Essential Black Friday marketing tips to ensure success

Black Friday has become one of the most important weekends of the year for businesses in the UK. What used to be a one-day shopping extravaganza has since morphed into a month of special offers and other Black Friday promotions for some businesses.

Simply put, optimising your Black Friday digital marketing campaign is vital if you’re a business that wants to boost your sales and your profile online. In order to stay competitive, make sure you are ready.

But how do you prepare for a Black Friday marketing campaign? That’s where digital marketing companies come in. Making a successful Black Friday campaign needs preparation and a clear plan, and our guide will explain exactly how a digital marketing company can help make your Black Friday a success and what they require from you.

When is Black Friday 2024 in the UK?

In 2024, the date for Black Friday is Friday, 29th November. It’s crucial to plan your Black Friday marketing campaign in advance, ensuring you’re prepared to compete in what has become one of the busiest shopping periods of the year.

How to prepare your business for Black Friday in 7 easy tips

Here are our key quick tips for business success this Black Friday:

1. Start early: Plan your Black Friday digital marketing strategy well in advance to allow for testing and optimisation, especially for e-commerce.
2. Build anticipation: Use countdowns, teasers, and emails to generate excitement leading up to Black Friday 2024.
3. Optimise your website: Ensure your site can handle increased traffic, with fast load times, easy navigation, and user-friendly Black Friday landing pages.
4. Target the right audience: Focus on segments most likely to convert, using data from past campaigns to refine your approach.
5. Craft clear offers: Make your deals stand out with clear, compelling messaging that highlights your best offers.
6. Leverage social media: Promote your deals, run flash sales, and engage with customers in real time on social platforms.
7. Monitor and adapt: Track your campaign’s performance and be ready to make real-time adjustments to maximise results.

Working with a digital marketing agency? Here’s what they’ll need

If you’re partnering with a digital marketing agency for your Black Friday 2024 campaign, each department will have specific needs to create the most effective strategy. These departments are:

• Paid Media (including Pay Per Click)
• Paid Social
• Organic Social
• SEO (including Content)

What your Paid Media team needs for Black Friday:

A Paid Media team specialises in getting your business noticed across platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Amazon. For a successful Black Friday PPC campaign, it’s crucial to set clear profit goals, expectations, and budgets. 

Remember, consumers chase the best deals, so if your offer isn’t competitive, you could overspend on PPC without seeing proportional returns.

With this in mind, a Paid Media department in an agency like Bamboo Nine will require the following from their clients:

1. Sufficient time to plan ahead: We ask our clients to provide all necessary information at least 10 weeks before Black Friday. This allows 4 weeks for strategy development and 6 weeks for the algorithm to optimise the campaign.

2. Clear messaging: We need the exact details of all offers shared with our Paid Media team to ensure precise and effective communication. Clear timelines, countdowns, or sign-up incentives can help you stand out amid the flood of deals. 

3. Creative assets: You’ll need to supply varied ad creatives (images, videos) tailored to different stages of the customer journey to maintain interest and avoid offer fatigue.

4. Expectations defined: It’s important to clarify your campaign goals, whether that’s boosting or maintaining profits, so the strategy aligns with your desired outcomes.

5. Campaign length clarified: Decide if your focus is on Cyber Week, Black Friday, or the entire month, and plan accordingly.

6. Budget set: Determine your budget early, balancing it with expected ROI to ensure competitive yet cost-effective spending.

What your Paid Social team needs for Black Friday:

With fierce competition and high costs, it’s crucial to spend wisely on social media before Black Friday. Test your audiences and creative assets early to refine your campaigns and avoid wasted spend.

Even if your business isn’t running a Black Friday sale, this period is still key in the marketing calendar. Your Paid Social team needs to optimise spending to stay competitive.

To help you prepare, our experts have compiled a list of essentials your Paid Social team will need for a successful Black Friday:

1. An established audience: Attracting a cold audience during Black Friday without prior trust and credibility built is costly and ineffective.
   
2. Time to prepare: We ask clients to allocate at least 6 weeks to build email lists and target audiences from website visitors, social media engagers, and video watchers.
   
3. Quantified creative learnings: Utilise insights from the past 9 months on what creatives and copy performed best to refine your Black Friday strategy.
   
4. Offer strategy decided: Consider whether adding extra value, like free delivery, to your Black Friday offers is commercially viable to drive purchases.
   
5. An email sequence set up: Set up an email sequence that teases and promotes your Black Friday offers before they go live.
   
6. Ads prepared: Schedule ads in advance so they are approved and ready to go live on time, avoiding last-minute changes that could disrupt performance.

What your Organic Social Media team needs for Black Friday:

Organic Social will work to grow your online following and customer loyalty through organic posting. This is done by creating an active and consistent account that delivers real-time feedback on products, creative and copy. This information can then be used to create campaigns that are tailored to engage your audience.

In the run-up to Black Friday, an Organic Social Media team will need the following from you:

1. An established audience: Without an engaged audience, your Black Friday campaign’s success will be limited. You can build engagement throughout the year by consistently posting and tracking what resonates.

2. Time to prepare: Start spotlighting categories or brands involved in your sale around six weeks before Black Friday to build awareness and drive organic traffic. This gives your team time to plan and execute the campaign effectively.

3. Details of the sale: Provide clear details on which brands or categories are included in your sale to ensure proper promotion by the Organic Social team.

4. Creative assets: Submit creative materials at least two weeks before the sale launch to allow time for copywriting and approval.
   
5. Details of collaborative posts: If planning collaborative posts with brands, allow at least six weeks for preparation, ensuring both creative and copy are approved by all parties involved.

What your SEO team needs for Black Friday:

An SEO team will organically build your business into a brand recognised by Google. This is done by gaining links, creating content, and optimising the user experience of your site, increasing the authority of your site and improving its rankings.

To help make a successful SEO Black Friday campaign, an SEO team will need:

1. Time to prepare: Searches for “black friday” increase sharply from the middle of October, so your Black Friday content needs to be live and indexed by mid-October at the latest. Develop and optimise specific landing pages with targeted keywords, deals, product highlights, and strong calls to action.
   
2. Specific keywords to target:  Focus on niche keywords where you can establish authority, rather than competing with major brands on broad terms like “Black Friday deals.”
   
3. A central page targeting Black Friday: You can build a main “[Your Brand] Black Friday Deals” page that serves as the hub for all offers. Retain this page annually to preserve authority, updating content and metas each year.
   
4. Page performance enhanced: Ensure your site loads quickly during high-traffic periods, as slow loading times can negatively impact search rankings and user experience.
   
5. SEO aligned with email & internal links: Drive traffic to your optimised Black Friday pages through coordinated email campaigns. Strengthen SEO by adding internal links to these pages from relevant site content.

Get ahead of the competition this Black Friday with a bespoke marketing campaign

Black Friday is a prime opportunity to boost brand awareness and drive an increase in sales. With the right Black Friday marketing strategies, you can turn this busy shopping event into a major win for your business. To ensure your campaign runs smoothly, it’s essential to prepare now.

Whether you need targeted promotions, compelling landing pages, or strategies like countdown timers and flash sales, our team is ready to help. To discuss your Black Friday 2024 campaign options, call our office today, and we’ll connect you with the right account manager.

You can also email our team with any questions or to arrange a call. 

Clock’s ticking!

• Paid Media – [email protected] 
• Paid Social Media – [email protected]
• Organic Social Media – [email protected] 
• SEO – [email protected]