Planning Your Meta Q4 Strategy: Key Takeaways

Our Paid Social Manager, Ragen Cooper, represented Blue Wheel at the Meta Agency Accelerator Summit, which was created specifically for high-impact agencies in the space.

There was significant focus around Meta in Q4 and the utilization of Meta AI as a part of the puzzle, especially around holiday planning. Ragen is here to recap the summit, share how you can use Meta to prepare for the Q4 holiday season, and offer actionable tips for your holiday planning!

What is the Meta Agency Accelerator Program?

The Meta Agency Accelerator Program was created specifically for high-impact advertising agencies. During the sessions, we learned about Meta in a way that many other agencies aren’t — giving us an additional edge when it comes to developing advertising strategies, creative, and budgets for our clients.

We gained applicable learnings that will set our clients up for success! And now we’re sharing some of those learnings here as well.

Benefits of Utilizing Meta for Brands

Meta has become the bread and butter for many brands’ advertising strategies—and for good reason. Advertising across Facebook and Instagram are some of the best ways to grow your brand and gain new-to-brand customers.

Meta is still the top choice for advertising for many reasons, especially during the Q4 holiday season. Meta reports that 56% of users discover brands on Meta during the holidays (November–December), at a time when conversions are high as people shop for gifts as well as taking advantage of discounts to buy for themselves.

Additionally, 35% of users agree that products found on Meta are more relevant than other platforms. This is likely due in part to Meta heavily investing in Artificial Intelligence to provide incredible accuracy for audiences. In fact, Meta reports that advertisers who opted into AI tactics on Meta saw:

• 20% better performance
• 23% increase in ad impressions
• -22% decrease in Q4 price-per-ad

So, not only are your ads on Meta more cost effective, but they’re also being shown to more relevant audiences that have a higher purchase intent.

Planning for Q4 with Meta 

Believe it or not, now is the time to solidify your holiday eCommerce advertising strategy. Planning your Meta Q4 strategy well in advance is crucial in reaching your revenue goals by the end of the year.

Consider Your Discounts

As you plan your Q4 Meta ads, one of the most important tactics to keep in mind is the discount you offer. Customers are looking for meaningful discounts. Meta reports that 82% of users care about discount offers, so when you’re planning your holiday offers, don’t just add a gift with purchase.

If your competitor offers a discount when you don’t (or they offer a better discount), many customers will simply follow the discount. In fact, 82% are open to switching brands based on their budget constraints. Users are increasingly loyal to the discount, not necessarily you.

Diversify Your Creative

Q4 is not the time to use old, stagnant creative in your Meta holiday ads. Users are bombarded with even more ads during this two-month period, so your creative really needs to stand out.

Conduct a survey of your purchasers and non-purchasers to understand why they have or have not bought your product yet. From there, you can create ads based on what drew them to your product or turned them away.

We recommend testing different ad types and value propositions to see what makes specific audiences convert at different stages of the funnel. Then, you can use that knowledge to inform your holiday creative.

We call this way of thinking Conversion Creative, and it’s the philosophy our creative services team utilizes on all their shoots for advertising content. By creating content that is specifically designed to convert based on data, you’ll see higher purchase rates and fewer abandoned carts.

Lean into Meta’s AI

Using AI in holiday campaigns is a great way to optimize budgets, narrow down audiences, and see greater ROI. Here at Blue Wheel, we’re seeing that targeting broader audiences is what drives performance now, versus more specific targeting. This philosophy allows algorithms to do their job, tailoring your audiences to your brand specifically.

Since abiding by these more broad and AI best practices, we have seen our costs go down and our returns go up, generally speaking. We are able to reach more people and seeing more profitable purchases. This includes:

• Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns, a new campaign structure introduced last year and rolled out over the course of this year. This AI tool requires broad targeting, and allows Meta to do the targeting so our teams can focus on creative.

• Advantage+ Campaign Budget, formerly Campaign Budget Optimization, sets the budget to the campaign rather the audiences. This then allows Meta to decide where the budget is best spent.

• Advantage+ Placements, formerly Automatic Placements, automatically delivers ads across all of Meta’s ad placements, rather than manually choosing where your ad is shown up. This helps to find a wider audience and delivers the right ad at the right time where Meta thinks someone will convert.

• Simplified account structure/broad audiences, Gone are the days of niche targeting and multiple campaigns and ad sets. Having fewer, larger-targeted audiences allows Meta to seek out who will actually purchase, leading to quicker learning phases, lower costs and more purchases over time.

Adopt an Omni-Channel Philosophy

Of course, Meta is just one piece of the puzzle, or what we like to call the Performance Commerce Effect (PCE). You should also be enacting advertising and marketing Q4 strategies across TikTok, email and SMS, influencer marketing, Amazon Advertising, and more.

As an omni-channel agency, Blue Wheel specializes in creating a comprehensive strategy that includes all of the above — giving you the flexibility to adjust budgets, optimize sales, and increase your total revenue in Q4 and beyond.

If you’re interested in working with us for the 2023 holiday season, now is the time to inquire. Reach out to our team today!