Picture this scenario. You’re a business owner who sells really cool knives. They look like miniature Samurai swords, and they chop through pineapple like it’s warm butter. You just started the company this year, and you’ve been so focused on the day-to-day struggle that you forgot the holiday season even existed.
The morning of November 1 comes after a fun night of taking your children trick-or-treating. You brush your teeth and look in the mirror. Suddenly, you come to an awful realization, and your face goes pale, like a ghost.
“Black Friday and Cyber Monday are in three weeks,” you say. “And I’ve done nothing!”
It can be really easy to freak out when you’re late for planning the season ahead. There are so many moving parts, and starting now sounds scarier than any of the costumes you saw last night. You wish you had started planning in September like everyone else.
While it’s always good to start early, go ahead and take a deep breath. If you act now, you can create an awesome Black Friday campaign that brings your company a lot of revenue.
The Big Deal With Black Friday
“Well, maybe I should just wait until next year,” you say to yourself as you drive to the office. “How good could Black Friday be?”
According to Adobe Analytics, online sales reached $9.1 billion on Black Friday in 2022, and that’s just the one day out of that weekend. Cyber Monday actually saw higher numbers at $11.3 billion. If you add up all the days from the major shopping weekend — including Thanksgiving — that is $25.7 billion.
That is a lot of money up for grabs, and sleeping on it would be a missed opportunity.
Set Your Goals
As you go into your office, you call an emergency meeting to plan for Black Friday. Time is of the essence, but there’s one thing you need to do before you make any concrete plans — figure out what your goals are exactly.
Setting goals is important because it gives you a framework of what you want to accomplish. For example, one of your goals is to get a certain amount of extra signups for your email list. You’ll want to make sure the proper system is in place to get the addresses.
Goal setting also increases the effort that you and your employees will put into your Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns. It gives you a measurable metric that everyone can work towards and develop strategies for.
The Type of Goals You Should Set When Late for Planning
“Why don’t we just shoot for a million knives sold?” one of your employees says as you begin setting goals. “You know, shoot for the stars, and maybe you’ll land on a moon.”
While that reasoning might make sense in theory, it’s not a good goal. No matter how hard your employees work, they will not be able to obtain it. So they likely won’t even try.
When you set goals, you should make sure they are SMART:
- Specific: The goal should answer what should be accomplished, who should be responsible, and what steps you should take.
- Measurable: Having an actual number to hit makes it easy to track progress, and helps you know when your team has succeeded.
- Achievable: You should set a goal that is realistic. It shouldn’t be so high that no one could possibly achieve it.
- Relevant: When you set the goal, you should ask yourself, “Why?” And the answer shouldn’t be some arbitrary thing you do just because. Your goal should fulfill a need.
- Time-Bound: Your team should have a clear picture of when to start the tasks and when the goal needs to be accomplished.
You and your team look at your historical sales numbers and realize you have sold about 500 knives on your best day. That was just a random sales push in June. Black Friday will likely bring about even greater numbers. So you set a goal of 1,000 knives and 500 new signups for your email list.
Plan Your Deals
Black Friday’s biggest advantage is also its disadvantage. People will be online that day with the mentality of buying things. But every other company knows this, and there is a lot of competition.
Something as simple as 20% off might work, but it’s also what every other company is doing. In order to stand out from the crowd, you might want to try bolder discounts like 30%, 40%, even 55%.
“But that would lose us money wouldn’t it?” your brilliant buzzkill of a CFO says.
That might be true if you are selling every item for that big of a discount. To offset this, you can put that discount on select products. This would bring people into your store, they can sign up for your mailing list, and you can sell them on other items.
Try Cross-Selling and Upselling
“Yeah, what about our premium knife cases?” says your marketing director. “We can recommend it at checkout.”
That sounds like a good idea to you because it is. This type of deal is called a cross sell. If there are other items that go with the one your customer is buying, you can suggest they buy something that goes with it.
You might also want to consider upselling. Maybe a customer likes the discounted knife, but you have an even better knife that suits a particular need better. You give a soft recommendation.
That customer decides to either buy it along with the discounted item or in place of the discounted item. They can also take the discount and decide on the more expensive item later. If they don’t decide to buy it now, you can always hit them with an email or social media ad later.
Drive Up Hype
The first time people hear about your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals shouldn’t be on Black Friday itself. Even the ones most loyal to you will be inundated with ads of what other companies have to offer. A lot of those people will also have planned what they want to do in advance.
You’ll want to use a combination of social media, paid media, and emails to engage your customers. The message you want to hit them with is that your store is the place to go on Black Friday.
The key to getting people’s attention is to have fun with it. If you’re enjoying it, they will too. Here are a few simple ideas you can implement.
- Countdown Timer: With simple coding, you can post a countdown timer to social media. This is an easy way to show people that you are excited for Black Friday and that they should be too.
- Mystery Deals: Instead of telling your customers what your big deal is, you can keep it a secret but have them guess — either in comments or by email — what they think it will be. Not only does this drive engagement, some of your followers and subscribers might give you some good ideas for the future.
- Talk Your Crazy Promotion: This is the exact opposite of the mystery deal, but you can always do both if you’re doing multiple things on Black Friday. If you are running a really big discount, then getting your customers excited early on is a great idea. This can be especially powerful in conjunction with the countdown timer.
- Leverage TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Reels: The beautiful thing about video in this day and age is it doesn’t have to be beautiful. In fact, sometimes the videos that perform the best look like they were shot on a cell phone. You can quickly make a video demonstrating your product and talking about the awesome Black Friday deal you’re about to have.
Don’t Forget Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday can almost seem like an afterthought. However, like we mentioned before, it is a huge day of sales that may even surpass Black Friday sometimes. It’s important to keep in mind what you should do for it.
There are a variety of ways you can handle Cyber Monday. You can extend the same Black Friday deals into Cyber Monday, create new deals, or a mixture of the two.
This could be an excellent opportunity to nurture your emails. For example, to the people who bought from you, you can send an email that gives them an exclusive deal. To the people who abandoned their cart, you can create a sense of urgency by telling them you have extended the Black Friday discount for one day only.
Make Sure Your Website Is Ready
The meeting went smoother than you thought it would. Everyone knows what they’re doing, and they all rush to their desks to get started. Nothing can go wrong now.
“Uh, boss,” your COO says. “What if we do so well that the extra traffic crashes the website?”
That is a very real scenario, and it is something you should work through with your web development team to ensure that it’s less likely.
You should also optimize the buying process and make sure it’s as easy as it can be for customers. If it’s just a little bit difficult, they’re not going to buy, and you’ll lose out on a lot of sales.
Lastly, you need to make sure your website navigates well on mobile. If anything, this is more important than how it works on desktop. According to Shopify, 73% of Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales in 2022 were done by phone. Only 27% of transactions were on desktops.
Get Some Rest Tonight
You get home from work with a huge weight off your shoulders. Black Friday is in three weeks, and you are now prepared for a successful season. You know everyone on your team will do their part because you hired the best.
Now, kiss your partner, play with your kids, and have a glass of wine. You deserve a nice, quiet evening.
More on BFCM Strategy
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