It’s no surprise that the ‘Black Friday’ sales are one of the most popular times of year for businesses to push sales and to create awareness of their products to the masses. Consumers are on the hunt for a bargain in the lead-up to Christmas and now more than ever before the competition is fierce.
Statista forecasts that UK consumer spending will drop to £8.71 billion over the four days starting with Black Friday, down from £9.42 billion in 2021.
Due to the Cost of Living Crisis, consumers have less disposable income. As a result, your Black Friday sales need to stand out from the competition to ensure a successful campaign.
Read on to see our top tips…
Evie Sandall
Over the Black Friday weekend, a significant influx of website traffic is expected with many companies taking part and offering discounts for their products and services. Many may overlook their SEO when setting up a new campaign, but it can easily be the most important factor to consider.
Before setting up a new campaign, we highly recommend assessing your current page loading speeds and general site performance. The majority of all Black Friday campaigns lead the consumers towards the website, and as a consumer, there is nothing more frustrating than a slow website.
According to Google’s research, when a website takes 1 to 3 seconds to load, the chance of a user leaving the site completely increases by 32%, and up to 90% if it takes up to 5 seconds!
Slow website loading speeds, missing or glitching images, and poor mobile usability are only a few factors that influence how well your website ranks organically within the SERPs (search engine results pages). Prior to diving into any campaign work, audit your website for the following:
Ensuring you target relevant keywords can make or break a successful SEO campaign. Irrelevant keywords or keywords with the wrong intention (to purchase/to educate) can lead to large amounts of money being wasted. Also, trying to rank for highly competitive keywords that every other site is already ranking for can also land you in a sticky situation with low success rates.
A great rule of thumb when starting a new keyword research for a specific time or event of the year is to look at historical data from previous years. There may be a specific keyword a user searches to find your business that you may not think of. We recommend starting on Google Search Console’s Queries report to see this. From this, you can paste some of these into Google’s Keyword Planner which can assist with new keyword suggestions.
Over the course of this weekend, more users will be specifically searching for “[product/service] Black Friday deals” to get the best price possible. This is something that you should seriously consider when finding keywords and utilising these within the on-page content and meta titles/descriptions.
Creating tailored landing pages can increase your chances of appearing for Black Friday search queries if properly utilised. If you’re running a campaign during this time, it’s important to target the most relevant keywords within your product/service pages to give them the best chance of generating conversions. These landing pages can also include new graphics that relate to the campaign being run (e.g. a banner declaring there is 30% off all products).
If you create a brand new page rather than editing an existing one, it’s incredibly important to add these to your XML sitemap, and even better if they can be added to the main navigation. Adding these to the XML sitemap will help Google index and place the page on your site, which can then, in turn, improve where the page ranks organically.
As the purpose of these custom landing pages is to increase traffic and conversions alike, we would always advise that the pages are clear, concise, and include an easily visible CTA for the user to follow.
Top tip: Tailored landing pages can also help with your PPC campaign!
Amy Eburne
The key to any prime shopping period is the plan, plan, plan! You should be preparing your campaign in advance so that the targeting, learning, and optimisations of the account ensure you can make the most of the peak search traffic that you want to capture, and subsequently capitalise on.
With the likes of the Money Saving Expert advising consumers to only buy what they need and not purchase for the sake of it, plus the aforementioned Cost of Living Crisis, we’ve seen a shift in the behaviour of online shoppers this year. In fact, consumers are looking to save and spread the cost of Christmas more than ever with 67% of people more interested in Black Friday than last year.
To make the most of this, the campaign set up including targets, budget, optimisation score, and data-driven attribution should also be factored in. It’s important to consider that the lower the target of your ROAS or CPA, the more equipt the algorithm is to drive additional sales and increase bids to win more auctions when competition is high.
If you’re now ready to maximise opportunity and increase spend, then you’re probably wondering which campaign is best for the increased sales period. There are a number of factors driving sales which can impact the type of campaign and platform it serves ads to.
As to be expected, the items that are on sale have the biggest importance to driving success over Black Friday. The main platforms generating this success are Search, Gmail and Youtube. The second most important is the locality of the purchase as users look to use Search and Maps to find items to buy. This comes hand-in-hand with consumer reviews which have an almost identical level of importance to locality, as consumers Search and look to YouTube to find more information as they go down the purchase funnel.
Just these few factors highlight the importance of maximising campaigns that advertise across all Google platforms. This is why it is particularly important for ecommerce sites to ensure they have Shopping and Performance Max campaigns running ahead of Black Friday, Christmas, and New Year, as these campaign types will show for all the key platforms whilst also driving users directly to the site to make a purchase.
Depending on your current account set up, if you are running an e-commerce based strategy, with Shopping or Performance Max campaigns, you want to make sure they are out of the learning phase and thus are stabilised in time for you to ramp up your spending and coverage. For these campaigns, there are key things to check:
For Performance Max (PMax), it’s key to prepare all your assets with a seasonal theme, whether it’s for Black Friday, Christmas, or New Year.
Things we question include:
Want to know more about PMax? Get in touch with our team, and show ads across the Google network!
Rowena Cole
Social media is the go to place for consumers to see new products and to spark interest in any upcoming deals. The Black Friday sales are starting earlier and earlier and you don’t want to miss out on any opportunities. This isn’t the time to wait until the topic is trending… you need to plan your social media strategy way ahead of time. First things first…
You can do this in a number of ways.
Educate your customers on why your products are so good, don’t be afraid to list your USPs and show the consumer how they will benefit from using your products. Are there any pain points that your products solve? How can the consumer live without this?!
Engage with your followers about your products and get a conversion going in the lead up to the sales. Perhaps do an FAQ’s post on the product or use customer review videos/ testimonials on how others have enjoyed the product. Real life stories are authentic and really help sell the product – positive reviews leads to positive results.
Once you have awareness of your product’s benefits in which your consumers will reap the rewards – it’s time to tease consumers that a sale will be approaching! You can do this with a countdown to the sale, you even prompt customers to add their favourite products to their ‘wish lists’ in time for discounted rates.
Now you have a countdown in place you are ready for when the sales go live! Get customers excited about your sale items by writing your social media copy which conveys a sense of urgency. For example this could look like:
This sense of urgency during the sales will encourage customers to take action now rather than waiting – this opportunity is too good to miss after all!
You can do this in a really creative way through organic posting, paid ads and via ‘stories’. The use of stories also helps create momentum to your sales as the content disappears after 24 hours. This highlights the time element of the story/ sale as consumers won’t want to miss out on a discount code that is displayed on stories before the content disappears.
Sofie Farthing
In a recent survey, 77% of email marketers agreed that investing in Black Friday email promotions provides a significant return. Even if your customers aren’t engaging with your brand anywhere else, dropping an email into their inbox is a surefire way to put your brand in front of their eyes and shine a light on the promotions you’re running this peak shopping season.
But with a huge number of brands out there taking the same approach, how do you make sure your email campaign stands out amongst the Black Friday inbox chaos amongst the rest?
These days, Black Friday shopping is no joke! People spend the weeks prior researching and hunting for the best potential deals to ensure they can be as savvy as possible when the big day arrives. Chances are, they’ve already decided exactly where they will be shopping and what they will be purchasing days in advance of Black Friday.
Make sure you’re letting the early birds know what promotions you’ve got in store ahead of time so that they can put you on their radar and factor you into their shopping plans. You may even have early promotions to reward the super organised amongst us. If you get the message out too late, you risk being left behind.
We’re not suggesting you get spammy this Black Friday, but one email simply isn’t enough! Ideally, your Black Friday email marketing campaign should be split into three phases over the course of a few weeks; pre-Black Friday, Black Friday and post-Black Friday. This way, you can target your customers in multiple stages of their journey.
At least one email should be sent to warm things up and let your customers know about your promotions. Perhaps send another out a day or two before Black Friday as a refresher and a reminder. On Black Friday, get an email out early doors and use this opportunity to urgency around your sales. This should be your most compelling email yet with an aim to persuade shoppers to simply click through and purchase.
But what should you be sending out post-Black Friday? Well, perhaps you’ve still got stock you want to shift. Could you create a last push email with the most tempting discounts yet in order to squeeze the last sales out of this shopping holiday? Maybe you simply want to thank your customers for shopping and start easing them into your Christmas email marketing campaigns.
Whatever it is, don’t go quiet after the Black Friday madness.
The beauty of email marketing is the data that you can pull from it to get to know your customers better. Whether it’s open rates, click-through rates or bounce rates, analysing how each of your Black Friday emails performed will help you draw insights into what was a success and what wasn’t.
You’ll thank yourself for pulling these stats together in 2023 when Black Friday rolls back around and you want your email marketing campaign to be bigger and better than ever!
If you’ve not had time to maximise your Black Friday sales with the strategy above, don’t worry!
You can use this as a template for upcoming sales including Christmas and January sales.
Call: 01788 288020 or email: [email protected]