In digital marketing, every quarter holds unique opportunities, with Q3 standing out as a vital preparatory phase for the absolutely crucial Q4 Holiday Season. At The Cirqle, we champion the concept of optimizing creator marketing and partnership ad strategies in Q3 to ensure you achieve unmatched ROI and ROAS during the festive period.

Q3: A Proving Ground for Q4 Success

Q3 offers a clear, noise-free view of consumer behavior, making it the perfect environment for A/B testing, audience exploration, and partnership optimization. It's a fact backed by data from Kantar Millward Brown, which shows that companies continually refining their ad campaigns are 39% more likely to outperform their ROAS objectives.

Refining Your Q4 Strategy: The Power of Q3 Insights

With Q3 insights at your disposal, you're better positioned to fine-tune your Q4 campaigns for maximized ROI and ROAS. This is especially crucial when setting up partnership ads on platforms like Meta and TikTok.

1. Partnership Ads on Meta: Q3 offers the opportunity to identify optimal creator partnerships and craft high-performing partnership ads. These ads excel on Meta. With the right Q3 partnerships and ad content, your Q4 ads can realize improved CTR and cost-effectiveness.

2. TikTok Spark Ads: Testing partnership ads on TikTok during Q3 lets you discover content that resonates with your audience. TikTok's Spark Ads amplify existing organic posts and, when adequately tested and optimized in Q3, can significantly boost your Q4 performance.

A Case Study in Action: The Cirqle's Approach to Optimizing ROI and ROAS

The Cirqle, with its focus on detailed analytics and creator partnerships, offers a unique platform for brands to maximize their creator marketing and partnership ad strategies. Let's explore a case study that encapsulates the potential of our approach:

Case Study: One of our clients, a leading fashion brand, wanted to improve their holiday season performance. They leveraged our software to execute a comprehensive Q3 testing strategy, focusing on partnership ads on Meta and TikTok Spark Ads.

The results were remarkable:

- In Q3, their A/B testing on various ad content and partnership collaborations led to a 30% improvement in ad engagement.

- Audience testing enabled them to identify a high-performing customer segment, which resulted in a 20% increase in target audience reach.

- During Q4, they achieved a 53% increase in CTR and a 19% reduction in cost per result, significantly exceeding industry benchmarks.

- Ultimately, their Q4 ROI and ROAS outperformed expectations, resulting in their most successful holiday season to date.

Our platform equipped the client with the necessary analytics to understand their Q3 testing performance, shaping their Q4 strategies. With our focus on partnership ads, the brand outperformed regular ads in terms of CTR and cost-effectiveness.

Moreover, our scalability feature helped the brand to extend their creator marketing campaigns to a broader audience, leading to enhanced ROI and ROAS. 

The Cirqle Advantage: Amplifying Your Q4 Performance

Q3 offers an invaluable opportunity to test and optimize your Q4 creator marketing and partnership ad strategies. Through Q3 testing, you can identify the most potent content, marketing channels, audience segments, and creator partnerships. Applying these insights to your Q4 campaigns can help maximize your brand's holiday season performance.

Remember, the key to Q4 success lies in strategic Q3 planning and testing. Start your journey towards unmatched ROI and ROAS with The Cirqle today.

Key Tips to Keep in Mind:

1. Start early: Due to macro-economic factors, shoppers are beginning their holiday shopping earlier. Take advantage of this trend by planning and launching your holiday campaigns well in advance to capture the attention of early shoppers.
2. Optimize for mobile: With the increasing prevalence of mobile shopping during the holiday season, it is essential to ensure that your ads are mobile-friendly. Optimize your campaigns for seamless mobile experiences to cater to the growing number of mobile shoppers.
3. Social proof: Building trust and credibility is crucial in holiday campaigns. Highlight positive reviews, testimonials, or user-generated content to showcase social proof. This can help instill confidence in potential customers and increase their likelihood of making a purchase.
4. Remarketing: Implement remarketing campaigns to re-engage users who have previously shown interest in your products or services. By targeting this audience segment, you can remind them of their initial interest and potentially convert them into customers.

Practical Advice

1. Number of creators - 10 to 15. Each creating 1 video post and 1 carousel of 3 to 5 images totaling a 20-40 creative assets p/campaign;
2. Acquire digital licensing rights and ad permissions from creators;
3. Leverage creator based audiences - Creating LaL audiences of creators followers is a powerful way of micro-targeting high-quality audiences with relevant content: 
4. By selecting 10 to 15 diverse creators allows you to create multiple audience segments who can then be targeted with relevant creator’s ads. These audiences are extremely likely to engage with the creator’s content and hence drive engagement and much better bottom funnel performance.   

4. Depending on the maturity of your ad account - you can strategize how best to inject creator ads into your media mix
   a) For Mature ad accounts (More than 1 year old with avg $30k p/mo ad spends or more) - you should add partnership ads in the bottom funnel campaigns. If you’re already using Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaign (ASC), you should add the best performing creator ads to them for even better results. 
   b) For Newer ad accounts (Less than 1 year old and less than $30k p/mo ad spends) - You should look to add partnership ads in the middle funnel or top funnel campaigns for the first week and then start adding the best performing creatives to bottom funnel campaigns.

5. If you still have doubts about whether creator ads can increase your overall performance or not. Then you can use this Ideal Experiment setup to test it yourself. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ta1q0FUfSS-hYUu2waf8qBfa23Hj9iGYp-RtHvXc3mc/edit#slide=id.g142b3ae566d_0_3
6. Learn which creator type and content type works best for you and iterate at least 1 more time within Q3 to step in Q4 with a healthy portfolio of creator ads that are ready to be scaled while still driving strong results.