December 12, 2022
By:Emily Harper
The year's busiest shopping period requires a strategic Black Friday marketing approach to meet your sales goals. In a period where every business is ready to drop surprises for their customers, how will you make your mark? Being reactive and dropping your prices lower than your competitors may not be the best idea. So how does this unique strategy help?
Businesses develop Black Friday marketing strategies around the occasion's theme. Black Friday sales are enormous because of the limited-time availability of goods and services that are cheaper than usual.
Consumers see this as something they wouldn’t want to miss out on and make purchase decisions even if they do not have a need. Black Friday marketing is designed to leverage this devious plot.
Your strategy should include limited-period offers and deal codes, email campaigns and social media communication that goes out to the market regularly, and a watertight pricing strategy insulated from losses.
Let’s explore the best marketing ideas that can put your brand and products in front of consumers by building word of mouth and top-of-mind recall. You can employ one, a few, or all of these ideas and develop your Black Friday marketing strategy.
Users are always hungry and eager for more benefits from the brands they follow. With Black Friday around the corner, they’re always keen to pick up on the best deals. This natural curiosity to view your brand’s content can be advantageous.
Your social media branding strategy before Black Friday will need to be a mix of organic content posting and advertising across platforms. The usual keywords will be more expensive to bid against, so pick your target keywords judiciously. For organic content, use scheduling tools to determine appropriate days and times to publish your content.
Social media commerce is rising and can get customers to your buying links sooner than ever. It could increase to $80 billion by 2025. Succeeding in social commerce also grows your social media following.
The oldest form of holiday sales marketing is direct mail letters. Cut to the 2000s, and we’re used to receiving emails (albeit unsolicited) all through the holiday season. Email marketing is a double-edged sword.
You can begin by building an email list. Lists are available off-the-shelf but can also be created by incentivizing consumers to provide their details when they visit your online store or interact with any of your touchpoints.
You can optimize emails for Black Friday marketing by adding elements such as pop-up forms, call-to-action banners, surveys, and more. Each email you send out should reflect the theme of Black Friday to be relatable and quickly absorbed by customers.
Black Friday creates a buying frenzy for one key reason: the fear of missing out (FOMO) on the available offers. The short window during which products are available at jaw-dropping prices is why brands rake in the money they make during the sale period. You can work this to your advantage.
Set up limited-time deals with a countdown timer on each product. This technique will help your customers hasten their purchase decisions and move closer to a sale. It is a period when you can indulge in flash sales that can catch your customers unaware. Put the items that are running out of stock under the spotlight so that they are easier to discover.
During and before Black Friday, customers rush to get their hands on things they want when they want them. By building your website for an unprecedented visitor surge, you are setting yourself up for success during your sale period. Websites can only deal with a sudden surge of visitors on their pages if they are optimized for e-commerce.
Integrating a payment gateway on your website comes with its own set of challenges. In addition to security certificates, you also need partnership deeds (in the case of LLPs), identity proofs, and more.
Teasers of your brand’s campaign help build the hype leading up to your sale. Creating a pre-sale teaser campaign gives your target audience a gist of what to expect from your brand during Black Friday. FOMO kicks in here, too, giving your customers a reason to keep checking your brand properties to learn more.
To build pre-sales curiosity by revealing your brand, announce the release date. Your communication should lead with the date of availability or sale, with words such as “coming soon” or “available now” as calls-to-action.
Once Black Friday is upon us, employing the right strategy to price your products is essential. You need to ensure that your product is available throughout the sale. If you have limited stock of the product on sale, label it as “stocks running out” so that you do not disappoint your customers after they have paid for it.
Use interactive tools on your website, like countdown timers that lead to the day the sale ends. These tools cause a tremendous change in the buying habits of customers.
In your quest to accrue new customers, remember your loyal ones. Do something special for customers who have invested longer in your brand. Offer them a price advantage or exclusive access to your choicest products and services and make this known.
Doing this will give your prospective customers a reason to believe in your brand's goodness, and they would also like to build meaningful relationships for more incentives.
Remember the customer who scrolled to the bottom of your sales page and backed out just before filling out the sales form? You can reach out to them through retargeting, but this time with the new promise of a Black Friday advantage.
Customers who have made it halfway through your purchase cycle have already shown an interest in your products. All you need to do is transform that intent into an actual purchase decision with an offer that is good enough.
You’ve set up your e-commerce store, have a robust social media plan, and have the best discounts in the market — what next? You need to make your Black Friday marketing discoverable for your customers.
Hashtags are the best way to achieve this. During special days like Black Friday, customers who seek offers and discounts use hashtags like #BlackFriday or #BlackFridayOffers to discover brands that offer the best prices.
Customers will discover your content more easily if you use these hashtags judiciously and consistently across all your marketing collateral. Hashtags aren’t like domain names or trademarks. You can use hashtags that trend to attract customers to your social media channels and your sales page.
What are some commonly asked questions about making Black Friday sales? Get your questions answered with these three FAQs.
Black Friday is a great time to reward your most devoted customers. An effective marketing strategy for fostering customer loyalty and encouraging repeat business is to provide these customers with special access to promotions and discounts.
A typical Black Friday sale will begin the day before Thanksgiving and continue through the following weekend. Cyber Monday, which occurs three days after Black Friday, is when many online stores begin offering deep discounts. Many stores offer deep discounts in honor of both holidays.
Despite worries about inflation and higher prices, estimates suggest that online Black Friday sales this year reached a record $9.12 billion. According to the study, the $9.12 billion figure is up from $8.92 billion in 2021 and $9.03 billion the year before.
Black Friday marketing tends to be aggressive because your competitors are as assertive as you are in putting their best offers forward. Excellent planning, innovative pricing, and any one of the nine strategies can give your business the edge during the holiday shopping frenzy.
We wish you a happy holiday and the best of luck in your Black Friday endeavor.