Why Planning Black Friday Paid Social Ads Early is Key

Now is the best time to get ahead of the game and start planning your Black Friday Paid Social ads. The big day may still be two months away, but it's important to be as organised as possible as we move in to the next quarter. 

Here are some of our expert recommendations for planning your Black Friday Paid Social ads to help you get a head start.

Plan Your Paid Social Strategy Early

Planning your strategy across all channels is important, but for Paid Social in particular, Black Friday is one of the most competitive times of the year - which brings with it much higher costs. It's crucial for brands to implement the correct strategy so that they can stand out from competitors, so deciding who you want to target, and the message you want to portray to them is key.

Having an organisation document in place so that everyone knows what is supposed to go live and when is a good idea. It allows you to have everything prepared ahead of time so that there's no last-minute changes. 

As scheduling individual ads across many channels is possible, preparing and building ads out, ready to go shouldn't be an issue. You can build up suspense by letting the audience know an offer is coming, and even look at countdown ads so users can see how many days they have until the offer goes live. Scheduling is good here too, as you don't need someone on hand to pause one countdown ad and switch another on.

Stand Out From Competitors

Play around with the content you're sharing on socials - have fun and think about how you can make your brand stand out from the crowd. Remember that there are best practice guidelines for each platform and work towards those, as well as creating bespoke assets for each social channel. Keep your branding tight within the assets, utilising different ad formats to capitalise on brand recognition and avoiding ad fatigue.

Using a mix of video and static ads is also a good idea, as you can retarget those who have viewed your video and serve them further relevant ads without seeming too desperate for their attention.

Certain platforms tend to provide better results with static ads, so consider this when thinking about ads on Meta, Pinterest and Twitter. Experiment with the format, such as standalone static posts, carousel ads and collections. 

For TikTok, talk to micro-influencers on the platform to work together and lock them down ahead of time to promote your Black Friday offers. Creating native looking content, otherwise known as user-like generated content, makes an ad more credible to users.

Personalise The Experience For Users

Tailor your ads to the people that are going to be viewing them. Use this time to reach out to prospective customers and put great deals in front of them while they're still discovering your brand. At the same time, reward your loyal customers and keep them coming back time after time. It's important not to just utilise the same assets and copy across large chunks of your strategy, and instead serve different messaging across your audiences to personalise the Black Friday experience.

If you have a larger budget, offering premium content on the likes of TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat could be the play. This means you pay a certain amount to utilise a specific ad format and serve it to the whole of the UK for a day, normally to gain mass awareness. These types of ads are done on a specific-date basis, so you need to be liaising with contacts at these platforms as soon as possible.

Test and Learn Ahead of Black Friday

Utilise the time ahead of Black Friday to test what works best for your brand and audience. You can also play around with things like polls on Instagram stories, and learn what kind of content or offers consumers want to see or would prefer. This will give your brand learnings on what you can lean into as the big day gets closer, but also can create a buzz and increased engagement ahead of Black Friday.

Testing landing pages to ensure the user journey is more streamlined and the user is more likely to hit the end of the conversion funnel is important too. The months ahead of Black Friday allow you to do landing page tests to really understand your customer's journey, and also to get other specialisms to integrate with your Paid Social team and improve content or conversion rate on the page.

Testing the type of ad copy users engage with is a good idea too. Test informal language, the use of emojis, short and long copy, including the URL and more. This will help you further understand your audience and the best way to engage with them at such a competitive time. This is another opportunity to integrate with content writers too, as they can assist in writing captivating copy.

Start The Black Friday Planning Process Now

The best way to have a successful Black Friday campaign is to start the planning process early. Planning what you'd like to learn from your tests. copy and assets is also good to do at the earliest opportunity too. Being organised and prepared is the first step of Black Friday success!

To recap some of the key points:

• Know who you want to target.
• Know the message you want to share.
• Build suspense with countdowns and previews.
• Make sure an organisation document is in place.
• Build out ads and ensure they're ready to ahead of time.
• Create bespoke channel assets.
• Explore different formats.
• Create content that looks native.
• Offer a personalised experience to users.
• Explore premium content options.
• Integrate and optimise landing pages for UX and content.
• Test and learn.
  

Want to learn more about Paid Social around Black Friday? Get in touch with our team to find out more. Alternatively, you can learn more about Black Friday and how to master integration ahead of the big day by signing up for our webinar.