How to win using localized weather and time-based ads

Hunch Voice: This time from Hunch

This time on the Hunch Voice with Ema Moljevic, our Growth Marketing Manager, we spoke up about the role of weather and time data for creating localized ads to get better engagement.

Questions answered:

• What's the best way to grab your users’ attention?
• What are weather and time-based ads?
• Why aren’t we seeing ads like these so often?

One of the best ways to grab consumers' attention and make them visit your online store is making your ads personalized based on their current weather conditions or time of the day.

Then why aren’t we seeing that many of these ads if they’re so special? - Because it takes too much time and resources to manually create multiple ads for various locations based on different weather conditions and time of the day.
So, it’s time-consuming, the technical part is challenging and you’re looking to reduce launch times, while also not hiring dozens of designers to do this.
However, you don’t want to spend 10 hours every day designing creatives and manually switching your ads on or off, right?

Let’s take a look at some highly engaging weather and time-based ad playbooks, the goals they reach and the impact they make.

For better understanding, take a look at the presentation slides.

Play #1: Attract customers using weather localization

Take the travel industry for example. Here, you target people based on the weather of their current location. You do this by using data from Weather API centralized in some of the towns in the targeted countries, so when the terms meet (e.g. temperature below 25C, it’s rainy or windy), show relevant summer offers to potential customers, triggering empathy.

Goal: Increase bookings from customers in targeted predefined countries by promoting online offers and deals to them.

Impact: Capture attention, communicate a sense of desire, convert decisions into bookings.

Play #2: Win by promoting weather-accurate offers

Offer weather-relevant products and engage customers in purchasing them.
Effectively target customers based on the weather they’re currently experiencing. If the weather in the targeted location is lovely, give the customers a reason to go outside. Otherwise, display products to make their stay at home more tolerable.

Goal: Increase product purchases by promoting weather-accurate offers to customers.

Impact: Increase relevance for seasonal shopping, communicate special offers.

Play #3: Advertise in a timely manner

Let’s see how time-based ads work.
You create two sets of visuals and adapt them to the part of the day. Depending on the part of the day, you’re displaying relevant ads and products to your customers. And you manually determine when your ad set will be running in the ad campaign.

Goal: Increase purchases of suited products based on the part of the day.

Impact: Increase shopping relevance at a relevant time.

Play #4: Rising discounts with rising temperatures

Connect your sales rates to the outside temperature.
For example, an ad is activated when the outside temperature reaches 15C. And for every degree above the threshold, a discount percentage is displayed. So, if the temperature outside is 35C, you’ll be shown a product on sale with a 20% discount.

The data from Weather API is checked hourly, while the visuals are then adapted to weather conditions, as well as relevant discount offers. So, you do not communicate the current temperature, but the value of the discount.

Goal: Increase product purchases by adapting the discount to the outside temperature.

Impact: Communicate weather condition opportunities, spark curiosity for uncertainty.

What stops you from localizing your ads?

All this sounds neat, and it’s quite simple using the Dynamic Creative Approach: contextualize the products within weather and time-based ads and divide different types of products into different weather and time-based categories. Just prepare a simple spreadsheet and list all of your products beforehand.
This means that you can create thousands of ads, for hundreds of products and hundreds of different locations, all in a fraction of time and without spending a fortune.

Dynamic creatives automatically run your campaigns based on different weather types of multiple locations and parts of the day.
You won’t need to spend a minute of your precious time going through your business manager, checking the weather for multiple locations, checking the time and starting or pausing different ads.
Hunch does this automatically.

Therefore, engaging with your consumers through Paid Social doesn’t have to be boring. In fact – you can drastically increase your results by using contextual campaigns. And one way to do that is to use weather and time-based data.

👉 Next Steps

Want to put your localization on auto-pilot? How about exceeding your own goals while you're at it?

Reach us out again if you want to go local on Social, we'd be happy to help. Contact your dedicated Customer Success Manager for further details. And in case you're not a Hunch customer yet, sign up for our platform demo.