Don’t take your Black Friday Marketing Campaign into effect until you read it.
Black Friday is, undoubtedly, one of the biggest days of the year to business, especially for the sales and marketing team. Last year’s holiday saw 93.2 million online shoppers and an all-time high $71.4 billion sales.
While Black Friday was more popular for online shopping, today’s shopping frenzy covers all types of businesses: from online, retail to even B2B. Companies on software, SaaS and other tools are taking advantage of this profitable holiday to attract new customers and generate leads.
Marketing strategy is key to ensure the optimal benefits of the sales. Take a look at our list of 4 Black Friday marketing ideas that will help you reach out to the prospects and rocket your business:
- Create buzz on social media
With an increasing 3.5 billion users worldwide, social media stands as the most powerful channel to market your campaigns to the audience. It may sound cliches that social media marketing is used as the first touch point. However, you can grab users’ attention through social sites, then turn them to the potential customers visiting your website.
While preparing for your social media strategy, it’s always good to start with a profile. Make sure your profile pictures, covers, banners and links are coordinated to fully support your Black Friday campaigns.
Black Friday is not about competing on prices but reaching out to people. To make your brands stand out from the crowd, create appealing content especially for your social media. Because social channel is a two-way communication, you can share posts asking for their opinions or polls to vote in.
Sharing gift guides is also a great way to boost up your holiday marketing campaigns. People spend lots of time on social media, so showing them how to style your products will get them thinking about their shopping in advance. It also gives you a chance to cross-sell when using gift guides to highlight your products that complement each other.
Most Black Friday shoppers have a sense of urgency when it comes to deals and promotion. Thus, adding a CTA (call-to-action) makes them think it’s in limited supply and urges them to take immediate action. Some CTAs you can consider are:
- 10 hours left!
- Only today
- Save now
- Only 50 items available
Remember, don’t bombard people with excessive CTAs. That would do more harm than good. Pick some relevant CTA, test their effectiveness before applying them to the posts.
Hashtags, for example, #BlackFridayxBotStar or #CyberMonday make your deals visible to a wider audience.
You can consider running ads to gain more exposure among target audiences in the leadup to Black Friday.
2. Leverage the power of referral programs
Recommendations or referrals are the old but gold marketing strategy, in which people make a decision on what to buy based on others’ opinions. To reach out to the new customers, brands often go for this tactic due to its proven effectiveness. (92% of customers trust referrals from the people they know — according to Nielsen.
Creating an appealing reward program is of key importance when it comes to referral marketing. Make your incentive irresistible. Segment your customers and target them with specific offers instead of providing them with blanket deals. For example, it’d be a waste if your second-time customers prefer a percentage discount when you offer a sum-fixed promotion.
Some ways you can think of for your referral marketings are free gifts, percentage discounts or VIP invites. If you are running a subscription-based service, a free monthly subscription is worth considering.
A referral program should be simple and easy to participate in. If it takes too long for a referral to take action, you’ll miss a lot of opportunities to get sales in.
3. Be ahead of your competitors
With thousands of businesses joining in the holiday hype, chances are your deals are going anonymous in the middle of the game. Small or big, everyone’s doing Black Friday.
Black Friday marketing does start long before the Friday. Thus, it’s important to schedule your campaign in advance and leave time for it to take effects. Create content for early shoppers before it’s too late and they’ve already got their shopping carts fulfilled.
A great example of early adopters is Wool and the Gang:
Instead of waiting for Friday, the brand starts its campaign a day before and leads the competition by having their own “Black Thursday”. This way, they mark their name on top of the subscribers’ shopping list.
Another example of an early Bird is Kate Spade
By calling the promotion “surprise”, the company triggers customers’ impatience and urges them to make early purchases.
4. Optimize your landing page
It’s where you turn your browsers into Black Friday buyers, so make it count.
After grabbing people’s attention about your promotion, entice them more by creating a page specifically for Black Friday. Craft a banner with bold, vivid designs and large, clear fonts. Aim for powerful messages and creatives. One way you can take into consideration is popups and a count-down clock to raise anticipation.
Below is an excellent example of Black Friday landing page:
The reason why this page beats others in the competition is that:
- It’s information rich
- It’s clear and attractive
- It provokes urgency
- It has navigation options on the right side to take users to their desired products
Another cool way to optimize your landing page during this busy and competitive time is to have chatbots handling customer requests. Traffic will be high during this 4-day holiday, so chatbot as a virtual assistant can walk customers through registration and guide them to the promotion.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday, aka Cyber Weekend, is the biggest day of the year for business. Take advantage of this holiday sale to capture leads and extend your brand exposure. We hope this post gives you some ideas on generating traffic and getting more customers during this Black Friday.