It’s not uncommon for Australian business owners and brand marketers to feel stumped thinking about what to do for Black Friday, Sofa Sunday, and Cyber Monday. This sales-loaded weekend is, after all, the ultimate reason to go all out on marketing. Exploring new advertising strategies to push sales to the hilt is easily one of the most popular avenues marketers are resorting to taking.
While maximum creativity is often encouraged when it comes to advertising, the effectiveness of a strategy still usually boils down to a few key principles. In this article, we’ll discuss the three pillars that you must lean on to build your Black Friday strategy in order to maximise potential success.
Make sure that your strategy has the following principles down pat, and then you can be as creative as your heart desires.
1. Start building anticipation early
The Black Friday season is indeed a great opportunity to ramp up sales, but to enjoy the increase in revenue, you’d also have to battle against two things:
- Almost every other business that’s vying for your customer’s cash and attention, whether they’re direct competitors or not.
- The small window of opportunity (time-wise).
To give you an advantage, you must plan out your strategy and build anticipation much earlier. Now, we don’t mean to tell you to advertise your Black Friday deals in August (unless that’s your jam, then go ahead and do so if you insist). What this means is that you must take advantage of the months preceding Black Friday to beef up your mailing list and social media followers. That way, you’ll be able to reach as many people as possible come November.
But don’t stop at simply trying to add more people into your database. Make sure that you stay within their radar by mailing them ultra-relevant content. You can also create personalised or targeted offers to appeal to each customer type. This stretch of time before Black Friday should be used to building and fortifying relationships with your customers. So when Black Friday comes around, your brand will likely be on the top of their list.
On the few weeks before the big day, begin releasing teasers for your Black Friday promotions. You can pin a note on top of your social feed or attach a reminder on your newsletter to do so. If you have a blog, you can also exploit that avenue by including a call-to-action on your latest posts to encourage your audience to subscribe to your mailing list. That way, they can get notified of the best and most unmissable deals.
2. Create a sense of urgency
As mentioned above, the window of opportunity that comes with Black Friday doesn’t last very long. However, some consumers tend to procrastinate on their shopping, thinking that their favourite shops will roll out different sales throughout the entire holiday season.
Even though this may actually be true in your case, we all know that the goal is to make as many sales as possible now. To handle procrastinating consumers, you’re going to have to create a sense of urgency to encourage immediate action.
You’d want to let people know that the offer you’re currently advertising isn’t going to be available for long—and that if they don’t act fast enough, the product in question might not be, either.
Three popular methods you can use to encourage immediate action are:
- Providing limited-quantity or members-only discounts
- Displaying a countdown timer
- Having flash sales with different offers every hour or day
3. Retarget, retarget, retarget
Retargeting is easily one of the most effective ways to increase sales. After all, you’re re-engaging with people who have already demonstrated purchase intent before, but for some reason decided to abandon their carts.
The holiday season comes like a whirlwind, with new deals easily distracting consumers from other promotions and causing them to abandon ship mid-way.
Last year, DigitalCommerce360 found that as much as two-thirds of online retailers didn’t bother rescuing abandoned carts—presumably resulting to the loss of business that otherwise could have been rescued.
Now isn’t the time to be conservative, either. You’d want to go beyond the usual reminder email and go straight to offering an extra discount. Chances are, your customers probably didn’t abandon carts out of sheer forgetfulness; they most likely left because they found (or were in search of) a better deal.
In conclusion…
No matter what gimmick or promotion you decide to roll out for Black Friday, these three principles shall stand as your foundation. Neglecting even just one of them could lead to losing the opportunity to maximize sales, and we know that that’s the last thing you’d want.
If you’re looking for more in-depth guidance for Black Friday, Search Insights’ powerhouse team of marketing experts is ready to help you anytime. Give us a call or drop us an email today to get started!
