It’s that time of year. Black Friday is fast approaching and if you haven’t already you’re probably wondering if/how you should utilize Black Friday. Pre and post-Black Friday can be a bleak time in some niches due to buying behaviors, CPMS typically rising in Q4, and for this year (2020) a huge political spend pushing ad costs through the roof.

At SV we’ve done a tonne of testing around Black Friday through to Cyber Monday and decided to share with you our “best practices” for maximizing this time of year.

Things to remember:

  • Simplicity is key. Customers are socially conditioned to look for discounts right now, don't create any crazy complicated offers or use this time to try out any new software.
  • Double budgets. (If not triple) If you have a good offer and a good product you can smash past your previous records.
  • Be sales heavy - it’s one time of the year that you can get away with it and people expect it.

Step One - The Offer

  • We see storewide incentives work best.
  • Make it super easy to get the offer, do not use any complex codes or make your customers jump through hoops to take the offer.
  • Make it worth their while, don't just re-frame your normal offer.
  • The length of the offer is completely up to you we’ve tested weekend-long ones to cyber Monday and week-long ones. All work well but this year we are seeing more people move to a week-long strategy.

Step Two - The Strategy

Pre signal content:

1-2 weeks before Black Friday we recommend running ad campaigns letting consumers know its coming, play with them, tease them, and build up your consumers’ level of intrigue. This can be done both via video content (video views) and opt-in content (get on the notification list). This is a great way to build curiosity and audiences that you retarget when your offer goes live.

Below you can see a couple of ad examples from our friends, Lowbrow Customs - a great brand selling custom motorcycle parts and accessories.

Lowbrow Black Friday Pre Signalling Content

Lowbrow Early Notification Landing Page (conversion rate 61%)

Step Three - Conversion Time

Ad Upload: Upload your ads 2 days before your Black Friday offer goes live. It’s a busy time of year and approvals can take their time. Don't be the person who set's your ads live at the last minute and find they don't get approved until Saturday.

Ad Creatives: Keep creatives short,  to the point and "salesy"….this is the time to go sales heavy and it’s ok to do so! Use images that show the product and the offer, this goes against our advice for most of the year. If you've read our articles or watched any videos we are generally against solely using product based images or sales-heavy copy. However, Black Friday is the time to turn this on the head as you can see from the examples below.

You should have ads across 4 main/segment levels.

  • Retargeting from signalling campaigns
  • All retargeting
  • Cold targeting
  • Checkout/web view retargeting 

Website

  • Add a banner across your website highlighting the offer and how to use it.

Pop-Ups

  • Use exit pop-ups.

Step Four - Supporting With Other Platforms

  • Social Media - Push your offer via your social media 3-4 times a day
  • Email marketing - Everything should work synergistically meaning your message from your social media/paid media should be echoed via email.
  • Throw the sink at it - any other platforms you might have such as influencers, chatbots, etc. use in the same way. This really is a time to double down across the board

The Results

The results are all that matter to define if this is a success. In this guide, we've focused on one brand. However, this is the same strategy we use across the board tailoring it to each brand.

An average return on ad spend of 15.97 across the board made this a successful campaign. This year we look to double this!

Joe Kensett

Joe is one of the directors at SV-Marketing. Not only does he keep the teams spirit up in office, he also reaches out to our clients to make sure their needs are met and satisfied. In his own word: He is a “fxxking legend!” ✌️ 🤣