With almost 50% of sales being driven by Paid Search (including Shopping), Organic Search and Paid Social during Black Friday weekend – it is as important as ever to make sure you’re ready to capture the right audience at the right time, on the right channel.
Year on year, TikTok, YouTube and Paid Shopping saw the biggest increases in revenue being attributed to their channels. Bing continues to see a year-on-year increase in ad spend and revenue, but like YouTube and TikTok has also grown in market share in the last 2 years – so this growth outside of Google is significant.
Building your audience
Preparation is arguably the most important element of any Black Friday campaign. Ensuring your Ads are being served to a highly targeted audience is critical for optimising performance and the months leading up to Black Friday present a great opportunity for brands to collect this invaluable audience data.
While maximising revenue on this year’s Black Friday will naturally be a key focus, this year’s event also presents an opportunity to get ahead of the game. Use your CRM and website data to build data for previous sales purchasers.
The relationship between short-term profitability and customer lifetime value is a key consideration for any brand on Black Friday. This may not work for a typical single purchase brand but brands with strong returning customer numbers can use Black Friday to grow their customer base and then focus on growth with a bigger pool of customers.
We have also tested successfully in the past having a lead generator on the Black Friday page, which our SEO friends suggest you keep live all year round. Make sure you’re using your CRM platform to build this audience and move this over to Meta and Google Ads – if these users turn to search again, you can be there present with your ad copy. I suspect you will see a higher ROAS from these users too.
Your digital shop window
Combining Paid Search with Google Shopping can be an effective tactic for brands during the BFCM weekend. The visual nature of Google Shopping enables brands to showcase their products in all their glory and provides essentially a shop window online.
Social, Performance Max and YouTube can be a brilliant way to capture new users during the research phase of purchasing, as well as establishing your sales period.
UGC that promotes your product and shows how wonderful it is goes an extremely long way to engaging new customers as they see the benefits, as well as how your products look in real life.
Black Friday bidding
Due to the increase in traffic, brands should expect to invest additional budget in Paid Media channels throughout the BFCM weekend. How much by depends on your position within the competitive landscape but it’s important to ensure you allocate enough budget in order to not cut off spend. Monitoring performance across the week and having different tactics in place depending on initial performance will ensure you are using this increased budget effectively and optimising ROI.
Putting the ‘key’ in keywords
Finally, selecting which keywords to focus on is another vital piece of the puzzle. While it may be tempting to invest in generic terms such as ‘Black Friday’ or ‘Black Friday Sale’ this approach will lead to significant wastage and is very unlikely to drive conversions or sales. Specificity is the name of the game so be as targeted as you can around the keywords that are relevant to your brand.
TikTok’s ad platform allows you to apply paid search keyword logic in a paid social setting. Monitor popular hashtags, content themes and trends
If you’re a brand looking to maximise your Paid Media strategy for this year’s Cyber Week please get in touch!