Planning your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns for your Valentine’s Day promotions 2023? 

In this post, we’ll go over the creatives you need to communicate your Valentine's Sale effectively. 

We’ll also share the best post-iOS 14 campaign strategy for your Valentine’s Day ads and show you how to set them up in just a few clicks.

Let's get started.

‍Your Top Creatives for Valentine’s Day Sales 2023

When planning campaigns for any occasion, the first thing to do is think about the creatives you want to run.

Here is a list of creatives you’ll need for your Valentine’s Day campaigns:

‍A Catalog Featuring Your Valentine’s Collection:

This is a great creative for your Meta ads. Here are some ways to make it stand out:

1. Lifestyle images

‍2. A clear offer

3. Relevant design

TIP: If you have a full-shop sale or coupon for Valentine’s Day, change your main retargeting and DABA catalogs with Valentine’s Day messaging. Use Socioh’s Smart Switch feature to update your catalog designs without losing campaign learnings.

2-3 Single Image Ads:

Your single image ads should communicate your offer clearly. Here are some ways to make these stand out:

1. Consider making your creatives in both square/feed (1:1) and story (9:16) format.
2. Choose images and copy that clearly communicate the occasion.
3. Make sure that you have a clear offer: Don’t keep your customers guessing. Your offer and the context should be obvious. Who is the offer for: are you selling to men or women? Are you offering a discount? If yes, how much?

If you're looking for inspiration, check out our ads library with 1000s of ads from D2C brands.

TIP: Add first cards to your carousel ads to set the context. All you need is a nice single image and a catalog featuring your Valentine's collection. 

Want to see an example? Take a look at these ads that one of our users is currently running:

‍BONUS: Already a Socioh user? You can now design your single image ads with Socioh — reach out to us to get alpha access to our image designer. ‍

‍1-2 Video Ads:

While not strictly necessary, these ads are great to add to your creative mix. Want them to stand out? Follow the same guidelines as those we’ve outlined for single-image ads above.

‍NOTE: Test and iterate on your creatives — this is the best way to succeed with Meta ads.

Now let's take a look at the best Valentine's Day Campaigns to run for your store.

‍Your Valentine’s Day Campaign Strategy for Meta Ads 2023

Once you’ve got your creatives sorted, you'll need to think about the campaigns you want to run and how to structure them.

At Socioh, we've simplified this task for you. You can go to 'Sales & Promotions' campaigns in your dashboard and set up the most effective ads to promote your Valentine's Day offers in just a few clicks.

Not using Socioh yet?

Steal this campaign structure to create winning Valentine's Day campaigns through your Meta Ads Manager. (Though we must warn you it'll take you a lot more than a few minutes!)

‍Retargeting Campaigns for Valentine’s Day

For occasions like Valentines, 4th of July etc., you should reach out to all the people in your funnel, no matter which stage of their journey.

Socioh’s ‘Consolidated Retargeting’ campaign is designed to do just that. With 4 ad sets, the Consolidated Retargeting campaign targets:

i) All your social media engagers from across Facebook and Instagram over the last 1 year.

ii) Your store’s lifetime purchasers, or everyone who has ever purchased from your store.

iii) All your website visitors in your pixel, or anyone who’s visited your website in the last 6 months, and

iv) Your entire email list, or everyone who's in your email list but hasn’t purchased from you. You'll need to upload this audience directly on Meta and then select it from Socioh’s custom audiences list. 

‍TIP: Run this retargeting campaign with CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) settings.
Why? Meta is very good at allocating budget — your job is to give Meta the widest audience possible to select from. You don’t need to guess which audience subset will perform. 

‍As for budgeting, we recommend you spend 25-35% of your total ad budget on retargeting.‍

Prospecting Campaigns for Valentine’s Day 

Wondering how many campaigns or ad sets you need for Valentine’s prospecting campaigns? 

Start with a campaign with 3 different ad sets for broad targeting, interest-based targeting, and lookalike audiences. With Socioh’s ‘Creative Tester’ campaign, you can do this in a few easy clicks. 

NOTE: If you are a small store (under $250 daily spend), this is the only campaign you need.

But what are the pointers to keep in mind as you set up this campaign? Here are some tips specific to each ad set:

1. For the broad ad set, keep restrictions to a minimum but do apply anything that makes sense to you, i.e. if your products are suitable for women, then make sure to add that.
2. For interest targeting, use interests that you have tested and which have worked for you in the past. If unsure, skip this ad set by unchecking it.
3. For the lookalikes ad set, stack 3-10% lookalikes of all your past purchasers, your best customers and your higher than AOV (Average Order Value) purchasers. Socioh automatically creates multiple lookalikes and stacks them. You do not need to make any edits to this audience unless you have a promotion that is gender or age specific.

‍This campaign is also set up with CBO to allow Meta to test what works best and spend accordingly. 

‍IMPORTANT: We recommend editing each audience to exclude your retargeting audiences if you are running Socioh’s ‘Consolidated Retargeting’ campaign. If, however, you are not running retargeting campaigns for everyone in your funnel, being lax with exclusions will work better. 

If you spend over $250 a day on your campaigns, there are two additional campaigns we recommend: 

1. Dynamic Ad, Broad Audience (DABA): A broad or open-prospecting campaign, this campaign is set up as a dynamic ad and uses Meta’s powerful AI to deliver to relevant audiences. A great campaign to scale spend with, there are nonetheless some pointers to keep in mind before you use this campaign for your promotions:

• Run this campaign only if you have tested DABA campaigns in your account in the past with good results. Your promotions are not the time to test new campaigns.
• Use the same catalog as the one you are testing in your retargeting campaign (category or whole store). 

TIP: Already running a DABA campaign? Use Socioh’s Branded Catalogs to temporarily edit or ‘switch’ your catalog design to highlight your Valentine’s offer. 

2. Advantage+ Shopping Campaign: This campaign also uses Meta’s AI in addition to automatic placements, lowest cost bid strategy, etc. to maximize performance & find new customers. Here are some pointers if you use this campaign for your promotions:

• This campaign is most likely to bring you results if you are an established brand with a good understanding of your creative and messaging. 
• Use 5-6 (up to 10) of your best offer creatives when setting it up.

TIP: Add your Valentine's catalog creative to this campaign especially if you skip the DABA campaign.

So what are you waiting for? Log in to Socioh and get started right away!

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