3 minutes

A Social Media Marketer’s Black Friday Checklist

We’re firmly in the run up to Peak Season, and we’re sure we can speak on behalf of the Nation when we say we didn’t expect to still be faced with such an unsettled economic climate!

With a constant shift in customer behaviour, preparing for Black Friday 2022 can feel a little overwhelming. Our Paid Social experts have created a checklist to help you navigate through - highlighting opportunities and issues you may face with tips on how you can make the most out of your peak season marketing planning (there’s still time!)...

  • Prepare for longer sale periods and consider new tactics
     

Unsurprisingly, Black Friday is one of the biggest online sales of the year, so much so that the event is no longer a day or two, we now see retailers jump aboard with their promotions and offers weeks ahead of the big day itself to reach bigger audiences.

Times are tough and brands are facing economic restraints which we predicted would in fact mean discounts would be lower than years previous - however, ran over a longer period of time, so the key is to start earlier! This allows you to get the attention of your customers before your competition pips you to the post and helps to maximise the impact of your promotion.

It’s also worth identifying ways of increasing your average order value. Think about cross-selling products with deals including more than one product, bundles or running ads with groups of products such as collection and catalogue sales ads.

  • Ensure your accounts are set up for success

Preparing your account for success from the off is key and something even the most commercially savvy brands can often overlook. By making sure your paid social accounts are optimised you’ll enable your brand to get more from your budget. Here’s a few things to consider: 

  • Is your catalogue set up correctly? Do you have any rejected products? Tidy it up in time!
  • Is your pixel tracking correct?
  • Do you have Conversions API set up within Meta Business Manager? 
  • Is your payment method up to date?
  • Is your domain verified?

We covered the ins and outs of laying the foundations for successful paid social campaigns over on our blog here!

  • Check your product feed is fully optimised 

Don’t overlook a good ol’ bit of housekeeping with your product feed and ensure it’s both tidy and optimised for your social ads. Consider shorter, more concise product titles, for example, do we need to show every descriptive word within that title? Possibly not! 

The user can see the colour and the shape already in the product image so don’t bulk up your titles with unnecessary words. Think about pushing your lifestyle imagery to the front - it’s definitely worth testing. Does your audience prefer product only imagery, or do they resonate more with lifestyle?

  • Allocate yourself some extra budget 

It’s important that when you are planning out your ad spend to ensure you are aware some weeks/months will require increased spend in order to compete in the social advertising landscape. Hopefully, you’ve done this and have a contingency budget for the Black Friday period! 

Review your past performing campaigns, audiences and ads to ensure you’re being strategic with where you’re spending your money. There’s a higher shopping intent over this promotional period, so it wouldn’t harm to test a little and maybe go broader with your targeting, if you haven’t already. 

  • Keep a close eye on your competitors!  

It’s something you should be doing frequently anyway, however, ensure you look at competitors' activity to help inspire your campaigns and ways you can look to increase conversion rates ahead of sales. It’s always worth noting what your competition is up to, what promotions they are running, when they go into sale or promotion - all of this is great when analysing your own performance against industry benchmarks!

  • Get your audiences in order 

If you’ve been running campaigns for a while you should have an idea of what audiences work best for your brand. However, one thing to ensure is that your customer lists are up to date! You may have a more up to date subscribers list you can upload and take advantage of within retargeting focused campaigns. 

We already covered this above, but don’t be scared to go broader with your targeting over this this time - especially on Meta at the moment, with interests being stripped, it’s recommended to try to do more with less. However, if you are going to test this, ensure you have nailed your creative! 

  • Stand out from the crowd

You’ve got to stand out in more ways than one. Firstly, the promotion itself… is it competitive? Is it beneficial to the customer? 

When it comes to creative, is it visually enough to ‘beat the scroll’? You need to stop your customers in their tracks with enough to entice them to a) notice your brand and message and b) click through your ads.

Another thing to consider, which many forget about.. ensure you have also optimised your creatives for the relevant placements your ads will be shown, i.e. Instagram Stories, Feed etc. Are you using video? Make sure it’s optimised for mobile!

 

If you’re looking for more advice on nailing your paid social campaigns, we’ve covered it all in our recent ‘Selling on Social’ series. Learn more about making the most of creatives and formats using the button below!

Read our 'Selling on Social: Making the most of formats & creatives' blog!