Prepare Your Campaigns for BFCM (Black Friday / Cyber Monday)

TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:41

Hello, and welcome to episode number 43 of marketing interruption. I'm your host Andrew Maff toe and today I'm going to talk to you about preparing your campaigns for Black Friday Cyber Monday. So it is currently September 23, I believe because I'm filming this a little bit in advance, but I'm pretty sure that's when this one's going out. And if you have haven't already prepared for Black Friday Cyber Monday that whole weekend or your holiday campaigns in general, you are way behind. I am anticipating that this is going to be a crazy, Q4 much much bigger than most people have ever thought because a lot of people over the summer and obviously in the spring got very comfortable with shopping online. And so I think that seeing that improvement seeing that increase in shoppers in q4 is going to get nuts. So I talked a little bit about you know, preparing your campaigns what you should do. My suggestion, since we're now in mid to end September however you want to look at it is think of a test you can do for Halloween if you want to run a test in Halloween let's say you did a fourth of July sale your Labor Day Sale at 20% off that did X amount you did you know look at basically look at your your your old numbers from other campaigns and see which campaign is you Think you want to run. And if you think you want to run that one test a different one that you haven't run yet on Halloween. So this is basically your last ditch opportunity to try out a new discount or a new giveaway, or however you want to do this. And make that your very, very last test, do not run any more tests, turn off all landing page tests, turn on any ad copy tests and creative test turn off everything. You don't want to have a bunch of mixed messaging or a bunch of mixed data when you're doing your big campaign because what you want is you want everything to be as perfect as you can get it up to that point, then you just want to run those things. So that your data is sound, your data needs to be perfect, because then when it's all done, you're going to gather all that data, you're going to put together a ton of spreadsheets, and you can compare it next year. You're going to compare it to the year before and then you can go back to testing. But my suggestion is always to completely stop tech testing. Next, I'm going to suggest to create a calendar. My favorite thing to do for this is to Have a separate calendar that's just for marketing. And it's basically marketing campaign related. So you have, you know, at a certain time I just use Google calendars is the way that I like to do this is well, if you're using something like HubSpot, then you can actually just do it within HubSpot. But if you don't do Google Calendar, and you can say what times and what specific social posts are going up when email marketing, you can set that you can set you know, per X amount of days, so and so ad is going to run. You want to be able to visualize when things are going out because you want to make sure stuff doesn't overlap. You want to make sure you're not annoying people too much. The issue is a lot of e commerce sellers around this time. never send a lot of emails until Black Friday, Cyber Monday and then they send one Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and Monday and it's ridiculous. It's way overwhelming. You don't want to send them any. Prepare all your social posts. So my suggestion is by the time your Halloween campaign goes live, you Pretty much want your Black Friday, Cyber Monday stuff to be done and scheduled that week, or maybe the week after. So that way anything you learned from a Halloween campaign, even if you do want If you don't, it's fine, just a suggestion. But anything that you learned during that time, then you can go back and make some adjustments, but you want to get everything prepped and done. I actually prepare everything have it done and a lot in my life. I have it done in scheduled on the first week of November, or the last week of October. And then every week, I check it and make sure that it's live is an OCD thing that I'm doing but I checked to make sure I could schedule it. It is going to go out when it's going to go out. I set a reminder for myself, that every day that something is supposed to go live, I'll go check it, make sure it went live, make sure I didn't miss any spelling errors. It's just you have to be really OCD about this stuff.

04:55

Prepare all your social ads, get those scheduled, get that campaign level down with all the budgets and everything. You want to use prepare all your website banners and pop ups, there's a ton of different software's and things like there are different apps out there where you can schedule banners on your website, or you can schedule pop ups, of course, and things like that. So get those all prepared. Prepare all your emails, make sure that your emails are ready to go ahead of time. My favorite thing to do that so many sellers miss out on is to announce early, most people come up with a game plan for what it is that they're going to be purchasing. You know, they only have so much money, they're not going to blow it everywhere on the last minute. So a lot of people a couple weeks in advance will either a start to plan things out or be a lot of these journalists will start to pick up gift guides and things like that. So that's a separate conversation of my suggestion is to find someone in PR who can actually start to put you in some of these gift guides. But otherwise, my suggestion would be to announce early, one of the things I used to do that I still do for review sellers is we'll actually start campaign right after Halloween specifically, if we didn't do anything for Halloween, so that way, it's almost like we just kind of ignored it. And we'll start a campaign right away. And it will be that only people on our email list will hear about our Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale until the actual day. So we're going to announce it early, like what it is we're doing ahead of time to these people. So it basically like a big email capture campaign, we're gathering up all these emails to do the big announcement of how much this discount is going to be for. And we'll probably announce it two weeks in advance, give or take, if you have PR stuff, you're gonna want to announce it earlier. Or you want to do it differently, where you say we're giving away 30% off on our entire website only with a certain code, and only people on our website are going to get that or only people on our email list are going to get that code, in which case you get all these PR people all these different journalists who can pick up saying that you're 30% off, but you have to sign up for a newsletter to get the discount or something like that. And people are interested in your product line now know that there's something coming and they can prepare for it. So the early campaign, and then the one thing that I find is amazing to me, and this happens way more than I am happy to admit, at least for other sellers is that when I'm first working with someone, they come out and they're like, okay, let's, what are we doing Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I go, can you send me the data from last year? And they go, Oh, we'll just look in our Google Analytics. So help me God. Okay. You need to document when stuff went live, how much reach you got, how many followers you gained, how many conversions you made on each individual platform, what your overall revenue was, what your revenue was stated on Shopify versus what it said it was on Google, what your traffic was, what your bounce rate was, what your conversion rate was, what your sales were on marketplaces like that. Literally every single possible thing that you can document needs to come out of that. And you need it for every single day. So the day that your campaign starts, that's when you have to document it daily. So make a spreadsheet with all those metrics, and just set it up by day for each sheet, and then start to fill out all that information because you need to know every little piece about what happened, because you're going to be able to leverage that information, not only next Black Friday, but also for the next campaign you do. If you're doing something for the holidays, which A month later, you're going to want to know Okay, here's what worked. Here's the spike we saw on this day. And it's probably because we ran this email, like you're gonna need to actually hammer into the details and put together a giant spreadsheet of what's working, what's not. That is probably what's going to separate this Black Friday, Cyber Monday from all your other campaigns because this is going to be the one if you haven't done this before, that actually helps you learn how to do a proper campaign. That's everything I wanted to touch on. So far as much I could in 10 minutes segment. So, thank you rate review, subscribe, shoot me an email. Reach out to me on social media at Andrew Maff. If not, I will see you all tomorrow.