Burst spend strategy is a great tactic when your business is seasonal or when you wish to capture customer’s attention for various reasons like negate negative perception, impact competition etc.
Let’s look at the different scenarios when a burst spend strategy can be useful:
- Seasonal Business:
Certain businesses have an element of seasonality which requires heavy concentrated spend during a specific duration. Below is an example of a retirement savings product in Canada called RRSP. This is a tax deductible investment that has an end date of March 31st each year. The screenshot below is the search trend for the term RRSP and it has spiked each year from Jan-March. Interestingly, most of the sales for this financial product happen in this period and almost all financial institutions have heavy spends during this period.
- Grow revenue in a short period
The best example for this is the ad spend by political candidates in US to raise funds from general public during Q4.
Bernie Sanders spend 204K on Dec 31st. And as per his office, they got 40,000 new donations on that single day. With an average donation of about $18, this would have meant over 700k raised in a single day.
- Donald Trump – Influence public opinion and improve personal image
Donald Trump’s campaign has been spending heavily in and around the presidential debates as well as in and around the biggest news stories around trade deals with China. The messaging creative also had the tone and the message to make him appear better than others.
Below is the spend details from Facebook Ad Library tool for Donald Trump
While burst spend strategy is great, it cannot replace the need for an always on spend strategy when it comes to digital marketing. Mike Bloomberg entered the presidential race late and he has been following an always spend strategy on facebook to:
- jump up in the opinion polls
- clearly articulate to the american people on what he stands for
He has spent 6.7 Million dollars in 53 days from Nov 14, 2019 to Jan 5, 2020 @ 126k per day, which is a lot more than what other democrats are spending.
