the kind of shop yours is, are also a great way to attract people to your business in the run-up to Christmas.

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But they’re generally text only, and so it can be hard to make them stand out.

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Being very visual platforms, Facebook and Instagram give you a way to put attention-grabbing graphics, photos and videos in front of people instead. 

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Facebook and Instagram ads are great for raising awareness, generating demand, stoking buzz and curiosity, and even driving impulse buys

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Before anyone can buy from your retail business, people have to know it exists. Awareness ads are perfect for promoting your brand, the type of retailer you are, and your location. According to some research, 81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying, and that will include following links in social media ads that catch their eye.

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You can stimulate demand with special offers that are only available on a limited basis. If you have a new product line, you can tease it and build anticipation ahead of your big reveal. 

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At Christmas, when people are often short of gift ideas, you can get them to explore things they may not otherwise have considered. 

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And you can trigger impulse purchases too when your ads end up in front of those who are already in a buying frame of mind, and present them with an unmissable offer.

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How To Build Facebook and Instagram Ad Campaigns To Boost Your Christmas Trade

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So, now you know more about the benefits, how can you build successful Christmas ads on Facebook and Instagram for your retail business?

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Well, don’t just hit the Boost button on an existing organic post and put £10 into promoting it, it’s a waste of money.

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Instead, use Meta Ads Manager to construct a properly considered, targeted, and appropriately resourced ad campaign. 

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Then:

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Familiarise yourself with the structure of Meta ads

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Ads built for Facebook and Instagram consist of:

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A campaign. This defines your overall objective

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Ad Sets. Inside your Campaign, you’ll create Ad Sets, which is where you’ll define your audience targeting, duration, and placements (i.e Facebook Feed, Instagram Reels etc).

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Ads. Within each Ad Set you’ll then create your ads themselves. These will consist of creative (the graphics, photos and/or videos you’ll use to grab attention and get your message across visually); copy, the words you’ll use to make your pitch; your links (to online destinations such as your website); and your Call To Action or CTA button (e.g. Learn More, Get Offer, Shop Now).

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You can only have one objective per Campaign, but each can have multiple Ad Sets all containing multiple ads.

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Set up your Pixel for tracking the actions people take

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Meta needs to be able to understand the actions people take after clicking on your ads in order to measure success and optimise performance (essentially by finding more people with similar characteristics to those who took the action you wanted them to). 

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This is achieved with a bit of tracking code called the Meta Pixel. 

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In Meta Events Manager, you’ll create a dataset (your Pixel) and then be given your Meta Pixel Base Code. This needs to be installed on every page of your website, and once working will send a PageView event to Meta every time someone visits a page on your website (provided that they’ve opted-in to marketing cookies).

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Then, on pages where you want to track specific actions, you add a small line of additional tracking code.

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For example, if you have a page where you are signing people up to your Christmas product reveal, you might add code to track Website Registrations or Leads. If you’re selling something online, you could add track Purchase code (or Add To Cart).

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Whatever you choose, it needs to comply with data privacy laws, and it must be functional before you start running ads, otherwise they’ll fail, be super expensive, or both.

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Decide on your objective and performance goals

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Once you’ve got your tracking sorted, it’s time to head into Ads Manager, where the first step is to decide what you want to achieve. 

Meta gives you several options for Campaign objectives:

• Awareness

• Traffic

• Engagement

• Leads

• App promotion

• Sales

Awareness ads are good for reach, brand awareness and video views.

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Traffic ads are good for link clicks, landing page views (visits to pages on your website), Instagram and Facebook profile visits, triggering Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp conversations, and calls.

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Engagement ads are good for triggering Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp conversations, video views, post engagement (likes, comments and shares etc), conversions, and calls.

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Leads ads are good for generating inbound leads using website and instant forms together, just instant forms on Facebook and Instagram, triggering Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp conversations, and calls.

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App promotions ads are good for app installs and app events.

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Sales ads are good for conversions (purchases), catalogue sales (ecommerce), triggering Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp conversations, and calls.

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Choose a budget

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To decide this, consider what you want to accomplish in terms of outcomes and work backwards from there.

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Here are some typical costs you might expect to pay depending on objective and performance goal, just to give you a feel:

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Awareness ads - £3.50 per thousand people reached

Traffic ads - £0.50 to £1.50 per landing page view 

Engagement - £0.02 to £0.06 per engagement

Leads - £1.25 to £2.50 per lead

Sales - £5.00 to £25.00 per conversion

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Remember these are just indicative, and can be affected by seasonal variations, ad quality, audience and ad placement selections, and more.

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So, let’s say you choose the Awareness objective and your goal is to maximise reach. Your research tells you that the total available Facebook and Instagram audience around your town is 120,000 and you want to try and get in front of half of them, so your target is to reach 60,000 people with your ads - you could potentially do so by spending as little as £210. 

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Select your audience and ad placements

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At the Ad Set level you can also choose your audience.

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⚠️ Warning: Meta will try and encourage you to let its AI tools find the perfect audience for you with what it calls Advantage+ Audience. In our experience, this doesn’t work very well yet, and so you’re better off making your own manual selections.

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Choose the geographic radius that you’d like your ads to target (minimum 17km) or specify your town or city only.

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Then make gender and age selections before turning to more detailed targeting options. 

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It’s a good idea to layer demographics, interests, and behaviours. For instance, let’s say you’re a men’s fashion retailer and you want to promote your in-store sales offer, you may want to target:

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Men aged 25-34

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With interests in fashion and style (retail); and fashion accessories; clothing; and shopping

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AND

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Who are engaged shoppers (with evidence of purchasing behaviour)

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This way, your ads will be shown to those most likely to be interested in your offer and most likely to buy too.

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You can also choose the placements in which your ads show, and there are lots of them. Again, watch out for Meta saying its AI can pinpoint the best, and instead start by selecting your own.

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We find Facebook and Instagram Feeds, Stories, and Reels work best. 

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Create your ads

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Now it’s time to produce your ads, which is where you’ll:

• Upload your creative (graphics, photos or videos)

• Supply your ad copy (the captions that appear above your ads on Facebook or below on Instagram), known as Primary Text

• Write headlines

• Provide descriptions

• Choose your CTA button

It’s best practice to have more than one ad (we tend to go with five) just so your audience sees a varied mix and doesn’t get bored or overwhelmed.

For each one, you can supply up to five Primary Text variants, five different Headlines, and five descriptions, which Meta will then show to people in different combinations to find the optimum. However, it can make reporting and analytics hard, so when starting out, stick to one Primary Text, Headline and Description per ad.

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Your CTA button is there to guide people on what to do, and you’ll have differing options to select from according to your Campaign objective. Use these wisely and honestly - if you’re running a Sales campaign looking to maximise purchases, Buy Now, Shop Now, or Get Offer are the right choices; these encourage action and make your intentions (to sell stuff) transparent. Learn More, on the other hand, doesn’t set expectations and may lead people to feel as though you’ve tried to cloak your true intentions if used in Sales ads.

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Make it obviously Christmassy

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If your goal is to boost footfall and make more sales in the run-up to Christmas, make that obvious in all your ad creative and messaging.

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Use graphics, images, and video creative with an obvious festive feel, and make specific references to Christmas shopping, festive experiences, and seasonal fun - Meta’s machine learning algorithm will spot this and it will then have a better idea of what you’re trying to do and will then be more likely to serve your ads to people who have already engaged with other Christmas content.

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Monitor for progress, be brave for the first 48 hours and hold your nerve for the first 7 days

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Once your Campaign is published, Meta will start showing your ads to people in your chosen audience.

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To begin with, you’ll be in the Learning Phase while Meta’s machine learning algorithm tests the various creatives, messages, CTA selections, and placements to find what works best. 

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Your Ad Sets will remain in the Learning Phase until either 7 days have passed or your ads have achieved 50 of the conversion events you’ve chosen as your performance goal, whichever comes first.

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During this time, it’ll feel like your budget is being hammered and results are poor, and you’ll be tempted to fiddle with your ads; don’t, let Meta do its thing.

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The time for concern is when you hit the 7 day mark if you haven’t yet obtained 50 conversions; your Ad Sets will be categorised as Learning Limited which is the point at which tweaks are needed.

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Some Campaign objectives exit the Learning Phase faster than others, those with a low audience commitment - Awareness ads optimised for Reach will hit 50 events in no time, Traffic campaigns often do too as do Engagement campaigns. Leads, App promotions and Sales campaigns - where people are handing over contact details or making purchases - take longer because it’s harder for Meta to find exactly the right people you need.

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Bonus Hints, Tips and Tricks to Make Your Facebook and Instagram Ads Work For Your Retail Business This Christmas

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Now you understand the benefits of advertising on Facebook and Instagram this Christmas, and have a handle on how to build and structure a campaign, here are some tricks of the trade to help.

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‍Get your main message across in the first 2-3 seconds of any video ads you use. People have short attention spans, and may not bother to watch all of your video ads even if they’re only short 15 second Reels. “Get 10% off selected stock in time for Christmas” is best conveyed right at the start.

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Use carousel ads for swipeable storytelling, product reveals, and offers. These are a great way to drive engagement by getting people to swipe through up to 10 image or video cards. Not only does all the swiping send strong interest signals back to Meta, you can spark curiosity and buzz with carousels too. Use them like this: “Swipe to discover our top 7 Christmas gift ideas for women under 35”, or “Get 10% off on selected product ranges this Christmas, swipe to see what’s included”, and “This latest gadget is a must-have for the man in your life this Christmas, swipe to see it in action”. 

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Be strikingly different and use humour to get noticed and remembered. Whilst keeping to the Christmassy look and feel, don’t be afraid to experiment with creative approaches that differ from what other retailers are doing - your ads will stand out more if they take a wildly different tack, and people will recall your brand more easily if your ads make them laugh. 

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Leverage ‘shop local’ and ‘support small business’ messaging. Given that lots of customers will instinctively turn to Amazon and Temu etc for much of their Christmas shopping, or the online stores of brands like Next (whether for home delivery or click-and-collect) you need to compete in other ways. People still feel connected to the places where they live, so lean into the fact that shopping locally, in person, supports livelihoods and keeps more money in the local economy rather than sending it overseas to giant corporations. It’s also good to inject your brand personality. 

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Emphasise the broader Christmas offer around you. Unlike buying online, shopping for gifts in person doesn’t need to be an isolated activity. It can be much more sociable, like meeting with friends, dining out, seeing a movie and more besides. Showcase how a visit to your bricks-and-mortar location can be part of a bigger excursion full of Christmas cheer. 

Help people find you. Show and tell people where you are, but also highlight your proximity to bus and train stations (“You’ll find us on High Street, just a short three minute walk from the train station”) and tell people where the nearest car and cheapest car parks are (provide postcodes, dropped pins from Google Maps, and What Three Words locations). And be sure to use external photos of your shop in your ads and associated content so people visiting have an idea what they’re looking for.

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Run specific promotions tied to publicised local events. If thousands of locals are expected at the Christmas Lights Switch-On, or there’s an artisan food market planned for the first weekend of December, or a temporary ice rink is on its way, run some ads that reference these and link a promotion to them. “Planning to attend the Christmas food market? Why not pop-in and do some gift shopping while you’re already in town, and take advantage of our exclusive offers, available just for the day?” 

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Key Takeaways

• With footfall in decline, high street retailers can no longer rely on prominent premises and the lure of bigger brands. The competition for visibility is online and on social media, but organic social media reach is artificially restricted.

• Pay-to-play Facebook and Instagram ads provide an affordable and effective way for retailers to reach many more potential customers and attract them in-store with precision targeting, blending online and offline promotional activities.

• Unlike organic social media where your audiences choose you, meaning you end up with lots of people liking and following your pages who are never going to buy, ads on Facebook and Instagram give you control over who you reach, allowing you to target people more likely to buy or visit.

• Facebook and Instagram are both visual platforms, so get creative and use that to your advantage. 

• Key success factors with all ads are: scale, relevance, and repeat exposure. Facebook and Instagram are perfect platforms for achieving all three.

• It’s best to build properly thought-out campaigns in Meta Ads Manager than use the Boost feature on existing organic posts. 

• Get your GDPR compliant tracking (Meta Pixel) configured and operational first - your ads won’t work effectively or affordably without this.

• Choose an objective and performance goal that best fits your needs, target wisely, and use a combination of scroll-stopping creatives (graphics, photos, and videos) and compelling messaging in the right placements to cut through and drive the actions you want.

• Brevity, transparency, and managing audience expectations are all crucial to getting your message across, revealing your intentions, and communicating what you expect people to do. 

• Use a mix of high-engagement ad formats, don’t be afraid to be quirky and use humour, show off your people and business personality to help forge a human connection, be helpful by drawing attention to things that make visiting you more easy, emphasise the social and community benefits of in-person shopping, and run specific promotions tied to public events that will attract big crowds to your town or city.

• The first 48 hours will seem especially expensive and lacking in results, and progress will feel slower than hoped for in the first 7 days. If you’ve done a good job, performance will stabilise after this and then accelerate towards your goal. If you get stuck in Learning Limited status, you need to make some changes.

Enjoyed reading this? Found it useful? Help us reach more people by sharing it on your socials! Want expert help building and running Facebook and Instagram ads this Christmas? Hurry, we just about have time and the space for a handful of extra retail clients, head here to start a conversation.