4 Black Friday & Cyber Monday Marketing Tips for Small Business

By: Johana M. Caba, M.A. 

A Content Marketing Strategy is one of the best ways to get some traffic to your website and guide your leads down the Content Marketing Funnel to your call-to-action. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the two huge spending holidays that businesses and consumers wait for all year long. It's the time of year where people spend money on Holiday Gifts and splurge on items like TVs and laptops. During this time, businesses join the madness by offering great discounts, free shipping all month, and great bundle packages. So, let us discuss some marketing tips that you can easily implement to increase your engagement rates and potential sales. 

Analyze Your Marketing Efforts
First thing is to analyze your previous marketing efforts. You should already know what who your target audience  is, where they spend most of their time online, their purchasing habits, etc. We went over how to create your own Social Media Marketing Plan for the Holidays in the last post; so, for this post, we will skip over those initial steps and start from the bottom of your marketing plan, which should be to evaluate your campaign. At this time, you should be looking at what you  have done in the past in terms of marketing for the Holidays. Did it work? Were you successful? Did you increase your leads and sales? These are questions you should be asking in order to move forward with a better idea of what strategies you will use again and which ones you will change. After you analyze your marketing efforts, you should have a better idea of what to do next. For example, will you be spending some money from your budget on social media ads or on influencer marketing? Tip: Micro-influencers might do a better job at getting you engagement, leads and sales depending on your industry or niche. Then, think about what it is that you want to accomplish this year. If this is a last minute plan that you want to create and implement for the Holidays, then it's time to get working! 

Read the Room
This year has been very hard on families and businesses. Economically, we are not at the place we would have been last year because of the global pandemic which has altered our way of living and caused widespread job-loss. Some of us have lost loved ones, some of us have survived the virus, and others have tried to be careful, wear masks and practice social distancing. I'm going over this because it's important that you read the room for any marketing plan. There have been many examples in the past of organizations/businesses that did not read the room before launching a campaign. Remember H&M's "coolest monkey in the jungle" hoodie scandal? And, most recently, Kim Kardashian-West's tone-deaf private island birthday party posts. You might think, what do Kim Kardashian and H&M have to do with reading the room? Well, H&M decided to move forward with a racist ad campaign that alienated customers and used an African American child to model a racist hoodie. And, as a businesswoman and business owner, Kim Kardashian decided to post her privileged and ultra-rich lifestyle posts during a global pandemic when people are struggling to put food on the table while others are dying from the virus.  The point I'm trying to make is that it is very important to be aware of socio-economic trends and events occurring before launching any campaign. You need to make sure that you are not bringing negative attention to your business from your campaign. Yes, I know that not everything is going to make everyone happy all the time, but it is important that you do your research and read the room to minimize backlash and negative feedback. 

Planning & Affiliate Marketing
It's not too late to start planning your Holiday campaign. Yes, November is next week, but that doesn't mean you can't launch a successful campaign. Yes, you procrastinated and that's why you are reading this post, but you can still plan great content, create a great strategy and get your sales. After researching, knowing your target audience, reading the room, evaluating past campaigns, and setting your goals, it's time to plan. Here, you are deciding what content to post, what ads to run, where to advertise, etc. If you are a business that sells physical products, then you need to make sure your website is up-do-date and that there are no dead links. Your plan will involve promoting your products through your social media pages, having sales and discounts, offering free shipping and getting micro-influencers to promote your products. You can always reach out to micro-influencers via their emails, websites and social media accounts. Offer them an affiliate link and settle on a percentage of sales that they will get for promoting your products. Affiliate marketing is the way to go here because you aren't spending any of your own money from the budget, instead you are paying them a percentage of the product price after the customer purchases it. For more information on Affiliate Marketing for Small Business, visit my post explaining everything. 

Social Media Ads Strategy
My last tip is to use social media ads. Utilizing ads is a great way to reach your target audience, get more views and engagement, and guide more people to your website. The great thing about social media is that you don't need a multi-million dollar budget to get to your target audience. It is very effective even with a very low budget. My best tips are to create engaging graphics to promote through social media ad campaigns or through boosting posts. I always suggest boosting posts that are performing well organically because they will continue to perform well after being promoted. When creating an ad campaign through social media, keep in  mind that you need to know and understand your target audience. You can select geo-targeting which will allow you to target people within a certain area. This is good to do for businesses with physical locations. For online-based businesses, it is better to focus on expanding reach and guiding leads to your website rather than on geo-targeting. Another tip is to spend your ad money on the platforms that matter for your business specifically. This means that you do not have to spend all your money on every single platform. For example, some businesses might find that they receive more engagement on Pinterest than on Twitter. So, for this business it's better to focus on advertising on Pinterest. Same goes for other social media platforms. If your engagement and leads are acquired through 1 or 2 platforms compared to all 4 or 5 that you may use, then focus on spending your ad money on those specific platforms. 

I hope that these 4 quick tips help you create a great plan for your marketing campaigns this Holiday Season! Black Friday and Cyber Monday are one of the hardest days to get through for sales and businesses. Remember to take everything one step at a time and if you need help, reach out to me by email or DM me on Twitter!