November is almost here, and the countdown to the most anticipated shopping time of the year has begun. Black Friday for 2022 will happen on November 26, and there is no doubt it will be intense. Black Friday is usually the most competitive season for businesses as they are looking to take advantage of the anticipation of buyers to make more sales. In this article, I share the optimal Facebook Ads Strategy to boost your sales for Black Friday 2022.

The pandemic has advanced the shift to e-commerce business and online shopping by at least five (5) years, and that means online shopping has become the easier option to keep safe and still get the best out of shopping.

This makes the online shopping space more competitive as it gets more saturated. During the Black Friday period of this year, you have to work extra hard to draw in customers and make sales by scaling effective advertising and marketing on your online channels.

Facebook advertising is an effective way to get more visibility and channel customers to your business. However, I have personally experienced that many business owners don’t get it right, and this can hurt their business. Building the best Facebook ads strategy for Black Friday requires a lot of diligent planning and effort.

During this peak shopping period, one ad is not enough to get your business’s visibility to thrive. That is not to say you should choke viewers with your ads (but by all means, do so professionally to keep your brand at the top of their minds). Read on to discover the types of ads you need to scale during the Black Friday season.

Organize your Facebook Ads For Black Friday

The Black Friday season is not just the day of Black Friday; it includes the holiday season of Thanksgiving and the less popular Cyber Monday. So your ad planning and campaigns should cover the entire season.

Here are the five (5) stages I follow to build a my clients’ Facebook ads strategy for Black Friday:

• Pre-Holiday Campaign: The ads and promotions will be published 4-5 weeks leading up to Black Friday. The goal of these ads is not to make sales but rather for prospecting to new customers, generating leads for building mailing lists. It is also for testing your audience’s anticipation level and interest in the Black Friday promotions.
• Pre-Black Friday: The goal of your pre-Black Friday Ads will still include generating leads from your audience to increase the pool of potential shoppers. You will also be organizing creative gift guides, bundles, and promotions.
• Black Friday: At this stage, you will be revealing your value proposition offer for the period to your audience and potential shoppers. Using the fear factor to create a sense of urgency through the idea of scarcity, limited offers, and countdown clocks for product availability. Strong CTAs will also influence the shoppers to make a buying decision and drive conversion.
• Cyber Monday: Cyber Monday is the Monday after Black Friday. People will still be looking out for cheap deals and affordable products. A perfect opportunity to reveal another offer to the world. This time your offer deal should be an attractive and clean design with a brief copy attached to it to distribute across your social media channels.
• Post Black Friday Campaign: Now that the main offer periods are over, you have to wrap up cleanly. Some shoppers are looking for last chance deals to make a cheap purchase, so you have to capture them in a purchasing basket and then offer some extra gifting.

Set up Your Facebook Ads Strategy For A Successful Black Friday

1. Build Your Facebook Ads Traffic Before The Black Friday Period

The traffic and sales that you are expecting on Black Friday cannot happen automatically. It will require prior planning and effort. The months before this peak season should be used to build traffic and refresh your leads.

This traffic and audience will be the ones to warm up towards your Black Friday sales and anticipate the deals and discounts you will be offering. They are the ones who are likely to buy something based on their previous engagement with your brand.

Even though some of them may just be window shopping, you can convince them to make a purchase through the right strategies. Every kind of audience is important and this is the time to build your traffic.

Apart from the audience discussed above, you should focus your efforts on lead generation before the busy quarter of the year through your email lists. You can build your email lists by offering a newsletter, discounts, an ebook, etc.

The advantage of building your customer base before the last minute is to avoid getting entangled with the heavy competition during that period. It is also to maximize profit by investing in these warmer audiences that you have nurtured.

My recommendation: Set up Facebook lead gen ads. This type of ad allows the prospect to share their name, email and even phone number in the facebook platform (Without visting an external landing page!). Offer them to join a priority list to know about the upcoming deals before anyone else.

Once they have shared their details, you can redirect them to your landing page or simply show a successful message. I prefer the former as it will allow the prospects to start browsing around your website and adding to cart products they may want to buy during Black Friday.

During the big event, you will be ble to retarget users depending on the stage the left off. For instance those who submitted the form and:

1. landed on the landing page.
2. Viewed different categories;
3. Added to cart.

There are so many retargetting variations depending on the way you approach this big event. If you want help from a Freelance PPC Consultant, feel free to reach out for a 20 min free consultation.

2. Plan Your Black Firday Campaign and Budget Ahead

Starting your ad campaign on time and with sufficient planning seems like an obvious strategy for any business to achieve maximum campaign success. However, I have seen some online stores start a little too late. You do not have to be part of that train.

• Planning Your Ad: Remember that planning your campaign surpasses developing a marketing strategy. It includes setting up your ad before the day that the campaign is supposed to go live on Facebook. Sometimes Facebook may choose to approve an ad manually, which takes a minimum of 24 hours.If you are uploading your ad campaign a day before the D-day, your ad will not be approved until after Black Friday, which will be a loss to your business. As a standard, you should upload your ads at least three days before Black Friday. I also recommend you run a campaign 2 or 3 weeks before to make sure that everything runs smoothly.
• Setting Your Budget: Ads are generally more costly during the holiday season because of the high competition so getting your target audience to engage your ads becomes more expensive. You must try to determine your ad spend based on current ad spend, and also study your ad spend during a similar period in the previous year.To get the most out of your Facebook ad budget, you must consider retargeting ads to customers that fell out of the sales funnel at any point before a final purchase was made. Retargeting costs less and has a high track record of conversions. Since the cost will go up during the frenzy black Friday week, consider using retargeting campaigns only during that period.
• Ad Spending Limit: A cautious point to look out for is your ad account spending limit. This is because when you reach this limit, your ads will automatically get turned off, which greatly disrupts the ad’s success. Your ad spending limit is individual of any campaign.Typically, you never reach this spending limit, but during a peak period like Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, you are bound to reach it and probably surpass it. You can change your spending limit in your Facebook Ads Manager before you set up your ad.

3. Target Your Ads

The whole point of Facebook Ads during the Black Friday-Cyber Monday period (BFCM) is to get your ads in front of an audience that is most likely to purchase from you.

• Dealing With Your Lookalike Audience: Ideally, you already have your target audience down to the letter, but you have to remember those customers similar to your target audience, that is Lookalike Audiences (LAAs).These are prospective customers that differ just a little bit from your ideal customer audience but are still very likely to make a purchase. Some marketers say that lookalike audiences are likely to increase conversion and are cheaper to acquire than a completely different audience.I personally liked trying out different LAAs, but some of my favorites include: Past purchasers, Add to carts, Product viewers x 2 (i.e. people that view more than 2 products).
• Retargeting: This is also a good time to recapture customers that feel out of the sales funnel at any point. Consider ads that guide them back to incomplete carts, saved items, viewed items, etc. especially the Black Friday and Cyber Monday dates when the cost gets considerably higher.Since the IOS14 update, Facebook does not report any sales that fall outside the 7-day window. This is why I have started to keep my retargeting audiences within those 7 days to minimize data loss.This is especially important for events that take place during such a short period. You are not interested in retargeting anyone who entered your website last month. Instead, you need to – healthily – “bombard” anyone who entered during the Black Friday week that is potentially interested in some of your deals.

4. Do Not Edit your Facebook Ads Campaigns

Editing your Facebook Ads after it has been published is not likely to hurt your campaign on a normal day. However, editing it on Black Friday will slow down your conversions.

Major edits like changing your target audience mean that Facebook has to run its learning algorithms again, and this takes valuable time that you cannot afford to lose on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

5. Create Beautiful Graphics, Images, and Videos

Facebook is a visual platform. This means beautiful videos and images are most likely to get the expected action out of a viewer. So as much as you focus on the tactical aspect of your Facebook Ads, remember the visual and creative aspects as well.

Your copy and visual assets; graphics, images, and videos should have fresh perspectives to keep Facebook users interested. Test variations of your visual assets before the BF-CM period so that you know what type of content is most effective and likely to convert your customers. Catchy and creative content such as videos that show your offer in the first 3-5 seconds of view is most likely to convert.

An example of great content is asking your audience a question like in the image above. For more clarity, you can tease a couple of items that will be available during the sale and ask your audience which one they like most. This not only makes them stay longer on your page, but it builds up the anticipation for your sales.

Consider the image below;

This is an example of a bad promotional post. You can tell a story with your posts instead of simply using words like “introducing the new fall collection, click here to buy” like the image above. Unless your brand is like APPLE, with a cult following, this strategy won’t work.

On a platform where over a hundred other ads similar to yours are published during the same period and competing for the same audience, the total point is to keep your ads creative and fresh to avoid ad fatigue and convert your viewers to buyers.

Make sure to have a super optmised landing page to provide all new website visitors with a memorable browsing experience.

6. Create Enticing Offers and Discounts

The BF-CM holiday sales are about saving big. They are the two most anticipated holidays for both buyers because of the promise of gaining more for less.

Buyers are looking out for the best deals with the lowest discounts. So give them what they want! You can use offer ads to quickly show your offers to customers on the lookout for great offers and use compelling CTAs to get a response or a conversion.

I like keeping my best cards for the remarketing campaigns, and Black Friday offers the best time to only run remarketing campaigns because 1) they offer lower cost per click and impression and 2) people already showed interest in your products – they just need another gentle nudge!

7. Test Run All Discounts and Offers

When you attract viewers using discounts in your Facebook Ads, you want to double-check that these discounts are working properly so as not to lose customers. Also, gifts that your offer to lure customers in should be available, if not you may anger and lose the customer. This will hurt your conversion rate and damage your brand trust among visitors.

8. Automate Discounts and Offers

As much as possible, automate the discounts that you are offering. It makes the customer experience smoother as the discounts will apply automatically to a customer’s cart, and they can know their final spend easily without much hassle.

9. Post Black Friday Followup

Black Friday customers are usually one-time customers for many businesses, but what if you have a strategy in place to keep them coming back for more? Remember that customer acquisition is more costly than customer retention.So you should have a game plan to keep a percentage of these customers coming back for more.

A good retention plan will include sending email updates, special offers, etc. anything that keeps those customers engaged.

I am a strong advocate for talking to customers directly. When Black Friday has passed and they have received your product, go ahead and give it to them and do not be afraid to ask about their experience buying from your store and what areas could be improved.

No one will help you build a better customer experience than people who already bought from you.

Metrics to Measure Your Facebook Ads Strategy For Black Friday

Just looking at the reach and impressions of your Facebook Ads cannot give a clear picture of the success of that Ad. Here are some key metrics to look out for.

• Lead Generation: When setting up your Facebook ads for Black Friday sales, you need to keep in mind how you are going to track your conversions. You can have a linked page to your website from your Facebook ad. If you are getting a reasonable amount of clicks on your Facebook Ads but not enough leads, it might be a problem with your landing page; maybe the copy is not relevant to your target audience, or the CTA is not well defined. Remember to check all links before publishing your ads to avoid losing customers.
• ATC: Your Add-to-Cart (ATC) is important as it gives you a percentage of the number of site visitors that added items to their carts. If you have a lot of incoming traffic and the ATC rate is still low, it could be because they are the wrong audience, your sales copy is bad or they are not interested in your offer.
• Viewed Pages per session: This is the number of pages that a user views within a specific session. The more pages a user visits during a session, the more interest he or she may have in your product or service. If a black friday campaign results in poor sales, have a look at the number of viewed pages per session. Perhaps you need to invest more time on improving the design of your website for the next campaign.
• Time Spent: This metric explains how long visitors spend on your site. If they are leaving almost immediately, then maybe your landing page copy, load speed, etc are not converting the way they should be.
• Sales: Measuring how much sales you have made is probably the easiest metric to track. If you are not getting the expected sales, you might need to increase your Ad spend to get your ad in front of more people.
• Website Traffic From Facebook: Measuring the number of clicks that your website got from Facebook Ads is also a good metric to track. High impressions and reach with a low click-through rate might indicate a broken link.
• Return on Ad Spend- ROAS: Looking at just your revenue is not enough to gauge the quality of your ads. When you look at your revenue as a ratio of your cost (Ad spend), it gives a clearer picture of how much you have gained based on the quality of your ads.

What to Avoid When Setting up Facebook Ads Strategy For Black Friday

• Wrong Targeting: A business is bound to fail if it cannot properly identify its ideal customer niche or its target audience. Knowing your ideal customer is not enough when creating an ad. You need to be able to properly identify them when setting up the ad based on demographics, age, etc. Also, diversifying audiences when targeting is a good way to increase your reach and get your product in front of more potential buyers, hence targeting your customer lookalikes.
• Incomplete Strategy: Black Friday is a peak period for commercial brands. There is a struggle to acquire customers and get a high number of sales even with the high competition. Using Facebook Ads is a great way to get your business and products in front of the right audience.However, Facebook Ads alone cannot be your only marketing channel during that period if you want to maximize profit and get the most out of it. Diversification of marketing channels is principal. Combine Facebook Ads will Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and ads on other social media channels that your brand is active. Feel free to reach out to book a free consultation with me to build a super complete funnel strategy for big sale events. The most important part of having a strategy is to create the right path and follow through to success.
• Depending On Discounts Alone: many brands assume that a price cut is the only way to draw customers in. It plays a part in the success of advertising campaigns, but other offers can also attract buyers during the Black Friday period. Make use of BOGO sales – Buy One Get One – , free shipping, gift items with purchases, etc.
• Not Planning: It will be the Achilles heel of any business to assume that just an ad campaign can make up for months of planning. When you start planning, you can create a huge customer following, test campaigns, visual assets, define and redefine your audience, and when it is time for the final campaign, you know just what to do. Planning means that you will have enough time to draw customers into your sales funnels at all levels and nurture them until they get to the bottom of the funnel and make sales, rather than just at the bottom of the funnel where you are more focused on sales.

Conclusion

The time that we spend on our mobile devices and social platforms has increased significantly in recent years. People are now connecting and basing their activities and decisions on digital channels and social proof. Facebook remains the place where most people connect; the king of social media platforms.

Facebook Ads connects you to your potential buyers with the promise of increased sales, so if you want to make the most of Black Friday, you need to reach people on Facebook and get your products in front of them. The tips in this article will help when setting up your Ads account to successfully build the best marketing strategy for your Facebook Ads for the Black Friday season.