Black Friday: How to Create a Successful Social Media Campaign

Are you ready for the turnover of your year? On Black Friday, companies generate record online sales. In 2020, Americans plan to spend $148.5 billion in the days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday alone. Arm yourself for the strongest sales day of the year and increase your turnover with a successful social media campaign. 

We’ll show everything you need to know about a Black Friday campaign, from setting your campaign goals and creating content to launching your campaign.

1. Set your Campaign Goals

Start your campaign by defining the goal of your campaign and setting KPIs. Do you want to increase your sales or do you want to increase the awareness of your brand? Some companies use this time to clear their stocks, present new offers or boost sales at Christmas time. Decide on a specific goal and corresponding KPIs in order to set a clear guideline for your campaign and to be able to successfully measure your success in the end. So be as concrete as possible with your objectives!

If you have already started a Black Friday campaign in 2019, it is now time to integrate the results into this year’s planning. Was your campaign successful? Was the performance as hoped for? Which key figures and data were used to measure success? Identifying your successes and mistakes will help you set your goals for 2020. 

A goal-oriented strategy will help you to plan and implement your measures. You can then evaluate your campaign based on your goals and check the success of your strategy. Goals for a Black Friday campaign can be to increase:

• Purchasing power/Sales
• Number of users on your own website
• Reach and brand awareness
• Interactions (comments, likes, shares) on social media profiles 

2. Set the Time Frame of your Campaign

Since Black Friday and Cyber Monday would be only single promotion days, many companies use the entire month of November or even a few weeks around these days for their campaigns. Black Friday is always the fourth Friday in November and Cyber Monday the Monday after. Decide on a duration that fits your campaign goals and is feasible for you and your team. The longer an action is, the harder it can be to keep the momentum and get the attention of the target group.

For example, if you want to run your campaign over a week from Black Friday on, you should start promoting your campaign a few days before. Of course, the complexity and size of your campaign is always important!

No matter how long you decide to run your campaign, it is always important to plan a fixed schedule. This will give you an exact overview of the potential scope and a clear idea of how much lead time you have to work with. For example, if you decide on an Influencer campaign, you will have to plan for additional time.

3. Choose your Social Networks

With a defined campaign goal and timeframe, you can now determine which social media networks you want to advertise on. To increase the success of your campaign, you should be active on as many platforms as possible, so you can maximize the effect. Adapt your strategy to each network and community. Remember that communication and community can differ significantly depending on the channel. 

3.1 Which networks match your goals?

Each social network works slightly differently and can therefore be used differently to achieve your campaign goals. Twitter is more suitable to keep your community informed about campaigns rather as being a sales platform. In contrast, Instagram is especially valuable when high sales are the focus of your campaign. 

Consider carefully which network will help you achieve your goals or which goals can be achieved through a platform.

3.2 Where do you Reach your Target Group? 

Ask yourself on which platform your target group spends the most time or where you can reach them most effectively. For example, if you have an active community on Instagram and Facebook, but few followers on Twitter, you should focus your activities on the stronger channels and not waste your energy elsewhere. 

Tip: It’s more important to reach your target group more effectively with less content than to use a lot of content that has been poorly implemented.

But don’t let this limit your creativity and collect all ideas first. Then you can more easily decide which ideas are most effective and which platform is best suited for them. 

4. Create your Content and Prepare your Strategy

What should your campaign look like? Now is the time to create your content and work out a solid strategy. Try to take a direction that is consistent with your existing branding, but different from your everyday content. Here we have put together a few questions to help you: 

• What is the focus of your campaign? Which product or service will be promoted?
• What is the central idea behind the campaign?
• How does the campaign help you achieve your business goals? 
• What is the advertising strategy of the campaign?

Tip: Collect your ideas and creative impulses on a mood board to have everything in one central place. To do so, you can create a pinboard on Pinterest and share it with your team. 

Once you have defined your concept and the general appearance of the content, you will start to design concrete content. The way you create content depends on the size of the company, the resources, the size of the campaign, and whether a physical or digital product is to be sold. 

4.1 Physical Product 

For a physical product, it is recommended to take photos and videos showing the real products. A mixture of product and lifestyle photos is the best way to showcase a product. Whether you plan a small photo session and take the pictures with your smartphone or organize a large-scale shoot with photographers is up to you. 

In this year’s Black Friday campaign, Converse simply puts its shoes in the spotlight. 

4.2 Digital Product

For the presentation of digital products, content is also created in digital form. As already mentioned, this planning process differs and is based on different circumstances. Again, stick to your creative guidelines and make sure to create high quality content.

With this ad the design tool Canva shows how to creatively promote an online product. 

Tip: Pay attention which content you can use for multiple networks. This way you make sure that your content is used to its full potential and that your efforts are worthwhile. Determine which content is used for which channels and create them in the required formats. 

5. Plan your Content and Launch your Campaign

Once all your content has been created, your next step is to coordinate your campaign from start to finish. When does the campaign start? How long is the duration of the campaign? When should which piece of content be played out? Plan now when each content should go live on which channel to maximize impact and ensure a smooth flow.

Tip: Enter all content into an editorial calendar and get an overview of the entire campaign for you and your team. This makes all actions visible to everyone and allows them to see what stage of the campaign you are currently in. 

Before starting the campaign, it is important to prepare yourself as well as possible. If you’re running a big promotion on Black Friday, it’s likely that you’ll have your hands full, whether it’s answering customer inquiries, taking care of your influencer cooperation and much more. If planning is done in advance, you can focus on its success during the campaign. 

6. Measure and Evaluate your Success

Detailed planning is the basis for a successful campaign. Make sure that you can measure your activities and evaluate the performance at the end. Here are  two ways to prepare and organize an evaluation.

6.1 Set up UTM Parameters for your Contributions

A UTM parameter is a unique string at the end of a URL. With UTM tagging you ensure that Google Analytics can track your traffic with absolute accuracy. First, decide which specific website you want to send followers to – this could be a specific landing page for your campaign or the online store of your website.

The best thing to do this is to send your target group to a website where they are asked to take a “next step”, be it signing up for a service or making a specific purchase.

In Google Analytics you can mark a URL with the following three parameters and their values. Add parameters (such as utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign) to a URL to collect data about the campaign. 

https://fanpagekarma.com?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=black-friday-campaign

The example shows how such a link can look like. In this case, we see that the link belongs to a Black Friday campaign running on Instagram. Pages like Google’s Campaign URL Builder help you to easily add campaign parameters and create a campaign-specific link.  

All you have to do is fill out the fields one by one and Google will create a custom URL for your campaign! Once you have added the link, you can start tracking traffic from each link on your Google Analytics dashboard.

6.2 Monitor your Social Media Campaign

Whether you promote your Black Friday campaign on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest, it is extremely important to keep track of your activities. Use the analysis tools of the individual social networks, such as Instagram Insights or Facebook Business Manager. Here you can get an overview of how your content is received by your target group and which ads convert best.

Conclusion

Black Friday starts the highest sales time of the year and gives you a great opportunity to increase your reach and generate good sales. Don’t just focus on sales figures, focus on increasing your brand awareness and presenting your products in a targeted manner. Keep topics like branding, network specificity and planning in mind, then nothing stands in the way of your Black Friday success.