Black Friday: How to attract advertisers?

Having grown significantly in recent years, Black Friday — followed by Cyber Monday — represents a major sales opportunity for e-commerce sites. It also often signifies the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season. If everyone is in the black (online sales have increased by 14% in the second quarter of 2018), it means that supply is increasing and competition is growing. For publishers, the aim of the game is therefore to attract advertisers. This strategy involves finding a subtle balance between editorial appeal and the conversion capacity of the audience generated.

A consistent editorial line and quality content

This is the first step of your strategy: being able to attract visitors continuously and in excessive numbers, in order to create a virtuous circle.

Common values

When appearing on a third-party site, advertisers expect consistency in terms of positioning, values and brand territory. A company selling hunting goods and equipment should not appear on a website campaigning for animal welfare, for example. Publishers must, therefore, be transparent about their values.

Who are they? What do they want? And what do they believe in? This information must be clearly laid out in an eye-catching manner. Advertisers are thus able to ensure that these values are in line with their own for an optimal communication strategy.

Relevant content

To attract advertisers, you must already be able to attract visitors to your website. The key asset that publishers can monetize is their audience. In order to achieve this goal, it is essential to have relevant content, a regular publication schedule, topics that create value and good storytelling. The occasional blog post is not going to cut it.

Not only should content be relevant, but it also needs to be high quality (syntax, content value, duplicate content, etc.), and social media activity must be constant. This all adds up to the perfect strategy to attract advertisers.

Visual content is as important as written content. Decorate your website for Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Black Week.

A clear editorial line

Your editorial line is the compass that guides your website. It defines you on an editorial level. Whether it deals with strong opinions and editorials or more factual information, it must be clear and not vary over time. You must be consistent to win advertisers’ trust. They have to be able to anticipate future content and understand the editorial issues associated with positioning.

KPI’s and analytics: fundamental figures

For advertisers, choosing a distribution channel is a question of efficiency. Advertising investments must generate visits, which can become potential clients and then customers. ROI is, therefore, a vital consideration, and publishers must know how to talk to advertisers.

To attract advertisers, you have to speak their language. This means understanding and managing your insights so you can promote the most interesting ones. However, there are hundreds of options: Google Page Rank, number of visitors, page views, average time, bounce rate, size of online communities, engagement rate, etc.

To find out where you stand, you have to identify the most impactful insights. For example, talking about the number of visitors does not make any sense if you also have a high bounce rate. The same rule applies to advertising offers: CPC is not promoted using the same metrics as CPM.

To promote your commercial offers, highlight your Black Friday results from the previous year: incoming visits, page views, growth vs. N-1, etc.

High-quality distribution channels

For publishers and advertisers alike, the quality of distribution channels is very important. Publishers must optimize their technical structure to monetize advertising spaces and databases, create optimized email kits, and manage innovative display formats.

Advertisers have to provide up-to-date and well-built product feeds to improve the conversion rate on D-Day. Your banners, newsletters and landing pages should be optimized to integrate advertisers’ Black Friday offers. The advertisers’ distribution channels must integrate seamlessly with your own.

The better suited the distribution channels, the more noticeable the impact of the campaign. Employ a win-win strategy and create engagement with personalized messages that do not detract from the user experience.

As Black Friday grows increasingly influential, the challenge faced by advertisers is choosing the platforms that will ensure the best returns on investment. Publishers should, therefore, integrate changes prior to the event to offer a sustainable strategy rather than a simple display effect.

Are you an influencer with an app or a mobile site? Do you want to promote a seller for Black Friday? Contact our Publishers Team or join the Kwanko Network!