Women's Apparel Holiday Weekend

The agency took the brand on about a year before that weekend, when it was doing around $40,000 a month. It was doing about $20,000 a day by the time the team started planning.

The goal for the main day of a holiday weekend was $200,000, about ten times a normal day. A day that size needs the audience, the offer and the brand's own customers ready before the money goes in, so the team started two months out.

The team broke the weekend into a nine-step plan. Most of it was preparation: knowing the audience, finding the offers that worked, and having the offer people wanted ready for the holiday. A lot of it ran through the brand's customer group on Facebook. About 10,000 people, mostly moms, posted around 270 times a day there, and in the weeks before the weekend the team built anticipation in that group and in the ad audiences. My part was the numbers behind the account and coaching the buyers who ran it.

• Facebook Ads
• A customer group on Facebook
• A special offer for the weekend

The brand did $380,000 in revenue on the Saturday, the main day of the weekend, against a goal of $200,000. About $25,000 of ad spend brought in over $350,000 of that. Revenue passed $1 million by the end of the week.

The brand kept what produced the day: its own customer group, offers that had already tested well, and the nine-step plan that got it ready.

Plan a peak backwards from the day it has to land. Here that meant two months of preparation for one weekend, with the customer group and the offer ready before the main day's budget went in.