Black Friday tips you can't live without as an e-commerce business

These are the tips to boost your online shop's sales during Black Friday (Week)!

1. Plan your campaigns well in advance

The first step is to find out whether Black Friday is for your business or not. Some companies choose instead of Black Friday to invest in charity campaigns and spread knowledge in their communication to build a strong brand with loyal followers. It's also worth bearing in mind that many companies are increasing their advertising budgets significantly, which means that you also need to do so in order to reach out in the noise. Therefore, set aside a budget specifically for Black Friday. Once you have set that budget, you need to decide whether you are going to advertise all week, all weekend or just on Friday. Some other questions that need to be answered at this stage are:

• What offers will you run?
• What prices will you offer in your campaign?
• What are your competitors and what might they offer?
• How will you make your offer stand out?
• Where should you advertise and how should the budget be allocated?

2. Target advertising to the right audience

Targeting the right message and offer to the right people is essential to achieve the best results. Create your target audiences in advance to whom you want to direct your offers.

3. Create content in advance

Now that you know which products, brands, product groups to offer and which target groups to advertise to, it's time to create the content for the advert. You should also create a Black Friday landing page well in advance and optimise it for search engines so that it can be indexed by Google.

• What should the advert content look like?
• Do new photos need to be taken?
• Should one or more videos be produced?

4. Schedule discounts and adverts

As you've noticed, I've been emphasising the importance of being prepared and doing things well in advance of Black Friday. The same goes for scheduling your ad campaigns on social media and in Google Ads. In addition, online shops can usually schedule discounts and offers to start on one date and end automatically on another.

• Don't forget to add the offer extension and opportunity "Black Friday" in Google Ads.

5. Measure the results

Of course, as always, it is important to keep track of your statistics and measure your success, usually you collect all statistics in Google Analytics but also in various advertising tools.

• Use UTM tags to distinguish different campaigns
• Summarise the statistics and efforts made, so you can easily compare next year's Black Friday campaign.

Want to learn more about marketing for e-commerce?

I wish you good luck with your Black Friday campaign. For those who are interested in e-commerce & digital marketing I will be giving a lecture on "The e-commerce tips you need for Black Friday & Christmas shopping" on 18 November at 10.00 am at Google Digital Academy. You are very welcome to sign up for this free course here!

Regards Viktor Hörman, CEO of Digital partner