Black Friday and Cyber Monday are now well-established sale days. Most offline & online business owners, especially those businesses that have B2C or B2B e-shop, make great offers to their customers. How can we properly prepare our digital marketing strategy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Read in the following article, all the possible promotional activities, placed in a proper order to gather ideas, that you can immediately implement for your own business.

Before the Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales

Marketing strategy first

Before getting started, you need to decide on the discounts you will be running on those days and the categories of your products or services, in which they will be applied. Obviously running small discounts is no good, as is deceiving your consumers with virtual/fake discounts (i.e. raising prices and lowering them again on the 2 days of the sale). For example, on Black Friday very large discounts are typical. Big implies a real 40% or more, wherever your cost and profit margin in your own market allows it, of course. Those of your customers who really care about price already have your products in mind and expect to find them at a lower price at that time. They usually keep an eye on them either on your website or on price comparison sites all the time and are aware of the price trend. Therefore, it is essential that you decide on your discount in time. The day of Cyber Monday following Black Friday usually has either the same or slightly smaller discounts for those who didn't catch the Black Friday discounts. Other people choose to apply discounts for the whole month. The decision is up to you.

Time for your digital marketing strategy

Ahead of getting started, you need to contemplate the strategy you're going to implement. A 2-point strategy is suggested. 1) In the beginning and for 1-2 months you start with general awareness of your products while doing actions that will bring traffic to your website. The messages at this stage talk about your differences compared to your competitors and not yet about discounts. 2) However, when the sale days arrive, you will switch tactics and messages. You'll retarget all the visitors you previously collected, who didn't purchase, and start communicating your discounts for the purpose of immediate conversions.

For this 2-point strategy, you will need a core creative idea, a detailed timeline, and a clear estimation of the total budget, for all the actions you will take in step 1 and step 2 (i.e. how much you will invest in ads, fees, productions, etc.).

Indicatively, you can start step 1 on 1 October (i.e. 2 months before the sales) and peak step 2 on the days of the sales. If you wish, you can start only 1 month before (i.e. 1 November).

What matters though, is that your strategy has two steps: 1) Initially generate visitors to your website to build an audience and 2) Then, on the days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, retarget all those visitors for the purpose of sales.

It is advisable for all of this, to combine the following digital marketing tactics depending on your allocated budget:

Social media marketing (an organic tactic that pays off gradually, but will work perfectly if you already have social networks set up with good engagement),
Influencer marketing (paid tactics that pay off immediately and even involve the endorsement of influencers towards your brand),
Advertising campaigns (paid tactics that deliver immediate results, allowing targeting and remarketing actions),
Email & mobile marketing (direct tactics that pay off immediately as long as you have collected legitimate user, visitor, and customer data from time to time).

If you are interested in learning how to choose and value all these tactics for every possible strategy for your brand, check out the Digital Marketing Strategy course.

Preparing your landing pages

Therefore, if you know in advance which products or services you are going to offer discounts on, it is imperative to have properly prepared pages describing these discounts. These are the pages that people will end up on, to make a purchase (conversion). The rule of landing page optimization says that these pages should have a) a clear title that mentions the discount and relevant keywords such as "Black Friday 50% off for all TVs", b) proper explanatory text, features, descriptions, before and after prices, c) the right and complete photos or videos, d) the benefits of your offer, e) the necessary testimonials & customer reviews as well as any other social proof such as your customer logos or awards you have received. Remember you are one step away from selling, you need everything to be flawless.

Obviously, in addition to landing pages your entire website should play great on mobile phones (friendly & responsive) download quickly (ideally at 4") and your hosting should be elastic, (meaning power, bandwidth, and concurrent users) as visitors increase. If you're interested in learning how to do these things check out the Website Development for Marketers course.

Optimizing the checkout

If a customer places a product in their cart, the long and challenging road of checkout begins and this is a very important funnel as you will be losing people at every step. Τhis is to be anticipated. For dozens of reasons, people leave at the stage of cart or registration or billing or checkout. Research shows that on average 8-9 out of 10 people leave at each step! Your task is to have made these pages excellent, simple, usable, and mobile optimized so that if they leave it is through no fault of your own. Once you've made the necessary improvements, do some testing of your website yourself and try to buy something to see what the potential problems are. Leave nothing to chance!

Black Friday strategy

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