For many businesses, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend kicks off the busiest and most profitable period of the year. Being prepared for the weekend as well as the following holiday sales and getting your Black Friday marketing strategies in order with plenty of time will help you to get the most from the weekend and ensure that your sale is a success.
For many businesses, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend kicks off the busiest and most profitable period of the year. Being prepared for the weekend as well as the following holiday sales and getting your Black Friday marketing strategies in order with plenty of time will help you to get the most from the weekend and ensure that your sale is a success.
Although Black Friday 2020 and 2021 saw lockdown restrictions forcing more and more customers to shop online and record spending in the UK over that weekend, Black Friday 2022 is set to look a little different.
At the end of a tough year for consumers and the start of a recession, it’s expected that spending will be slightly lower in the sales this year. Research suggests that Black Friday and Cyber Monday spending will decrease from £6 billion in 2020 and £4.8 billion in 2021 to just £3.95 billion this year.
However, despite Brits looking to spend less overall in the sales, the number of people in the UK who are actually planning to shop in the sales has increased from 33% in 2021 to 39% in 2022. This 6% increase could be a result of more shoppers looking to get good deals on their Christmas presents as the cost of living crisis takes hold.
This year, 46% of shoppers intend to shop solely online during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So, with more people heading online but spending less, it’s more important than ever to make sure your digital marketing strategy is ready and to make sure your brand is seen online.
Here are our top tips for getting your Black Friday digital marketing strategy ready.
Planning your Black Friday marketing campaign, knowing which channels you want to utilise and the messages you want to get across and doing all of this in advance will ensure you get the most from your Black Friday campaigns.
You will need time to get campaigns up and running before the big weekend so make sure you and your team have plenty of time to prepare.
You should also start building excitement around your Black Friday offers by talking about them early and grabbing customer’s attention with your deals and offers. Starting this around the end of October will help you build excitement and continue building your email lists and social media followings. This will ensure you have plenty of people to target when it actually comes to running your campaigns.
For any digital marketing strategy, data is important. It can help you to analyse what is and isn’t working and make changes to your strategy accordingly. Make sure you review the data from last year’s campaigns before deciding on this year’s strategy. You don’t want to waste your budget on activities that won’t work.
Here’s some of the data to look at to help make decisions this year:
This will allow you to focus your efforts on the elements that went well last year as well as provide you with knowledge you need to fix anything that didn’t go according to plan. For example, did you have returns due to a courier issue or late orders? Can you improve your customer service to improve this for this year?
Making sure your website is properly optimised and working properly will mean that you can take orders throughout the weekend without any problems or loss of sales.
Regardless of whether it’s Black Friday or not, the performance of your website is crucial for success. During the Black Friday weekend, customers will be browsing a number of websites to get the best deal and they want to find the information they need as quickly as possible. For optimum success, a website page should load in less than 3 seconds. Any higher and customers are less likely to buy and more likely to go somewhere else.
You can check your site speed for both desktop and mobile by using a page speed tool. This will also provide you with information on the changes you can make to speed up your site.
More and more customers are buying through mobile devices so making sure your website is mobile optimised and user friendly will help to improve your success over the weekend.
A key part of mobile optimisation is reducing the number of stages between choosing a product and purchasing it on a mobile device. Make it as easy as possible for customers to purchase from you on a mobile device.
Over the years, household names have lost sales due to website outages caused by high volumes of traffic. Checking your web hosting can prevent this from happening. If you’re near the resource limit already, you might want to upgrade to ensure that your website is able to cope with the additional traffic it will receive and to prevent you from losing out on potential customers because they can’t access your website.
Once you know which products you will be selling, ensure that each product page is up to date with as much information about the product as possible and make sure that the path to checkout is as smooth as possible. This will help you to drive more conversions and prevent cart abandonment.
This is the perfect opportunity to look for cross sell opportunities on your product pages to try and increase average order value throughout the Black Friday and Christmas period.
Social media can play a huge part in driving traffic to your website for Black Friday. 54% of social browsers use social media to research products so promoting your products and Black Friday offers on your channels can help you to raise awareness of your deals, allows you to listen and respond to what customers want and need and respond to customer service enquiries.
Making sure your social media strategy and channels are in line before Black Friday will help you to tie everything together.
Make sure you have a clear profile picture and a branded cover photo, as well as relevant keywords in your bio. This will make sure that potential customers know exactly who you are when they land on your social profiles and helps to build trust.
To make things easier when it comes to the actual weekend, you can schedule organic posts in the run up to the event and throughout the course of the weekend promoting your deals and letting customers know what you have to offer. You will still need someone to respond to customers or be reactive but this should help with the workload.
Make sure you use Black Friday hashtags too to help customers find your products.
Facebook and Instagram allow you to connect your online store which lets customers buy directly from your feed. This helps to eliminate any frictions that can slow down customer shopping experiences and can encourage them to buy from you.
Make use of user generated content to help build trust between your brand and customers. Ask existing customers to upload photos of the products they’ve purchased or ask them to leave reviews. These social signals can set you apart from competitors when customers are looking from brand to brand for the best deal.
Using Facebook and Instagram ads can help you to directly target the people who are most likely to buy from you. Facebook ads allow you to target specific customers within your local area, within certain demographics or with specific interests so you can create a highly targeted audience to push your ads out to a wider audience.
Facebook also allows you to create a lookalike audience which finds users who are similar to your existing customers, providing you with a better chance of converting new customers.
You can also retarget people who have already visited your website but who have not bought from you yet. Black Friday is the perfect opportunity to try and convert these people with your time limited deals. These people are also low hanging fruit because they’ve already interacted with your brand and are aware of what you do.
If you ran ads last year, make sure you analyse last year’s performance. Have a look at the ads that worked in terms of engagement and conversion rates to find what works well and what doesn’t. Look at how you can improve them for this year.
In the months before Black Friday you should publish and share relevant content. Have a look for relevant keywords based around your offering and the seasonal terms you want to target and then create content around these. This will help you to attract organic traffic before, during and after the Black Friday period. You can then reach these people again through your social media targeting to try and convert them.
Content such as gift guides are the perfect way to inform your target audience of what you do and what you can offer. This type of content may also generate traffic from visitors who fall outside of your typical target audience but they will be looking to purchase gifts for their friends and family who are likely to fall into your target audience. Providing guidance on finding the perfect gift will help to convert these customers.
Make sure you promote this content on your social channels too to reach as many people as possible. You could also boost this content to a targeted audience on Facebook to ensure as many people as possible see it.
Paid search, or PPC ads, are the perfect way to target audiences who are searching for specific products and looking for the best deal. Make sure you prepare your ads in advance and include the offers you’re going to run in the ad copy. All you’ll have to do on the weekend is switch these on and make sure they’re working properly.
Make use of all of the available ad extensions and features to get the most from your ads. Utilise site links, extensions, countdown features and showcase all of your best products and deals. These features can help to build urgency in your ads and encourage searchers to click and buy from you.
Include information on the products and discounts you’re offering in your ad copy including any information that can set you apart from competitors and draw customers in to buy with you such as free shipping or whether you’re offering any free gifts.
If you have an Ecommerce store and you want to push your top product and deals, Shopping campaigns provide the perfect way to ensure your products appear in search for relevant search terms.
Take advantage of remarketing lists to continue to engage people who have already interacted with your brand and push them to convert. You can specifically target basket abandoners or people who have purchased in the past and might be interested in ordering from you again. Remember that customers start looking for Black Friday deals long before they’re ready to buy so targeting them through a number of channels can help to convert them.
Customers who visit a website after engaging with a remarketing ad are 70% more likely to convert in comparison to those who are not retargeted. It can also increase online sales by 20%, and this is just on a normal day so imagine what you could achieve over the Black Friday weekend!
SEO is a longer term strategy than paid ads but putting in the work now can help you to capitalise both this year and in the future.
Make sure you use Black Friday related terms on your landing pages to help increase the chances of your brand being found in the SERPs. Make sure you optimise the relevant pages for these keywords and make sure they’re placed in the titles and meta descriptions, alt tags and page headings.
One of the best strategies is to create a dedicated Black Friday landing page that you can update and use every year and which can be hidden throughout the year until you’re ready to start using it. This will help with long term SEO as the page will hold its SEO value and you can update it every year to help improve its rankings and drive more organic traffic to your site.
More consumers are now choosing to shop locally, with ethical consumerism and sustainable shopping on trend, optimising for local SEO for Black Friday 2021 is likely to help you drive local footfall if you have a store or encourage people to buy online because you’re based in their area.
An easy and effective way to get your brand seen in local searches is to optimise your local listings. You can use Google My Business or Bing Places for Business to help more local customers find you. If you have a brick and mortar store and you want customers to find you, ensure that your business details such as business name, phone number, address, website address and opening times are all up to date.
As well as allowing customers who are close to you geographically find you, it also increases your likelihood of appearing in your local pack which is a SERP feature that appears above organic search results in local searches. If you appear here, you can benefit from improved brand visibility, higher click through rates and a higher number of conversions.
You can use email before, during and after the Black Friday sales to drive traffic to your website. Start building your list well in advance of the event so that you can build hype and awareness around your deals. Emailing throughout the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend can help to create urgency around your deals and help to push customers to convert.
Make sure each email includes a catchy subject line to grab customer’s attention and encourage them to click through.
This is also a great way to re-engage those who have already bought from you in the past. These emails should be designed, scheduled and ready to go over the weekend so that you don’t forget to send them.
Once the chaos of the weekend is over, it’s important to track and analyse the results so that you can see whether this year was better than last year and why. This will allow you to improve year on year.
Use Google Analytics to track traffic to your website from your paid social, paid search, SEO, content and email campaigns. It will also show you bounce rates and tracking conversions can show you the sales made from a specific landing page.
Heat maps can also help you to find out where your website visitors are clicking, how they look at your product pages and how long they spend. This will show you where customers are clicking as well as the most important sections of your website. The insight this provides can help you in the future to fix any sticking points in your user journeys to purchase.
If you want to make the most from your Black Friday campaigns, make sure you have everything prepared and ready to go and you know exactly which products and deals you will be providing. You will also need your team to be prepared to be reactive, fix any issues and respond to customer queries as they come in.
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