What Small Businesses Need to Know to Get Started With a Black Friday Campaign
Black Friday is one of those things that small business owners either love or hate.
But fact is that Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday are the days when business (and non profits) can benefit the most from creating a campaign to promote their products or services.
I am a big fan of Black Friday campaigns for small businesses.
In 2020, here are the top 5 things customers looked for the most to make their decisions to shop on Black Friday (source: FinanceOnline.com):
Items on sale (23%)
Being local (18%)
Consumer reviews (15%)
Recommendations (12%)
New things (11%)
Convenience and free shipping are two other highly sought after criteria shoppers consider on Black Friday. And in the past few years shoppers have been avoiding brick and mortar stores and preferring to shop online. This includes a big increase in conversations from mobile devices — hello, Instagram!
But yet, many small business skip Black Friday campaigns altogether, which is unfortunate because they could be leaving a lot of sales on the table that could highly impact their month’s revenue, and even their yearly revenue.
These are some of the limiting beliefs that discourage small businesses and entrepreneurs to take advantage of all the dollars spent on Black Friday:
“Black Friday is too competitive. My offers will get lost in the shuffle”
“I don’t even know how to create a campaign. It will probably be expensive and take way too long”
“If I participate on Black Friday, I will have to heavily discount my products and services and I don’t have the wiggle room to do this”
“If I create a Black Friday campaign, it will diminish my work”
Black Friday can be an amazing opportunity for small businesses and entrepreneurs to make some extra revenue before slowing down for the end of the year.
But many of us will make these common Black Friday mistakes when promoting their small businesses on social media, that I see year after year.
Mistakes Small Businesses Should Avoid on their Black Friday campaigns
1) Have a very short promotion period.
Many people are busy with family in different days that week. By not promoting it long enough, you could have a lot of your audience miss the whole thing.
2) Not posting and emailing your audience enough about your offer.
Most people need so see your offer several times to make a purchase. Consider that many people may be busy for a few days that week and the math won't math. So post and email your audience every day talking about different aspects of your Black Friday promotion and using different engaging pieces of content for it. Don’t forget to also use all platforms you’re in and all Instagram features for this. Not just feed posts. Create Carousels, Instagram Lives, Reels, TikToks and more.
For emails, do not forget to add a soft opt out. A way for your audience to
3) Have a low ticket offer when you have a smaller audience.
Sales is a numbers game. If you have a small audience and your goal is to make some extra revenue, selling 10 things that cost $20 won't tip the scale. But selling 10 things at $97 will be a lot nicer. So bundle products together or create a 1:1 offer to maximize your revenue.
4) Not making it exciting or unique.
A new offer or unique bundle of products is a lot more appealing than a code for $10 OFF. Some ideas are new products - a limited Black Friday batch or opening is a great way to test new products and services, without having to fully working on them and add as an offer to your business.
5) Make your offer too complex.
People don't pay attention to every word in our captions or emails. So making an offer with different discounts for different products or exceptions can get really hard to communicate. Keep it focussed and simple, so people understand what they are getting.
6) Skip Black Friday altogether, if you want to make more money.
Okay, before I comment on this one I want to make sure you know this:
I am not telling anyone who is already busy to do more! You should 100% skip Black Friday if you're already too busy and stretched out too thin. Working until burnout will not help your business succeed. On the contrary.
Now, for those who do have time to create something simple and think they might as well skip because there's too much competition: the amount of people who wants to get deals that day is overwhelmingly bigger than the competition.
So worth a try!
This month of November, we are focussing on helping all our members inside the group with their Black Friday Campaigns. Head here to become a member and get started today!
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Manu Muraro is the founder of Your Social Team, an Instagram training membership and content shop to help social media managers and Instagram savvy women entrepreneurs to beat the algorithm and grow their organic engagement (yes, even in 2021).
This year she also launched Your Template Club, a Canva Template subscription to provide social media managers and Instagram savvy business owners with content templates designed for engagement in their inbox.
Born and raised in Brazil, Manu moved to the U.S. in 2000 right out of college to work for Cartoon Network, where she made an award winning career in creative and strategy. In 2017, Manu started Your Social Team with the mission of helping women entrepreneurs and social media managers grow engagement and sales through Instagram without the overwhelm.