Black Friday has fast become one of the biggest international shopping events—one that customers look forward to with great anticipation. Many stores offer great Black Friday deals and you can make the most out of them.
While not so long ago, only a few major department stores hosted Black Friday sales, the shopping event has now become a global phenomenon, spilling over into the online sector with Cyber Monday.
The competition to attract customers is now immense—with everyone holding a Black Friday sale, how can you ensure that you get noticed by customers and increase your revenues?
You need to get creative with your marketing if you want enough people to view and buy your Black Friday products.
Of course, brainstorming ideas can be hard, especially when Black Friday marketing campaigns start so early.
In this article, we will share eight marketing ideas you can adopt for Black Friday to increase your engagement and ROI.
1. Black Friday Sneak Peeks
Your marketing team will know well in advance that your business is holding Black Friday sales. But do your customers know this?
Don’t keep your customers guessing—let them know with a sneak peek at what to expect from your Black Friday sales.
Create a poster or video for your Black Friday sneak peek and send it out to your mailing list. You can also share sneak peek posts on social media.
Update your website’s homepage to reflect the upcoming sales with information about when the sales go live, for how long, and how large the discounts will be.
By giving your customers a sneak peek about what to expect, you build anticipation and boost your marketing efforts.
2. Host a Black Friday Appreciation Event
Black Friday is fun, but only after the fact. During the actual event, customers are harried, desperately trying to get the best products at the best prices.
Similarly, employees both online and offline have a difficult time fielding customer queries, firefighting issues, and ensuring that everyone gets served as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
To foster goodwill among customers and employees, why not host a Black Friday appreciation event?
It can be a big party, or a small get-together with loyal customers where you share your gratitude for the community with some cake and coffee.
You can hold the event in your store or offer coupons for food or gifts online.
However you plan to host it, ensure that your branding efforts are up to par, as that will help spread awareness about your business.
3. Giveaways
Black Friday is all about sales but that doesn’t mean you can’t also give away some free items. People love freebies and by giving away products, you make your Black Friday sale, and your business, much more enticing for customers.
Host a giveaway before your Black Friday event begins to build your email list and drum up anticipation for the actual sales.
You could also plan simple social media contests that require little effort from people, such as entering a draw to win something or sharing or retweeting a contest post. These are easy to execute and will attract more customers.
Try and make the giveaway prize a little exciting—such as an additional discount or coupons for a partner store, as that will bolster customer engagement.
4. Offer Deals Customers Can’t Refuse
Contests aren’t the only way to build your client list—you can also offer additional deals on your Black Friday sales to increase contacts and grow customer loyalty.
As the prospect of Black Friday sales will increase traffic to your site, ask site visitors to sign up to access deals that will give them additional discounts or longer-lasting discounts.
You could offer the same deals through newsletters or email blasts sent to a select few loyal customers or subscribers in your existing database.
As we have ascertained, people love freebies. Another deal that customers are drawn to is a free gift for purchasing a certain item, or for buying items that amount to a certain value.
There are a number of ways to capitalize on the Black Friday spirit to encourage customers to engage with your brand, and deals are one of them.
5. Offer Hourly Deals
And there is yet another way to use deals to market your business’ Black Friday sales—offer hourly deals over and above your regular Black Friday sales.
Hourly deals will increase traffic to your website and social channels—customers will want to ensure that they don’t miss the next deal and will keep visiting your pages and sharing it with others so as to stay abreast of your latest deals.
You should consider using a social media marketing tool that you can schedule your hourly deal posts with. The busy Black Friday sales will make it impossible to manually post about the hourly deals—a scheduler solves that problem.
An hourly deal not only increases traffic and interest in your Black Friday sales, but will increase engagement with your brand beyond the event.
6. Gift Guides
Customers use Black Friday as the perfect opportunity to shop for the festive season in December.
But there are so many offers available during Black Friday and on so many items that consumers are likely to be confused about what to buy.
Why not make life easier for your customers by creating a gift guide? It will help people decide what to buy and how, and will make your brand more valuable to consumers.
Your gift guide can be in the form of a blog post, a newsletter, or a collection of social media posts, such as Instagram’s Shoppable posts.
Choose your keywords well and you will be able to increase your reach and attract customers in segments you had not previously targeted.
Additionally, gift guides will help improve your customer knowledge base so you can better serve your customers even after Black Friday.
7. Team Up with an Influencer
According to influencer marketing statistics, influencers can increase ROI by 520%. They can also help build brand awareness and improve engagement.
What better time to team up with an influencer than during your Black Friday event?
Research influencers within your field or industry who would be a good fit for your company’s profile.
You could also ask your influencer to takeover your social media platforms, or to share their own Black Friday tips on your blog or vlog.
Remember to compensate your influencer and to run an awareness campaign to let your followers know about the team up.
An influencer can massively impact your reach and help increase your Black Friday sales returns.
8. Host a Referral Campaign
Another way to improve your reach and your Black Friday sales is to run a referral program.
There are a number of ways to host referral campaigns—on social media, via email, and on your website.
You can ask social media followers to tag friends in the comments of your posts, or to forward an email to others.
Additionally, you can give a code to your customers that their friends can use to get more discounts.
A referral campaign will increase your followers and spread brand awareness.
Final Words
These eight marketing ideas should make your Black Friday sales event much more attractive to customers and boost your sales profile over the holiday season and beyond.
About the Author:
Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at the online infographic and design platform Venngage. She writes passionately about marketing-related subjects, including social media, sales, web traffic, content writing, and being productive.Twitter: @Venngage