How to prepare your business for Black Friday and Cyber Monday is on a *lot* of business owners minds, right now. While Black Friday and Cyber Monday may not be traditional Aussie sales events, there’s no denying they should have a big circle in the calendar this year when it comes to key planning for your social advertising campaigns.
With the end of November quickly creeping up [eeeep!], we thought you might be hanging for a little advice from your old mate Aunty TDP. So what’s on the agenda to prep? A few things …
You’re going to need some killer creative
Now’s the time to unleash the attention-seeking qualities of your brand. It’s going to be crowded out there in your audience’s feed so you’re going to need to win them over in an instant. This is no time for modesty!
Think bright colours, eye-catching imagery and if possible as much video as possible!
When preparing your business for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we usually we wouldn’t recommend using heavy graphics in your ads campaigns but this is one opportunity you can consider popping it front and centre on your images or videos. Your other option is to pop it in your campaign copy and an emoji doesn’t go astray either to grabbing some attention.
Remember not to put your eggs all in one basket, when you prep multiple creatives you allow your audience to decide and make sure you’re driving maximum bang for your buck with your advertising dollars.
Get your best promo ready or prepare to sit this one out
If you’re not planning a promotion for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, this could be a good opportunity to give your campaign activity a little bit of a breather.
Of course, your promotion doesn’t need to be a discount as such, it could be bundle deals, a gift with purchase or spend and saves, but if it’s business as usual, it’s going to be hard to compete with the big discounts and we’d honestly be hesitant to try!
We’d strongly urge you to have your plan in place as soon as possible because deciding at 9am on the 27th that you’d like to run a sale tends to make maximising your results a little bit tricky [not to mention stressful!].
Save up some budget so you can go bigger
It’s not unusual to see a drop in your ad performance [and especially ROAS] in the lead up to a big sale period and following on from one too. If you’re seeing such drops already we’d recommend you reduce your budget a little bit now so you can accelerate it over this key weekend period!
In general, you’re going to want to save up your pennies so you can invest a little bit more heavily over cyber weekend if you’re hoping to make a considerable impact on your bottom line. We’re generally a conservative bunch when it comes to budget, but this weekend isn’t really the opportunity to play it safe as it’s such a short window to get the traction you’re hoping for.
Run the promotion for the max amount of the weekend
We’ve done some testing with 24 hours flash sales or different discounts for Black Friday vs Cyber Monday and while they can work, they’re risky if you haven’t tried it before. That’s not to say we have anything against these sales in general, but when it comes to social which found it trickier to pull off in general.
We’d recommend running the campaign for the maximum time possible, launching with your promotion ASAP on the Friday and running through to the end of Monday.
This gives you time to optimise [which we are SO fond of] but also means your ads have a bit longer to deliver and if you’re new to this that’s definitely a good thing in our book.
Set up your audiences and campaigns in advance
Facebook’s reviews have become a whole lot stricter this year [thanks to COVID and the US election] so you do not want to risk having anything stand in the way of your campaign kicking off right on time.
By setting up your campaign and audiences well ahead of time and scheduling them to launch the minute you desire you can avoid potential hair-pulling moments later on. Fridays should be fun after all and after experiencing this for ourselves in previous years, this is definitely some advice we’re VERY happy to pass on.
If you’re yet to get cracking on your plan for this shopping frenzy there’s still time but you’re going to want to start your prep sooner rather than later. If you’re looking at this wide-eyed wondering how on earth you’ll even begin to tackle setting up your ads there’s luckily also time left to whizz through our online Facebook Ads Intermediate course.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about Christmas, which also happens to be just around the corner, you can also get your ducks in a row here.