Best Marketing Tips You Need for Black Friday | E-Commerce Masterclass Recap

Black Friday is nearly upon us and has become more than just a day of waiting in long lines and discount shopping. It’s now become a worldwide week-long shopping extravaganza in stores and online. For all you businesses looking to increase your sales and maximize your online advertising, this is the perfect opportunity. E-commerce guru Patrick Wind gave an insightful lecture at OneCoWork Wednesday night on how to successfully advertise your products for Black Friday.

The Facts

First things first, it’s important to acknowledge some facts about Black Friday sales. Like how the average sized basket per customer is 743 dollars, the peak time for sales is noon, and 40% of sales are made via mobile. 38% of customers want to get every deal they can meanwhile 68% of customers care about the amount of time it’ll take to ship a product. In fact people care more about their products getting delivered before Christmas than the discounts itself. So how are you going to ensure that your online advertisements stand out? Here’s a few quick ideas Patrick shared that you can apply to your campaign:

• Put “Up to 70%” (for example) on your ads and have the code already applied online instead of providing a discount code for customers to apply at checkout. Apply a high discount on the cheaper products you sell, and apply smaller discounts to your best-selling items so you draw customers in.

• Think of Black Friday as Black Friday Week. Sales typically start increasing the Monday leading up to Black Friday and last until Cyber Monday. This means that you should have your ads prepared weeks in advance so come time for the start of Black Friday Week you can start advertising.

The Timeline

Now that you know some basic facts, you’re probably wondering where to begin with starting your Black Friday online advertising campaign. Patrick showed us his four phases for this season to help you stay on top of your ad campaign and optimize your sales:

• Phase One (July): Start covering the basics and create a checklist for what you need to accomplish in the upcoming months.

• Phase Two (August-October): It’s the perfect time to start building momentum so start branding and acquisition campaigns to bring new customers in that you can retarget in phase three. Heavily increase traffic at least three weeks before Black Friday.

• Phase Three (November-Early December): Maximize your sales with remarketing and prospecting DPA, or Dynamic Product Ads.

• Phase Four (December-January): It’s time for post-Christmas sales! Use this time to boost sales among your Christmas customer base.

Looking for even more tips for the four phases? Patrick shared three expert tips to help you during the building momentum phase and with Black Friday Week:

• When building momentum, use Instagram and Facebook Live at least every other day. Fun Fact: Instagram stories will be the most popular format for sharing content in 2018.

• At the start of Black Friday Week, give your loyal customers early access to the deals and discounts starting on Thursday.

• Display the discount in your ad’s image or video so that it stands out and has the “stop-effect.” Did you know that the brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than written information? Take advantage of this!

After a round of Q&A, Patrick went on to teach his famous Full-Funnel Strategy, a way for you to gain the most revenue from your Facebook advertising. To put the Full-Funnel Strategy in simple terms, it means to communicate different messages to different customers according to the current level in their “customer journey.”

The first phase, branding, stresses the importance of visual images for ads and targeting customer’s right side of the brain to make an emotional impression. The second phase, prospecting, is when you show these customers the product because your brand is now in people’s minds. So you have interested customers, but they aren’t completely convinced they want to purchase your products. In the third phase, retargeting, you create scarcity to increase a customer’s sense of urgency, or FOMO, fear of missing out, on the product.

Thank you to Patrick Wind for hosting another excellent event jam-packed with tips and advice! Interested in attending more events like this? Head over to the Events section on our website to see what other events are happening at OneCoWork. Hit subscribe (below) and stay updated with what’s going on through our newsletter digests.

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