Black Friday is one of the major revenue events of the year for businesses across many industries. To understand why, you only need to look at the statistics. A huge 130.7 million US shoppers were projected to participate in 2023. The event represents a perfect opportunity for companies of all sizes.
Unfortunately, though, the event also poses a challenge. With so many businesses taking part, how can you stand out and cut through to your audience?
With so many Black Friday online shoppers, there are few better places to start than a social media campaign. With the right approach, you can boost your public relations and make the most of this once-in-a-year shopping event. But why is social media the answer? More importantly, how can you tailor your strategy to succeed on Black Friday?
Why Social Media is important on Black Friday
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Online sales are expected to surpass $7 trillion by 2025. Thanks to special discounts, online shoppers can get their hands on their favorite products. What’s more, a huge proportion of Black Friday buyers will get their deals online. At the same time, 58.4% of the world now uses social media (SM). These two facts alone demonstrate why SM should be an essential part of every company’s Black Friday strategy.
Although commonly associated with business-to-customer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) companies can also profit from Black Friday. With a B2B CDP, you can build a comprehensive buyer persona and produce targeted social media posts.
With the right messaging, customers will go straight from your SM marketing to your promotion page. From here, there’s a high chance they’ll cash in with enticing deals. What’s more, with fun appealing posts, you can build loyal customers who will stick around long after Black Friday.
Unlike other forms of marketing, SM posts can also be tweaked ‘on the go’. You can’t easily change a billboard, nor is it wise to spam a customer with constant emails. SM posts, however, can be edited based on responses and data. You can continuously refine your posting until you find a winning formula.
Tips for Boosting your Black Friday Social Media Approach
We’ve established that social media is a crucial part of achieving Black Friday success. But where should you get started? Below, we list some marketing ideas to help craft a successful Black Friday SM campaign.
1) Identify your target audience
It sounds basic, but before you begin posting, you must consider your audience. Successful brands know their audience like the back of their hands. They know how they tick and the kinds of social media posts they respond to. To put it simply, you should build a 360 customer view.
Acquiring this kind of knowledge means more than just doing market research. You need to dig deep and get to know your audience on a more personal level. Luckily, thanks to data analytics, your social media marketing strategy doesn’t have to be a ‘shot in the dark’. You can learn everything you need about your audience and more.
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Collate data from sources such as your SM, website, customer feedback, and sales. You can also consider a variety of external sources. Use this data to gather information on customer demographics, interests, and more. From here, you can create customer profiles and tailor your social posts.
2) Evaluate which social platforms will deliver the biggest benefit
Your prospects likely favor certain forms of social media depending on their age, social status, and other demographics. Tailor your promotions to primarily target the social media that is most likely to reach your targets.
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It’s well known that an older demographic is likely to use Facebook. Research shows that the platform’s largest age group is aged 35-34. Younger prospects, on the other hand, prefer TikTok, with the primary user base aged 18-24.
Consider the social media platforms that will help you to strongly represent your brand. For instance, you might use Facebook ads for digital marketing agency, or if you’re running a clothing brand, you might post on Instagram.
3) Use creative people
If you want to succeed, your marketing campaign needs to stand out from the crowd. It’s not enough to simply have a good offering. You need to present authentic content that grabs people’s attention. To do this you need the right people. They’ll need to understand your product, but perhaps even more importantly, they will need to pitch imaginative ideas.
It’s important to explore all (sometimes unusual) approaches. A versatile and creative team will be able to quickly consider ideas and select the options most likely to work for your customers.
If you don’t have the right people in your organization, you can bring in outside help. You may even use conversational AI technology to create a framework for your posts. Alongside this, It’s often a good idea to select internal people to train and develop ‘in-house’ expertise for future campaigns.
4) Check out your competitors
Whilst you don’t want to copy your competitors’ campaigns, it’s a good idea to see what they are up to. Which approaches seem to be producing the best results? This could be visuals, logos, slogans, or even something witty.
The events of previous Black Friday campaigns will provide useful information. Don’t stop there, however. Other marketing activities running across the year all give useful insights.
How are competitor campaigns presented? Are they colorful, light-hearted, or packed with information? What kind of promotions or special offers have they used?
Your social media marketing strategy must match your brand and objectives. But you can find hints and tips by perusing social media, adapting, and feeding these into your activities.
5) Agree on your targets—what does success look like?
Don’t approach Black Friday without an understanding of what you want to get out of it. Think of this in the context of other promotions too; remember that Cyber Monday comes immediately after!
Set targets that focus on sales but could cover other things. Are you looking to grow your base by seeking potential customers? Or perhaps you want to consolidate existing customers or re-engage with those who haven’t interacted with you for a while? To track these areas, you might look at metrics such as customer sign-up to your emailing list, levels of engagement, etc.
Make sure you have mechanisms in place to evaluate success. If your processes are agile enough, you may be able to make tweaks on the fly. These can make all the difference.
6) Identify promotions and advertising pitches
Whilst you want to boost sales, you’ll also want to increase profits. Balancing price reduction against margin will be just one fact to be considered. Which products will you promote?
Will you offer loss leaders to bring customers to your site? If so, what is your social media strategy for encouraging further purchases? Customers are inundated with advertisements and promotions. Ultimately, you need to ask what sets yours apart and how you will encourage the idea that this Black Friday deal is the one for them.
Make your promotions interesting and easy to absorb. Think about layout, page position, colors, slogans, etc. It’s probably not a good idea to overwhelm customers with information. A simple, eye-catching layout is usually more effective.
7) Deliver a public relations boost
Every time you take to social media, you have an opportunity to improve your business’s public relations. This is achieved by making content that is interesting, relevant, and built around digital storytelling. The flip side of this is that poor social media content can switch customers off. If they find it unappealing, boring, or simply not relevant, you could be damaging your public relations.
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Another factor that will apply to your Black Friday campaigns is customer satisfaction after purchase. If you ‘over-promote’ products, for example, to shift surplus stock, and this leads to customer dissatisfaction, you’ll take a big PR hit. Be sure to keep public relations in view every time you engage with social media.
8) Build customer anticipation
Although the timing of Black Friday itself is determined, you might want to consider warming people up in advance. You can aim to build anticipation for upcoming deals in adverts, newsletters, and visuals on your website.
Start too far in advance and people will ignore or even forget the message, but in the weeks leading up to Black Friday, you can start to warm people up. This will increase in the final week. Ideally, your customers will be anticipating Black Friday and keen to log on and grab themselves a bargain.
9) Evaluate success and feed lessons into future exercises
When the dust is settled, it is important to review your success. There are always lessons to learn, even after a successful campaign.
Did you achieve the engagement you hoped for, and did this result in increased sales? Can you get feedback on how your promotion was received? The lessons you learn from this will improve not just next year’s Black Friday promotion, but other promotions throughout the year.
Use Black Friday to boost your profile, engagement, and sales
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Customers see Black Friday as one of the biggest opportunities to grab a bargain. Make sure you use this to harness this enthusiasm to the benefit of your brand and boost your PR. Heading into promotions without the necessary preparation is likely to result in frustration. With the right approach, though, you can make Black Friday a big success.
We’ve explored many aspects that can make Black Friday a big success for your profits and your brand. It’s a day when many people are looking to make purchases. Make sure you don’t miss out!
