By Huma Mian – Senior account manager
With the year winding down and the holiday season kicking in, consumer spending often increases during this period.
Black Friday spending in 2024 is expected to increase by £800 million, up 27% from a planned spend of £3 billion in 2023. With three in five UK adults looking to spend this Black Friday weekend, it’s important to make sure your brand stands out from the crowd.
Here we run through six marketing strategies you need to consider and implement to boost your sales this Black Friday.
1. Optimise your website and product descriptions
Your website is your shop front, and you want to make sure items and information are easily accessible. Start by looking at your customer’s journey to see how easy it is to buy your products. Review any stumbling blocks and make some changes before you get higher traffic to the website.
Adding extra information to the product descriptions and making sure items are easy to find under categories will help to avoid questions and make the process smoother. Reducing the number of steps for checkout will also make the process seamless and will help increase your sales, and the chance of returning customers.
2. Keyword research
A survey by BrightEdge found that 68% of users’ online experiences start with using a search engine and up to 53.3% of total traffic on e-commerce websites comes from organic search.
With this in mind, having a strong SEO strategy and conducting some keyword research is a great way to get insight into your customers habits, especially during a seasonal campaign. This will help to draw more traffic to your website and support you with any changes you need to make.
Utilise tools such as Google Trends and Keyword Planner to help you find the most relevant industry-related keywords for your business and include them on your website and in as part of your marketing mix.
3. Email marketing
Email marketing is still a core part of any e-commerce strategy, with stats showing that 89% of e-commerce marketers use it as their primary medium for generating leads. Aim to start early with communications, letting your loyal customers know what your Black Friday offer will be. Put the offer code in the email and make sure the design is engaging and links to a populated landing page to increase traffic to your website.
According to Deloitte, 90% of customers find personalised advertising appealing. So, look to segment your subscriber base into your loyal repeat customers who have recently purchased, and new customers who have purchased for the first time. You can then opt to give different discounts to each segment or encourage giveaways for new customers.
4. Social media strategy
Your marketing strategy needs to include organic and paid social media, as this is the best way to reach new audiences. While it’s important to keep up engagement with your current followers, utilising a paid media strategy will help you reach new targeted audiences.
A strong paid media strategy is also beneficial to secure sales. With enough early planning, you can also A/B test your ads to see which format types and styles your audience enjoys the most and make any changes needed.
To capture your audience’s attention, strong assets are a must, whether it’s a video or carousel images, it all helps to make your brand recognisable. For the captions, keep the tone of voice authentic.
Don’t forget to include TikTok in your social strategy. With the increase of TikTok shop and people opting for more authentic influencer reviews, you could be missing out on a huge platform for your audience if not.
In our blog we break down further the differences between paid and organic social media, as well as the benefits, to help you perfect your strategy.
5. Re-marketing and re-targeting
Not only is Black Friday great for increasing sales, it is also useful for building your customer base. Re-marketing and re-targeting are great ways to encourage conversions and win back potential lost sales.
Remarketing aims to re-engage your existing customers to help encourage repeat purchases, whereas re-targeting focuses encouraging potential customers to make a purchase or transaction.
Retargeting ads are done using cookies or pixels on web pages that track user behaviour and encourage your audience to click back on your website.
For remarketing, look at creating emails and SMS alerts with offer codes when you get new sign-ups to your mailing list ahead of Black Friday. Send reminder emails to your consumers ahead of the sale or offer too.
You may want to run both tactics side by side but it’s important to have the right messaging for each audience type so you can better understand what stopped someone from purchasing in the first place.
6. Lead generation
Lead generation is vital for building a database of contacts before Black Friday, and your marketing strategy should involve extensive research into your customers and the spaces they occupy to know how to connect with them.
Ahead of Black Friday, why not utilise your social media platforms to get people to sign up to an SMS for a discount code. By adding this to your Linktree or having a clickable link on your posts, you will encourage people who are already using their mobiles to sign up on their device. You can then send them reminders and bounce back offers. QR codes in stores can also be useful for leading people to a pre-filled SMS sign-up for a discount code.
Website pop-ups are also a classic way to remind customers of discounts and are likely expected during this time, but be careful about having too many pop-ups on each page, as this could have a negative impact and make your website harder to navigate.
If you’re looking to boost your sales this Black Friday, you need to use a mix of tactics and utilise every method of communication to your advantage.
Whether it’s ensuring you have a sharp social media strategy, a targeted email and SMS customer list or re-marketing ads to capture potential customers – they key to any successful Black Friday marketing campaign is to put the customers at the forefront to provide them the best possible experience when purchasing from you.
To find out more about digital marketing strategies you should know about for any campaign, visit our blog.
Talk to our marketing experts
At Cartwright Communications we are passionate about helping brands connect with their target audiences with high-impact and cost-effective marketing campaigns that build loyalty and drive highly successful results.
Find out more about how we can help your business by contacting us here.
