As it counts down to the holiday season, one date especially has businesses across the globe buzzing with excitement and anticipation: Black Friday.
It has become synonymous with incredible discounts, frenzied shopping sprees, and, well, massive profits. For brick-and-mortar stores and online retailers, Black Friday marks a pivotal moment in the annual sales calendar, when the right strategy can lead to a revenue windfall.
With that in mind, your Black Friday social media strategy isn’t just a supplementary add-on; it’s a core element of your business’s success.
Retailers who understand that social media holds the keys to customer engagement can reach a wider audience, generate excitement and anticipation for their Black Friday sale, and drive sales. This article will show you how.
Why You Need a Black Friday Social Media Strategy
Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. It’s an excellent opportunity for retailers to reach wider audiences and generate massive sales.
Businesses of all types participate in Black Friday sales. You could be selling ethical fashion products, a cutting-edge cloud PBX solution, or even Barbies—it doesn’t matter. If you offer products or services, Black Friday is a golden opportunity to attract customers with enticing deals and promotions.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
And what’s better than social media for maximizing your visibility and engagement while helping you generate leads (and close them)?
Social media can be the ultimate catalyst for your Black Friday success, allowing you to connect with loyal customers and potential buyers in ways no other marketing channel can match.
Social media platforms boast billions of active users worldwide, making them the perfect stage for your Black Friday performance. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter open your business to local and international audiences.
But it’s more than just about broadcasting your offers.
To emphasize the power of social media in your Black Friday strategy, consider leveraging social media statistics. Tracking metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns. These statistics can guide your content and posting strategies to ensure you’re maximizing your reach and impact.
Social media also offers interaction between your business and your customers, enhancing the overall shopping experience and building trust. It lets you engage with customers in real-time, answer inquiries, provide personalized recommendations, and address concerns as soon as they crop up.
It also helps you set the stage for the shopping frenzy associated with Black Friday. An effective social media strategy creates a sense of urgency around your sale. Teasers, countdowns, and sneak peeks can build excitement and drive traffic to your website or walk-in store.
11 Steps to Creating an Effective Social Media Strategy
Here are ten vital tips to incorporate into your social media strategy to ensure that this Black Friday is a profitable one.
Start Early
The early bird catches the worm. Black Friday is highly competitive, and beginning your campaign early is a great way to stand out.
Early campaigns create a sense of anticipation, gently nudging customers to start thinking about their shopping lists. Plus, you’ll be establishing yourself as a Black Friday destination, a go-to source for the best deals.
Some retailers set the stage for Black Friday campaigns halfway through November or even earlier by mentioning the term in preceding discounts and promotions. A week to the date, “early Black Friday sales” begin to pop up, with businesses eagerly laying the foundation for the grand shopping event.
Image sourced from Twitter
Start teasing your deals and discounts in the weeks leading up to Black Friday without revealing too much. Promptly engage with customers who inquire about your deals and provide information to maintain their interest.
Whether you’re offering physical products, digital services, or anything in between, the power of social media in your Black Friday strategy remains unparalleled.
Define Your Ideal Customer
You should build any marketing campaign around your ideal customers, but this is especially important for Black Friday. The heightened competition and the vast array of deals and promotions mean you must target your messaging precisely.
That way, you can craft Black Market deals your ideal buyers see and address their needs. Plus, it helps you to determine the right social media platforms to focus on. We’ll discuss this later.
Do your research. Several existing resources can help you research your ideal customer. Surveys, customer interviews, and social media analytics provide insights into demographics, interests, and shopping habits.
Then, create your buyer persona—a fictional representative of your ideal customer. For instance, if you sell body-positive gym wear, your buyer persona could be a 25-year-old who wants to find affordable and stylish gym clothes that fit her body type.
It works even if you serve more than a niche audience. With different personas, you could create different promotions and run them for each market segment.
Plan and Schedule Your Content
A lot of time goes into brainstorming and researching content ideas that are creative and engaging to your target audience. Knowing when to post them and following through can also be pretty tedious.
That’s why meticulous planning and scheduling pay off significantly when executing a successful Black Friday social media strategy. Automation plays a key part when strategizing your Black Friday content schedule.
Think about it as you would setting up direct deposit for employees—it may require some initial effort, but ultimately streamlines the process and ensures that everything is done automatically, exactly when it needs to be done.
Consistent posting is key to maintaining your audience’s attention and excitement. And when you schedule content in advance, you’re making sure there are no gaps or delays in your messaging.
Brainstorm a list of topics you could write or create content about, such as product spotlights, countdown posts, and “Flashback Fridays.” Don’t be afraid to be creative with your content ideas.
You could draw up a simple content plan on programs like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Alternatively, you could use a social media automation tool like Bulkly.
Scout the Competition
Social media competitor analysis involves examining your competitors’ social media activities to understand their strengths and weaknesses. And how those compare to yours. In simple terms, it lets you assess how your competitors are approaching Black Friday and identify areas to outperform them.
What kind of content are they posting about Black Friday? You could discover content ideas and identify content gaps. Just as importantly, how often are they posting?
That said, don’t just copy your competitors’ deals. Offer something unique that will make your brand stand out. A distinctive value proposition that builds on your competitors will help you stand out and draw in shoppers.
Use Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags can improve your social media effectiveness by up to 40%. They can be confusing starting out. But once you get the hang of them, you start to see the results coming in.
Hashtags categorize your content, making it easier for social media users to find them. When you use relevant hashtags, your posts will show up in search results for those hashtags. That way, those interested in what you’re posting are more likely to see your content.
Image sourced from Instagram
For instance, if you offer online phone services, a hashtag cluster for Black Friday posts could look something like this: #BlackFriday #OnlineCalling #OnlinePhoneDeals #CyberMonday.
Don’t just use the same hashtags over and over again. A wider variety of hashtags will reach a wider audience. At the same time, don’t use too many, as this can make your posts look spammy.
Select the Right Platforms
Around 75% of Internet users research brands and products on social media. Maybe there was a time when a simple Facebook page could do wonders. These days, your business needs a solid and diverse social media presence coupled with a concerted effort to produce meaningful results.
But with over a dozen relevant social media platforms, attempting to be everywhere at once will stretch you thin.
Instead, you should focus on the platforms most relevant to your target audience. It’s where you can maximize your efforts and get the most results.
Consider your industry and the type of content you plan to create for your campaign. Some platforms, like Instagram and Pinterest, are image-centric and ideal for showcasing visually appealing products. If you own a fashion store, this is the way to go. Others, like LinkedIn, may be better for B2B services.
Create Eye-Catching Content
Search “Black Friday” a week before the event, and millions of social media posts flood your screen. Your content needs to be engaging to stand out from the crowd.
Plain walls of text just won’t cut it, and your competitors know this.
People are more drawn to visual content and they boost engagement, so make sure your posts include images and videos. As for the media, it should be eye-catching to captivate your audience. Bold colors, high-resolution product shots, and creative design can make your posts pop.
Image sourced from Twitter
They don’t even have to be all serious. Social media-savvy brands are enjoying a love-in with older and younger audiences alike. So don’t be afraid to use memes and gifs, as long as you’re not being offensive or tacky.
Consider a Black Friday theme. You could include festive graphics, exclusive banners, or promotional templates to convey the limited-time nature of your deals.
And if you’re seeking to evoke emotions and create connections, storytelling is the way to go. For instance, you could craft customer stories showcasing beneficiaries of previous Black Fridays.
Run Contests And Giveaways
You can do more than just build anticipation for the D-day. How about some excitement around Black Friday right now? Pre-Black Friday contests and giveaways can generate buzz well before the big day arrives.
Keep the rules simple to understand and easy to follow. For instance, they could qualify by liking, commenting, and sharing a post. Tagging a friend or creating user-generated content are other ways to enter and spread the word about your upcoming Black Friday deals.
Your contests and giveaways could be in the form of a Grand Prize, where one lucky winner goes home with the pot. Alternatively, you could go with sweepstakes, so several winners go home happy.
Use Different Social Network Features
The easy way is to write a regular post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok—but there are several unique platform features you could be exploring.
You could use relevant hashtags to get your Black Friday promotions on the Explore page. The result’s not certain, but when it works, you get a ton of free promo. Stories and Reels are other examples of features you can exploit to reach audiences who may not scroll through their feeds to reach your posts.
LinkedIn has carousels, where users can view images or videos by swiping across them, and so do Facebook and Instagram. The image below shows streaming platform Hulu using the feature for its Black Friday social media campaign.
Image sourced from Facebook
Run Ad Campaigns
Whether you’re a PaaS providing alternatives to hosting Kubernetes, k8s observability solutions or a skincare brand with acne solutions, your target audience is out there somewhere. And ad campaigns could be the key to effectively reaching and connecting with them.
Social media ad campaigns let you target your ideal audience through tailored ads to reach the most relevant and potential customers. They drive traffic to your website or platform, increasing the chances of conversion and boosting sales.
Ad campaigns work for towering multinationals and small businesses alike. For instance, Walmart, one of the world’s largest retailers, runs ad campaigns to showcase its Black Friday deals to a vast and diverse audience.
Image sourced from Twitter
In 2020, that involved a 6-day campaign that included flash sales, discounts, sales countdowns, and more.
Don’t forget to track the results of your campaign to know what’s working and what’s not. Artificial intelligence tools can be particularly beneficial for making data-driven adjustments.
Create FOMO
FOMO, the fear of missing out, is a powerful emotion that can be used to drive sales. Creating a sense of urgency in your social media marketing encourages your audience to act quickly and take advantage of your deals.
For instance, using FOMO to market remote desktop for Windows software could involve offering:
- Limited-time deals: Offer a discount on your software for a limited period of time, such as 24 hours or the weekend of Black Friday.
- Limited stock deals: A limited number of licenses at a discounted price.
- Scarcity language: Throw in terms like “last chance,” “while supplies last,” and “don’t miss out” to intensify a sense of urgency.
Image sourced from Facebook
Countdown timers and exclusive previews are other approaches you can incorporate to keep your audience anxious to take advantage of your deals.
Profitable Black Friday Sales Through Social Media
Black Friday is not just a means to rake in massive sales figures. It is also an opportunity to build brand awareness, generate leads, and create a sense of excitement around your products or services. It’s also a great chance to increase the customer experience.
By harnessing the power of social media, you’ll ensure that this high-stakes shopping event is a win-win situation for your bottom line and customers.
But don’t forget other channels, like email marketing, SEO, and in-store promotions. They can complement your social media efforts, ultimately leading to Black Friday success for your business.
