Commandments of a 2021 Black Friday campaign
You should run an awareness campaign for Black Friday 2021! 🤯 Don’t worry, I haven’t gone bonkers. I can provide some very pragmatic reasons for my bullish opening statement. I decided to write them up after recently discussing Black Friday strategies with our agency’s account manager at the Facebook team. Guess what! He confirmed that this is indeed a viable option to consider.
Reason 1: The competition is crazy!
Going back to Black Friday 2020, it has been one of the most competitive campaign periods ever. Everyone was ramping up advertising spends drastically to land more sales. During the time range, digital advertisers spent 2 to 3 times the daily November average. Alone the Paid Search spend level was up 2.9x; for Social Ads, the factor was 2.1x. More spend means more bidding competition means higher CPC and CPA. For example, the CPC for Facebook maxed out in week 48 of 2020. The measured CPC peak was 84% above the annual average simply because the preferred campaign goal is conversions for all of these campaigns running during the Black Friday period.
Reason 2: Everyone looks for the real deal
According to last year’s data, the deal hunt started earlier than ever, with Prime Day coming first until it culminated in Cyber Monday. The timespan when consumers expect hefty price reductions is getting ever longer. At least it is the entire Black Friday Weekend plus Cyber Week. But not every product has the margin to stand out in the battle of discounts during those days. Every 2nd consumer expects the discount to sit in the range between 26% to 50% off. 21% of consumers even expect more than 50% average discount. You can offer 15% off and free shipping? Don’t even consider running a conversion campaign during the Black Friday period.
Reason 3: Awareness being left aside by the majority of advertisers opens a window of opportunity
Conversion Campaigns are the Red Ocean during the Black Friday period. On the flipside, CPMs of awareness campaigns remain relatively unimpressed by the rally. The timing for building awareness is long enough before premium inventory gets rare in the prelude for Christmas. Ok, to be fair, some advertising partners raise their CPMs in general for Q4 but for the most part, e.g., with Programmatic top of the funnel, contextual direct media buys, or Video Awareness campaigns, you will not experience a significant increase in CPMs. So why not sit back, run a relaxed top-of-funnel campaign for your product, and watch the combat of conversion campaigns from a distance.
So, no conversion campaign this year? Here are 7 commandments if you are doing it anyway
Did you hear that you should not run a Black Friday campaign for more sales? You may have misunderstood me. Black Friday is huge: in 2020, shoppers spent $9 billion online. And the number increases every year. Sure, you can rise to the occasion with a performance campaign if you…
- have a range of convincing deals to offer
- have an attractive and heavily discounted product you can use as a carrot for attaching upsells
- have built your awareness and created remarketing lists before Black Friday
- have the budget to spend 2 to 3 times more than on usual days
- have sufficient bandwidth of creatives ready, from video to static
- have campaign automation in place that will stop underperforming ads
- have done the maths and know that all of the above doesn’t break your calculation to achieve a net positive ROI
… go for it!
If you want to dive deeper into the topic, I have collected some links for you. Enjoy the read, and good luck with your campaigns. If you are looking for support, please do not hesitate to contact me.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1189554/discount-expectations-for-black-friday-united-states/
https://skai.io/blog/black-friday-2020/
https://www.basicthinking.com/facebook-ads-2020/
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/11/08/black-friday-ppc
https://madgicx.com/10-black-friday-cyber-monday-tips-for-facebook-advertisers/
