Business-to-business (B2B) advertisers often experience a surge in leads after January 1st. However, the post-holiday slowdown is a reality for many businesses, both online and offline. This article will show you how to leverage Facebook ads to transform the typical “January slump” into a successful first-quarter launch. We’ll explore strategies categorized as follows:

• Brick and mortar: Enhance foot traffic using carousel ads and store locators.
• Ecommerce: Utilize holiday shopper data and Collection ads for cross-selling related products.

Before we dive in, let’s debunk a common misconception…

The Post-Holiday Slump Is a Myth

Both physical stores and online retailers go all out with deals and promotions from Thanksgiving to Christmas, creating a perceived lull afterward, a period where consumers seem to slow down their spending. Consequently, many businesses scale back their online advertising or even hit pause. This is a mistake. There’s still plenty of money to be made after the holidays, and Facebook ads can help you tap into it.

Let’s look at the stats! According to data directly from Facebook, 65% of shoppers intend to continue shopping after Christmas. The reason? Humans are inherently consumptive, always wanting, even needing new and better things. Things that complement their recent purchases or items rediscovered in the back of a drawer. Additionally, January presents an opportunity to capitalize on post-holiday sales. So, let’s give the people what they want!

For Brick & Mortar Businesses: Attract Customers with Store Locators

Since you are reading the nexus-security blog, it’s likely that a significant portion of your (or your clients’) business happens online. However, for some, driving potential customers to a physical store is just as crucial as online sales. In a country with almost 30 million small businesses, some still rely entirely on face-to-face interactions to generate revenue.

Regardless of your business model, one thing remains constant: Facebook ads can help you guide interested individuals in your vicinity towards visiting your store.

The Strategy

If you have multiple locations, Facebook allows you to utilize the “Store Visits” campaign objective. This dynamic ad format lets you display proximity-based creatives to users based on their location (eliminating the need to create numerous individual ads).

Impressive, right? However, if you operate from a single location (which we’ll focus on today), you’ll need to get creative. Currently, Facebook doesn’t support “Store Visits” as a direct objective. Instead, you can combine reach or brand awareness campaigns with highly targeted location parameters and carousel ads to attract local prospects and guide them to your store. The difference in campaign objectives is simple. Brand awareness campaigns prioritize showing your ads multiple times to the same audience, which benefits advertisers with niche target groups. Reach campaigns, on the other hand, focus on maximum exposure. If you fine-tune your location targeting, selecting “Reach” as your campaign objective enables you to showcase your ads to the widest possible audience within a concentrated radius around your store.

To achieve this, create a new Facebook ad campaign using the guided creation process. In the Marketing Objectives section, choose “Reach” and give your campaign a motivational name.

Now, it’s time to define your hyper-local audience. While adding demographic information (age, gender) and detailed targeting (demographics, interests, behaviors) relevant to your offerings helps, the crucial element is setting precise location parameters. This example demonstrates what not to do:

Let’s imagine you own a store near Boston’s famous Prudential Center. When selecting your target location, Facebook allows you to specify whether you want to reach everyone in that area, travelers, recent visitors, or local residents.

For a more nuanced approach (if you’re in a bustling city with enough people to justify it), you can create separate ad sets for the same location, tailoring your message to Facebook users based on their connection to that area. For example, travelers might need to know about your coffee shop’s excellent free WiFi, while residents might respond better to a “free pastry after 10 lattes” loyalty program.

Present that offer in a carousel format, and it’s irresistible. Now, let’s add your target location. Input your business address and adjust the radius to a sensible distance. In a city, 1-3 miles might be sufficient for a sizeable audience. In less populated regions, you may need to expand it considerably.

With your location set, determine your budget and ad set duration. Pay close attention to both frequency capping and ad scheduling. The former prevents overwhelming your local audience, while the latter avoids advertising your store when it’s closed.

Adjust your ad schedule to match your business hours and proceed to ad creation. Select the “Carousel” format and move on to the exciting part.

Start with your universal ad copy, highlighting what makes your business unique and mentioning either your address or proximity to a well-known landmark. Next, ensure your carousel ad includes three cards, with one (ideally the last) displaying a map of your business location. You can enable this in the ad creation interface.

The first two cards should showcase your unique selling proposition, a current offer, or a picture of your storefront (being subtle won’t help). Since your location is unlikely to change, use these cards for A/B testing ad creatives in your foot traffic campaign. You can customize a headline and description for each card (they won’t appear in all Facebook ad placements). Utilize these to feature exclusive offers that attract customers to your store. Although the added map card automatically includes a “Get Directions” button, you can add it to your visually appealing cards as well. From a measurement standpoint, you can track reach metrics at the campaign level within Ads Manager:

Remember to test your ad creative frequently and ensure you have enough inventory to handle the anticipated influx of customers eager to spend their money on your post-holiday offerings.

For Ecommerce Businesses: Cross-Sell to Your Expanded Customer Base

You run an ecommerce business. You’ve spent the last month attracting prospects and using dynamic remarketing to re-engage those who escaped, and it paid off. December was a success! What’s next? It’s time to cross-sell to your existing customers. For those unfamiliar, cross-selling involves suggesting complementary products to a prospect or customer, essentially enticing someone with money in hand to buy something extra. Amazon excels at cross-selling.

Because who doesn’t need ankle weights with their weight vest, right? Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” section on product pages cleverly combines social proof and convenience to sell more at the point of sale. Our approach with Facebook ads is slightly different: we’ll focus on cross-selling to customers acquired during the holidays.

The Strategy

Let’s say you sell men’s grooming products – ergonomic razor handles, blades, shaving creams, badger hair brushes, and overpriced beard oil. If a customer purchased a razor (your most expensive item), there are multiple ways to approach a cross-sale. Even better, these cross-sales can be recurring because customers need to replenish their supplies regularly.

The secret to successful cross-selling with Facebook ads? Custom audiences. To put it simply, custom audiences are essential for small to medium-sized ecommerce businesses. If you have a vast product catalog, letting Facebook automate your cross-selling with dynamic ads is recommended. But that’s a topic for another time. Begin by creating custom audiences using the email addresses of customers who purchased your razors. Navigate to the audiences tab, click “Create Audience,” and select “Customer List.”

Upload the email addresses of customers who bought your product during the holidays. Since we’re discussing post-holiday sales, I’m assuming your Facebook pixel is already set up to track purchases as conversions. If so, create a new conversion campaign targeting your previous buyers:

Now, since you’re capitalizing on recent purchases to cross-sell, you have several options for ad creative. We’ll concentrate on Facebook’s new Collection ad because it lets you promote multiple products without managing a product feed. It simplifies the creation of dynamic, engaging ads to showcase various cross-sell opportunities. Simply insert your images into a pre-designed template, and voila – you have an ad! The only limitation is that it’s exclusive to the Facebook mobile app. However, feast your eyes! This impressive example from Adidas demonstrates the potential. However, you don’t need a fancy video to make it work. Let me explain. First, complete the cover image and text sections of your Collection ad (the part that appears before the catalog-style section). Where Adidas used a video, insert an image of the product your custom audience purchased during the holidays (in our example, a razor handle).

In the text fields, remind customers about their recent purchase and highlight the benefits of your complementary products. You could also leverage a different angle, like scarcity or fear of missing out, depending on what feels appropriate. Next, add the products you want to cross-sell in the “Product Lists” section. Facebook requires a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 8.

For each product, include a headline (product name), description (likely price), and a destination URL. That last part is crucial; you can direct customers to the specific landing page of the product that interests them most. To maximize this feature, add a unique UTM parameter to each cross-sell product destination URL. This enables you to retarget anyone who visits a product page from your Collection ad but doesn’t make a purchase with a separate ad that specifically features either a) the product they viewed as a single image ad or b) the three products they didn’t view as a carousel ad. You’re welcome – turning a missed cross-sell opportunity into a regular sale!