The holiday shopping season kicks off this week with Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday. This concentrated burst of shopping activity presents a major opportunity for businesses to drive sales, acquire new customers, and position their brands for future growth.
However, the key is to not treat these days merely as one-off sales events. Smart businesses should have an integrated marketing plan to maximize results both during and after the busy holiday weekend.
To keep things simple, my recommendation is to Target, Capture, and Celebrate.
Target
When you Target your customers or prospects, this is the running of ads, content, emails that is designed to get a purchasing action. Think of this as your Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Google Ads, Email Marketing and Direct Mail marketing.
Here, we are looking to provide incentives for our existing customers to buy again and for new or on-the-fence customers to make a purchase.
Some Examples:
- Offer tiered discounts and special bundles leading up to and through Cyber Monday. The deep savings will incentivize purchases from new customers, while limited-time offers drive action from existing customers.
- Spotlight products and services that would make great gifts. People are actively shopping for others this weekend – make it easy for them by highlighting interesting and unique gift options.
- Run retargeting ads after the weekend to reconnect with website visitors who didn’t initially purchase. Cyber Monday website traffic numbers are often very high.
Capture
Ok, so what about all the other people that saw your ads and didn’t make a purchase? You need to have a plan as to what to do with them. What we want to do is capture as many of them as possible so we can target them later.
- Capture email addresses and other contact info wherever possible, such as at checkout or through a pop-up. Use this to nurture new subscribers with valuable content and special deals.
- Get them to follow you on social media. The more information Meta has about people who value your content, the better marketing and retargeting campaigns you can run.
- Have a “freebie”. Something customers may want in exchange for their email address. “Get 50% off your next purchase” or something similar.
- Promote gift cards and vouchers during check-out. You want to keep top of mind for recipients to use after the holidays. Or alternatively, if you buy $100 worth of product, we will give you a $25 gift card for you.
Celebrate
Ok, now the weekend is over, we move on to the Celebrate stage. Some marketers, myself included, may call this the nurture stage. Here we connect with our audience to celebrate the customers, the sale, and build good will. The important thing here is NOT to sell again right away. This gives the impression that “thank you for your purchase, but you didn’t buy enough.”
- Share fun “thanks for shopping” content on social media channels later in the week. sprinkled with some holiday cheer, this is another touchpoint to continue engaging both existing and new customers.
Conclusion
When you are marketing, remember to be genuine. You have a solution to the customer’s problem. Your job is to see how your product can do that.
The holiday shopping kicks things up a notch, but savvy businesses will parlay all marketing activities on Black Friday weekend into long-term growth and repeat sales. The key is executing integrated tactics that acquire new customers, incentivize purchases, capture contact info, and reconnect post-holidays. With some strategy and effort, your business can absolutely capitalize on these prime selling days.