Black Friday Marketing: How to Warm Up Your Audience | 142
When you think of Black Friday, you might think of big sales (or long lines outside of department stores). For small businesses, though, Black Friday has a whole other layer to you. You have to consider what you will sell and how you will promote it, so you don’t get lost in the sea of Black Friday promotions.
Let’s chat about the three elements you need in your Black Friday marketing plan to warm up your audience and increase sales about 8 weeks before the big event (BF or something else).
#1 Host a Live Event
You don’t need to put together a huge event, but there are lots of pros to going live. First, you can build your email list (which can be very beneficial right before Black Friday). It's also a great way to nurture your audience and warm them up to the offer you will promote during Black Friday.
Typically, IRL Black Friday is a bit of a free-for-all. But online, I highly recommend you make your deals exclusive as a way to thank your existing audience for sticking with you. Plus, by marketing your Black Friday deals only to a warm audience, you’ll likely see better sales and it helps your people feel like they’re a truly valued part of your community.
#2 Focus on Nurturing and Brand Awareness
In the six weeks leading up to Black Friday, you want to show up consistently. Focus on creating high-value content that will warm your audience to your offers. You don’t need to show up everywhere, but just show up consistently on your best-performing platforms (like email or social media).
You can also run ads during this time to increase your brand awareness and generate more leads. For brand awareness ads, drive traffic to your blogs, podcast shownotes, or videos content. And then retarget those people to your free offer to help build your email list.
#3 Team Up for Collaborations
I am a big fan of collaborations for a few different reasons. First, they are often free (doesn’t get better than that). Second, they are a great way to reach new people and tap into a trusted audience.
There are lots of ways you can collaborate with people including, guest on someone’s podcast, speak at a summit or conference, co-host a live event and more. These are all relatively easy to do, and don’t require a ton of time - but can have amazing results.
When it comes to Black Friday marketing, this is a great way to grow your email list and expand your reach before the sale. As an added bonus, collaborations also help nurture your audience.
Where Are the Sales?
You might be reading this and thinking, “What kind of Black Friday marketing plan is this? I never sold anything!” But that’s actually the point. Building awareness and reminding people that you are there in the weeks leading up to the event will help immensely when it is time for you to promote your small business Black Friday deals.
Plus, during this time, you are building a strong foundation for your sales. You are warming your audience. You’re building your list. You're showing up as an expert. This increases the likelihood of making sales.
Want more Black Friday marketing tips? Take a listen to Part 1 of this series (Episode 137) on the five essential steps to prepare for Black Friday.
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.
Welcome to this live Black Friday prep. We're about six to eight weeks before, depending if you're listening to this live in the Facebook group or if you are waiting until this comes out on the podcast. We’re anywhere from six to eight weeks before a live event.
We're specifically talking about Black Friday, but this could be a launch for a course or a program, a summit, something like that. I have three different pieces of advice. So number one is the live event. I talked about this in part one, hosting a live event about a month before. Number two is nurture and brand awareness. And then number three is collaborations. So let's dive in!
Number one is the live event.
This does not have to be a big gigantic live event. It doesn't need to be a launch of any sort, but live events are really great for a couple of different things. Number one is list building. You can definitely grow your list by hosting a live event. It's also a really great way to nurture because for Black Friday specifically, I highly recommend that you are focused on selling to your warm audience as a thank you for being part of the audience.
Typically, Black Friday wouldn't be a free for all, open to anyone sale. It really is to our warmest audiences. By hosting a live event, maybe it's a workshop, a video series, or just some sort of training that is really focused on high value, you can bring new people into your audience, nurture them, and then really start to develop those relationships that will continue to grow over the next four to six weeks.
And then by the time Black Friday comes around, they're more likely to buy from you because people who know us and like us and trust us and have got amazing, high quality information are so much more likely to buy from us in the future. And again, this does not need to be a huge pitch, it can be a live series that you're doing in a Facebook group or an Instagram or whatever social media you want.
Number two is to focus on your nurturing and brand awareness.
So this is two different pieces like you can split it into two different things, your content and then your emails. So you're really wanting to create lots of great content, blog posts, podcast episodes, videos, whatever your long form content of choice is.
You do not need to do all three. Just pick one. But really being sure that you're showing up consistently and that you're prioritizing the relationships and you're providing high quality content. I can't say that enough. High quality, valuable information is really, really important leading up to that live event when you're trying to nurture those relationships.
And then your content is a great way to increase your brand awareness or visibility. You can be running ads directly to your content, so directly to a blog post or the show notes for a podcast or videos that you've recorded. It's a really great way to just bring in new people to your audience that have never heard of you before.
And brand awareness ads are very cost effective. They're inexpensive to run and you can reach a lot of people at that low cost because you're not asking them to do much. All you're saying is, look at this content - I have some value.
And then along with the nurture piece is prioritizing your emails. If you aren't currently emailing every single week, this is a great time to try and bump it up. So if you're emailing once a month, try emailing every other week. If you're emailing every other week, try emailing every week, just for this like six to eight weeks leading up to the live event.
The more consistently you're showing up, the more likely people remember who you are and keep you top of mind and then want to buy from you. Especially if you're prioritizing relationships, building those relationships, nurturing relationships. So that when people are ready to buy or when you're ready to sell at Block Friday or whatever your event is, people are ready to buy. Now, this does not mean that you can't do any sales content.
You can always include sales opportunities in your emails, especially soft sales, reminding people of things that are available evergreen, or if you have something else that you want to specifically sell. I'm not saying you can't do that. I like the 80/20 rule, and in this case you'll be doing 80 percent nurture value content and 20 percent sales in your email.
Number three is collaborations.
Collaborations are my favorite. I think I like collaborations even more than ads, even though... I'm an ads manager and I do really, really love Facebook ads. But collaborations are great for a couple of different reasons. Number one, they're free. Number two, they're a really great way to reach new audiences quickly because you're tapping into somebody else's trusted audience.
You're able to access a group of people that you wouldn't have access to other ways. And there's so many different ways that you can collaborate with people. And so this is another really great way to just build your email list. So if you think back to the first live that I did where we were talking about list build, list build, list build, list build, that's coming up again where it's like list build and nurture, list build and nurture, list build and nurture.
Six to eight weeks out from the event, we're still focusing on list building, but there's now more of a balance with the nurture. And so collaborations, for example, like a podcast, if you go guest on someone else's podcast, that's really great for the collaboration because you're able to show up in other people's audiences.
You're able to get known, but at the same time, as a guest on someone else's podcast, typically you're providing amazing content and you're showing yourself as an expert. And so it's also doing that job of nurturing and building the trust that you are the expert.
Another really great way to collaborate with others is through summits or conferences, online specifically. Typically you'll pre record either an audio or a video, a piece of content of some sort, and then everybody in the group will promote. And so you're cross pollinating with the audiences of all of the presenters, not just like the one person. So you'll typically get access to 10 to 20 different audiences, which is also really great. And similar to guesting on a podcast, you're able to showcase yourself as an expert.
Another really great way to collaborate with other people, and this is really low pressure and really easy to do, is to host a live event together. So either on Instagram or Facebook or whatever platform that you choose to do it. Going live together because it broadcasts it to both audiences, and so then you're getting that access to other audiences. So podcast guesting and conferences are my two favorites.
And then I also like just the low pressure of going live with somebody. You don't really need to pre plan. There isn't a lot of work that needs to be done around it. It tends to be really organic and a natural flowing conversation. So that can be a really great way to access other audiences as well.
So those are my three main points for you. Hosting that live event with a focus on list building and nurture. Focusing on your nurture content and brand, like your nurturing and brand awareness from a content perspective but also from email. And then collaborating.
Collaborating with others, again, this is really great list building and nurture. So I feel like a big piece is missing here, and that's the sales piece. A marketing plan has three layers. You have your brand awareness layer, where you're just becoming known by people. A lot of big companies, McDonald's, Nike, Walmart, run a lot of brand awareness ads where they're not really selling anything. They're just brand awareness, and usually they're showcasing a Big Mac or a pair of running shoes or whatever that they want you to buy. But the typical goal for these ad campaigns is to just keep you thinking about their company.
So when you need a burger, or you need a pair of running shoes, that's the place that you're going to go. And so that's what you want as well, is just staying top of mind and becoming known by more people than currently know you.
So, that's the first layer, it's just becoming more known by people. And then the second layer is lead generation, and this is growing your email list. It could also be growing a text list. That's not something I have a ton of experience with. I don't have a text list. I don't subscribe to text lists. But that's just me and I know that there is lots of value in them and that there are online businesses that have had a ton of success from a text line and text list. So if that's something you're interested in doing, definitely go for it because it is successful. It's just not my jam. But growing those people who are subscribed to your email and text if you choose to do it, those lists is the second level.
And then the third one is sales. When it comes to ads, the sales piece is the last one we typically add in because you're going to be doing a lot of your sales to those subscribers to your email list. We don't typically try to sell to a cold audience. We tend to sell to warm audiences, people on your email list, people who have joined the webinar and might be interested in what you have to sell.
So that's why those come in last. That's why right now as we're leading up to a gigantic sales event like Black Friday, we don't need to be doing as much selling. I wouldn't say to start teasing quite yet. We'll talk more about that in part three which will happen at the end of October. So starting to consider what you'll do if you're interested in running a waitlist and how you'll incentivize people to get them on your waitlist.
Now, I did make a note and somehow I had skipped over it, so I'm gonna just talk about specifically what kind of ads to be running right now, six to eight weeks out from the live event. There's two types of ads that I recommend that you're running right now. The first one is brand awareness ads, and these will be going to your content.
Brand awareness ads go to your content so that people are consuming the content. They're great for nurturing. The second type of ad, and I typically recommend most people are running these types of ads all the time. And so constantly growing your emails is really important. And that's the second type of ad that in this phase of preparing for a big sale that I highly recommend, and even more so than that day to day that I always recommend. You can run lead generation ads to get new people, more people signed up for that live event.
You can also run lead generations to any sort of free lead magnet that you either already have going on or that you create specifically in relation to that the Black Friday sale that you're planning on having. And so the live event one is great because people love live events showing up getting really great value from them.
And there's like an anticipation piece, and there's the urgency because it's happening live, so they need to sign up right now. So running ads to get more people to your live event, and then running ads to get people a freebie of some sort, whether it's a PDF checklist, or some sort of other download, or a video training that you already have, and just running ads to bolster that, the growth of your email list through the freebie that you're already using.
So you don't even necessarily need to create something new. If you want, you can. And then create a free lead magnet of some sort that relates directly to it. It's always a good idea, if you're running ads to your event, it should connect to your Black Friday sale or whatever your big event is so that the right people are going to be on your email list. And this goes back to backwards planning, which I talk about all the time, but where you start with the end in mind, and then you're like, okay, this is what I'm going to be selling so what freebie do I need to get those people onto my email list?
I sell Facebook ads. So if I'm selling Facebook ad strategy, then a training that I have coming in October is Facebook ad essentials for teacher business owners who want to outsource their ads. So I'm thinking about the person who wants to outsource their ads because they're going to hire me. And then my training is, Here's The Essentials. Like here's what you need to know about Facebook ads to be ready to hire them out. But if you have something like my French immersion math resources, I could pull one of those like pieces of the unit out and offer it as a freebie.
Just as a bit of a recap, do the list building, do the nurture. Even if you don't want to, those are the things that pay off long term because you are known by more people and you give out that amazing, awesome value that people trust you. Then once it's time to buy, whether it's because they're ready or because you're actually selling, then they start to say yes, and that is how our businesses grow and we make such a huge impact.
So again, thank you so much for being here. I'll be back with another live at the end of October to wrap up this little mini series.
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!