Tick tock, tick tock, Black Friday is just around the corner, and if you haven’t prepared your online promotion strategy by now, then you should start right now. We’re talking about the biggest sales event of the year, where you can in a single month outperform your results from the last 2-3 months combined.
Let’s see what you should consider when preparing your Black Friday strategy on Facebook and Instagram.
It’s important to define up front how long Black Friday will last for your business so you can estimate how much budget you’ll need. November is that month of the year when a Friday lasts 2-3 weeks. Depending on the strategy you want to apply, you can opt for one-day, weekend, week-long or even month-long Black Friday campaigns.
Think about what type of Black Friday campaign suits your business or niche. Online stores can sell considerable volumes in just a few days of offers, but for services or products for which there is an extended time in making the buying decision, you need an extended offer so you can maximise your results.
Keep in mind that Facebook’s algorithm needs a longer time to optimize volumes and costs on campaigns, and a longer offer over several weeks can get you better results because of the optimizations you can make to your campaigns.
If this isn’t your first Black Friday, then also look back at past data, see what your costs were, which campaigns brought the best results and what can be improved this year.
Set your budget for campaigns. On Black Friday, it’s recommended to allocate an extra budget than you’ve used in previous months because you’ll encounter much higher CPMs, but also to make the most of the increased demand in the market.
Expect November 11 to be the highest CPC day of the year. Just as last year saw the highest CPCs on November 12.
Explore the Audiences section of Facebook Ads and make sure you have audience lists ready for the offer period to use in targeting campaigns. Here you can use custom audiences recorded via Pixel, email and phone number lists and engagement audiences for Facebook and Instagram pages.
It is important to note that it is recommended to have a minimum of 1000 users in each list so that Facebook’s algorithm can optimize correctly and efficiently when using lists in campaign targeting.
Depending on the specifics of your business and its niche you can define which audiences are most appropriate.
A general recommendation that applies to most ecommerce businesses is to have lists such as Page View, Wishlist, Add to Cart, Initiate Checkout, Purchase, Lists of emails and phone numbers from customers or newsletter subscribers, Video Engagement, Facebook Page Engagement, Instagram Page Engagement.
For service sites you can use audiences such as Page View, All users who arrived on a service page, All users who arrived on a contact page, Lists of emails and phone numbers from customers or newsletter subscribers, Video Engagement, Facebook Page Engagement, Instagram Page Engagement.
All these lists should be created for different durations, the most common are 7 days, 30 days and 180 days. And on the basis of these lists you can also create look a like audiences.
Before the Black Friday offers start, warm up your audiences with teasing campaigns that introduce the Black Friday period, some of the products that will be on offer and what discounts users can expect on the site.
For teasing you can use ad-level videos and create audiences with users who have watched 50% or 75% of the video. And then retarget this audience during the period when Black friday offers are active.
Also before Black Friday you can run campaigns with add to cart optimization because it will record additions to the cart at lower cost and the add to cart audience will populate much faster. So during the Black Friday offer you can retarget the 180-day add to cart audience with sales optimisation campaigns
Remarketing campaigns are mandatory during Black Friday, so in addition to using add to cart audiences and those based on interaction with teaser ads, you can also use more general audiences such as all users who arrived on the site in the last 30 days or users who interacted with your Facebook or Instagram page.
For new target campaigns, analyze the audiences that perform best in your account and use them to the fullest during bids. In this case it can be broad audiences, interests or lookalikes.
Once audiences are in place, also consider how the ads users will see will look. For this you will need to prepare specific Black Friday banners highlighting the discounts on the site, in the case of product carousels use frames and price tags to highlight them and last but not least don’t forget the ad messages.
If the Black Friday offer is going to be a multi-week offer then you’ll have time to optimize your campaigns. So feel free for each ad set in your account to test several ad variations. Single Image, Video, Carousel, Collection or variations of these, and once you’ve recorded your first sales, analyse the performance of each ad type and pause the ones that aren’t delivering cost-effective results.
Don’t forget that Facebook is only one component of the marketing mix, so don’t ignore other promotion platforms to maximize your November results.
