One of the main focuses, or stressors, when it comes to Black Friday is deciding which creatives and creative strategy to use. Similarly, the Black Friday creative strategy will also vary between different marketing tools and platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, email and SMS.
Your Black Friday creative strategy will be largely subjective, but the person behind your creative strategy is crucial to guiding the overall business strategy as you promote your brand to the world and compete with millions of other businesses in the same space.
While it’s important to stand out and be unique, it’s still necessary to follow a few simple guidelines and best practices so as not to go too out-of-the-box and risk losing potential customers who end up not understanding what you’re trying to communicate to them.
Black Friday creative strategy best practices
If you’re responsible for your Black Friday creative strategy or are planning on doing the bulk of the work yourself, there are a few ways you can get ahead of the game and make your life easier so that you don’t spend too much time on unnecessary aspects of your creatives.
This isn’t to say that you won’t commit a lot of time ro your creative strategy, because you will, but it’s more about focusing on making them look the best that they can be without wasting your time.
A few ways you can be more efficient are:
- Prepping well in advance with a “fake offer” as a placeholder so you can spend more time on the look and feel rather than the offer that might change
- Don’t add dates to your creatives as we all know how in flux things can be in a lead up to Black Friday and dates might have to be changed on a whim
- Keep your offer simple so you don’t have too much text crowding your creatives
- Align your content across all of your platforms and put your focus on getting your creatives right and then simply resizing them based on where they’re going to be sent out on
Your Black Friday creative strategy is the way that you’re going to make money over the week or weekend, and so it’s not only about being efficient but also about being savvy and playing by the rules, if you like, when it comes to platforms such as Facebook.
For this reason, CPM’s can be very high on creatives with “Sale” or “Black Friday” wording, so don’t just rely on these images and have some plain ones added into the mix. Even if it’s simply creatives that are your best performing over the past year, you can still usually get away with using these and sometimes they’ll yield better results.
Another important aspect is your overall sales copy, that normally goes hand-in-hand with your creatives and offers. Our advice is to do your copy as early as possible. Check it. Double check it. And then check it again. Honestly, you can’t read it enough. And if you’re still unsure, get someone else to read it as you might now have become blind to typos or ways to make it punchier and catchier after reading it that much.
Finally, we did touch on this previously but just keep in mind that creatives are subjective and there is no right or wrong way to do it. You simply can’t go wrong with going with an ad that has your offer standing out but if you feel like you want to experiment then you can never have too many creatives.
Nothing is stopping you from trying out something new and, who knows? Maybe you come up with something that really resonates with your audience and brings you great success.
Remember, it all starts with the offer but the creative is where you really help your brand to shine, enticing people to your store and, hopefully, making an awesome amount of sales over BFCM.
It’s a stressful but also exciting time where all of your hard work throughout the year comes to fruition, so be prepared and look your best.
