Black Friday marketing tips and making the best offers

Rui Correia

Pick up a few extra tips for your Black Friday marketing success


With Black Friday fast approaching, businesses are preparing for one of the most important days of the year when it comes to getting customers and maximizing your online sales.

One way of accomplishing this is by elaborating marketing campaigns for Black Friday on your website, making sure you reach your target audience before your competition is imperative to ensure that you’ll be the first choice when it comes to purchasing various products, in this article we will give you a few tips you can use to successfully increase your revenue stream in this start of the holiday season. 

Marketing Black Friday for your website: Tips and tricks of the trade

Black Friday marketing 

A great mechanism to help develop your Black Friday digital marketing is by improving your organic search traffic, this is done through SEO which helps you focus on longstanding strategies to increase your keyword ranking, you can start preparing right now for optimizing relevant keywords that stay as such year-round and will boost your organic search traffic for the holiday season.

To do this you must apply some methods that will best your SEO position for the holidays like identifying keywords that are relevant for this season and building Black Friday landing pages for specific keywords. 

Identifying relevant keywords for the Black Friday and holiday seasons is essential when it comes to improving your organic search traffic, doing this kind of research will also tell you which keywords are too competitive and will be harder to reach a higher ranking in.

To find Black Friday relevant keywords you must look at your data from previous years, you can do this by using Google Search Console, doing so allows you to identify the most attractive keywords and the items or products that were most searched for in the past few years. 

Once in possession of these relevant keywords you can insert them in the Google Keyword Planner and find identical search items to boost your organic traffic. The secret to finding the right keywords to use is to focus on keywords that have a high search figure, that are not overly competitive (which means that you would be going against too much competition like ads, Amazon search pages and the largest retailers) and that are most relevant to your own products or business. 

Now that you have the most relevant keywords for Black Friday it’s time to start using them, to accomplish that you can build landing pages on your website specifically for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, doing so will allow you to increment the likelihood of those pages having a higher ranking when Black Friday gets here.

The sooner you build these pages the better, creating the pages earlier will give the time you need to optimize them and enable the page to generate a higher ranking throughout the time. When building your page try to use continuous URLs, that way you can re-use these URLs in the next few years, doing this will increase the value of your pages as it builds steam from the use of previous years. 

Another way to enhance your content is to optimize your headlines. Headlines are many times what appeals a potential costumer to enter your website, so having an engaging headline is a good head start. 

And how do you make your headlines more appealing? A good way to start is by implementing numbers on them, for example a “top 10 list”, or “20 tips for your business” kind of headline is a proven way of attracting readers. It is also advised to keep your headlines not too long, headlines with around 7 or 8 words are proven to be the most reliable when it comes to providing the necessary information and enticing people to click on the article without having to use too many words. Or too few. Keeping your headlines simple and informative is the best way to go, a good headline tells the reader what it needs to know without too much effort. 

When it comes to promoting your website for Black Friday many times it all comes down to building anticipation, creating on your viewers a spark of curiosity is a great way of ensuring that they will come around when Black Friday hits, you can accomplish this by creating product teasers or offering samples, make sure you leave the readers wanting more without giving everything away. Here's an example of a good teaser by AppSumo: 

Black Friday teaser

An additional method of marketing for Black Friday is to use scarcity, very often buyers will become tempted to purchase items if they have a limited number of products available to them, the idea of scarcity is to create a sense of urgency in your costumers, so when you create Black Friday offers make sure to let people know that the stock might become empty sooner than later.

Lastly, we have another digital marketing tip that will help boost your Black Friday sales, with this tip we want you to use your costumers as your allies to aide you in gaining even more costumers, to do this you can use referral-based discounts, and what are those? These are the kind of discounts you get when you refer people to a certain business, if someone you know buys a product from a store because you directed them to it then you get a discount from that same store. Simple but effective. Many businesses have used this method throughout the years as you can see from the Ibotta example below: 

Referral-based discounts 

 

Using these straightforward tips should help you maximize your website’s exposure for this BF/CM season thus enabling you to raise your revenue stream by creating more Black Friday sales. 

How quickly do Black Friday deals change and how to offer the best deals

Every year we see a growth in the volume of Black Friday sales and with that comes a faster pace of deals coming up and offers changing quickly, sometimes it’s hard to keep in touch with all that is available during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, this is where Squirrel comes in, one of the best features of the Squirrel widget is always being up to date on all offers at all times, especially with the ever changing offers and the rollercoaster of price adjustments throughout Black Friday. With Squirrel, if you’re looking for some specific item, it will pull up a list of all the retailers and their prices for you and make sure you’re getting the best deal out there.

So how can you offer the best deals on Black Friday? Let us give you a few more tips on that.

One key for Black Friday success is to start as early as possible, getting your ads out there weeks before the actual Black Friday extravaganza is a surefire way of getting ahead of the competition, this also allows to be prepared and know which ads are gaining the most steam. 

You should also keep all your mail listings up to date and make sure you send regular newsletters to costumers so they can keep in touch with your best offers. An alternative way to use your email list is to reward your usual costumers (or VIP costumers), send them an email offering a bigger discount for regular customers and reward them for the loyalty they’ve shown, this way it can also help make sure that they keep coming back for more. Here’s an example of one of these emails by Philosophy: 

VIP email discounts

 

One thing that many businesses fail to keep in mind is optimizing their website for mobile use, about 70% of sales were made by mobile last year so it is paramount that your mobile site experience is up to par otherwise costumers will flock to your competition. Having an operational mobile site is a good way to earn money this Black Friday.

Last but not least, make sure you use your affiliate partners so your Black Friday is more valuable, understandably many businesses are concerned that working with large brands such as Amazon, Awin or Rakuten will eventually lead to them losing their seller privileges, however becoming an Amazon affiliate partner is a great way of boosting awareness for your website and your products, having that attention will lead to long-term success for your business. Working with the biggest affiliate partners will help validate your product and solidify your position in the marketplace whether as an online business, ecommerce platform or even as content creator. Don't forget that Squirrel allows you to use your affiliate partners at will, we know how hard you've worked on building an effective and dynamic affiliate network so we never want to get in the way of that. 

Now that you have these tips in your back pocket it is time to start getting ready for the coming holiday season, especially Black Friday and Cyber Monday and the sales bonanza that comes with them. 

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