Ep 23: Black Friday / Cyber Week Prep

It’s every e-commerce companies favorite time of the year, Black Friday and Cyber Week. Let’s talk strategy.

Hey everybody, it’s Jim Lastinger. Welcome to Marketing in 10. Hope you’re doing well. Hope everyone’s staying safe and healthy. I’m personally, a little bit under the weather, but we’re powering through, so pardon my scratchy voice a little bit.

Okay. So it’s officially, by the time this episode comes out, it’ll be a week from Black Friday, so Black Friday and Cyber Week are here. And by this point, I’m sure that you’ve all got your promotional ideas ready to go and got all your sales set up and all the coupon codes ready. But now that you’ve got that out of the way, it’s time to start thinking about things from an ad standpoint, if you haven’t already started doing that. So I’ll talk through each of the different marketing channels and tell you what I recommend.

So starting with Google Ads, the first thing, the easy thing, is create promo extensions. That’s an ad extension type called promo extensions. You want to create those for all of your sales. These self expand your real estate on the search result, so it makes your ads look a little bit bigger by adding an extra line underneath it. They do a good job of highlighting your promotions. They don’t show all that often, but when they do show, it appears that they work pretty well. They can show coupon codes and show the active dates that your promos are up. They look really good.

Okay. You’ll also want to update your ad copy on high traffic ad groups. I don’t recommend doing this for all of your ads, but for ad groups that get a decent amount of traffic, it’s really worth the effort to go through and create specific ad copy that highlights your promotions or your sales. So if you’re having a 25% or 20% off sale, for example, putting that in the ad copy really helps drive your click-through rates and your conversion rates. I’ve seen that time and time again. It really, really works. Just be sure that once your promos are over with that you go back to where you were before. The way that I personally do this is I add labels to any temporary ads so that you can quickly come back and find these and turn them off once the promos are over. It’s a good way to keep things organized.

For Facebook ads, you’ll want to create new versions of your ads that highlight the specific promos that you’re running. That means adding copy to the text part of your ads and if you have image ads, you want to consider adding the promo onto the image itself. If you’re running video ads, you’ll want to consider incorporating that text into the video itself, or maybe even having someone talk about that, but you definitely want to make it visible on the video, as well. Highlighting those promos prominently can help create a sense of urgency that can really help drive your sales.

From an SEO standpoint, you can also do prep work there, as well. Specifically, one thing that I like to do is you can update your homepage, titles and metas to draw attention to the major promos that you might be running. Again, if you’re running something like a 20% or 25% off sale, site-wide, I would go ahead and put that in your page title. Once Google processes that and starts showing that on your search results, that will help make your SERP listing stand out a little bit more from your competitors. Just be sure to change it back once the sale is over.

You’ll also want to make sure that you have your product schema updated with any promo pricing that you have. A lot sites this time of year will apply a flat rate discount to all of the products on the site. And if your product schema data includes that new sale price, then that will help you stand out from the competition, if your product data is typically shown on the search results page.

And we talked about product schema back in Episode 22, so go back and listen to that if you haven’t already, I’ll be sure to put a link in the show notes and it’ll be up at jimlastinger.com/22. And that’s about it.

I hope that this year’s is Black Friday and Cyber Week are fantastic for you and you crush your sales goals and set new records, all that kind of good stuff. And that’s it for this week’s episode. I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing in 10, and until then, take care and have a great day.