Black Friday Marketing Ideas: What to Do During the Sale | 147
If you couldn’t tell by now, there is a lot to consider and prepare for when it comes to Black Friday or another live event! As we wrap up this three part series, let’s take a look back…
Part 1: In episode 137, I shared how to start preparing twelve weeks out. The moral of that episode was list-building (and then even more list-building).
Part 2: In episode 142, we looked specifically at eight weeks out, where you could host a live event and participate in collaborations to grow your reach.
Now, let’s explore what to do around the time of the sale, including what to expect from your Facebook Ads.
#1 Create a Waitlist
One Black Friday promotion strategy is to create a waitlist for your offer. You can promote this waitlist one to two weeks before the sale and get people excited about what’s to come. There are some big advantages to a waitlist. First, you are getting people on your email list, so even if they don’t buy, you can nurture them later.
Second, it gives you a sense of the interest around your offer. The people who sign up for a waitlist will be warmer leads, so you’ll likely see higher conversion rates.
#2 Be Strategic With Your List Building Efforts
You’ll rarely ever hear me say this, but you don’t need to focus a ton on list-building right before or during the sale. This does not mean stopping altogether… in fact, if you have an ongoing lead generation ads running, I recommend you let it continue throughout your sale.
Yes, the ads will likely get more expensive mid-November through the holiday season, but that is normal. Hang-tight until January when ad costs will decrease. If you need to lower your budget or cut out visibility ads for a while then do so, but try not to stop the lead gen ads.
If you don’t have an ongoing lead generation ad running, now is probably not the time to start. Hold off until the new year when ad costs are more reasonable. Take this time to focus on nurturing your list and building those relationships leading up to the sale!
#3 Run Ads Through the Sale
Lastly, if you want to run ads through Black Friday, I recommend engagement and retargeting ads.
Engagement ads help increase your engagement on a social media post, can build brand awareness, and give you brownie points with the algorithm. My favourite posts to use for Black Friday include ones that showcase your offer to get more people aware of and engaging with it. Be sure to be targeting your warm audience as they’re most likely to buy!
Sales page retargeting ads are perfect for a live event like Black Friday because they help keep your offer top of mind to people who have shown and interest in your offer. I recommend you only show these ads to people who have visited your sales page within the last ~10 days.
Now what if you missed out on all the prep work?
That’s totally okay… take this time to focus on your current audience and make sure they feel seen, appreciated and taken care of. Building relationships and nurturing your leads is a great way to pave the way to better sales in the future.
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:
Hello and welcome to this third installment of the Black Friday series. Really, it is leading up to Black Friday, but this series is perfect for anybody who's looking to market and prep for an upcoming event. So a live launch, or a conference, or a summit that you're hosting… something like that.
Back in September, we did the first part of the series. The main focus of that was when you're about two and a half, three months out. List build, list build, list build. You want to be growing your email list in preparation for the launch and starting two and a half, three months before this live event is going to give you a chance to get people on your email list and then warm them up, nurture, and build those relationships.
In part two we talked about continuing to grow your email list and then also to nurture and really make sure that you're putting the time and energy into nurturing through consistent emails. Very, very important. And also consistent weekly content of some sort, whether it's a blog or podcast or video. And then also I recommend you host some sort of live event. It could be free or a low cost workshop offer. You could have a sales pitch at the end or you could just do a free training or paid training with no sales pitch at the end.
Really, the goal of that live event is to gain more email subscribers and nurture, nurture, nurture. You're adding those people to your email list and then the live event is going to be a training to nurture and really build those relationships and build them quickly. And then today we are about two weeks out from Black Friday. So these are my tips if you are about two weeks out from some sort of event. And when I say two weeks out, let's say you're doing a live launch, we're talking two weeks out from the beginning of the registration period.
The first one is creating a waitlist. The second one is taking stock of your list building efforts. And then the third one is the different types of ads that you can be running. So let's jump into the waitlist. This is a great strategy for pretty much anything that you have coming up that's exciting. You can start a waitlist really anytime.
For an event specific like Black Friday, I would recommend waiting until like the month of November. Really just hyping up like, I have something exciting coming for Black Friday or I have this really exciting offer and I'm going to be sharing it with my email list first. You could even say like, waitlisters will get a special coupon or they will find out 24 hours in advance. Some sort of extra bonus to incentivize people to get on the waitlist. I think that doing an extra bonus coupon code or early release of the offer 24 hours, 48 hours in advance is a better strategy because there's definitely going to be people on your email list that are primed and ready to buy.
So a waitlist is really really good for building the hype and the excitement around something. I think we all at this point realize how many different sales opportunities and offers and programs and courses and everything that is going to be sent our way over that kind of two week period before and after the American Thanksgiving weekend. If you're new here, I'm in Canada. So our Thanksgiving weekend was about a month ago at the beginning of October, but we still will be bombarded by tons and tons of sales offers leading up to Black Friday throughout the Thanksgiving weekend. And then the week after with Cyber Monday and some people extending their sales beyond. So if you have a waitlist and you're going to get your audience excited about your offer, that's a really great strategy.
Something I mentioned in the previous two episodes that is really important to mention again, I personally believe that Black Friday should be a promotion for our audience only, as almost like a special thank you for being part of the community, for being part of the journey. Also, just because of the extreme quantity of offers that are out there, to send your offer out into the wild to cold audiences, it's not going to go well. It's not going to convert. And so I really, really strongly feel like you should focus a Black Friday promotion on the warmest of your audience, and that would be your email list.
That's also why I recommend getting that waitlist together, so that you can get the hype up. It's also part of the reason why two and a half months ago, we were talking about building your email list. Because now, those people who joined your list two months, three months ago, have been there, have been consuming your content, and they will be warmed up and ready. But two months ago, three months ago, when they first joined your list, they probably wouldn't have been in a position to buy. They probably wouldn't have felt like they knew you or had that relationship with you.
Number two is to take stock of your current list building strategy. I feel like that's a really weird way to put it but what I really just mean is that from November through January are some of the most expensive days, weeks of the year to advertise. And this is across the board because of the consumerism that is happening leading up to Black Friday and leading up to the Christmas holidays. There's just a lot of promotion and selling and sales that are happening.
And the way that Facebook ads work is like supply and demand. So the more demand there is, the more people advertising, the more expensive advertising gets. When there's fewer people advertising, it's cheaper. And so in January, there will be less sales happening, less promotion happening. Companies will pull back on their budget.
And so ads will become cheaper again. That's just the cycle of it. We see it every single year. November and December, ad costs spike. And then in January, they drop again. And so if you are currently running lead generation ads to build your email list, I don't necessarily think you should stop. In fact, my recommendation is basically never stop lead generation, but I want you to be prepared for costs to increase.
And that might mean that you pull back your budget slightly. So instead of spending 20 a day, you're only spending 10 a day. Or it might just be riding it out and saying, okay, I understand that this is going to be more expensive, but this is just part of business. Continuing your lead generation through these more expensive months of November and December is going to benefit you in January, February, March. As we've talked about so many times on this podcast, buying cycles are getting longer, people need to typically take about three to six months to buy from you after learning that you even exist. And so to continue bringing in those leads, even though it is more expensive in November and December, as long as the ads are continuing to convert, it's going to help you ensure that you have a stronger spring. Like Q1 will continue strong because you continued those lead generation efforts through the more expensive season.
You may also decide that it is too expensive and that you need to pull back completely. But I highly recommend that you supplement that lack with additional organic measures. So maybe increase collaborations, increase your pinning, increase the amount of reels that you're doing, something to compensate for the lack of traffic you'd be getting from ads. And then if you don't do either of those in about three to six months, if there is a lag, if sales dwindle, if everything in your business kind of slows down and feels a little bit eh and sticky, then that's just a learning point to remember for next year because bringing in consistent leads is extremely important. So as soon as the new year rolls around, if you do decide to stop your ads, then getting back started as quickly as possible is highly recommended.
Okay. Third, what types of ads do I recommend you run over Black Friday? So the first one is an engagement ad. This would be taking a piece, like a social media post that you've created that is showcasing your offer and running an engagement ad.
So engagement ads, the objective is to get more people to engage with the post. That means like, comment, share the post, and really just add hype to it and really. Get people excited. Remind them about the offer and just get people engaging with that social media post. And then the second ad would be sales retargeting. So this is a really simple ad. Anyone who lands on your sales page, they start seeing a sales ad for your offer. And you can do this so that anyone who's been on the page for the last 10 days starts to see these retargeting ads.
One is an engagement and one is a sales ad that's only going to people who have been on your sales page. That is really really important, especially at this time of year. We want there to be a very clear trigger action that starts them seeing the sales ads. So they've gone to your sales page or maybe they've clicked a button in your email.
I often talk about how they sign up for a webinar or they participate in the webinar as one of these trigger events. You probably aren't going to be having a webinar for Black Friday. Really the main trigger action is going to the sales page. So if someone's interested in your offer, they go to the sales page, and then if they don't buy, they would start seeing these sales ads that are just promoting that offer and reminding them that it exists.
This weekend is just going to be chock a block full of sales, events, and offers. This is just so, so important. That somebody does that action. And then you are showing them engagement ads and also the sales ads to keep your offer top of mind so that if for whatever reason they didn't buy originally, maybe they didn't have their credit card or they got distracted or something else happened that they can take advantage of your offer as soon as they're able to.
So I think that is all the tips that I have for you. We are going to create that waitlist, get people excited, get them hyped. Don't forget to invite your entire email list to the waitlist, send it on your social media and Facebook groups, like everywhere that you possibly can. Don't stop your list building, even though costs are going to get more expensive, continue to build your list consistently, be ready to ride out the wave of more expensive ads for most of November and December, and know that ad costs will drop back down in January.
If you are going to run ads for Black Friday, I recommend an engagement ad to get people really hyped up. And then also a sales ad that is retargeting people who have visited the sales page within, I would say like the last 10 days.
I hope that this was helpful. I hope that you have an amazing Black Friday sale if you're choosing to run one. I'm actually not running one. I meant to say this at the beginning of today's Black Friday episode, but I'm actually not running a Black Friday sale this year. I've already shared my exciting offer with my email list. For the entire month of November, I am offering $300 off of my Facebook ad sprints.
So these are my signature VIP package. It's a six week Experience, if you will, where my team and I create everything you need for your ad, the images, the ad copy, and then we set everything up. We test everything for you. We optimize the ad campaign. So at the end of the ad sprint, we're able to hand you back a campaign that is running really well bringing in leads. It is a lead generation ad. So this campaign is bringing in leads. New subscribers to your email list every single day. For the last at least 12 months. The Facebook ad sprint has been $1,297. This is the first time I've ever put it on sale.
So for all of November, it is $997. There are 10 spots available, 2 have already been taken. So there's only eight left and once all the spots are full, it's all done. I'm really excited! So if you are interested in booking a Facebook ad sprint with me, reach out on Instagram. I'm @heyitsjenzaia. We can connect in the DMs.
Thank you so much for being here. I hope that this episode has been helpful and I look forward to being back next Saturday with another Saturday strategy session!