Ep 38: Black Friday/ Cyber Week Ads Prep

On this week's episode of Marketing in 10, we're talking all about Black Friday, Cyber week and how to run ads to your promotions.

Hey, friends. I'm Jim Lastinger. Welcome to Marketing in 10. This is the podcast where I cover a different marketing topic each week and I do it in 10 minutes or less. Today, I'm talking all of about Black Friday and Cyber Week and how the best strategies for running paid ads to promote your business and [inaudible 00:00:47] of your promotions during the holidays. Black Friday and Cyber Week are some of the most important times of the year for advertisers, particularly if you're an e-commerce company. But something I see all the time is that advertisers don't really know how to take advantage of Black Friday, and they don't have a strategy for running ads to take advantage of their promotions. That's what we're going to talk about today. This is my recommendation and this is my strategy for how I approach holiday seasons and this is what I recommend you do in your campaigns.

The very first step in any successful promotion is always the planning phase. You want to make sure you have your promo dates nailed down and schedule the ads and extensions accordingly. Once the promo is over, make sure you go back to your normal ads. You'll never believe how many times I've seen customers just run Black Friday ads all the way until January. It happens all the time. It's always super helpful to have all of your ads and promotions ready to go at least a week beforehand. You don't want to start planning your promos or writing new ad copy on Black Friday. That's a recipe for disaster.

Okay, so first let's talk about the Google ad side. Your approach here is going to depend a bit on what kind of promotions you're running. If you're running something store wide, a promotion that applies to all of your products or services, then you'll want to add promotion extensions with all of the details. I recommend adding the promo extensions at the account level just to keep it simple. These promo extensions, they show up nicely on your text ads and clearly explain your promos. The extra real estate really helps your ads to pop. If it makes sense, I recommend creating new versions of your text ads themselves that include the promo text. Maybe replace one of your headlines or descriptions with details of your promo.

If you're only discounting one or more products, then update the text ads that you use for those products. A more limited approach there might be the best way to go. You can also upload promotions in Google Merchant Center and have those show up in your shopping ads. That's also something you should do, definitely if you're eCommerce.

Okay, so next, let's talk about what to do on the Facebook ads side. For Facebook, you want to make sure that you have your new ads ready to go that heavily emphasize your promotion. You'll want to create new ads specifically for your promos. Display the promotion prominently in your headline, in your call to action. You want to call it out in your text, maybe even put it in your images or videos, just depending on what you have. If you have warm traffic or remarketing campaigns, you'll definitely want to create new ads for your promos there. You want to take those people that already have some knowledge of your brand and tell them, "Okay, we're doing something a little bit special right now." Give them all the more incentive to go ahead and jump into purchasing.

Something you might want to do is I suggest increasing your ad budget for your remarketing campaigns just to make sure that that promo is shown to people that are already interested. Take advantage of it as much as you can. The bottom line is that you want to use all of these options that you have for showing your promotions. It's super busy out there this time of year, and you might have to increase your ad budgets just a little bit just to keep the same level of visibility that you typically get. Since it's busy, you need to make your ad stand out as much as possible so use all the different options that we've talked about here. New ad copy, ad extensions, promo extensions, all of that stuff. It's all going to be important.

I'll have show notes in a transcript available at jimlastinger.com/38. Feel free to reach out there if you have any questions about digital marketing or any of your holiday promotions. I'll be glad to help. If you have two minutes, please rate and review the podcast. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to do that. That really helps me to grow this thing and to help more people.

I have a bonus for all of you listeners. I've created a free guide that shows you exactly how to manage your Google ads accounts in just 30 minutes a week. This is a great guide. It's exactly the process that I teach to my coaching clients. It includes everything you need to run a profitable ad account. You can download it for free at jimlastinger.com/guide. That's jimlastinger.com/guide. I'll also drop a link to this in the show notes.

That's all for this week's episode of Marketing in 10. I'll be back next week with another episode. Until then, take care. Have a great day!