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15 Black Friday Marketing Ideas You Should Be Using!

15 Black Friday Marketing Ideas

Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year, and as a result, it’s also one of the most competitive times for retailers and brands. The usual news images of people fighting in the stores aside, Black Friday is actually a very useful shopping holiday. There are data that suggest a lot of small businesses and stores make 20-40% of their year’s sales on Black Friday! So, it’s definitely not something you can shrug aside if you want to make a good last-quarter impact on your sales numbers.

Of course, it’s not just shoppers who have to compete and fight to get discounted goods — the same is true for all businesses, entrepreneurs, contractors, and all others, really. In order to get ahead of your competitors, you need to think outside the box when it comes to marketing.

 

15 Best Black Friday Marketing Ideas

Here are 15 Black Friday marketing ideas that will help you reach new customers while driving sales in stores and online:

1.     Start planning early — Or not!

It’s not too early to start planning for Black Friday. If your business is small, it can make all the difference in time and effort if you plan ahead. You’ll have more time to prepare deals and discounts, get extra staff on board, and prepare your website and social media accounts for the influx of traffic that comes with a big sale day like Black Friday. Planning early also means there’s less chance of things falling through at the last minute—you won’t be scrambling around trying to fix errors or rushing orders because everything was pushed back due to poor planning.

Of course, you can also skip the hectic planning from a few months earlier and focus on it in your own time. Even an 11th-hour strategy can get you a considerable increase in sales and profits, assuming you have the right Black Friday marketing ideas and know how to make them happen using the right tools.

2.     Develop a cohesive message across all marketing channels

One of the most important things to do when developing your Black Friday marketing plan is to have a cohesive message across all channels. This will ensure that you are communicating the same information in a similar way so that customers can easily understand what you’re offering and how it benefits them. Here are some tips:

3.     Establish your Black Friday sales dates well in advance.

Not only is Black Friday the biggest retail day of the year, but you also need to take into account that it’s likely going to be a hectic one. For that reason, we recommend starting your marketing plan as early as possible and not waiting until just before Black Friday to start thinking about how you’re going to get shoppers in your store.

To do this properly you’ll need some pre-planning:

4.     Give customers what they want.

This is the most basic piece of advice, but it’s also the most important: listen to your customers. It’s easy to get caught up in your own ideas, but if you always put yourself in the shoes of your audience, you’ll be able to understand their needs better than anyone else. Consider what kind of deals they want (a great one!), how they like being treated (nicely), and if they feel heard by the brand (absolutely!).

5.     Create a sense of urgency.

6.     Research competitors to understand the landscape you’re working in.

7.     Release deals early to those who sign up for email alerts and other offers.

If you have an email list and/or social media following, it’s time to put them to work. You can give your loyal customers exclusive deals, promotions, and giveaways if they sign up for the newsletter. This will be a great way for you to capture their emails and get more sales from those who haven’t already purchased from you before—especially if no one else is offering these kinds of offers!

To make this work well for yourself, make sure that:

8.     Offer free shipping on all purchases.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but one of the best is to offer free shipping on all purchases. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s an example: if someone spends $100 or more on your store, they get free shipping (or if they spend $50 or more). You could also make it so that if someone spends any amount of money at all above a certain threshold (say, $25), then they get free shipping. The key is that you have options; pick one that works best for your business and stick with it!

9.     Prepare your social media accounts for increased traffic and engagement.

To prepare for increased traffic and engagement on your social media accounts, you need to make sure that your site is ready. This means making sure that it can handle the traffic if necessary scaling up or down as needed. It also means having a plan in place for handling post-holiday sales and returns, which may be more frequent than usual during this time of year.

To ensure that you are prepared for Black Friday marketing success:

10. Run polls on your blog or social media accounts to tease upcoming promotions.

For example, you could ask:

11. Make sure your website can handle increased traffic loads.

This is a crucial step, as if your site is not ready for an influx of new visitors, it could cause problems and even cause you to lose sales. If the site crashes or experiences slow load times when you need it most, some people may be put off by the experience and choose to move on. To make sure this doesn’t happen:

You can use Google’s free but powerful tools like PageSpeed to gauge how well your website will perform under pressure. You can also consider changing your CMS (like WordPress) or maybe your hosting (do you use cloud hosting or shared web hosting?).

12. Include a countdown clock on your website, promotions, and marketing materials.

Include a countdown clock on your website, promotions, and marketing materials. The countdown can be used to show the day of the sale or the time remaining until the next sale. This can help build excitement and anticipation for these events by giving people an idea of how much time is left until they can take advantage of your discounts.

To handle all that without feeling overwhelmed, you can use an all-in-one, powerful marketing and sales software like RunSensible. RunSensible combines all the usual marketing and segmentation features with amazing promotion tools and landing page designers.

13. Promote your business through local media coverage and holiday events

Encourage customers to share their own photos of your products by using hashtags in social media campaigns and promotions encouraging them to tag their photos with custom hashtags when making purchases or reviewing products online.

Social media campaigns and promotions are a great way to encourage customers to share photos of their purchases. You can also use hashtags when making purchases or reviewing products online, which will encourage people who see the hashtag to check out your store.

14. Create excitement with a live webcam showing employees preparing for Black Friday

15. Reward loyal customers with an exclusive offer before the general public gets access to specials at midnight or when the doors open the next morning.

To get the special rewards really right, simply use RunSensible’s email campaign segmentation features. They let you easily pick out the customers that you’ve previously qualified as VIP or loyal with a few clicks, giving you an email list and nurturing schedule. You can then use the native Promotions feature to generate, configure, and send digital coupons or other offers.

 

Key Takeaway

Black Friday is a great opportunity to engage with customers and build loyalty. By planning your marketing strategy in advance, you’ll be able to create an exciting campaign that will encourage shoppers to buy more than they originally intended. As we have seen, in almost all of these Black Friday marketing ideas, a real all-in-one CRM and marketing solution like RunSensible is necessary. Start for free right now, and see what else it can do for your business.

 

FAQ

Can I only use these ideas on Black Friday?

Of course! Almost all of these ideas can be adapted to your usual promotion and marketing campaigns, meaning you’ll get a lot more out of learning these strategies.

How long should I continue offering my Black Friday deals?

A good idea is to start Black Friday a week early, giving your campaign time to make its way around to all your customers and leads. Since we have the Cyberweek holiday right after that, it’s more reasonable to stop Black Friday on time.

Are there any disadvantages to using Black Friday marketing?

Some marketing experts think that offering something with a heavy discount for a while will create the wrong expectation in future customers, who expect to buy your goods and services with the one-time Black Friday prices they saw before.

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