The Marketer's Playbook to Winning Black Friday & Cyber Monday (2023)

Identifying & Understanding Your Target Audience

In the fast-paced world of holiday ecommerce, success hinges upon your ability to understand and connect with your target audience. As you gear up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it becomes increasingly important to delve into the minds and motivations of online shoppers who will be eagerly scouring the internet for the best deals.

Turning curious clicks into cash conversions takes more than just an amazing product. By understanding and empathizing with your target audience, you will gain a significant competitive advantage and position your ecommerce business for unprecedented success.

The first step to selling your product is knowing who you’re selling to, allowing you to tailor your holiday marketing campaigns to your target audience.

BFCM Shopping Personas

Market Research & Analysis: Building Successful Campaigns

Your ecommerce business doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Developing a successful online marketing campaign not only requires understanding your audience but the landscape in which you’re competing for consumer dollars and attention.

Research is the key to building a strong foundation for holiday marketing success. By equipping yourself with the knowledge gained from meticulous research and analysis, you will possess the insights needed to create impactful campaigns that resonate with your audience, outshine the competition, and drive impressive results.

Market Research

Market research serves as a compass, guiding you through the intricate maze of consumer preferences, trends, and demands. By immersing yourself in the world of your target audience, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of their needs, pain points, and desires. This knowledge will enable you to tailor your offerings, messaging, and promotions to resonate deeply with your customers during the holiday shopping frenzy.

The four most commonly-used market researching methods are surveys, focus groups, interviews, and customer observation.

Surveys

Difficulty

In a survey, respondents are presented with a concise series of questions, which can be delivered through on-screen questionnaires or via email. This research method allows you to effortlessly engage with your customers and acquire the information you need to enhance your products, services, and overall customer experience.

Focus Groups

Difficulty

Focus groups involve assembling a carefully selected group of individuals who represent the target market of a company. Led by a trained moderator, these sessions facilitate discussions on various topics related to the product, user experience, and marketing message, aiming to gain deeper insights.

Interviews

Difficulty

Interviews involve one-on-one conversations with individuals from your target market. Conducting in-depth interviews with your target customers yields significant benefits in understanding their needs and preferences.

Customer Observation

Difficulty

Observation is a clever and powerful research technique involving a representative from your company taking notes while observing an ideal user interacting with your product or a competitor's product.

Competitive Analysis

Even the biggest ecommerce brands have competitors.

Knowing who else is competing for your customers is one thing, but knowing what they’re doing when they succeed is another. By delving deep into the strategies and tactics employed by your top competitors, you can uncover valuable insights that will inform and elevate your own digital marketing campaigns. This includes examining their advertising campaigns, social media presence, email marketing, and website content, so you can identify patterns, trends, and successful strategies.

For example, if you find that your biggest competitor is offering 20% off their products for Black Friday, you should offer 25% off or include free shipping. Going the extra mile to one-up your competitors improves your value proposition and ultimately better positions your brand to get the sale.

If you take the time to learn your competitors’ angles and their value propositions, it will become clearer how to carve out your own lane in the market.

Keyword Research

By conducting keyword research, you can identify the specific keywords and phrases that are highly relevant to your holiday offerings. This research provides insights into the search volume, competition level, and trends associated with these keywords.

Understanding the keywords that are popular and frequently searched for during the holiday season allows you to optimize your digital advertising campaigns. You can strategically incorporate these keywords into your ad copy, landing pages, and website content to increase your visibility in search engine results and drive targeted traffic to your website.

Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help you identify which keywords are associated with your business and how much it will cost to rank for them. This is a worthwhile investment considering 75% of people never go past the first page of search results.

Customer Feedback Analysis

The benefit of asking honest questions is getting honest answers.

While it might not always feel nice to be told your product is lacking or that the user interface on your website could use work, taking customer feedback to heart and implementing changes can only better your business in the long run. Take it with a grain of salt, but don’t hesitate to act when the public has brought a real issue to your attention.

Some of the most popular methods for collecting customer feedback include online reviews and ratings, customer feedback forms, customer support interactions, and social media listening.

Online Reviews & Ratings

Difficulty

Monitoring and analyzing online reviews and ratings on platforms such as review websites, social media, and e-commerce sites provide a valuable source of customer feedback. These reviews offer authentic opinions, ratings, and comments about products or services, which can help identify areas for improvement and track customer satisfaction levels.

Customer Feedback Forms

Difficulty

Feedback forms can be placed on websites, in-store, or sent through email to collect specific feedback from customers. These forms often include structured questions and rating scales to gather quantitative data. Feedback forms provide a convenient way for customers to share their opinions and experiences.

Customer Support Interactions

Difficulty

Customer support interactions, including phone calls, live chat conversations, and email exchanges, can offer valuable feedback on customers' concerns, challenges, and suggestions. Analyzing the interactions between customers and support representatives provides insights into common issues and areas for improvement in the customer experience.

Social Media Listening

Difficulty

Monitoring and analyzing conversations on social media platforms can provide real-time feedback and insights into customer sentiments, opinions, and experiences. By actively listening and engaging with customers on social media, businesses can gather feedback, address concerns, and identify emerging trends.

Data Analysis

Data analysis can help you make smarter, well-informed decisions.

Holiday marketing campaigns typically take place over a two-month period, but data from previous years can help you determine which part matters most. It can also help you understand which touchpoint in your marketing funnel is driving the most sales.

Ultimately, data-driven insights enable you to understand customer preferences, identify opportunities, and allocate resources effectively, ultimately driving better results and achieving your holiday marketing goals.

How to Craft a Compelling Brand Message for the Holidays

The best stories are the ones that resonate with others.

Your brand’s story should be authentic and bridge the gap between you and your customers. Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers are looking to find things they want—oftentimes holiday gifts for others—at prices they love. Your storyline should be cognizant of this, and play into the holidays, which are often associated with strong emotions such as joy, warmth, nostalgia, and togetherness.

Creating an effective content strategy means keeping your messaging, branding, and visual aesthetic consistent across all your marketing channels. Everything from your website to your newsletters should be working together to push your story in an omnichannel strategy. Consistency builds trust and reinforces the brand image you want to convey.

In today's digital world, visual content plays a vital role in digital marketing strategies. Eye-catching visuals are more likely to grab attention in crowded social media feeds, websites, and advertising platforms. Well-produced videos and captivating images can increase click-through rates, engagement levels, and conversions, making your digital marketing efforts more effective. Through carefully crafted visuals, you can showcase your products, services, and brand personality in a captivating and lasting way.

Selecting the Most Effective Marketing Channels for Your Brand

When planning an ecommerce marketing campaign, it’s important to understand the different channels through which you can reach your audience.

As you might expect, each has its own benefits and limitations. Choosing the one(s) most appropriate for your business takes careful planning and a thorough knowledge of each platform. You’ll want to take both your audience as well as your budget into account when making these decisions.

However, no matter your audience, you shouldn’t choose just one. The Rule of 7 is based on the principle that consumers need to see your brand at least seven times before making a purchase decision. Reaching the right people is great, but effectively reaching them in multiple ways is what this playbook is all about.

Email Marketing

Email marketing allows you to communicate directly with your audience in their personal inbox. Unlike social media or other advertising channels, email provides a more intimate and personalized way to connect with your customers. Whether you’re sending welcome emails to new subscribers, notifying customers of seasonal promotions, or poking them about an item they left in their cart, the goal is building stronger connections with emails that feel real and personal.

Compared to traditional forms of advertising, email marketing is a cost-effective marketing tool and has an incredible return on investment. Once you’ve compiled a mailing list, you can simply mass-deliver your desired communications with the click of a button and track key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. These insights help you make data-driven decisions, refine your email strategy, and optimize future campaigns for better results.

Lay the groundwork for a seasonal email campaign by increasing the frequency of your newsletters leading into that time. At the minimum, your email marketing subscribers should get an email from you before Black Friday and Cyber Monday, on the dates themselves, and the day before the end of your sale.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is great for promoting your products, sales, and loyalty programs. It’s also a great place to conduct giveaways, partner with influencers, and—as we’ve discussed—create those all-too-valuable connections with your customers.

Additionally, all the big social media platforms offer in-app shopping features that ecommerce brands can leverage to drive sales. It’s important for you to understand the specific features and requirements of each platform to make the most of in-app shopping capabilities. By leveraging these features, you can reach a wider audience, increase product visibility, and drive sales by providing a convenient and seamless shopping experience within the social media apps that users already engage with.

The Role of Content Marketing in Holiday Planning

Your marketing efforts shouldn’t be limited to strict, “buy this!” advertisements that feel as though they’ve been created by sales-driven robots.

Great copywriting sells—be relatable, empathetic, and inclusive. These values should be at the core of all your content, whether it’s informative and well-optimized blogs, exciting social media reels, or captivating promotional videos.

This content-driven approach enables you to engage, educate, and inspire your audience, fostering a sense of trust and loyalty that translates into increased sales and long-term customer relationships. 

By incorporating a diverse range of content formats, you can engage your audience across different channels and guide them through the holiday sales funnel.

Remember: no matter what kind of content you’re making, it should feel like it was created by real people for real people. As we’ve discussed throughout this playbook, people feel more inclined to buy when they feel their needs have been heard and met.

How to Drive Sales Using Promotions & Discounts

As an ecommerce brand, you have a unique opportunity to captivate your audience and drive sales by strategically leveraging promotions and discounts. By offering compelling deals, exclusive discounts, and limited-time offers, you can create a sense of anticipation and urgency that compels shoppers to choose your brand over competitors.

Psychology is your friend here—use it to your advantage. By tapping into the emotional triggers of holiday shoppers and aligning your promotions with their desires, you can create a powerful incentive to take immediate action.

Familiarize yourself with the following advertising techniques and watch your sales go through the roof.

Tips for Optimizing Your Ecommerce Website

Unsurprisingly, having a well-optimized website is essential to succeeding as an ecommerce business during peak shopping periods.

From an attractive landing page to detailed product pages, your website should be something that both facilitates and enhances the buying experience. Having a slow, confusing, or unresponsive website is a surefire way to lose paying customers to competitors who took the time to upgrade their brand’s digital base.

Fortunately, this portion of the playbook is here to walk you through the need-to-know basics when it comes to optimizing your website so it performs when needed most.

Key Considerations

The Holiday Checkout Experience Checklist

• Simplify your checkout experience to one page.

• Enable guest checkout as requiring registration interrupts the shopping process.
  

• Enable abandoned cart notifications to re-engage anonymous shoppers and bring them back to your shop.

• Eliminate distractions on mobile devices as smartphone screen sizes are limited.

• Display the most important product details so users don’t have to return to a product page to review their purchase.

• Enable the autocomplete functionality on all your forms so users don’t have to re-enter information.

• Condense your form by using inline labels or placeholder text for short fields.

• Remove any popup messages that create friction at checkout.

• Use a progress bar indicator during checkout so customers know how long the checkout process will take.

• Offer multiple payment options for customer convenience.

• Let shoppers select their preferred shipping method and provide estimated delivery dates.

Optimizing & Testing Your Digital Advertising Campaigns

One of the biggest things you should take away from reading this playbook is that website optimization is a never-ending process. Growing stagnant or too comfortable with your marketing campaigns is a great way to fall behind.

It’s important for your business to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and to be continuously testing them to make data-driven decisions. Your website traffic, conversion rate on call-to-action content, and customer acquisition cost (CAC) are three of the dozens of metrics worth keeping tabs on. 

You should be tracking these KPIs during the holiday season, but the real value is in tracking them leading into that time to help inform your decisions. Low website traffic might push you to finally make the changes we outlined earlier, or maybe realizing your CAC leads to changes in your business model that allow you to put more products on sale.

When you inevitably find yourself torn between potential options, consider conducting A/B testing to see which might perform better. Have a group engage with Option A and another engage with Option B and record the results—the scientific method works!

This type of A/B testing can also be used when evaluating the conversion rate optimization (CRO) of your business. Try out different landing page designs and CTAs to see which generates a more enthusiastic response.