5 Essential Steps For Your Black Friday Marketing Plan | 137
There are a lot of mixed feelings when it comes to Black Friday. Maybe you’ve decided to sit this year out, or you’re worried about getting lost in the commotion. What is often misunderstood about Black Friday, however, is that it’s the work before the sale begins that sets the stage for success! With that in mind, I want to talk through the essential elements you need in your Black Friday marketing plan, so you can maximize your sales.
#1 Don’t Slack on List Building
Building a loyal customer base takes time, and the buyer's journey can take even longer. The sooner you start bringing new people to your list and warming them up, the more success you will see.
If list building ads are a part of your Black Friday marketing plan, set aside 90% of your ad budget towards list building ads. The other 10% can be used for nurture-based content, like blogs and podcasts.
#2 Cultivate Warm Leads
This goes along with list building, but Black Friday should be reserved for your existing audience. Think of it as your way of showing gratitude to your existing audience. Also, people are bombarded with sales emails and social posts. However, they are most likely to buy from businesses they already know and trust. Instead of chasing cold leads, focus on your existing audience.
#3 Consider Hosting a Live Event
Another marketing idea for Black Friday is to host a live event. I recommend doing this about six weeks out. You can put together a workshop, training, or challenge, but the goal is to get more people to your email list. Don’t worry about putting a full-blown pitch together for your live event. You can soft-sell your upcoming offer, but this is more about planting the seed - not sealing the deal.
#4 Strategic Collaboration for Exposure
From late September to Early October, focus on collaborations to broaden your reach. (Have you noticed a theme for your Black Friday marketing plan yet?) You can make guest appearances inside Facebook groups, guest on a podcast, go live with someone, or participate in summits. This allows you to get visible and introduce yourself to new people (plus the potential to continue nurturing your existing relationships).
#5 Consider What You’re Selling
Of course, you also need to consider what offer or offers you plan to pitch during Black Friday. It might seem obvious, but your marketing plan will benefit when you are strategic. Think about your current capacity, whether you will tier your offers, and what kind of incentive you will offer.
Once you’ve established your offer, reverse engineer your Black Friday marketing plan to create content that builds to the sale.
I know it’s tempting to throw together a marketing plan for Black Friday, especially if you haven’t seen a lot of success in the past. But I hope these marketing ideas help you put together a successful Black Friday! You can also get more tips for creating marketing plans on episode 134.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Hello and welcome. We're going to be talking about Black Friday and leading up to a big event like Black Friday. This could also be used leading up to a launch or leading up to a summit, something like that. So there's going to be three lives that are happening. One now, one in about a month, and then one in about two months from now. So we're going to talk about what to do when you're about 10 to 12 weeks out from a launch, what to do when you're about six weeks out from a launch, that's the next one. And then the third one is when you're about two weeks out from a launch, or in this case, Black Friday.
The first thing I want to say is list build. List building is so important, especially when you're about 10 to 12 weeks out or three plus months out from an event. List build, list build, list build. If you're running ads, about 90% of your budget should be going towards list building at this point because we want to get people on our email list so that we have time to nurture them and build that relationship so that when our event or Black Friday comes, they are primed and ready to buy.
And so this could be using a lead magnet that you already have, or a free training that you already have, or it could be doing something brand new and fresh. It's totally your choice, but I do recommend that you put your time and energy into list building. Again, we're about 10 to 12 weeks out, so right now is perfect for list building.
The next thing is to, and this goes along with the list building, but is to consider hosting some sort of live event next month. And so for us with this in Black Friday, that would be like September, October. For a very similar reason, building your email list and really trying to get fresh eyes on your email list.
And so likely one of the best ways to do that is running ads to that registration for your event and the live event. So whether it's a training or a workshop or a challenge, what's really great about them is there is a list building aspect. And so you're going to be growing those relationships and nurturing people.
For this live event, I don't necessarily recommend that you do a full blown pitch of any sort, but you definitely could do something like a soft pitch where you mention your product or service or your course, whatever it might be that you're selling. So people are just aware that it exists and if it is a good fit for them, how they can jump in right now. So consider hosting that live event to both build your list further and nurture people.
This is also a really, really great time to be strategic with collaborations. There are three different ways that you can really build your audience, build your list. The first one is to organically build that list yourself. The second one is collaboration, so you're borrowing someone else's list, and then the third one is paid, so you're buying eyes on your freebie so that they will then join your list. And so strategically collaborating with other people, whether it's through podcasts, whether it's through lives together, whether it's in summits or going into somebody's group and really just taking advantage of those strategic partnerships that you either already have in place, or maybe that you are able to develop.
And getting yourself in front of new people to again, grow your audience and become familiar with new people so that because this is happening late September, early October, they have that six to eight weeks to get to know you better and to build that relationship so that when you do do the Black Friday sale or whatever your launch or event is, they're primed and ready to buy already. And they're not like brand new to you because I probably should have said this before, but something like Black Friday.
I would recommend that this is a very special sale, that this is a very special event for your audience only, really for your leads, your warmest audiences to say thank you for following you. Thank you for being a part of your world and to really capitalize on those relationships that you've built in the last year. There's so many sales going on, so much advertising going on, so many promotions going on that it doesn't necessarily make sense to be promoting to people who've never heard of you before because we definitely are more likely to buy from somebody that we trust and that we already have a relationship with.
And so it's a good idea to focus your time and energy for something like Black Friday, especially on those warmest of warm leads, because there's so much other promotion that's going on and you're going to be competing, whether you like it or not, you're going to be competing with so many other people, and that's why those relationships are just so, so important.
That's a really, really big reason why I think building your list now and starting ahead of time. Now, I am a believer in always building your list and to be consistently bringing in new leads to your business because it takes that time, anywhere from three to six to nine months for them to warm up. And so if you're not building your list, then you're not setting yourself up for future success.
Specifically, I know Black Friday is a huge promotion time for a lot of people, and that's why right now is the time to really build those email lists, get those people on your email list, send out that nurture content so that people are ready to buy. And part of this is also nurturing people. So putting out your long form content consistently, I've talked about this on the podcast before. It's so important to be consistent and whether consistency for you is like for me, I put out my podcast every single week.
Every single week without fail, that podcast goes out. And so that's really great. That's amazing consistency. But if for you consistency looks more like a blog once a month, that's great. Or every other week is also great. I wouldn't recommend going any less than once a month, but as long as you're consistent with that once a month or every other week, that is very, very, very important.
Before when we were talking about the ads to grow your list, I said about 90% of your budget. The other 10% of your budget I would put towards nurture content. And so this can be driving people to your podcast or your blog. It can be promoting video content that you've created or user generated video content often does really, really well.
And so this is a really great way to build your warm audience and also nurture people because they're seeing your product in action or they're hearing about the places that you're an expert and it helps you to build that authority so that they really have become, like, come to know, like, and trust you.
And seeing these small clips or reading that blog post is a really, really great way for them to develop that trust and to learn about you and to decide if you're the person that they want to buy from and to get all of their advice or. Get the expertise from so the next thing that I recommend that you do is consider what you're going to be selling to start making the plan for what you're going to be selling and to Figure out if you're going to tear your offer So having like a low point a mid and a high what your capacity is Especially for that high ticket if it's something that does have a capacity.
So for me, I'm coming up with My high ticket will be my ads management So how can I get people into the ads management and what is my capacity? How many people could I take on? What is my ability to provide good quality ads and service? And knowing like, well, is that there's two spots available? Is that that there's six spots available?
How many spots are available? And so knowing what that capacity is, especially if you're having one on one offers. In the past, I've done strategy sessions where I've had like 10 sessions available over November, December, January, or whatever it might be. And once those are full, they're full. And so just starting to think about that.
And then are you going to have any sales strategies? So discounting your products or buy one, get one, or. Buy more, save more. So, like, if you buy one, then it's full price. If you buy two, you save 5%. If you buy three, you save 10%. If you buy four, then you save 15%. If you buy five, then you save 20%. So, like, the more you buy, the more you save.
Are you going to be giving some sort of gift with purchase or a bonus of some sort? This could be an extra digital download or a strategy session or an actual physical gift with the purchase. If you have a membership, a really great tool that you could do would be a free month or a free trial. This also really works well with apps.
They use the free trial often. And then the other sales or urgency strategy that you could be using would be bundles. So either creating bundles that don't normally exist or creating a new bundle that's never previously exists but may continue to exist beyond Black Friday. That's another great strategy.
So you don't really need to like come up with your official strategy and know exactly what you're going to be doing now, but just having that idea of what you're going to be selling and what sales strategy and urgency creator you're going to have, because if you're just like, well, here's my course, it's the same price as it always is.
There's no urgency there. There's no bonuses. There's no sale. There's, it's just the exact same course for the exact same price, but I'm going to say, well, I could buy that at any time. Like why would I buy it now? So starting to think about that. And that also helps you to develop your content strategy, like reverse engineer your content strategy, because if you know what you're selling, then you can start to create content for September, October, November, that really drives people towards the purchase.
So just as kind of like a bit of a summary, we want to be working on building our list and this again does not stop. So building our list, creating our sales plan, and then prepping for that live experience that you're going to be hosting next month. Again, end of September, beginning of October. Those would like if we have to boil it down to your action steps, build your list, always be building your list, determining that sales plan, the urgency, and then prepping for the live event.
I think that those are really, really important tasks next steps so that you can really get ready for a really great Black Friday or for a really great launch. If you're already building your list constantly, or if you start building it for this and just continue to do that, every single event and every single sale that you do in the future is going to build upon the past ones.
And as you build your list more, it's like a snowball. It's really hard at first, but it grows and it gets easier and it grows and it gets easier. And as you're putting out more content, You're nurturing people more and you're really creating that atmosphere and environment that is nurturing those relationships.
It gets easier to sell and so that's just something else to keep in mind. I hope that this was really helpful. I hope that you'll be back for the next one in about a month when we talk about what to do when you're about six weeks out from Black Friday or from your big event. And then again, the beginning of November will be the last one when we're about two weeks out from the big event.
So thank you so much for being here for coming to join this live. And if you're listening on the podcast, thank you so much. I'll be back with another Saturday strategy session next week.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!