Brace yourselves, silly season is fast approaching! That’s right, it’ll be Christmas before we know it and as marketers, this will typically be one of the most lucrative times of the year for our clients, so it makes sense to make sure we’ve got our ducks in a row to capitalise on the upcoming spend-frenzy.
A key milestone during this time is the now hugely popular Black Friday sales, which have been expanded on in recent times and are now a fully-fledged spend-fest taking over the entire weekend, finishing on the Monday with Cyber Monday sales.
Black Friday is the Friday immediately after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, so this year it will fall on November 29, 2019.
Any business selling goods or services should have a sound strategy in place to capitalise on this period as people are going to actively be in the market to spend, spend, spend!
Here are some helpful tips to think about when planning your Black Friday sale:
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Incentives
Do you want to run a 25% off Sitewide sale, or are you going to use this as an opportunity to get rid of some older stock with BOGOF offers or similar? Test out different promotions to engage different people!
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Channels
Think about what channels you are going to use. Make sure you have your ads updated on social and that you revise your copy in Adwords. Think about how you can utilise your email database, how many emails to send out and the content on each. Will you try and expand the reach on your campaigns by utilising Google Display Network or YouTube, for example.
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Creative
Along with considering what channels to use it is also important to make sure you produce a set of vibrant new creatives to advertise your promotion. Short, animated video creatives tend to be the medium of choice but it is best practice to test multiple creatives in different sizes to find out which resonates with your audience the most and delivers performance in relation to the KPI’s you have set.
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Content/Products
will you have any specific products to showcase during this time? Do you need to plan some content around this? Blogs can be a good way to educate and soft-sell products to customers and are a great lead in to warm people up to a product before you hit them with a big offer over Cyber Weekend.
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Budget
Are you going to push your ads further to try and maximise the returns over the sale period or are you going to be conservative with your ad spend? As with any other sale period in digital, costs tend to shoot up when we think about CPM’s, CPC’s and CPA’s etc due to the auction-based bidding systems that are used on platforms like Facebook and Google. As more advertisers want to cash in more ads are placed and more money gets spent which pushes costs up for other advertisers too. Something to be mindful and wary of!
