How Fashion & Beauty Advertisers Can Build an Informed Campaign Strategy Using Past & Present Trends

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the year’s biggest shopping days — especially for fashion and beauty retailers.

To ensure marketers don’t miss out on sales and stay ahead of the competition, we dug into the most valuable trends, creative strategies, and targeting solutions that brands can use to get a head start on their campaign planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2021.

We’re going to show how you can get started today, including:

Our 2020
trends & Predictions

Fashion and beauty are usually strong industries for sales, but with people stuck at home and prioritizing essential purchases due to the pandemic in 2020, consumers were spending less on clothes, makeup, and accessories. As NPD Group found, prestige beauty sales fell 19% in 2020.

Still, Taboola was able to pinpoint some niche readership trends across these verticals at the end of last year:

Overall trends also emerged from other industry sources, painting a clearer picture of how the 2020 holiday shopping season was predicted to unfold:

Huge Gains for

prime day

Now let’s look at how 2020 holiday shopping actually shaped up.

The NRF reported that retail sales in November and December unexpectedly grew by a whopping 8.3%. Still, as predicted, online and non-store sales also increased by almost 24%, and clothing and accessory sales decreased by 14.9%.

Since Black Friday and Cyber Monday were very unusual last year, we also found a better 2020 comparison for our network: Prime Day. Amazon’s big savings push in October provided a more accurate reflection of what a normal Black Friday would look like — especially since it’s entirely e-commerce-driven. As Digital Trends reported, Prime Day 2020 saw the biggest revenue totals yet during any sales event for the online retail giant.

What We Predict Will Be Popular This Year

This year, some of those 2020 trends are expected to stick around and even increase in prevalence.

As Adobe predicts:

Online shopping will be the new normal. e-Commerce spend each day in November and December exceeded $1 billion for the first time in 2020. Cyber Monday spending also exceeded $10 billion. And another first: more than half of shopping revenue came from smartphones on Christmas Day, proving the power of mobile during the holidays.

Contactless shopping will increase. For safety and convenience, shoppers took advantage of opportunities to buy online and pick up in store. During the holiday season, this shopping method accounted for 25% of all orders. It’s expected to remain popular in 2021.

News Trends for Black Friday in the Fashion & Beauty Categories

For the fashion and beauty verticals specially, Taboola’s data from US news content pulled from the start of the year until June 10th shows growing interest around topics like Kim Kardashian, clothing, hair, footwear, and Amazon. This data matches up with the pandemic-fueled engagement around at-home beauty, care, and entertainment.

Taboola Publishers That Support These Trends

How to Build  an Ad Campaign Strategy Using News Trends

Advertisers can take advantage of these trending news topics and build more effective and engaging campaigns by figuring out which types of ad creative their audience responds to most.

We pulled our Taboola Trends data in the US fashion and beauty categories in June 2021 to discover which images, videos, and headlines drive the most clicks in these industries.

Beauty Creative: Image Trends

In the beauty category, image trend data shows that color photos are getting significantly more clicks than black and white photos, so keep those cheeks rosy!

Images without text are normally the strongest performers for CTR. The beauty category is no exception, with a big CTR uplift for a glam shot without words.

Sorry A-Rod, but your Blur Stick will have to take a back seat to Jenny from the Block. In the beauty category, images of women will get you a higher CTR than those with men.

Fashion Creative: Image Trends

Fashion and food may seem like an odd combo, but we must not forget Katy Perry dressed as a cheeseburger at the 2019 Met Gala after-party. Fashion brands should consider images with food for a higher CTR.

Fashion has a long-standing interconnection with the arts. Those looking to try something edger than your typical e-Commerce shot may opt for an illustration for higher CTRs.

With dressing comfortably at home (and now as we are returning to the office, comfortably at work) being a top priority in a post-lockdown world, it is unsurprising to see indoor styling making a splash.

In the beauty category, image trend data shows that color photos are getting significantly more clicks than black and white photos, so keep those cheeks rosy!

Images without text are normally the strongest performers for CTR. The beauty category is no exception, with a big CTR uplift for a glam shot without words.

Sorry A-Rod, but your Blur Stick will have to take a back seat to Jenny from the Block. In the beauty category, images of women will get you a higher CTR than those with men.

Fashion has a long-standing interconnection with the arts. Those looking to try something edger than your typical e-Commerce shot may opt for an illustration for higher CTRs.

Creative Trends: Videos

According to Taboola’s Video Trends data, Advertisers can boost video completion rates by including winter scenes.

Colorful settings can also create nice contrast to printed garments and bold make-up.

Advertisers would also be wise to keep their visuals simple and striking with no text. Let the clothes speak for themselves!

According to Taboola’s Video Trends data, Advertisers can boost video completion rates by including winter scenes.

Colorful settings can also create nice contrast to printed garments and bold make-up.

Advertisers would also be wise to keep their visuals simple and striking with no text. Let the clothes speak for themselves!

Creative Trends: Headlines

Use the Taboola Title Analyzer to find the best-performing titles for your campaign. It tests your headline options against each other to pinpoint the ones with the highest-predicted CTR.

It’s easy to see that “7 Beauty Tips for Self-Care Success” is expected to drive the highest CTR while “Need a Better Skin Routine? These Solutions Can Help” is down at the bottom with a low-predicted CTR.

Need a Better Skin Routine? These Solutions Can Help

Treat Yourself At Home with Hair Care Products

7 Beauty Tips for Self-Care Success

Predicted
CTR

Putting Trends Into Action

Putting all these trends together, here are a few examples of what a high-performing ad might look like.

Taboola Products to Fuel Your Black Friday Campaigns

We’ve compiled the top products and strategies marketers like you can use to shape campaigns during high-performing seasons like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Creative
Strategies

These strategies can help you elevate your message and encourage users to take action after they visit your website.

Video ads

Static images

Descriptions and calls to action (CTAs)

Repurposing social media content

A/B test multiple creatives with Taboola’s expedited learning, which lets our algorithm predict your highest-performing creative assets in less than 24 hours.

Targeting
Solutions

There’s no better way to learn someone’s interests than to learn about what they’re reading online. We’ve built a wealth of targeting solutions to connect audiences and brands, including:

Contextual Targeting: Show ads alongside content your ideal customers are already reading, with the help of machine learning and contextual intelligence that scans content and analyzes audience behavior in real-time.
Audience Targeting: Tap into an editorial marketplace with a deep, ongoing understanding of your audience's interests and behaviors.
Taboola Audiences: Our platform offers hundreds of pre-packaged and custom interest segments to choose from.
3P Audience Targeting: Reach consumers based on work profiles, age and demographics, unique behaviors, and the types of consumer tech products they might be looking to purchase using 3P cookies.
First Party Targeting | Direct CRM Onboarding & Lookalikes: Onboard your CRM data into the Taboola platform, to deliver personalized customer experiences. Build lookalike audience segments and suppress or target specific customers.

Bidding
 Solutions

SmartBid auto-optimizes your bids at scale. This tool does the heavy lifting for you, automatically identifying your ideal audience and adjusting your bids for the right opportunities. Fixed Bid lets you manually adjust your bids.

Learn more about Taboola’s bidding strategies here.

Essential
Recommendations

Install the Taboola Pixel

The Taboola Pixel maximizes your ad performance by illuminating audience’s behaviors and the impact your ads are having. Discover new site visitors or interact with your content the way you expected.

Re-engage them with the help of customized click actions or targeting based on their time spent, length of sessions, or how far they’ve scrolled down a page.

Targeting Strategies

Implementing the Taboola Pixel will be beneficial for retargeting users:

Pixel Audience Targeting: Re-engage users with custom messages based on actions they've taken across your sites. You can track actions such as "Add to Cart" and "Learn More." For example, retarget 'add to cart' users with a new offer or marketing message.
Attentive Audiences: A group of users that have spent a significant amount of time on your website, but haven't yet converted. Retargeting these audiences enables you to re-engage users based on the attention they've paid to your brand.

Proven Results: These Fashion & Beauty Brands Saw Unimaginable Results with Taboola

Adidas Creates A
New Best-Seller

Sportswear giant Adidas needed to increase awareness for its new BOOST footwear technology and distinguish it from its legacy product lines. They leveraged Taboola Video to share content at scale across premium publisher websites — with overlaid CTAs that enticed viewers to click and convert.

Adidas saw a 50% uplift in CTR and 25% higher CTR than other video platforms. The black men’s model of the BOOST footwear presented in the video also became a best-seller as a result.

eSalon Increases CTR by 53%

Tech beauty startup eSalon offers custom-blended hair color for at-home application. With such a unique product, the brand was eager to spread awareness and reach just the right customers who might be interested in what they have to offer.

eSalon used Taboola’s expansive Data Marketplace to segment and target highly engaged audiences. The brand also leveraged Taboola’s storytelling platform to reach those readers with organic, long-form content about its offerings.

As a result, eSalon grew by 15X since working with Taboola, acquiring tens of thousands of new customers and increasing CTR by 53%.

Start Your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Campaign Today

In 2020, consumers started their holiday shopping as early as October, proving that it’s never too soon to start your seasonal campaign planning. Black Friday and Cyber Monday, in particular, are set to be major shopping days — especially for fashion and beauty retailers. So advertisers want to be ready with the outreach strategies and creative content they need to make their messages heard.

Just remember to stay on top of emerging trends, make data-backed decisions, and access the right tools and platforms to fuel your campaigns through the end of 2021 and beyond.