Q5, the “mini-quarter” between the end of Christmas and mid-January, holds plenty of potential for marketers looking to drive performance. The major sale dates may have been and gone. But engagement and purchase intent remains high, whereas CPMs typically see a significant drop with many advertisers reducing their spend.
This is where the Q5 opportunity presents itself. Those who continue spending through Q5 can cash in on discounted inventory and hit Q1 without losing momentum.
But, to maximize campaign performance during Q5, you’ve gotta have the right creative.
This article explores five creative strategies that will put you in a position to fully capitalize on the Q5 opportunity.
1. Remix existing content
By the time Q5 hits, you’ll have a whole year’s worth of content that’s been created. This presents a great opportunity to maximize your initial investment in these assets by repurposing and remixing them into Q5 creative.
Not only does remixing make a lot of sense from a cost and value perspective, it also allows you to get creative produced much faster. Considering Q5 immediately follows the busiest time of the year, and only lasts for a brief period, being able to turn around fresh creative quickly is a big advantage.
Images, videos, UGC, holiday season creative – any asset can be remixed.
🏆 Success Story: Click here to learn how Shuttlerock enabled Health-Ade to satisfy their increasing creative requirements by repurposing and remixing their existing content into quality video creative – at scale.
In the following two strategies, we'll explore the key creative considerations when remixing for Q5.
2. Shift focus from Q4 gifting to Q5 shopping
During the holiday season, a lot of messaging revolves around gifting for others. In Q5, this shifts to shopping for yourself.
Your Q5 creative needs to reflect this. The messaging of your creative – both in copy and voice-over (VO) – should speak directly to the audience’s personal shopping wants. Promote deals that call on shoppers to “treat themselves”, and speak to the fact that the end of the year is the perfect time to buy that thing they’ve been holding out for.
3. Tap into your audience's new year resolutions
New year’s resolutions play a big role in the Q5 period.
Even if people don’t set strict resolutions, the new year period still elicits an aspirational mentality where a sense of personal growth is heightened. The phrase “new year, new you” encapsulates this and is often used (sometimes overly so) in Q5 ad creative.
Tapping into resolutions is a powerful way to engage audiences, but you need to be careful not to be too forceful in your messaging. Many people are averse to the concept of new year’s resolutions. Our recommendation is to use messaging in your creative that riffs on the idea of resolutions in a way that avoids cliché but still speaks to concepts of personal growth and renewal.
4. Diversify creative to speak to different buyer motivations
Whether it’s a new year's resolution or just wanting to grab a good deal, there are many different buyer motivators during Q5. Instead of developing one creative concept that tries to cover all the bases, diversify your creative so that your ads are personalized toward different audiences.
In the Prose example above, you can see how four creative concepts were produced. Each variation uses a different approach to visuals and messaging, helping showcase the full scope of their products’ uses and benefits.
Along with driving higher relevance and engagement, creative diversification will also help your Q5 campaigns avoid creative fatigue with audiences not being overexposed to any single video.
5. Test & learn to hit the ground running in Q1
Q5 also presents a good opportunity to test different creative approach, using these learnings to inform your Q1 strategy. Take this opportunity to test different creative variations, content types, formats, and placements.
You may be thinking that this sounds like it would require a lot of production resources. This is where we can go back to the first strategy in this article: remixing existing content. You don’t need to create anything new to test new creative approaches. Just repurpose and remix what you’ve already got.
🏆 Success Story: Click here to explore how Shuttlerock helped give Babbel the ability to test a bunch of different creative formats to see what works best for driving direct response.
Capitalize on Q5 with Shuttlerock's creative solutions
Q5 creative is all about remixing existing content, adapting messaging, diversifying, and testing new approaches. Those who adopt these strategies will keep their momentum from the holiday season, and head into Q1 with a head start. Those who don't will be left scrambling to catch up.
At Shuttlerock, our creative solutions enable you to achieve each of these Q5 strategies. We’re specialists in remixing existing content. And our streamlined, tech-driven production process makes it a breeze to produce diverse creative variations and test different formats and placements.
To learn more about Shuttlerock’s solutions, please feel free to request a demo, or get in touch with a representative in your region.
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