Year-end is coming on like a freight train and with it, the inevitable planning for Black Friday 2022 specials and holiday sales. If you feel intimidated and a bit overwhelmed at the thought of planning your Black Friday marketing strategy, this post is for you. As you review some of the best marketing strategies for small businesses, you’ll walk away with a plan in your mind by the end of this post.
Why do a Black Friday sale At All?
If you’re a bit of a rebel and want to buck the trend, pause for a minute, and give this some thought. Yes, Black Friday marketing is a trend, and an obscenely profitable one at that (to the tune of 8,9 billion USD last year!). When cash flow is an urgent priority or crisis in your business, don’t buck, come up with something truly epic instead.
Whether you have a sale on Black Friday 2022 or not, the main thing is to either join the trend or do it with a twist right before or right after because like it or not, customers are priming their budgets to spend when the time comes.
Start With Your Black Friday 2022 Marketing Strategy – The Plan
As with anything in business and online marketing, start with a plan. What are you aiming to offer, at what discount, to whom, and why? What’s the incentive for the customer along with the obvious discount?
Think about your messaging — you’re competing with thousands of other companies for attention, and customers are distracted at this time of the year. Their inboxes are crowded with emails, year-end functions at work, kids’ school year wrapping up, holiday planning, Christmas planning, etc.
How does your offer speak to their distraction, stress load, desires, and needs? Do a brain dump of everything that comes to mind along these lines, and then organize it into a prioritized list. This will be the beginnings of your marketing strategy!
Remember to check your SEO tools for useful keywords to include in every channel of your marketing strategy — they need to be included in all your content marketing for this campaign! And your website should be SEO-optimized for customers searching Black Friday specials as well.
Next, list the platforms you will be using to execute your Black Friday 2022 marketing strategy, i.e., website updates, landing pages, emails, social media posts, social media and/or Google Ad campaigns, paid search campaigns, etc. For Google Ad campaigns, Adbot makes your campaigns easy, quick, and effective. What is your budget for these? Where can you bootstrap and where can you optimize? Remember to delegate — many hands make light work, as they say.
Black Friday eCommerce Strategy & Sales Ideas – The How
Now we get to the exciting part — exactly how is the ecommerce part going to work? How will customers get what you’re offering on Black Friday? Work your way through the following tips to make your ecommerce strategy as effective as possible.
- Consider compiling a Black Friday 2022 catalogue you can send out ahead of time so customers can plan what they want to buy. Customers could compile a wish list that they can convert into a transaction on the day.
- Check that your site will be able to handle an above-average amount of traffic so that it doesn’t crash. It’s no fun when a bunch of disgruntled customers suddenly start complaining on social media.
- Make the purchasing process as fast and simple as possible, i.e., the fewer clicks needed to complete the check-out, the better. This will keep your abandoned carts low (remember to prep follow-up responses/mailers for those abandoned carts as well to get more completed sales or you’re leaving money in the cart!).
- You can also use this opportunity to upsell other products with a simple landing page that pops up after a customer has selected a particular product.
- Personalize the content, use your customers’ first name in email campaigns, and use customer segmentation to get super specific with your messaging to each target group.
- Use QR codes as an easy way to get customers to connect to your online store, to get access to additional benefits, giveaways, subscribe to your mailing list, etc.
- Offer spending rewards, like giving a discount if they spend over a certain amount, plus free shipping. Your customers will be incredibly grateful!
- Add a free gift to your Black Friday offer if possible, something doable that could also potentially encourage your customer to become a loyal part of your brand community. You could also make it something random to add fun and mystery to the shopping experience.
- If possible, set up a pre-order feature to your offer. This will also give you an advanced glimpse at customer interest and whether your offer will hit the mark. For the customer, the incentive is to avoid stock issues and long queues.
Best Black Friday 2022 Social Media Campaigns — The Where
The best Black Friday 2022 social campaigns are not a random let’s-throw-money-at-this affair. Use your marketing strategy above and zoom in on the social media part. How many posts over the weeks leading up to Black Friday will cover your campaign? Think about messaging that will:
- Get your customers’ attention — what do they need to know? Why?
- Make them aware of stunning offers coming soon — how does it stand out compared to competition?
- Whet their appetites to be ready — create scarcity and urgency with limited supplies/limited offer.
- Compel your ideal customer to buy, but ethically, of course (remember, people buy and then justify).
Consider which social media platforms your customers use the most and go be present there. Create brand awareness in a human, relatable way that connects with your customers. Use time-sensitive tools like reels, quick live streams, Q&A sessions, stories, sneak peaks, and push notifications. You can also try selling directly on social media — this can be quite successful on Facebook and Instagram.
Repurpose your social media posts into text messages for an additional marketing channel. People cannot resist checking texts, so this is one of the most immediate forms of marketing guaranteed to grab attention.
Prepare your social media content ahead of time so that you can schedule it in batches. Yes, this is a bit of a monstrous task, but if you get yourself a solid coffee and power your way through it in half a day or one full day, you can rest easy knowing it’s done and ready. Whatever additional posts you are inspired to add in between to take advantage of a relevant trend will then have more power because you’ve already got consistent content growing your audience.
After Black Friday 2022 — The Important Extras
Before you start planning your Christmas dinner on your nicely fattened Black Friday earnings, remember to follow up with your Black Friday customers. After all, it would be even better for your business if you could encourage them to become long-term customers. After they’ve completed a purchase, send out a campaign that includes a thank you, then a quick question about their customer experience. This will show them that you care about them and that your after-sales support is genuine.
Be a Black Friday 2022 Rebel and Still Make Bank
You can use all the tricks mentioned above and still do something different on, before, after, throughout Black Friday, or throughout the whole month. Name it something more relevant to your product/service/offer or angle on your promotion. Choose the Thursday, the Saturday, or the whole week before or after. Change the colour!
Make it exciting — you could even run a sale on a different product or product category every day of the month or for the week of Black Friday 2022 and Cyber Monday 2022. It’s another way to keep customers coming back for more!
The rules are yours to break as long as you still apply your marketing strategy above. This is a terrific opportunity to be as creative as you like with your marketing and messaging. If you have fun producing it, your customers will enjoy it too.
Author byline
Heideli Loubser is a wellness and education copywriter and a content marketing strategist helping you grow your business. She is also a solo homeschool blogging mom of two kiddos. When she’s not wielding her powerful pen to help businesses and other parents, she enjoys gardening, painting, caffeine, and dark chocolate in large amounts.