Everything You Need To Know In The Lead Up To Black Friday

As you may well know, it’s coming up to be one of the biggest calendar events for retailers and we’re sure you’ve got ideas and campaigns planned, but here are some ways you can optimise your PPC campaigns even further in order to maximise results.

Times to Run Your Paid Adverts

In order to give your business enough time to create and test its marketing strategy, we recommend that you start preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday as early as September.

By starting as early as this, you can figure out which way is best when it comes to defining your target audience. Not only that, you can begin to plan which campaigns will best suit your business goals.

One way that you can focus your efforts is with staggered marketing tactics. For example, email marketing and newsletter sign-ups are great places to start. You can roll out your emails multiple times and days of the week depending on historical success. This will then determine the best times to launch your Black Friday assets.

Throughout September, it’s vital that you focus on how you can expand your email list in order to increase your overall reach. This can be done via sign-ups, top-of-funnel display campaigns & new user bidding strategies.

Another way to prepare for this period is using both search trend data and historic data, if you have it to hand, of course. If you don’t, you can utilise a DSA campaign. By inputting your Black Friday landing page as an ad target, you can start to gather data on the search volume around Black Friday-specific keywords.

This will then be a brilliant starting point when creating your search campaigns as you have live data which you know already carries volume, without needing to test.

Running Ads Over Black Friday Weekend

The most common time to run Black Friday campaigns is the very weekend it lands. Whilst this is still very much applicable, it’s key that not all of your marketing focus and planning goes into this weekend alone.

Why? Because this time period is when the market is most saturated with Black Friday promotions. If you’re only running during this period, it’s very easy for you to go under the radar without any significant uplift.

Whilst Black Friday is a great opportunity to increase ROI and volume via existing customers. It’s imperative that you’re focused on bringing in new customers, that way you’re maximising overall exposure, growing your customer base, and hopefully… generating new lifetime customers who will come back as repeat business.

In my opinion, I would always allocate a minimum of 20% of your Black Friday budget to the weeks prior. This way, you’re targeting the top of the funnel, and with highly engaging ad copy and promotional imagery, users will be sure to save your promotion dates ready for the big launch.

“Top of funnel” is a term used to describe new users who are considered “cold” and unfamiliar with the brand, a “cold” user often takes much longer to convert than a “warm” user at the bottom of the funnel. For example, a “warm” user may convert following only 1 or 2 site visits as they trust the brand, whereas a “cold” user may take up to 5 or 6 visits before making a buying decision.

That’s why it’s key that you ensure there is a build-up to your promos, so your new users are being targeted by numerous unique selling points and creatives over a longer period of time, ultimately, this will help entice the user into making a purchase for your promo once it goes live.

Black Friday Teaser Campaigns

Teaser campaigns are a brilliant way to start your Black Friday journey. I would recommend a teaser campaign to be launched between 2/4 weeks of your go-live date. This way you can give yourself plenty of time to build up your audiences and create noise around your promo.

Teaser campaigns can be launched across a wide variety of networks. Performance max is a campaign which allows you to target users on all 6 of Google’s marketing channels. Search, shopping, Gmail, discovery, display & YouTube.

For me, this will be a great starting point for your teaser campaigns. With an all-purpose performance max strategy, you can create multiple campaigns with a variety of audience signals for both new and existing customers.

This will mean you’re covering all bases, and your loyal customers aren’t feeling left out.

Budget Loading Over the Black Friday Period

Budget loading is essentially a way of capturing the maximum number of users available by increasing your budget in periods where volume is the highest.

This is very common all year round when it comes to payday cycles, as it’s a well-known fact that buyer behaviour is increased once people have been paid.

For Black Friday, this is no different. And in fact, it is even more heightened as users commonly tone down their spending as early as September in order to maximise their savings during Black Friday.

On average in the UK, we see that consumer spending has increased as much as 25% YoY during the Black Friday period.

Whilst the cost of living crisis is very much apparent in the UK, I don’t see there being too much of a decrease in spending if any, this Black Friday.

If you’d like to speak to Embryo or learn more about any of our services to see how we can benefit your business, we’d love to hear from you.