Nearly 20% of the world’s population celebrates Ramadan. This year, Ramadan begins on 10 March, and ends on 9 April with the celebratory feast of Eid al-Fitr (Eid).
Across the globe, Indonesia is the largest market for Ramadan shopping, followed by MENA where retail sales were projected to reach $66 billion. And sales look set to grow even more this year, with 56% of people who celebrate Ramadan in Saudi, 64% in UAE, and 74% in Egypt saying they’d spend more during the holy month.
So what does this mean for marketers?
- Be as relevant as you can with dynamic creative optimisation (DCO)
During Ramadan, people prioritise their own and their family’s wants and needs. 93% of consumers look forward to spending time with their family, and 91% want to cook at home. By understanding this, you can establish more meaningful connections by creating content that appeals to your target customers.
Ensuring your content is relevant is the key here. Not only do you need to consider the context of your ads, but you also need to understand the nuances of the holy month and be sensitive to where and when your ads are being shown. For example, displaying food content during lunch hour may seem insensitive to your target customers.
And a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. Leveraging dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) can increase the relevancy of your ads and help you amplify your Ramadan campaign performance.
With DCO, you can adapt your messaging and creative to specific audiences, locations, environments, and beyond. With a single template, you can create thousands of variations of ads, tailored perfectly to the individuals viewing them. Simply put, DCO enables marketers to send the right message, to the right person, in the right place, at the right time. To learn more about DCO, download our guide here.
- Leverage social display advertising in countries with high social media usage
A UNESCO study found that an incredible five MENA nations appear in the global top 10 for take-up of social media networks, with the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar having the highest levels of social media usage in the world. In addition, more than 94% of internet users in countries such as Indonesia, the UAE, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia watch online video content weekly.
This can be expected to increase even further, especially amongst working adults, as instead of going for in-person lunches and tea breaks, people reach for their phone to scroll on social media during the working day.
Marketers can take advantage of this through tapping into social display advertising – which is essentially placing social media posts outside of the social networks’ own walled gardens. Here are some examples:
The benefit of social display ads is that they look and feel more like entertainment than traditional ads. They also leverage the capability that social media posts have to build engagement and interaction, rather than coming across as a sales pitch. This approach encourages organic engagement and signifies to the customer that what they are seeing is authentic content rather than an ad. This ‘softer’ approach benefits your brand whilst driving better performance and an uplift in social media followers, giving the opportunity to then further target these users. Learn more on how your brand can take advantage of social display advertising here.
- Bridge the gap between online and offline activities with footfall measurement
While the following is specific to Malaysia, this is something that all brands need to consider regardless of location: 87% of Malaysians plan to stock up on consumer goods during Ramadan, favouring essentials like packaged foods. This is a huge opportunity for retail brands, with the majority opting for online channels over traditional in-store shopping across almost all categories.
However, this does not mean that brands should go full-on into e-commerce as there is still a significant group of consumers who prefer to shop in-store. Brands and retailers must take note, particularly in South East Asia, where offline spend is now catching up to online spend post-Covid – in fact, 71% of retailers in Asia Pacific now expect to open new stores in 2023.
For brands who want to understand customer behaviour across multiple channels, footfall measurement is a technology-driven tool tracking customer traffic in physical stores. Brands, particularly those with large retail footprints, can understand how customers move through the store and what products they are interested in, while also analysing the customer’s interaction with marketing efforts both on and offline.
By gaining an understanding of the customer journey across various touchpoints, retailers can strategise a holistic and cohesive customer experience. This is incredibly important as even with the expanding realm of e-commerce, over 85% of transactions continue to take place in physical stores.
- It’s not too late to start your Ramadan campaigns
While you should start engaging with your customers as soon as they start considering gifts, it’s never too late to start your Ramadan campaigns. Marketing in the lead-up to Ramadan enables brands to take advantage of lower CPCs during the first two weeks of the season while also offering customers a relevant and compelling message to assist them in finding gifts for friends and family. In addition, keeping your audience engaged with exclusive deals, personalised content and suggestions throughout the whole Ramadan period will ensure that your brand remains front-of-mind when your customers are ready to purchase.
At Crimtan, our cookieless connected platform ArchiTECH helps brands reach their customers with personalised, relevant messaging at the right time, in the right place. If you’d like to learn more, get in touch with our experts who can deep-dive into each element with you and your team, and help you to maximise your marketing budget to reach your Ramadan campaign goals.