Black Friday: What is the best lead generation strategy for your brand?

Friday, 23rd November 2018. Maybe this date won’t mean much, but for retailers and e-merchants, this is one of the most important days of the year.
Black Friday has gradually taken the retail world by storm and nowadays kicks off the shopping period that leads up to the Christmas period.
This 100% American tradition is now found in several countries (Black Friday is always the day after Thanksgiving) is an extremely important time for the big brands that decide to enter the game, whatever the Country where they want to communicate.

Last year, the number of sales jumped 30% over the previous year, reaching an average basket value of 118 euros. Figures that confirm the success of online sales by well-prepared companies.
To make Black Friday 2018 a must-attend event for your brand, here are some tips and tricks to get you one step ahead of the competition.

First step: improve your seo in order to increase your brand visibility

Unless you’re a major retailer such as Amazon, CDiscount or Fnac, there’s a good chance that most of your site traffic comes from potential customers Googling a product.
Even if Black Friday is not yet upon us, it’s now that you should be working on improving your SEO if you want it to have an impact. Content marketing, optimization of titles and keywords, the loading speed of your pages, mobile accessibility… It’s time for an SEO check-up!

Important levers to work on are:

• Resolving any page 404 errors, broken links and redirects.
• Making sure your servers will be able to handle an increase in traffic.
• Optimising your site’s cache for faster viewing and improving the load time for any images.
• Refining your CTAs and continually doing A/B variation tests so as to determine which display types get the highest conversion.
• Optimising your metadata, keywords, content structuring, sitemap, open graph, etc.
• Monitoring customer reviews (Google My Business, Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc.), responding to comments and always thanking your loyal customers.

Step two: develop a promotions plan

Give your targets teasers 

Black Friday is an event that needs to be carefully planned in advance. It’s not something to think about three days before it all kicks off. Now’s the time to work on content, campaigns and preparing your teams. You can create an editorial calendar to define and control your content creation: 30 days before, 20 days before, a week before, etc.

Whip up a frenzy with an exclusive offer

While Black Friday relies on quantity and impact, some sales may be gleaned by doing the complete opposite. Why not use the rarity and uniqueness of a product to your advantage? This could be selling a limited number of products at a discounted price, creating a countdown or inviting customers to join a private club and benefit from offers reserved for members.

Your loyal customers, ambassadors, and influencers also have a vital role to play. Create exclusive offers, open the online sales an hour before other retailers or provide additional incentives (higher discount, free delivery or extended guarantees)… There’s so much you can do to reel in customers.

Play the social media card during for black friday

Indispensable, social networks are an important sounding board for Black Friday. Your chatbot can save you time by creating a first online connection. Use conversational robots in messaging tools as a lever for advertising your products and actively interact with prospects and customers (notifications at key moments, encourage sharing of photos and videos with specific hashtags, etc.)

Black Friday is also a great time to engage your community via entertaining content, games, and competitions. Be creative and generous so as to create a buzz around your brand. And if you haven’t as yet done so, you can also focus on sponsored campaigns. It’s a way of personalizing messages in order to reach a new audience. Retargeting is a useful way to direct prospects to your landing pages or your website.

Step three: pull lead generation levers

Each objective must be the subject of a particular campaign according to your sales scenarios and your conversion funnel:

• email marketing, publicise your brand and your products/services via external databases, encourage visitors to subscribe to your offers so as to not miss anything on the day.
• co-registration with a trusted partner, seek qualified leads that are ready to transform.
• surveys, capture new prospects via well-honed questions in order to optimize your transfer rate on the day.
• competitions, what’s more, tempting than the chance to win one of your products/services in exchange for a subscription to your newsletter or agreeing to share your brand?!
• SEA and SMA campaigns
• etc.

You also need to work closely with your affiliates to ensure they can relay the right messages at the right time. With the right content, the right visuals and the right message, this is an indispensable tool for boosting sales when the big day arrives.

As a key moment for generating and converting leads, a commercial event like Black Friday brings freshness, dynamism and unparalleled creativity. An external and internal impact to optimize your marketing strategy while developing new initiatives within your organization.

If you want to know more, then check out our 10 tips to help you prepare for Black Friday! If you’d like to receive a personalized offer according to your lead generation objectives then please feel free to contact us!