For eCommerce businesses, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are often the most important times of the year in terms of sales. It’s important to have a well thought out digital marketing strategy in place ahead of time. However, for many small business owners, it can be hard to find the time to think about new marketing ideas. Time slips away and the sales are here before we know it.
In this article, I will share 5 ways to quickly implement a Black Friday and Cyber Monday digital strategy so you can make the most of this big sale weekend. While each business differs and will need a unique strategy, these tips should help you get a last-minute strategy in place so you don’t completely miss out.
Black Friday & Cyber Monday Marketing Tips
- Decide on your USPs
- Decide how you plan on incentivising people to buy
- Perform a website health check
- Create holiday themed graphics
- Use gift guides to promote your offers
1. What Is Your USP?
Your customers will be overwhelmed with advertising during and in the lead up to the sales. In order to stand out you will need to decide on a unique selling point and make it clear to customers why they should choose your products or business over the competition.
The most common examples of USPs are:
- Price
- Quality
- Emotional appeal
- Convenience
- Range of products
Pick 1 to 2 of these examples and focus on building a marketing strategy around them. Don’t try to tick all these boxes, you only have a couple of seconds to grab customers attention so just focus on your main USPs for the purpose of this campaign.
2. Incentivize People To Buy
Customers have high expectations when it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals. A small discount or free shipping alone won’t do a lot to excite people. However, a combination of offers can appear attractive without having to sell at cost price. Could you offer a 10% discount, with free shipping, and a small freebie? Or a “New Customer” offer in addition to your sale discount.
Or how about creating product bundles. A customer may come to your website wanting to buy one product but then see’s a special bundle deal. For your customers, the price-per-item is lower than expected, while you get to sell multiple items at once, even if the profit per item is lower.
Make sure to use sitewide to promote your offers. If you’re not sure how, get in touch and I’ll implement them for you.
3. Perform A Website Health Check
Prepare your website ahead of the big weekend by checking all your pages are active, all links are correct and working and the check out process is bug free. The last thing you want is to have a successful marketing campaign be wasted because your customers can’t make a transaction on your website. Have a professional take a look or, at a minimum, use a free online tool to crawl your website and check for errors.
4. Create Holiday Themed Graphics
Create themed graphics to promote your offers for your website, and for social media. If you’re short on time, a tool like Canva can help you complete this step in minutes. There are pre-made templates that you can add your branding to, making it look like you are much more prepared than you are. If you’re not very creative, or have never used tools such as Canva, get in touch and I can make these graphics for you. I also build personalised templates that you can use time and time again by simply tweaking text and small elements.
5. The Power Of Gift Guides
What products/services do you most want to sell? Choose a small selection and create a “Gift Guide blog post”. Group your products/services for certain buyer personas to help overwhelmed customers buy presents for their loved ones.
Have time to take it one step further? Create a compelling outreach campaign using email or social media DM’s to contact relevant nano or micro-influencers/journalists in your industry. (Relevancy is the key to success here). Try to find influencers who have previously created gift guides and contact them with a brief description of your product/service and the special offers you will have. This works best if you have previous relationships built with these influencers, or if you have the ability to offer free gifts in return for exposure. However, it’s worth a try anyway, so long as you keep it friendly and non-assuming.
Conclusion
I hope you found some quick and creative ways to make the most of this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. If you missed out on opportunities this time around, remember there are plenty more sales periods throughout the year.
If you would like help implementing any of the strategies above or would like to hear about more advanced tactics get in touch today.