if you haven’t already, now’s the time to start thinking about Black Friday...

It’s fast approaching!

And if you haven’t started pulling a plan together - then you need to… 

Naturally collecting imagery, video content, creating images and implementing ads can take time and need to make sure you’re firing on all cylinders when that time comes to maximise profits.

Pre and post-Black Friday can cause problems for many businesses with yearly-high CPMs of which are only on an upwards trend year-on-year. So making as many precautionary steps as possible will only increase your chance of success.

Here at SV we’ve done a tonne of testing around Black Friday through Cyber Monday and want to share some of our “best practices” to help scale your performance this November!

Things To Remember:

• Simplicity is key. Any offers should be sitewide, consistent or easy to understand. Any confusion or uncertainty can drive consumers to not complete their purchase.
• Double budgets. Anything you see working, scale, scale, scale. But make sure you’re ready to do this before you launch… Horizontal scaling and simply upping the budget isn’t as effective as it once was, so make sure you have new audiences, copy variants and creative tests to implement into the account to help increase spend.
• Be sales heavy. It’s the time of year where people only care about one thing… The price. Make every effort to draw attention to your sale and remove the monetary barrier to purchase as much as you can to drive sales.

Here’s a breakdown of what you should be thinking about going into this invaluable Black Friday period.

Step 1: The Offer

• Remove the complications. Go store wide or apply directly to your products so that consumers aren’t needing to do anything on top of completing the purchase.
• Avoid codes. Again aiming to reduce dealing with customers complaining that they didn’t receive the discount you boasted in ads. You don’t need the headache.
• Money talks. Don’t just re-work your current offer but really make it stand out. Your margins may not always be able to compete with the biggest names, but your offer should stand out from your usual pricing or it won’t catch the consumers’ eye.
• Time-frame. We’ve tested everything from day-long to month-long and all strategies work. All we will say is that brands are starting promotions sooner and sooner to become the early bird that catches the worm.

Step 2: The Strategy

• Pre-signal content. Look to build excitement, awareness and anticipation amongst your consumer base with awareness or lead generation ads that will give you a pool of high intent consumers to retarget or email the moment your launch goes live.
• Prepare to retarget. You can retarget website and pixel engagement for up to 180 days on Meta, make sure you’re ready to target these segments with tailored ads to re-introduce them into the funnel. Hit previous purchasers, website visitors and social engagers as they’ve all already been exposed to your brand and may be waiting for your newest discount before they purchase, so make the most of your previous marketing efforts.
• Plan your audiences. If ever there’s a time to find new audiences to help scale, Black Friday is it. With how much horizontal scaling has dropped in effectiveness over the past couple of years, it’s essential that you have new audiences to test in order to scale what’s working. 

Step 3: During The Launch

• Ad Uploads. Get everything up into the account ahead of time. You should be ready to scale at the flick of a switch, not need to lose a day of increased profits because you’re needing to find the time to upload mid launch.
• Ad Creatives. Keep direct and to the point. People are looking to know how much they can save during this time and they’re hunting a bargain. Get the traffic through to your site and let your sales pages do the work. Both images and copy should draw attention to the sale, key features and have a strong CTA to get traffic flowing.
• Website. Make sure your site is fully optimised for speed, effectiveness and user experience. This includes having Black Friday related content, banners and pages set up specifically for the event. Preparation for this needs to be done well in advance to make sure you’re ready to flick a switch the moment you launch.
• Clarity. It is essential that you look to make it clear about how to use any discounts you put in place, whether it’s automatically applied or whether consumers need to input a code, make sure there is no confusion wherever consumers will navigate on the site.
• Pop-ups. Use exit pop-ups that can reduce the bounce rate from your site and drive people to complete their purchase rather than exiting the page. Whether you offer an incentive or just increase urgency, any effect it has on conversion rate is only going to help your launch.

Step 4: Other Platforms

• Social Media. Push on all platforms as often as you can, around 3-4 times a day during launch. You’ll be pushing through the clutter of all other brands doing the same, so make sure your existing customer base are being reached with your posts.
• Email Marketing. Everything should work synergistically meaning your message from your social media/paid media should be echoed via email. This is where the pre-awareness will come in handy in boosting your launch, so make the most of it.
• Utilise everything. Any other platforms you have like influencers, chatbots etc. you should be looking to make the most of during this time. Whatever way you can increase traffic, get your message out there!

Well there you have it. Simple right?

If you have any questions or want any help in planning your Black Friday launch then please get in touch and we can set something up!