My recommendation is around promotional strategy and execution. Having a strategy is fundamental, but it’s also as important to ensure its successful execution.
A few things to think about are the attractiveness of the campaign, feasibility, and difficulty to execute.
Make sure to have distinctive offers that can drive consistently high traffic through the weekend, if you won’t be running the same campaign for the entire period. And keep them simple enough to improve your odds for a positive execution.
Communicate your offer to customers multiple times, and from different marketing channels, to expand your reach, and minimize fatigue, especially when pushing your offers on a daily basis.
Ensure you have the tools to properly execute. Discuss with your team the potential areas where it can fail, revise the plan, and be prepared for emergencies. Your initial plan may not go as expected, but swiftly executing a less-than-ideal plan can still yield better results than not running anything at all.
Marcio Chiaradia – Director of Marketing
Branded Online
Black Friday and the subsequent weeks leading up to it are crucial to get right for a successful Black Friday period.
My number one tip for eCommerce success over the Black Friday period is incredibly simple but is often overlooked, be prepared and prebuild your promotions in advance just in case alterations are needed or promotions completely change. I’d strongly suggest all advertisers build in their seasonal ad copy using a business data feed, allowing promotions and content to be changed across the board quickly and easily on Search ads. For shopping, be prepared and ensure that you have a supplemental feed (or data sent to merchant centre) that has the relevant information needed to run sale prices or be picked up for specific product promotions. Lastly, if you’re really prepared and your promotions aren’t changing, get your promotions uploaded to Merchant Centre ready for the start of the Black Friday season way in advance.
Have everything promotional prepared for Black Friday will allow you to concentrate on what really matters over the holiday season, leaving you time to optimise accounts, push high-performance products and ultimately increase your profitability overall.
Nick Handley – Head of Performance Marketing
Fluid Digital
If you want to make Black Friday a success you need to do something more than just offering an arbitrary discount. Black Friday fatigue is setting in with consumers. A day has turned into a week, now a week has turned into a fortnight and consumers are getting immune to the discounts but also increasingly wary of the true value of the discounts on offer.
Combine this with pre-Christmas sales, Cyber Monday sales and even Amazon Prime Day and consumers are increasingly aware and confident of being able to bag a bargain all year round.
If you want to win this Black Friday, do something different and authentic to your brand that doesn’t solely rely on discounts. Two great examples would be Patagonia and their #loveourplanet campaign that gave 100% of their Black Friday Sales to charitable causes and saw them record sales of five times their expectation. Or Outdoor retailer REI and their #OptOutside campaign that saw them shun Black Friday, closing stores and e-commerce operations, giving staff the day off and encouraging us all to get outside. Different, authentic and great PR value.
Neil Hannam – Search Marketing Manager
Rock Kitchen Harris
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.
