The Black Friday/Cyber Monday period isn’t too far off. For most brands this is the busiest and most important time of the year, so getting your digital marketing right during this period is crucial.

Over the past few years, paid social media marketing has played a huge role in most brand’s Black Friday campaigns, and this year will be no different. We’ve compiled some tips for getting your Black Friday campaigns right, with the first tip being quite timely…

Have you started planning yet? If not, why not!

Black Friday may still be a couple of months away, but you need to start planning for it now! What’s your killer message, what creative are you going to use to convey that message, what’s your budget split between channels (we’ll come onto that more later). All this and more needs to be decided now, so you can hit the ground running when your campaign goes live.

Utilise more than one channel

Gone are the days when Meta (Facebook) was the only effective social media channel where you could run your Black Friday paid social media campaigns. Tik Tok is in town now and a lot of brands will be utilising it this year. Some brands may actually spend more on the channel than Facebook.

If you haven’t started running any Tik Tok campaigns but are considering adding it to your Black Friday marketing mix, we suggest getting some awareness campaigns running asap. You need to find your audience on the channel before you start pushing out sales messages. It’s also very important any ads you create for Tik Tok are native to the platform, don’t go putting unedited tv ads on there, they won’t work!

In addition to Facebook & Tik Tok, you could look at testing Pinterest. You might be able to find a more niche audience on there that isn’t on Facebook or Tik Tok.

Don’t start your activity too late…

A lot of brands make the mistake of turning on their campaigns on Black Friday. Unfortunately, this means their campaigns will still be in the ‘Learning Phase’, the period before an ad reaches enough conversions (usually around 50) for it to be running effectively.

To make sure your campaigns are out of the learning phase for the Black Friday period, start your campaigns a few days before. DO NOT make any major changes to your ads once it’s gone live otherwise your campaign will go straight back into the learning phase.

Engaging creative

It’s so important to get your creative right, especially during this period. There’s going to be so much competition in the newsfeed, CPM’s are going to be very high, so you have to make sure your creative stands out.

Try using the period before Black Friday to test out different creatives/copy/ad types, so you have some learnings to go off when it comes to putting together the ads you’re going to run on Black Friday & Cyber Monday. Also, don’t forget to make sure your creative matches each placement you have turned on. If it looks odd, or out of place, it won’t get clicked on!

Go Dynamic if you can…

If you’re an e-commerce business and you haven’t got a product catalogue, do your best to get one set-up before Black Friday. This will open up the opportunity to run dynamic retargeting campaigns over the Black Friday period, which in my experience is one of the most effective campaign types on Facebook. You can retarget users who’ve viewed or added to cart with the exact product that they’ve been looking at. You can also build collection ads, which basically has a cover video or image that can include an offer or discount code, something to push the user to purchase a product that they’re clearly interested in.

You can do a similar thing on Tik Tok as well, having a catalogue of your products on the platform will mean you can run collection ads, which are very much like those found on Facebook.

Summary

To be honest, the period before Black Friday is just as, if not more, important than the big period itself. It’s a time to make sure your brand is in the front of your audience’s mind, a time to test and a time to plan. If you don’t use this time, your ads likely won’t be successful on Black Friday. There’s time to rectify that… but it is running out.