Build up your online audience early. The week of Black Friday is over-saturated with ads, therefore getting an early start on your online ad campaigns can give you an advantage. With this saturation, you’re competing with ad space in two ways:
- The amount of information potential customers can retain, and
- The additional costs to run your ads as you are competing with more businesses to appear in feeds and search results.
The rule of seven in marketing says someone needs to hear/see your message seven times before they will act. So if you’re leaving all of your marketing for the week of Black Friday, you’re likely not giving your ads enough time to perform as well as they could.
Sharlene Reimer – Digital Marketing Strategist
Graphic Intuitions
My experience is more heavily weighted toward the marketing side of the holiday season, and in that vein, the biggest tip I have is to be leveraging data well in advance of the Black Friday and holiday seasons. Too often I see companies heading into this critical period with the same general marketing plan they ran last year (or the last 5 years), with maybe a few tweaks to stay current, and then using data either during or after the holidays are over to determine “how successful we were.”
What I often don’t see, but that has much more value, is using data on the front end to determine the plan of attack for the holiday season before a dollar is ever spent. And not just “your” data – this should include data from 3rd parties as well. For example, how does a market’s weather pattern impact the success of the holiday season in that market, and how is that going to influence this coming year? Something as simple as this can drive messaging, product focus and even channel selection inside the marketing/media plan. That is, if you’re using data at a deep enough level to understand those impacts. It takes some forethought and some horsepower on the data side, but the benefits can be substantial.
Zack Pike – VP, Data Strategy & Marketing Analytics
Callahan
Get ready to add the brand new Google in-market audiences for Black Friday (released globally in the next few weeks) to your Google campaigns and set them to targeting with a high bid adjustment.
Get your Google promotion extensions setup and pre-approved making sure you use the specially created Black Friday header to make your ads pop against competitors.
Create new Gmail ads (catalogue ad types) and setup custom intent audiences targeting Black Friday keywords and main competitor brand names and URLs. Then layer the new Black Friday in-market audience with a 900% bid modifier.
Steven Johns – Digital Marketing Consultant
Door4
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
