Black Friday comes just once a year, but it’s without a doubt, one of the most prepared for shopping and holiday events of the year. Not only does it kick off fourth-quarter holiday shopping, but it’s also the precursor to Cyber Monday and massive Christmas shopping as well.

If done correctly, staying prepared and ready for Black Friday with your online marketing and sales promotions can result in your company sales and earnings going from negative to positive for the year – hence the word “black” in “Black Friday”.

However, even with that being said, finding the most success with such promotions isn’t as simple as sending out a mailing the day before and just lowering your prices for a few days. Instead, it’s all about preparing your content creation, marketing, and traffic sources throughout the year.

Ready to kick your Black Friday marketing into high gear? Here are some of the best tools, resources, and reference guides to help you get there!

Prepare for the coming fourth quarter week by week

As previously mentioned, to see the highest conversions and revenue from your Black Friday promotional effort, you need to know who your audience is, what they want, and how you are going to reach them. If this is something you are already doing throughout the year, you will be steps ahead of the competition and might even have a plan in place.

If not, or you are currently struggling with how to grasp everything being thrown at you in preparation for the big day, I recommend taking a look at this handy Black Friday social media campaign calendar, which breaks down the year into a weekly action guide on how to best prepare for the fourth quarter.

By having such planning and preparation in place, this allows for better strategy, content management, and analysis of paid ad campaigns. Once you have these three metrics and marketing methods in place, you can then scale backward from Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and a shipping-cut-off range roughly a week before Christmas.

As we all know, social media marketing and the scheduling of content on a daily or weekly basis can be hard enough. Throw fourth-quarter promotions and scheduling into the mix and things can really start to get hectic.

If you are doing any types of content creation and marketing for Black Friday, you should definitely be using an editorial calendar to keep things in order.

Use remarketing to increase conversions and bring back customers

Getting traffic and customers to your site on a daily basis might not seem like a problem, but what happens when every business on the internet is fighting for that same traffic? Madness and extremely expensive prices… that’s what!

For times like these, you will wish you had better prepared.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is by making sure you always have a pixel and site visitor tracking in place. If you are already focusing your efforts on social media and email marketing, this is an absolute must.

With Facebook Ads being one of the easiest traffic sources and social media platforms to set this up, we can refer to this remarketing guide on how to set everything up step by step.

The reason why remarketing is a must for all online businesses and brands, is that it allows you to show advertisements to your existing site visitors, customers, and subscribers on your mailing list. With improved targeting and higher click through rates, you will likely see lower ad costs and higher conversions.

Now, jump forward to the coming Black Friday and holiday shopping season… imagine what is possible once you start creating targeted ads that are catered to your existing audiences and customers’ needs.

Take advantage of pre, during and after Black Friday promotions

The battle for Black Friday sales isn’t something that goes into effect right when November comes around. For big businesses and brands, they are preparing day and night, every single day, and keeping an eye on the competition to see what they might be up to.

Some of the most well-known and respected brands to bring out the bells and whistles every year for Black Friday include Macy’s, JCPenney, Target, and Kohls. Of course, these are also retail locations and the internet has completely changed everything.

Reflect back just a few years and you will remember a time when retail locations would open at midnight on Thursday night. Hundreds of customers would wait outside for the doors to open and run inside to get the latest promotions.

Jump forward to today and Black Friday promotions not only start before midnight on Thanksgiving but even earlier in the day – and in some cases even earlier for online promotions.

A good way to summarize all of this would be to check out these reference points on how to win Black Friday, provided by Inc Magazine. In this article, they recommend planning out the following winning factors.

• Win on delivery options with free shipping.
• Attract shopping crowds through a retail experience.
• Treat loyal customers with exclusive offers.
• Offer bundles and deals for more savings.

Again, the last thing you want to do when October and November come around is start to panic and try to come up with competitive promotions and ideas when your competition already has everything in place. For anyone already planning to run Black Friday promotions or deals, I also recommend you follow the blogs here, as they will update accordingly as new promotions go live as we get closer to the big day!

Wrapping up

The best way to win Black Friday and to provide your audiences and customers with the best deals and savings possible is to plan out and work on Black Friday throughout the course of the year.