While it’s important to be organized and strategic with start/end times to promotions and monitoring CPC increases by the competition, it can be easy to forget that there’s a real person behind every search or ad impression. You need to understand the context of how your prospective customer is impacted by competitor ads and decision fatigue amongst a flurry of deals and promotions. Stand out against competitor ads with contrasting product images for PLAs or ad headlines with unique CTAs. To combat decision fatigue, make sure you have remarketing campaigns to nurture non-purchasers through different CTAs and creatives.
Gil Hong – Paid Media Strategy
NP Digital
Before Black Fiveday hits, it’s critical that you create a communication plan for your team and your clients. Ideally, all of your campaigns run smoothly and performance exceeds expectations, but what if issues arise? Like, a site outage, ad disapprovals, promo codes not working or your conversion pixel misfiring. Having a communication plan in place that helps you escalate and resolve issues quickly can mean the difference between strong holiday performance and disaster. We recommend that you document the following ahead of Black Fiveday:
- Contact information and responsibilities for all team members, IT staff and vendors
- Planned OOO and vacation times
- Critical dates, like code freeze
- ROAS and spend thresholds where campaigns should be paused
Griffin Roer – Founder
Uproer
My top tip to prepare for Black Fiveday weekend is to take care of the quick wins first. For the e-commerce clients I work with, this starts with auditing each channel of our marketing strategy.
Some things I’ve looked at this month to prepare some of my clients, for example, would be:
- Finding areas that are wasting our money or underperforming. This has been things like implementing negative keywords across an account to eliminate irrelevant clicks to moving budgets to the highest performing campaigns or channels.
- Finding quick wins for website conversion rate. I like to think to myself “what does a customer want/need to know to buy this product?” Then move that information to the top of the page. Oftentimes this is price, images/video, reviews, a brief product description and add to cart button. Make sure those key elements are easy to find, especially on mobile.
- Looking at historical sales data from the weekend. When I have historical data, I review what worked well last year and roll those things into the upcoming year’s strategy. I don’t try to reinvent the wheel each year, I take what worked, and build upon it.
The quick wins you find will help push the needle on your Black Friday strategy, regardless of what you’re selling, and they can be found within the data you’ve gathered over the past year if you know where to look.
Nolan Barger – Internet Marketing Analyst
WebFX
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.
