Best Practices for Black Friday 2021

It’s a tricky question to answer knowing that many businesses will begin their Black Friday campaigns in early November. There’s no substitute for preparation. The real secret is knowing when to start building hype around your products and offers. This determines how you handle business communication and what kind of Black Friday deals you plan to offer.

Let’s start with the what. Say, for example, you’ll offer a refer-a-friend Black Friday deal. Besides getting a discount, the customer who involves their friend also gains an additional perk, for free: they help a friend discover a great product and a sweet deal!. By doing that, they nourish their mutual relationship (which is a huge motivator behind people sharing anything online). This is precisely what the campaign could communicate: how your product helps shoppers nourish their relationships with friends, family, or coworkers.

The how has to do with your best-performing marketing channels, in terms of leads and sales. If it’s social media, a few short videos on the topic could be distributed in a matter of days. The same goes for Facebook ads. If you have great SEO game, publish a few new blog posts ahead of Black Friday. Even if PPC drives most of your sales, push the ads with enough time to make an impact. Add the time needed to create this content to your publishing schedule, and that’s pretty much your timeline.

The same principle could be applied to leverage any type of messaging. Let’s not forget that the majority of Black Friday shoppers are looking specifically for bargains. They want the best value for their money, so for example, you might offer bundle deals. To maximize the potential of these offers, you could do a longer pre-Black Friday content marketing campaign (2-3 months), create several pieces of content that show how these products complement each other, and laser-focus on the “bargain” aspect in your messaging. Again, choose the channels that have historically driven most of your sales, and create content accordingly. You could even let the customers know these products might go on sale on Black Friday, and ask if they would like to be informed when that happens. If not enough people are interested, you can kill the bundle deal before it flops.

As for “alternative” customer-winning strategies, here’s a little throwback. Remember when you used to covet Dr. Martens shoes and saved up and waited for them to go on sale so you could finally buy them? Remember how you already had outfits planned out and knew exactly what concerts you'll wear them to and how cool you'll look at school? Because I do. Back then we didn’t have Black Fridays, but there were still bargains to be found. And we knew exactly what we wanted to buy and why.

To inspire such feelings in your customers, you have to go beyond sales activities. Why? Because sales activities typically focus on the product. Conversely, non-sales activities tend to focus on the customer, their stories, their why. Discover why your customers buy your product. Is it because it saves time or money? Is it because it’s exclusive or luxurious? These are the story elements behind every product. Not your stories - but your customers’ stories, which you can leverage in inbound marketing campaigns.

Start with the what (the story you want to tell) and decide on the how (your most prolific channels will determine the type of content and campaign). Strive to educate, inform, entertain, and help your customers be and do better. And remember, you don’t simply want customers to buy your product - you want them to be happy about buying your product. And for that, you need to make your product part of their story.

Let me scratch out "Black Friday" and give you a more generalized answer. While there are some differences between seasonal campaigns (duration, repetition, massiveness), an ad is either successful or not. Every successful ad has captured customers' attention, gained their trust, and had a clear call to action. Above all, the ad was a perfect match for the audience as far as GDPR will allow.

The text is not the only way to send your message to the world. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words – and video is worth a thousand pictures. Photos and videos are shared several hundreds of times more than text (accodring to every major social media network), and the predictions are that by 2022 more than 2/3 of all content online will be videos. Those stats are a clear message (pun intended) why digital advertising agencies have a sudden need for video content makers.

Let’s see... BF is a sales-related holiday, right? So no doubt what should be the goals, no matter if we’re talking B2C or B2B. But there’s a mistake most companies are making.

All they do throughout the year is trying to sell. No awareness, no education, not forming relationships with their customers. And so when the holiday season is here, they do the same.

The problem is that they get to only 5% of their target audience all the time. 95% of their potential customers aren’t ready to buy.

So instead of urging them to go to the website and buy, companies can do better in creating awareness, educating them, and increasing the number of people that are ready to buy.

That’s how the inbound sales will go up, and companies will get more people that, if not ready to buy yet, are interacting with the company's brand - they have seen their posts and messages in the feed, they had a chat with their employees, they are reading their blog posts and checking their products.

So when Black Friday comes, all they need to do is do retargeting campaigns, to bring all those people back to the website to buy - now with a discount. Sales turn out as a reward for people’s relationship with their brand.

In other words, work the whole year to get successful BF campaigns.

At the end of BF, companies end up with more sales and with more loyal customers ready to come back and buy more.

If you want to know more about B2B marketing, this is the podcast for you: B2B Weekly podcast