How to prepare your channels for Black Friday
It’s the most competitive time of the year (we hope you sang it) waiting ahead for all of us in the digital landscape.
Budgets and bids are rising, and the chance to break through the noise is not the highest during November. We have therefore prepared a short but informative guide on how to prepare your channels for the most sales-important period.
- Adapt your content and messaging
First and foremost, make sure to have content for all channels. Since it’s a competitive period, you have to make sure to spread out content for all channels. Having only one still image in different formats is not the solution though. Make sure to have various contents to use throughout the sales period, and customize it depending on what platform you use. Maybe you’ll have a special offer for your most valuable customers as an email send out? Make sure to adapt the messaging and content for them. Same as if you have a campaign on Meta trying to acquire new customers. Introduce the brand as you remain the goal of conversion.
- Have one stable discount
According to a study, consumers actually prefer having a stable percentage throughout the sales period. Instead of having different markdowns that become higher and higher – consumers actually prefer having between 20-25% off in sales throughout the whole period. This is mainly because the consumers don’t feel fooled if they purchased something during one period of markdown, and a week later the offer has become even lower. Having one percentage of sale off doesn’t only make the customer feel like they can rely on the company not fooling them, but also helps with the ad optimizations.
Instead of switching content and adjusting the copy throughout the different markdowns during this short period, it helps the platforms to learn and not re-enter the learning phase all over again. This meaning, that the platforms hopefully will drive more conversions during this time.
- Collect email leads
When the digital landscape has a lower competition, use this time to prepare and collect email leads. This way, you can highlight what’s to come and nurture these contacts during the peak sale. Also, some of these leads will stay and become a regular customer. The earlier you start collecting these leads, the lower CPL will be. Make sure to also include your terms and conditions for signing up, since they are
- Prepare your PMC strategy in advance
Now that PMC has replaced the Smart Shopping Campaigns on Google, it is crucial to have an updated strategy for Black Friday with this multi-channel format to serve ads to the right audience, at the right moment.
Due to PMC’s extensive learning curve, there are key foundational elements that must be in place well in advance of Black Friday to allow the machine learning to learn and improve positioning your ads for success when interest is at its peak.
First and foremost, you need to make sure that your Performance Max strategies have a full funnel setup, and that Google does not only allocate 100% of your spending to branded keywords. Of course we want to trigger ads to appear in the Shopping Feed and SERP on relevant generic keywords as well.
Secondly, it’s critical to know which promotions you’ll be running before Black Friday to make sure that you are fully prepared with your PMC strategy. Here, relevant copy needs to be at place in a campaign plan where the right promotion is being highlighted. Relevant extensions also need to be scheduled in the account (promotion extensions, sitelink extensions, callout extensions etc) to make sure that ad is fully extended with the offers during the campaign period.
- Set the right keyword strategy
To ensure that ads are being triggered and displayed in the SERP for the most crucial keywords for your business, it is important that you don’t forget to adjust your search tactics in time for Black Friday. When creating your keyword strategy, keep the following two considerations in mind:
– Use keyword data from the previous year to make sure that you optimize your search campaigns for this year’s Black Friday and target the right keywords for your business. In order to find new opportunities for your keyword targeting, we also advise you to thoroughly examine basic keyword data from Google Trends and/or the Google Keyword Planner.
– Find and use appropriate Black Friday keywords. To make sure Google allocated budget to those keywords and that you enter the auction, we recommend that you create a Black-Friday specific Search Campaign with those keywords. When bidding on holiday specific keywords, we advise against bidding on the extremely generic keywords like “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” since they are too broad and too competitive for giving value to your company. We recommend that you instead focus on the more niche keywords for your business to generate value.
