Effective Media Planning To Influence Luxury Holiday Shoppers

Holiday shopping seasons aren’t like other times of the year—consumers, especially upscale consumers—are looking to spend thousands of dollars on luxury purchases in a very short period of time. In fact, holiday shoppers with a household income above $120,000 are expected to spend more than $3,000. But during this potentially lucrative window, marketers across various luxury goods niches are all trying to shout loud enough to drown each other out and grab shoppers’ attention. 

To thrive during the shopping season, your clients don’t need a bigger megaphone—they need very specific and effective media planning. Carefully orienting advertising campaigns around their target audience’s daily habits, routines, thoughts, and holiday-focused needs is key to lasting success, and that means placing ads in just the right place at just the right time, every day leading up to the holidays.

Key Factors of Effective Media Planning for the Holidays

Kick off the next phase of your holiday sales strategy with more effective media planning. This guide will walk you through:

• The importance of identifying how the holiday season changes your target audience’s behaviors
• How your strategic presence can affect and influence shopping behaviors
• The benefits of targeting ads in upscale, brand-safe environments
• How to use insights about upscale holiday shoppers for more effective media planning to increase return on advertising spend (ROAS).

Here are the steps to take to craft a media plan for the holidays that will get the results your clients expect. 

Identify the Holiday Habits of Your Upscale Consumers—What Behaviors and Preferences Are Driving Their Purchase Decisions?

Upscale consumers with plenty of spending power—and especially those in the professional world—are your target audience. What are they doing differently now that the holiday shopping season has arrived? Are they:

• Spending more time outside the office for lunches and coffee breaks to run errands and buy gifts?
• Stressed parents who are trying to balance a lot of holiday to-dos and can benefit from frequent reminders about your solutions?
• More likely to see appeal in things that are cozy, luxurious, and comfort-driven?
• Looking for inspiration for gift ideas as they go to the break room or ride elevators in the building?
• Shopping online in the office (or at least looking at deals more frequently)?

No matter what your shoppers’ habits are throughout the majority of the year, they change during the holiday shopping season. Identify those small changes. Use industry research, identify historical changes in your web traffic trends, and zero in on when your target audience is most likely to care about your ads. 

Related: Maximizing Holiday Sales: Exploring the Impact of In-Office Advertising on Online Purchasing Behavior

This is the vital first step in figuring out the right media strategy for maximum impact. After all, if you don’t engage with your audience’s seasonal wants and needs, your ads will be a waste of money. Effective media planning starts with a solid understanding of your target audience, and general knowledge won’t do.

Prioritize Advertising Campaigns That Align with Daily Behaviors Around the Holidays

Highly targeted campaigns are important because they satisfy two goals: they allow you to send incredibly effective advertising content to niche luxury shoppers, and they don’t waste your advertising dollars on audiences that aren’t a good fit for you and your ads. This centers on the core objective of efficiency: minimizing waste. 

The more specifically you can identify the holiday shopping behaviors of your target audience, the better you can create and distribute advertising that matches those changing behaviors and delivers quality impressions. Consider:

• Maximize the number of touch points between luxury shoppers and your brand. By knowing what office buildings your core buyers work at you can deliver advertising that resonates with them. 
• Create stories for different aspects of B2C holiday shopping habits. You can deliver ads for impulse buys and low-cost luxuries right before common coffee break windows. Alternatively, advertise office-appropriate gifts for busy professionals who need to buy something for their teams, their clients, or their White Elephant assignment right when they’re most relevant, prompting an immediate online or in-person purchase. By understanding the small and large motivations that flow across the holiday season, you can refine every aspect of your advertising to make your products the solution.
• Speak to the growing online shopping trend. For those buying for Hanukkah, 57% of holiday shoppers will do their shopping online, and 75% of shoppers will do the same for Christmas. Incorporate the growing focus on online shopping into your holiday ads. With effective media planning, you can:
  • Create ads that highlight the ease of use and convenience of your brand’s website. Craft stories that appeal to busy professionals who can check stressful to-dos off their lists within seconds of returning to their office.
  • Have these ads played when professionals are moving throughout their office building. This both reminds them of an urgent task—holiday dinner, presents for far-off family members, travel preparations—and primes them to think about online shopping in their office as the solution.
  • Analyze the results over time. Are you seeing better results from the ad campaigns built around the intersection between holiday luxury shoppers and their professional in-office lives? Once you start seeing stellar metrics, you know you’ve found a winning strategy. Continually refine your efforts for more and more efficient advertising.

How Displaying Ads in Upscale Locations Maximizes Impressions While Optimizing ROI

Know what your audience needs when they need it, and put your relevant ads in front of them as often as possible—that’s the foundation of the most effective media planning strategy your company can create this year.

The value of this approach is that you are building meaningful connections with your audience and becoming top of mind when your viewers are most likely to make a purchase. Simultaneously, you won’t be placing ads in front of the wrong audience or the right audience at the wrong moment. Take a look at some specific benefits of this approach:

Grab Their Attention When It’s Available

It’s a rare moment when highly educated professionals, who make up a significant portion of the luxury shopper demographics, don’t have their eyes on a screen. The average person spends 3 1/4 hours a day on their phones. Combine that with time spent on laptops at work, in virtual meetings, watching streaming television, and seeing ads in places like trains, subways, or at gas stations, and the moments in between screens are fleeting. 

That’s why there’s enormous potential in including your advertising on engaging, content-rich screens located in office tower lobbies, elevators, hallways, and break rooms. These locations make up a surprising allotment of the ‘in-between’ times when luxury shoppers can’t or don’t have their eyes on a screen. They’re walking, chatting with coworkers, waiting for coffee, or simply have their hands full. Their attention will naturally gravitate toward brightly lit screens with captivating stories and ads. 

Related: Effectively Target Affluent Professionals to Drive Luxury Retail Purchases Online and In Store

These moments are even more valuable during the holiday shopping season. The accounted-for screen time on phones, TVs, and computers will be dominated by companies who pay peak rates for highly competitive time slots, keywords, and buyer personas. By focusing your—and your shoppers’—attention when those other distractions simply aren’t available, you can maximize your impact and impressions.

Your Ads Align With Their Current Objectives and Shopping Behaviors

Because you and your marketing partners have put in the legwork to understand the seasonal behaviors of luxury shoppers, your ads target them at precise points that align with their needs and routines. 

Your products and services can be on a vivid screen throughout their office when your touch points have the biggest impact: before they sit down at their desk, when they’re planning out what to do on their way home, and when they’re ready for a break. Depending on your specific audience, you can prime them to fill an online shopping cart or swing by the local store near their office.

Surround Your Ads With Cues to Trust and Buy

Luxury shoppers are drawn to information that is practical, relevant, and interesting to them. Throughout the holiday season, their focus turns toward winter and holiday-related subjects that extend beyond advertising, such as content about:

• Holiday survival guides and holiday entertaining tips
• Gift guides
• Winter weather information
• Charity topics and feel-good stories
• Information for the year ahead, such as financial tips 

Luxury retail shoppers care about the quality of the information as much as the type of information. Placing your ads on office, workplace, and residential screens in Class A office towers and luxury apartment/condo buildings alongside trending insights from Fodor’s, The Wall Street Journal, Vox, and AccuWeather lends your content that same prestige and interest. 

Look for opportunities to place your advertising among these favored content topics. This can include creating sponsored content that blends your products and these topics together harmoniously—for example, syncing your ads with related content topics such as gift guides, luxury travel, holiday entertaining & more!

Captivate Is Your Partner in Effective Media Planning This Holiday Season

Effective media planning starts with a media partner who brings real value to the table. At Captivate, we’ve built a network of thousands of screens in offices and residential buildings that connect luxury shoppers with high-engagement campaigns. We can help you capture the right attention targeting your audience’s daily routines, positioning your client’s brand as the solution to the holiday shopping tasks they’re thinking about and keeping that brand top of mind.

Captivate provides genuine engagement and satisfaction to luxury consumers who interact with our screens—86% enjoy watching our screens and 83% say they’d feel disappointed if the screens were gone. Introduce your carefully crafted ad campaigns to your target audience’s daily media, and watch as they genuinely enjoy the results. Reach out to Captivate today to start collaborating on effective media planning that fulfills luxury shoppers’ needs and your business objectives this holiday season.