Between budget-conscious consumers who are hunting for deals earlier than ever and increasingly frantic competition for holiday sales, both in-store and online, the clock is ticking if you want to make the most of 2024’s busiest shopping season.
In fact, Gallup’s 2023 research indicated that 24% of US consumers last year started their holiday shopping as early as September.
That leaves you just weeks to plan a winning marketing approach that will have consumers flocking to your brand. With the elevated costs of paid media placements, you also need to use your budget effectively and strategically to ensure that your campaign isn’t lost in the crowd of Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions.
To help you start on the right foot, Major Tom’s in-house paid media experts have five proven Black Friday tips for brands that will help your paid media marketing stand out — and help your business grow well beyond the holiday shopping season.
First, the good news: your potential customers are likely to start the Black Friday shopping season with a sense of urgency and excitement. They know that this is their chance to find the year’s best deals — and that they won’t last forever — so they’re likely to encounter your ads with a higher-than-normal intent to purchase.
Your job is to capitalize on that sense of urgency throughout your paid media marketing.
How?
First, be sure to highlight limited-time offers in your ad creative and copy, including deals with limited availability or low stock. The fear of missing out is a powerful motivator, and if you put a specific deadline on a deal that customers are already interested in, they’re less likely to wait for a purchase.
Google’s Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) also offer some great tools to help you lean into this sense of urgency, like dynamic countdowns. These let your audience know exactly how long they have left to claim a deal. Generally, though, make sure the language in your ads puts the discounts and deadlines directly in front of your audience.
You can find a few of our other tips for your Google campaigns in our guide to preparing for the holiday season.
Extras like rotating flash sales that run alongside your main promotions can also further heighten that sense of urgency and keep customers checking in throughout the campaign.
With that said, you need to ensure your Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals actually deserve the fanfare.
Discerning customers will know if your campaign is all hype and no substance. For example, just claiming that a regular monthly discount is a special, one-time only, highest-ever price reduction will teach customers that they can’t trust your advertising, even if it wins a sale or two. Once that trust is lost, you’ve undercut the impact of all your future spending.
With the extended Black Friday season stretching a little further every year, you also need to manage audience exhaustion and burnout. Don’t overdo it — be strategic with your placements and ad spend to ensure that customers don’t tune out before your main deals go live.
Plan some space between previous promotions and your Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, and they’re more likely to feel like an event for your audience, rather than the latest in an endless procession of unremarkable discounts.
The more substance you have behind your paid media promotion, the more your audience will respond to the campaign.
Of course, that sense of urgency cuts both ways.
Once the holiday shopping season begins, time is tight, the cost of paid media placements starts to increase, and you have limited opportunities to update your approach if something isn’t working — or if you notice a new opportunity.
To that end, you need to prepare in advance to make fast, effective, and data-driven decisions during your campaign.
Do you have the tools in place to monitor audience behaviors in real-time? Even with Google walking back its plans for third-party cookie deprecation, first-party conversion tracking offers more accurate — and comprehensive — measurement for the effectiveness of your marketing efforts across channels.
Setting up proper tracking, let alone turning that data into meaningful audience insights, takes time, and if you don’t have a clear analytics plan ready, you’ll be left flailing once the Black Friday season is underway.
While some insights from previous holiday campaigns are still relevant this year, consumer behavior is changing constantly, even over the life of your campaign.
Responding to those changes can make the difference between wasting your budget and stellar results. Be sure to monitor ad performance as your campaigns are running, using A/B testing to refine your creative assets and copy, update targeting parameters, and adjust your budget allocation to maximize ROI.
At Major Tom, we also leverage Dashboards to provide real-time blended data, helping you get a complete picture of your campaigns at a glance. Along with using conversational AI to quickly understand trends across campaigns, we can make agile, data-driven decisions that help you quickly adapt and optimize.
For more information on understanding your paid media data, check out our guide to decoding your PPC metrics.
Or elevate your ad strategy with our advanced look at driving paid media ROI.
Whether you’re updating your website or building out your paid media campaigns, your audience’s needs and pain points should inform all of your decisions. You’d be amazed at the number of times businesses think they’re being audience-centric when they’ve in fact fallen back into brand-first decisions. And if you haven’t performed the user research to understand what your audience wants, you’re just taking a best guess.
Every so often, take a moment to challenge decisions and be a devil’s advocate for different perspectives. This will help ensure that your rationale always goes back to the audience’s needs.
While incorporating programmatic advertising can help optimize your targeting and dynamically personalize the creative in your ads, you still need to ensure that your copy variations and creative assets resonate with the audience’s specific desires and pain points.
For example, maybe you sell incredibly effective skincare. But if your audience is looking for an all-natural ingredients list and ethical business practices — and you don’t address that in your ads — even the most impressive execution will fall flat.
Ask yourself, what does the audience need from your product? All of your creative should put the answer front and center.
You can also support your campaign through social proof, turning your audience into effective advocates for your brand. If you have reviews, testimonials, or other compelling customer stories available, be sure to integrate them into your ads.
This sort of positive word-of-mouth helps build trust and credibility — and can be one of the most powerful motivators for consumers trying to choose between multiple similar brands during the crowded Black Friday season.
Still building that sort of customer support? Give your existing audience an extra incentive to get involved! For example, you could offer extra discounts or early access to sales for long-term customers, rewarding their brand loyalty and giving your new customers a reason to stick around after the holidays.
Social media promotion or giveaways can also help to build additional hype for your campaign, leveraging existing customers to amplify your paid media efforts.
One particular trend to watch out for in 2024 is consumer behavior shifting away from brand loyalty. Between rising costs and stretched spending power, potential shoppers will be even more discerning about whether a Black Friday deal actually offers enough to buy.
In fact, 70% of shoppers are expected to be more mindful of where they spend their money this year, seeking out the best possible value even if that means switching from brands they’ve supported in the past. (Source: Google Event: 2024 International Holiday Readiness).
To align with this trend, concentrate on implementing tactics that enhance perceived value, like clear price comparisons, free shipping, or extra bonuses that you offer for purchases of a certain size.
Just as importantly, ensure that you’re clearly communicating that extra value through your media channels. Don’t wait to surprise users with a BOGO or gift-with-purchase at the checkout — use your campaigns to put it in the spotlight.
On a similar note, the most successful Black Friday campaigns plan for a prospective customer’s entire journey — including all the different channels where they might encounter your brand, and what they’ll do after they click through an ad.
While it’s true that Black Friday audiences tend to be closer to purchase (and while paid search has proven to be one of the biggest sales drivers during Cyber Week), you should tailor some portion of your ads to different stages of the funnel, from awareness to brand consideration to that final sale.
This doesn’t have to be done manually. Dynamic ads can adjust based on users’ behavior and previous interactions with your brand (product or service page visits, for example), personalizing their content to highlight offerings that have already grabbed viewers’ attention.
And once you’ve won a purchase, do you have a plan to bring them back? Incentives for returning customers, or additional offerings in exchange for an email, say?
Investing in the customers you’ve already won can help turn Black Friday business into evergreen support for your brand, and give you a head start next holiday season.
Of course, it’s increasingly rare that a customer’s full journey to a Black Friday sale will take place on one device — or that encountering your ads on a single channel will convince them to buy.
In fact, your potential Black Friday shoppers are browsing and considering their options online, in-person, and on social media. Perhaps most importantly, they’re spending time in mobile apps. In fact, the majority of both Black Friday and Cyber Week sales in 2023 came from mobile devices. If you want to see meaningful results this year, that means you need to cater your campaigns to users in mobile web browsers and other apps.
Consider how you can tailor your creative assets to these different formats and platforms. For example, are your visual assets available in different formats, so you can optimize ads for each channel? Have you tailored your copy to deliver the most important message in the space available on each platform? Do they drive to a mobile-optimized storefront, so that users won over by an ad can easily make a purchase?
If your ads are illegible or awkward to navigate on different devices, you’ll alienate a growing portion of your audience.
You also need to make sure that your campaign is consistent across all channels, building a seamless experience for users that will help familiarize them with your brand and holiday offers. If their experience is radically different across channels, your campaigns will struggle to build on each other and move users toward a purchase.
Also, don’t rule out growing new channels like Connected TV (CTV), where your ad spending can leverage the authority of legacy media while reaching the massive audience of cord-cutters and streaming TV viewers. Brands are increasingly aware of the opportunities offered by this format, with CTV ad spending poised to grow by 20% in 2024 alone.
Finally, while it’s easy to be laser-focused on sales targets during the holiday shopping season, remember that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a great opportunity to build long-term equity in your brand.
Major Tom advocates for a balanced approach during the holiday season, splitting your budget between brand-building and performance marketing efforts.
This does two very important things for your holiday campaigns.
First, it leverages your brand’s existing values, identity, and positioning to stand out from competitors. That’s especially important when you can’t beat them with deals and discounts alone. Two brands offering 50% off a popular product might be interchangeable for a prospective customer. But compelling brand-building helps build an emotional connection that they can invest in when the discount doesn’t set you apart.
This kind of customer affinity and loyalty won’t come from a campaign that’s solely focused on sales. Want to know more? Get our essential tips for an effective brand strategy that will help you build stronger relationships with your customers.
Second, it ensures that the budget you spend now will continue to pay dividends long after the holiday shopping season is over. This helps build steady growth and revenue, bringing audiences back long after the Black Friday discounts have disappeared. Structure your campaigns correctly, and every ad is more than a push toward your sales goals for the season — it’s an investment into the health of your brand.
This helps turn your holiday budget into long-term gains for your business, boosting brand recall and helping you build towards bigger wins with next year’s marketing.
For all the opportunities it offers, Black Friday is perhaps the most saturated time of the year when it comes to media marketing. Giving customers 50-60% off is table stakes, but it won’t help your brand cut through the noise.
Be sure to stick to your larger business goals, and remember what your brand actually stands for — and what you offer your audience. Build your holiday campaign for that audience, and remember that, if you do your job, they’ll still be watching after the Black Friday and Cyber Monday frenzy has ended.
For more tips on building an impactful paid media campaign, read our blog on advanced tips for superior paid media ROI.