Ahhh… the holidays. Black Friday is just around the corner again, consequently, sending the Internet into a veritable state of emergency. In this article, we’ll show you what you should consider regarding your marketing strategy revolving around this super shopping day, what preparations you need to make, and what pitfalls to avoid. We’ll break down our recommendations into tactical and conceptual strategies, so even if your business model does not directly equate, you can find parallels in the theory.
Black Friday Digital Tips
Prepare your website for Black Friday (and Cyber Monday!)
If you have a marketing business, B2B/B2C, or e-commerce business, you likely depend on the integrity of your website to convert customers.One of the biggest mistakes that you can make is to not prepare yourself for increased traffic. Especially if you have an extremely tempting offer, it’s important to make sure that frustrated customers aren’t leaving your website due to sluggish loading pages rather than the speedy, efficient service they’re used to. Black Friday is especially dangerous in this regard because consumers’ attention spans are very low due to the many offers, so the risk of abandoning the purchase increases disproportionately.
Speed-test your website
As a result of high website-traffic, site speed usually decreases in an inverse relationship. An unresponsive page puts more than just users’ patience to the test. Failure in the customer experience may prevent you from making a transaction. A website should have strong conversion rates during the Black Friday shopping season rather than high bounce rates. To prevent hiccups and unwanted crashes, My Social Biz recommends intermittently testingYou the speed of your website using a variety of methods. Perhaps the two most well-known tools are GTMetrix and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. You merely need to enter the URL of your site for each tool to analyze it for speed and other optimization criteria.
Always keep your website up to date
Our general recommendation is especially true on Black Friday: a good, conversion-optimized website is half the battle in e-commerce. Therefore, check the following things and upgrade if necessary:
- Eliminate all 404s.
- Check your redirects.
- Check the layout of your website on a smartphone and optimize it for the mobile buying experience.
- Plan touchpoints to your Black Friday offers on the site (e.g., a separate button in the navigation).
- Test your entire tracking setup – ideally by placing a test order.
Gradually adjust your daily spend
If you have a large online presence, you’re likely running ads for your business during the holiday season – if not all year round. If you have planned a larger budget than usual, this tip is especially important for you. Both the Google and Facebook algorithms are known for their fragile nature. Therefore, it is advisable to increase the Daily Spend gradually– NOT overnight. This method allows the algorithm and its campaigns to “acclimate”. Adjusting spend, especially during such a crucial time during the year, can be a daunting process. We have a blog that helps you determine what aspects to consider when modifying your digital bids, and what you can risk.
Strategic Black Friday Tips
Make a content plan
To achieve maximum success, you should start planning and targeting your marketing activities well ahead of time. This means: think about which products you want to promote (e.g. only a certain category) and which channels you want to use for this (social ads, PPC, email marketing). This will help you set the right focus and prioritize your actions accordingly.
When creating your content plan, it’s a good idea to take a look at last year’s Black Friday marketing and review what worked particularly well and what you’d rather not repeat this year.
Once you have a basic overview, you can expand the content plan step by step and then use it for your stakeholder management or brief your design team to create suitable creative elements. With enough time to prepare, you can avoid unnecessary stress at the end of the year, and your colleagues will thank you for not having to rush through the work at the last minute.
Tease your deals in advance
Let’s not kid ourselves, on Black Friday, you won’t be the only one vying for shoppers’ attention with your brand. Not to mention, consumers like to know they are getting the best deal possible on this crazy day. To ensure that your Black Friday deals don’t get lost in the flood of offers, you should try to generate as much excitement and interest as possible in advance. Beginning two weeks before to Black Friday, the oncoming sale should reach your most engaged readers 2-3 times to make sure your message is getting through to your customers.
On social media, for example, you can present the highlights and thus trigger anticipation among your followers. The same goes for your newsletter, which you can send to your existing customers. I recommend including a live countdown that shows when deals will become available– this has proven to be very effective with our customers in the past. After all, it conveys a sense of urgency and boosts your customers’ FOMO.
As you can see, there is a lot to consider when planning a marketing strategy for Black Friday. The right preparation and a well-structured planning of this shopping event are the be-all and end-all in order to achieve the best possible outcome.
A mix of practical implementations on your website front, and strategy tweakments to your content plan, can be enough to catapult you into the best sales you’ve ever had all year. And the best part, it’s not too late to receive consulting advice. You need help making a few critical changes in the coming week. If you need help with this, you can always contact us. We wish you every success for Black Friday!