The holiday season is coming and in the performance marketing world that only means one thing: preparing campaigns that will hit that ROI like never before. Finding relevant creative that will engage the average user has never been this challenging.
The recession made the job harder: customers are more likely to make smart choices when it comes to purchasing. In fact, last year Black Friday made 57% of consumers feel pressured to make purchases - compared to just 36% this year.
To all performance marketers struggling to find the best strategy for this year’s Black Friday and pitch it to their clients: this is the piece of content that needs your attention. Here’s the ultimate Black Friday list to help you create and execute a successful campaign.
The checklist:
To cut to the chase here are the steps you should follow:
#1 Decide if the brand needs a Black Friday campaign
The only meaningful metric for measuring the success of any Black Friday campaign is ROI. The more products have been purchased the greater the campaign is. There’s a huge difference between regular sales and Black Friday. On Black Friday people expect drastic price drops, so they’re waiting for that period to buy something 50% or 70% off.
If the brand is still young and doesn’t have enough brand recognition, Black Friday is the wrong moment to start with a brand awareness campaign. Also, if you work with a brand that already has had a lot of sales, or generally sells affordable products, maybe the gain won’t beat the investment of money and time for creating the campaign.
If you work with developed e-commerce brands, or for brands that sell electronic goods, furniture, beauty products, cosmetics, etc., Black Friday is the opportunity you mustn’t miss.
#2 Choose the set of products for the Black Friday campaign
As a performance marketer, the best strategy you can propose to the brand you’re working with is choosing products with high demand, but insufficient purchase.
Usually, the reason why these products are not being purchased is the price, that’s why the best scenario is to put this kind of product on a big sale and watch the magic happen.
This is especially related to the products that people have been waiting to purchase such as new TV, fridge, or expensive perfume. Language schools, different courses, or even travel agencies can also benefit from putting their most expensive offers on the Black Friday sale.
#3 Pick the best timing
The holiday season is the moment when everyone advertises, so picking the right time to start with your campaign is crucial.
Brands shouldn’t advertise their best offers too early, but even worse is to be too late.
The first thing to do is to generate your audience and plan the budget (don’t forget that ad spending in this period is bigger than average). By the moment you read this article, these things should be done.
You can start with pre-sales, just to get things going.
A week before the actual date is the most important - that’s the last chance to make the boom effect with the Black Friday campaign.
#4 Define the creative
When products and timing are defined, it all comes down to good creative. This is the key point of preparing the campaign.
What should you know from the beginning?
- Video creative performers are far better than image ones
- Black Friday creatives need to have clear communication (how much is the saving, what are the benefits)
- Customers should instantly recognize Black Friday creatives
- Black Friday campaigns should be on-brand
What strategies you can use?
The countdown strategy is the proven one. Nothing creates that kind of hype as communicating how many days are left for the offer of the lifetime. Pro-tip is to make the bigger sale as getting closer to Black Friday. To make this happen as seamlessly as possible you will need the technology that will automatically update the sale, using the information you previously established and inserted in the product feed.
Localization is the second strategy that will get your Black Friday creatives going. This strategy is especially beneficial for brands that have multiple franchises per city or country, but a different selection in each. You can communicate different products based on the location where they are available. This will create a better user experience, reduce delivery time, and contribute to overall purchase effectiveness.
#5 Put the spotlight on online shopping
Creating a shopping mania effect in a brand’s brick-and-mortar store is great, but don’t forget that when tired of running from store to store people become easily frustrated if the product they have been searching for isn’t available or doesn’t meet their expectations. Not to mention the crowds.
To make as much stress-free Black Friday as possible and reduce the store panic mode, encourage customers to online shopping by communicating special online offers. This will provide a much better user experience and make a good brand impression.
Hunch is just the right secret weapon for your next Black Friday campaign
Creating such a campaign for one brand is a challenge, but doing it for multiple brands seems impossible.
Not with Hunch.
Leveraging the Hunch platform will help you avoid working day and night during the holiday season.
If you just want to make small changes to creatives that are working - Hunch Creative Studio can help you do it easily. You can add Black Friday elements on regular creatives, create a template, and then with the power of creative automation generate thousands of ads for different platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and others.
Hunch got covered marketers who have no idea where to start when producing creatives: you’ll find Black Friday-ready templates, that just need to be adjusted for brands you’re working with.
Using the Creative Studio you can produce both video and image on-brand creatives. If you want to use localization or countdown, use the power of Hunch’s dynamic creative, which will automatically make changes to your live campaigns.
We save the best part for the end: while personalizing the ads based on your target audience, the Hunch platform is running creative testing, which will give you just the right insights into what’s working and what’s not.
Who says that only Santa brings presents? Book a demo and make Black Friday your favorite holiday of the year!
