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Cyber Week 2022 is just around the corner. Are you still looking for ideas for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign? Then let our Top 10 list inspire you to make your Cyber Week campaign a complete success.
What is in it for you
- Pick up the Cyber Week spirit in your posts
- Take the word BLACK in Black Friday literally
- Be careful with giveaways
- Add variety to your Cyber Week offers
- Engage your fans during Cyber Week
- Post behind-the-scenes
- Offer “goodies” instead of discounts
- Use the official Cyber Week hashtags
- It’s now or never – Create urgency with your Cyber Week deals
- Avoid banners and promotional images on social media
- Conclusion
1. Pick up the Cyber Week spirit in your posts
Tap into the Cyber Week spirit and use images or memes to share relatable situations with your audience. Here are a few ideas:
- Are you familiar with the following situation? You’ve been roaming the internet for Black Friday deals, your list of wants is getting longer and longer, and now you are consciously avoiding the thought of how you will be able to afford Christmas presents after spending so much money during Cyber Week.
You are not alone. Share this relatable feeling in a meme with your audience, just like Asos did in 2021.
- Create posts on subjects such as “My preparation for Cyber Week” that caricature the intense research process many people go through when looking for the best deals.
- When your campaign is waiting in the wings, post a meme, declaring: “12 a. m.: the sale is on! 🚀” or “I’ve canceled all evening appointments because in 3 hours the ‘Cyber Week Sale’ begins!”
- Post a meme after your promotion ends, reading: “Me feeling guilty after spending my entire month’s income in one day…” or “Me showing up to (family) dinner tomorrow”
- If your company owns a brick-and-mortar store where big crowds show up on Black Friday, then go ahead and create a post about “Cyber Week madness: When shopping malls become a real-world wrestling ring”.
But no matter what your post looks like, make sure your target audience can relate to it. If you don’t own a brick-and-mortar store, it makes more sense to post a meme about creating never-ending wish lists than it does to talk about the chaos in the malls.
2. Take the word BLACK in Black Friday literally
Use the word BLACK in Black Friday as an opportunity to promote your black products. Tom Ford, for instance, promoted its black packaged perfume “Black Orchid” in 2021 and provided a shopping link. And fans loved it.
Alternatively, you can release a special “limited black edition” of the product you are promoting during Black Week. And if you don’t have any black products available, try to make your post as black as possible.
3. Be careful with giveaways
Sweepstakes during Cyber Week offer a chance for your promotion to be shared by bargain hunters across the internet. Offer free products or personal ‘meet & greets’ with influencers you work with as incentives.
For instance, Boohoo gave away access to three exclusive company events for the winner, among other things. The interaction rates show: it worked.
However, giveaways don’t only have positive consequences for your engagement and reach on social media in the long run. Sweepstakes attract a lot of people who are only interested in the prize, not in the company. Especially if the prize is money, an iPad or something similar. These people, however, will never engage with a post of your profile again. As a consequence, the percentage of fans who don’t like the profile’s posts increases and the newsfeed algorithms will interpret this as “the posts are not exciting”.
After a short time, your reach drops, even though your well-intentioned giveaways have attracted so much attention. So if you plan on offering a giveaway, best case scenario your prize is not something money can buy, but a once-in-a-lifetime chance for your fans to share something special with your brand. This will draw people in who really like your brand, as opposed to bargain hunters who are only looking for free products.
4. Add variety to your Cyber Week offers
Surprise sales, changing offers and expiring deals provide an endless stream of content for posts on social media during Cyber Week. They will also draw your fans to your profile (and website) again and again in order to not miss an important offer.
The following are some ideas on how to add variety to your posts:
- Post about daily changing locations where customers can take advantage of your offers. This idea is best employed if you have multiple stores and want to invite customers to check out all of your stores.
- Offer an online-offline mix. For example, offer discounts in your online shop only Monday through Wednesday, in stores only on Thursday, and in both physical stores and online on Black Friday.
- Offer lightning deals and surprise sales. This way, you create an incentive for users to be constantly active and follow your posts by suddenly posting limited time offers and offers that are limited in numbers.
- Focus on a different product line each day: why not offer winter clothes on Monday and Tuesday, sportswear on Wednesday and Thursday, and discounts on all items which are still in stock on Black Friday?
With promotions that span over multiple days (e.g., from Black Friday to Cyber Monday), daily changing offers create new opportunities to keep fans engaged with your posts.
5. Engage your fans during Cyber Week
Use the Cyber Week to put your customers front and center.
Here are a few ideas on how to engage your fans:
- First of all, make sure your team responds to every comment, question and message from your fans. This is a basic, but it is SO important.
- Choose one person – or set up a “social media team” – for Cyber Week that creates good vibes in your brick-and-mortar stores, and captures the mood on site by photographing the beaming faces of customers who just cashed in on their Cyber Week deal. Share this on the brand’s social media channels.
- Re-post reviews, hauls, and emotional reaction videos from customers after the announcement of your promotions. Share first impressions, stories, as well as posts from customers who just took action on your Cyber Week deals.
Sharing “user generated content” shows closeness to your fanbase and has the added benefit of suggesting that your products are popular with other people. - The fact that “reaction videos” perform better than product images, for example, can be seen when examining two TikToks from Walmart. One video shows the reactions of customers, the other does not. Result: The video with fan reactions has more than 6x as many interactions as the same video without the fan reactions.
Positive example:
Negative example:
- Or go a step further and convert your Cyber Week promotion simultaneously into a community event. Host a fan meetup where your passionate fans can come together at one of your stores, and post highlights from the event on your social media afterwards.
- Also, get your fans’ friends involved. Gymshark created some hilarious discussions in the comment section by using this trick. The caption read: “Tag a friend and if they don’t respond in 5 minutes, they’re paying for your Gymshark Early Black Friday order.”
6. Post behind-the-scenes
Give regular updates from your brand during Cyber Week.
Keep your fans up to date and post for example
- live updates on remaining stock and which products are already in short supply.
- how you are doing everything you can as a team in order to make Cyber Week a great experience for your customers.
- live updates on the mood of your team during your Cyber Week promotion. This is where you can show how excited your team is that the Cyber Week sale is finally underway. Show how much fun your team had with the customers who already took action on your Cyber Week offer. Or post fun and quirky dance videos of your employees, just like Walmart did in 2022. Show that these days are special to you and that you want to use them to connect with your fans.
7. Offer “goodies” instead of discounts
If your company strategy is to not give discounts, it does not mean that you have nothing to offer during Cyber Week. “Goodies”, i.e. attractive bonuses that are given to the customer free of charge with the purchase, are a successfully proven alternative. Here are five suggestions:
- Do as Apple did in 2022 and give a free gift card with every purchase of eligible products bought between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- Offer free shipping and returns on online orders during Cyber Week.
- Extend the return shipping period, like Cartier in 2021.
- Give an exclusive shopping bag or gift box with every purchase.
- Or give customers free product samples with their purchase.
8. Use the official Cyber Week hashtags
Use hashtags that are frequently used during Cyber Week to give your campaign more visibility. When looking for deals, many users search social media for specific hashtags. The most popular ones are:
- #bfcm,
- #blackweek,
- #cybermonday,
- #blackfriday and
- #cyberweek.
Also, use the current year in your hashtags to label deals from this season:
- #bfcm22 or #bcfm2022,
- #blackweek22 or #blackweek2022,
- #cybermonday22 or #cybermonday2022,
- #blackfriday22 or #blackfriday2022, and
- #cyberweek22 or #cyberweek2022.
We also recommend creating your own Cyber Week hashtag on which you share your actions, and under which your fans can share their excitement, their shopping experiences, and first impressions with other fans. For example, in 2020 Gymshark created the hashtag #BigDealEnergy, where fans and Gymshark partners could share all the experiences and actions encompassing Cyber Week at Gymshark.
9. It’s now or never – Create urgency with your Cyber Week deals
Since the impact of urgency has been proven in studies, we were surprised to find out that few brands were using this strategy in their Cyber Week campaigns.
- Announce the end of your Cyber Week offer in your posts, or – if you follow our tip above and have a new promotion every (other) day – the end of each campaign.
- To add even more weight to these announcements, incorporate timers on your website or in your social media stories.
- To add even more weight to these announcements, incorporate timers on your website or in your social media stories.
- Show how many products are left in stock and which products are already sold out. You can do this by showing photos from the almost empty warehouses, by sharing a video of the purchase of the (second-to-) last copy of a product, or by giving constant updates on which products are not available anymore.
Urgency forces people to take action quickly. Take advantage of it!
10. Avoid banners and promotional images on social media
Posts that only display text are often the ones that get the fewest interactions, as this post by Bose shows:
A post by Bose promoting the Black Friday sale in a text-only format received a meager 48 “likes” and 18 comments among more than 4 million people who follow Bose‘s profile. Shameful. Lesson learned: avoid generic “Black Friday Sale” banners.
And while we are at it, don’t just show products on Black Friday either. Neither with the discounted prices, nor without.
Conclusion
There are many ways to capitalize on the Cyber Week. We encourage you to try a few of these tips. And if you want to measure the success of your campaigns and find out which of the tips works best for you, do it now with your 14-day free trial of Fanpage Karma! Because only through trial and error can you find the post strategy that will make your Cyber Week a true success.
