Top 10 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Digital Marketing Strategies to Try in 2022
Black Friday is the first day of the traditional Christmas shopping season, the time of sales and incredible discounts that customers look forward to every year. For marketers, however, preparing for this period is an annual extra challenge. This is when it’s extremely imperative to attract as many customers as possible and stand out in the deluge of promotional offers.
Every store, both in offline and online retail, strives to surprise its customers and exceed their expectations. For this reason, we have decided to collect the most interesting Black Friday marketing ideas and strategies for eCommerce marketing in 2022.
What Is Black Friday?
Black Friday falls on the fourth Friday in November, following Thanksgiving. The busiest shopping day of the year first started to be celebrated in Philadelphia in the 1950s. Huge crowds of shoppers and tourists flocked during this period before the Army-Navy game, one of the most traditional and enduring rivalries in college football.
Over time, retailers introduced the annual Black Friday as a day of huge discounts and holiday shopping. This helps them end the fiscal year at a profit or, as they say in the professional world, to “spike up the sales margin” or “pull a (quick) profit.”
In today’s environment, Black Friday has also spread into the eCommerce industry and has expanded from a single day to a weekend of sales, from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. And later that period was expanded even further. The sale period now begins around the beginning of the week of Black Friday, and ends by Cyber Monday, following the Thanksgiving weekend.
Top 10 Efficient Black Friday Marketing Strategies for 2022
There is no one-size-fits-all Black Friday marketing strategy since a lot depends on the characteristics of your business, as well as the habits and needs of your customers, and your desire to clean up the inventory.
Black Friday can be called a true shopping festival that really helps not only come out in the black but also sell items that are sold worse or simply not in demand in normal times.
Every marketing team draws up its own brand marketing strategies and works through various ideas. However, there are methods that work effectively in several different cases. Perhaps they can help you make the right decision to attract your customers.
Quick Getaway: You should definitely set your goals before starting the campaign. This is because not only does it give you a clear vision of what you want to achieve but it also enables you to propel your business in the direction of the extensive change you wish to bring about within your organization.
What’s the next step? Tracking your marketing campaigns. let’s delve into the reason behind it.
You need to bear in mind that it’s important to be aware of what isn’t working to adjust your strategy accordingly. Not every campaign will be successful, and if a particular tactic isn’t meeting your goals, it may be necessary to reallocate resources.
Now, you might be wondering ‘how can I track my marketing goals and campaigns?’ Don’t worry. Leave it to WatchThemLive! Besides heatmaps and a session replay tool, WarchThemLive offers a goal-tracking feature that enables you to set conversion goals and measure your marketing performance.
How does it help you? It allows you to measure the success of your marketing efforts by finding out how many visitors take your desired action. So you can improve your marketing strategy for more conversions.
1. Use Social Media
BF marketing strategies are always about getting attention, generating interest, and driving sales. There are shoppers who love surprises and the feeling of being on the hunt; others like to think ahead about what benefits they can get.
You can use social media to announce future discounts and promotions. In some cases, you can utilize “secret deals,” offer special personal discounts or bonuses and excite the curiosity of your customers. You can also act vice versa and openly hold Instagram promotions, announce discounts, or conduct subscriptions.
Do you think your Instagram account needs more audience to reach out and be successful in all campaigns? Fortunately, there are many possible ways to make your account a successful business account. One of its best ways is to hire a dedicated growth team to manage and grow your account. They know how to manage your account without getting your Instagram account banned or using any bots.
They also know Instagram’s algorithm and use various techniques, including follow/unfollow, DM, and hashtags, to grow accounts rapidly. The best and most reliable service that we recommend is AiGrow.
According to AiGrow team performances:
They will manage your account manually, send you daily activity reports on WhatsApp, which will help you check everything they’ve done to your account, and also send you a more thorough Instagram analytical report per week.
2. Create a Sense of Urgency
The sense of a limited time to make a decision motivates many people to hurry up. Thus, you can use the following:
- Countdown counters on your commercial website;
- Timers on social media pages;
- Thoughtful email subject line.
- Generate video testimonials and display them.
Grab the attention of your customers by focusing on the fact that your offer for a specific product, super discount, or giveaway is limited in time and number of items. To entice your customers to make a prompt purchasing decision, you can use this strategy for different products on different days and hours of sales. However, don’t forget to have a strong and visual live chat support to respond to all of their questions quick so you don’t miss out on any purchases.
3. Make Exclusive Offers to Loyal Customers
People like to be appreciated and praised. We all like to stand out in some way, right? Thus, you can offer discounts to your registered users via special coupons.
Alternatively, this can also be a giveaway for your loyal customers or for everyone who has ever bought from you before. This way, you will build credibility with new clients and win back some of your old customers who haven’t visited your online store for a long time.
4. Try Direct Sales on Social Media
On Black Friday, a lot of people get on social media to look for beneficial offers and lucrative promotions. Therefore, you can use social media platforms (e.g. Instagram) to promote your online store and for direct sales and track you can the track the performance of your campaigns through enterprise social media management software.
Instagram influencer marketing popularity is on the rise. The more popular influencer marketing gets, the more brands try to find and collaborate with influencers to increase their brand awareness.
Ainfluencer is an influencer marketplace that helps both brands and influencers connect and collaborate. Brands can do a search through the marketplace and use Ainfluencer’s custome search filters such as location, gender, language, category, hashtag, etc. to do the process faster.
Even though you won’t be able to “copy” all of your products to your chosen social media platform, you can choose those items that you think are most likely to arouse interest among your followers there. Being able to buy an item “here and now,” without going to the store’s website, often motivates customers.
5. Use Hashtags on Social Media
Many customers use Facebook’s search bar and hashtags to search for online stores and discounts on their favorite products. If you’re a retailer, add hashtags like
- #blackfridayshopping,
- #blackfridaydeals
to your promotional posts on FB or other platforms. This will help you greatly expand your audience.
As we’ve already mentioned, a dedicated growth team will help you grow your account in the best way possible. They can also create posts and compelling content for your campaigns, use smart hashtags, create great captions for your posts, and so more. Get started with the AiGrow team. Professional experts on AiGrow will help you grow your account without getting banned because they manage it manually and don’t use bots.
6. Apply Referral Codes
Referral programs work well on Thanksgiving, i.e. Black Friday Eve. Offer your customers the following:
- Special bonuses;
- Extra discounts,
- Gifts in exchange for referral codes.
- Optimize your conversion rates as the campaign goes on
Such codes are assigned to every customer (the referrer) as soon as they join your referral program. Make your existing customers help you attract new clients. This is how you can increase the sales and loyalty of your regular customers.
7. Offer Rewards
You can offer free shipping Black Friday deals on orders above a certain amount or provide branded giveaways and rewards for different orders.
For example, if a person purchased goods worth $100/$200, you can offer a 10%/20% discount coupon. This way, you will encourage your customers to increase their order value and, consequently, improve your conversions.
Instagram contests and giveaways are perfect ways to boost your brand visibility and awareness on Instagram and attract new followers. With AiSchedul’s contest and giveaway picker tool, you can speed up the process and save tons of time and energy.
All you need to do is upload your giveaway post, add your giveaway hashtags, and set your conditions. The powerful engine of AiSchedul will check all the participants automatically and picks a random winner from them. The AiSchedul Post & Reward tool automates the entire Instagram contest process so you don’t have to know how to count and track entries.
Run Your Instagram Giveaway Now!
8. Give It for Free
Customers like free things – some like surprises and others enjoy getting useful items for free. This is why you want to offer your customers something at no charge and intrigue them in your ads. Alternatively, use a website visitor tracker to find the most relevant users and give it to them for free.
In this case, it’s essential to know your target customers well and understand what gifts they would really find nice and useful. The easiest way to do this is to give a gift based on your customers’ purchase history.
9. Create Gift Guides
A gift guide can become your powerful marketing tool for Black Friday. Essentially, it is a catalog of your products/services, which is created in such a way that your customers can quickly and easily figure out exactly what they can buy from you and what benefits they can receive.
For your gift guide to become popular among your online store visitors, you want to make it really engaging. For example, you can create a “Trendy Gifts for Your Fashionista Friend” guide that will include a collection of fashionable accessories for the current season.
10. Conduct SMM Contests
Social media contests and giveaways are a traditional method of drawing attention to a brand, which hasn’t lost its relevance. Thus, you can set up a theme contest prior to Black Friday and include mandatory reposts of your promotional post as one of the requirements for your followers.
Such a method works as social proof: acquaintances of everyone participating in the contest will see your brand and perceive it as a recommendation from someone they know personally or are used to reading. This increases both recognition and brand credibility.
Bottom Line
There are actually a lot of eCommerce tools and methods to attract your potential customers and motivate them to buy from you on Black Friday. You can draw attention to super discounts or run an experiment and try a new, unconventional approach.
For example, in 2021, DECIEM, an umbrella of beauty brands like NIOD, Hylamide, and The Ordinary, closed its website and offline stores on Black Friday and then extended the discounts until the end of November. Some British brands stand out by refusing Black Friday at all, as “shopping should be done wisely.” However, they do run promotions somewhat earlier, later, or only for registered customers.
Choose your own way to spike up your sales margin, and good luck with your Black Friday sales!