Episode #048: Black Friday: 3 Ads to Maximize Sales
Black Friday: 3 Ads to Maximize Sales
In this week's episode of the podcast we're talking Black Friday & Cyber Monday - specifically what ads you can run to maximize your reach and sales this year.
When you tune in you're going to learn...
Where your advertising focus should be for Black Friday (hint: it should be on your warm audience)
What custom audiences to create to run your Black Friday promotions to
The (3) Ads that we run for our promotions that will help you maximize your results
This is an episode you don't wanna miss...
Links Mentioned on the Show From Zach:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing podcast, episode number 48. And in this episode we're talking about advertising your Black Friday promotion. So if you're thinking about doing a promo for Black Friday, these are the ads you definitely want to be running. So stay tuned.
Hey, hey, hey, Not So Average marketer. Welcome back to the podcast. Now I'm excited this week to talk about Black Friday Cyber Monday sales. Now I want to start this episode by saying that if you are thinking about doing a sale or you're on the fence, I always like to tell my clients that yes, Black Friday Cyber Monday is a great opportunity to generate some revenue, but it's not a requirement to have a thriving successful business. So I know that this might be counter to the episode because I'm going to talk about Black Friday advertising. And there's a potential, you're going to hear this and be like, "Oh, I don't need this episode," but I'd rather just be honest with you that you don't need to do Black Friday, you don't have to.
You have permission, even though you don't need it from me, to say, "You know what? I don't want to do Black Friday this year. I'm busy. I don't have the capacity, the holidays I'm focused on instead." That's okay. I have a client I was talking to and they were telling me, "I'm really just got a lot going on. My client load is full, I'm launching some stuff and I'm going to try and put something together for Black Friday because I know it's a good idea." And I said, "What makes it a good idea? Why does it have to be this good idea to do Black Friday? What if the good idea is actually just to sit back and reap what you've sewed over the past several months and just relax?" So I just wanted to lead in with that and tell you that if you're on the fence or you're like, "I don't really have the capacity, but I feel like I should," you don't have to. You have permission to not, it's okay to skip Black Friday Cyber Monday even if you have a business.
So with that being said, if you are doing a Black Friday promotion, then this is the episode for you because we're going to talk about where you should be advertising if you want to get additional sales for your Black Friday promotion. Now, I think it's important that we talk about first and foremost where you should be focused during Black Friday. So when I think about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and I'm just going to start saying Black Friday, so I don't have to say both every time, but when I think about those, what I'm thinking about is how do I turn my warm audience into loyal customers? How do I get people who might have looked at my brand or looked at my offers but not committed to working with me an entry point into my business?
What that means is that you're not looking to generate brand new customers for Black Friday. And I should qualify that by saying, when I say brand new, I'm talking about people who have never heard of you before. Now the exception would be if you're a physical product business, but I know you guys know this, that's not our target market. If you're listening to this and you sell physical products, this episode will still have relevance to you, but it's not really who we're talking to. But when you're not in the physical product space, people aren't like impulsively looking for, "Oh, what's the best digital product that I can find on my Facebook newsfeed for Black Friday that's going to get me more customers or help me with my health or help me with my money mindset." That's not the mentality of people shopping on Black Friday.
So what that means is that we want to focus on our warm audience, not cold sales, that's where we want to put our attention. And the other thing to consider is that list building should potentially be on pause. Two reasons, one, from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, ads can get really expensive. We tend to compete with other people in the feed. Things get a little more expensive, we generally see and so I'm not pushing really aggressively to grow my list. If I have list building ads running really well, I'll generally let them run over the weekend. But I'm not creating new list building ads and I'm not saying, "Oh, I'm going to build my list for Black Friday." You just have to break that mentality that you're going to grow from cold audiences during the Black Friday promotional season. Now all of that to say it's not impossible, you can run ads to cold audiences and potentially generate sales.
I just don't think that Black Friday is the time to compete with the noise and do that. So with all of that being said, there are three different ads that I recommend that you run for Black Friday if you want to increase your sales. And the first one is an engagement post. And you've probably heard me talk about these on the podcast before where I talk about running engagement ads to stay top of mind or running engagement ads to grow your following. But what we recommend is that you post about your Black Friday offer on Instagram or Facebook, and once you've posted on Instagram or Facebook about your Black Friday offer, you can take that post and run it for engagement to your warm audiences.
Now here's the situation with this. You're not going to generate a lot of sales from your engagement ad, you might generate some, but the goal with this ad is not to generate sales, it's actually to generate awareness of your offer. So what I do is I would create a post, let's say you're doing like 30% off a low ticket product or 30% off maybe your primary product. And you would say, "Hey, I'm so excited to announce that this Black Friday through Cyber Monday, we're going to be offering 30% off our signature course X, Y, and Z. You have five days to claim your special offer." And then with an engagement ad you can actually add a link to your sales page. And that's what I would do. I would add a link to the sales page so that people can go check out the offer.
The point of this ad is that you're going to start collecting and accumulating comments, likes, shares, engagement on the posts that exist on your Instagram and Facebook. But a layer deeper, you're also communicating with your audience what's coming, what to expect. So traditionally we run ads, generate leads or sales. This ad is just about making sure your audience knows what the offer is. And with engagement ads, people can actually see an ad multiple times. So you're running this to your audience basically saying, "Hey, here's my offer. I wanted to make sure you knew about it." And then we'll put some other ads into play that are designed to generate the sales.
The other thing I want to say about the engagement ad is that the point of it is to also collect those social proofs. So you can post on your Instagram and your Facebook, but we both know you compete with the algorithm. When you run the ad for engagement, you're not competing with the algorithm, you're just spending a little bit of money to drive traffic. And that can be really, really effective. So you don't necessarily need to be like, "Oh, how am I going to get this post seen? Or how am I going to make sure people know about my offer?" It's creating that awareness for you at a low cost. Now, real quick, just to reference this, the audiences that I would run this ad to are my entire email list. So you can upload your email list to Facebook and run ads to them. I would target my entire email list.
I would target people who have been to my website in the last 60 to 90 days. Wherever you feel comfortable, depending on your volume, I would target, if you're running lead ads, like we talk about on this show a lot where people fill out a form on Facebook, you can create an audience of people who have filled out that form and you can run ads to them. And then I would also run ads potentially to my Instagram or Facebook engagement audiences if I've been posting consistently on either platform. So the point of this is that I'm running ads to all these places. Now that's the first ad that we run. We make a post, we boost it, we're trying to create awareness.
The second ad that I run is a sales ad, a sales ad for conversions. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take those same warm audiences, and there's two options here and I'll read through both of them. But option one is to take that same post that you're running for engagement, that's going to start getting the likes, the comments, the shares, and use it again as a conversion sales ad. So you can take that same post that's starting to get the legs, the comments, the shares, the social proof, and you can say, "Oh, I'm going to run this as an ad as well."
The point of a conversion sale ad just to talk Facebook ads for a moment, is that you get to tell Facebook, "Hey, I'm looking within the audience parameters that I give you for people you think are most likely to buy my product." And Facebook has a lot of data on people. Like it, love it, it just is the reality. And what that means is that lots of people within your targeting group are your potential customers. So with all of those people being potential customers, what you can tell Facebook is, "Hey, I want you to target the people who are most likely to convert."
And Facebook will do that. It will actually hit the people that it thinks are most likely to buy your product. So while the engagement ad is about awareness and social proof and building up that ad, the conversion ad is about getting the purchase. So this is where you're actually saying to Facebook, "Hey, I don't just want awareness, I want sales." So that's option one, is to use that existing post. Option two is to take those same audiences, but instead of using an existing post, create a new post that's specifically designed to generate sales. This could be testimonial ads, this could be product mockup ads, this could be text based ads, it could be video, but you can create not just one but multiple variations of your sales ad that's designed to get people to buy your product. So what I like to do, if it's up to me and I have the budget for, is I will actually do both.
So I will take that post that I've been running for engagement and social proof, and I'll run it as a sales ad. But I will also create new ads to run to my warm audience that I think might potentially convert well. The point of that is that I'm split testing and that people are seeing the offer multiple times in multiple ways. So I don't just want them to see one post about the offer, I want them to see three posts, four posts, five posts with different angles, different copy, different images, different creative. So I'm split testing within my own audience. Now I think it's worth noting because a lot of people ask me this, "Zach, isn't it really expensive to run ads on Black Fridays Cyber Monday?" And we touched on that briefly, but the reality is when you target your warm audience, it's not going to be cheap.
Maybe that's not what you're expecting me to say, but it's not going to be ridiculously cheap, but it's not going to be outrageously expensive. And you have to remember that even if it does cost a little more to advertise to these people, you're doing two things. One, you're advertising during what is traditionally a big buying season, people are in the buying mindset. People are looking for things to buy. People are shopping, even if it's not directly for digital products. They're in that mindset over this time period that they're okay spending money.
The second thing you have to keep in mind is that you're only targeting your warm audience, which means even if it costs a little more, you're more likely to get the sale. You're more likely to get the purchase from the audience that we're targeting than if you were to say take a low ticket product and just run it to cold audiences. You're going to get decent results more efficiently. So just to do a super quick recap, I'm first running an ad for engagement. That's to build up social proof and create awareness of my offer. Second, I'm running ads to my entire warm audience for sales conversions, and I'm using that same engagement post so that I build up my social proof and make the offer to people with it, but I'm also potentially creating new ads with different angles, copy and images that I can promote to that same warm audience.
Now, the last ad type that I like to run is a really simple sales page retargeting ad. And this one's really easy to set up in most cases. All you have to do is go into Facebook and create a custom audience from website traffic. And what you're going to do is you're going to say, hey, everybody who has seen the sales page for specifically your Black Friday offer in the last say 10 days, right? Because you're probably not going to run your Black Friday promotion for more than 10 days or so, max. You probably might not even run it that long, but everyone who's seen the Black Friday sales page in the last 10 days, you want to create a custom audience audience of them. Now, if you want bonus points, you could also create an email list of everyone who's clicked on your Black Friday offer and add it into the audience within the last couple of days.
So just to clarify that point, you would create an audience of everyone who's clicking on the links in your email. You would create a CSV of those people and you would upload it to Facebook one to two days before the promotion ends, right? Because you won't have that audience until after the promotion starts. But you can layer it in just for what I like to refer to as double dipping. You're hitting people who have seen the website, but you're also hitting people that might have iOS tracking turned off or who are opted out of email tracking. You can still grab that email and you can target those people with an ad. Now, the simple sales page retargeting ad, that's the audience that I use. As far as copy and creative goes, I keep it super simple. I'm going to present them with the offer, the price point, what they get, and a call to action.
So traditionally with a Facebook ad that sells a product, you want to do all these things. You want to persuade people and you want to get them interested and you want to hook them in and grab their attention. And I'm not saying don't do that. My opinion is that when I'm doing a sales page retargeting ad it's not as important. I'm not saying it's not important, but it's not as important. And the reason it's not as important is because we're only running this ad to people who have already expressed interest in the offer. They've already raised their hand and said, "Yes, I want this offer, but they haven't finished their purchase." Or they've raised their hand, I should say and say, "Yes, I'm interested in this offer." So we're not running this ad to people that are unfamiliar with the offer or unfamiliar with the elements or unfamiliar with what they're actually going to get.
They're familiar with the idea, with the concept, with the offer, with the price point. So what this really is, is it's more of a reminder ad. It's more like, "Hey, I noticed you looked at this thing. Come back and make your purchase." Now there's one thing that I want to just mention briefly, and that is that some people kind of stress, they say, "Well, what about people who already bought the offer? Do I need to exclude them? Do I need to remove them from the audience?" And to that I say, it's up to you. You can remove people who have already bought the offer by excluding buyers from your audience, but you don't have to. And I personally like to leave buyers on my targeting list. And the reason I do that is because the people on my buyer list will leave feedback on the ad and they'll say something like, just bought it or so excited or can't wait to get in on this.
And I think that those social proofs, especially on a sales page retargeting ad just enhance the conversions. We notice that when we get more comments and more people engaging, that we get better results. So I think it's worth it to include your buyers, even if it costs you a little bit extra, because you're going to find that more people are seeing it and being like, "Oh, all these people are buying, all these people are commenting, all these people are saying how great it is. I really feel like I should check it out." And that's what we want to happen.
So let's recap everything that we covered today and set the stage for what I would do. So first things first, with Black Friday, we're focusing on our warm audience, not cold sales. We're not trying to build our list over Black Friday. We're not using free content. We're actually selling a product to our warm audience to get people engaged and get people more likely to continue to work with us and buy from us. There's three ads that I run. The first one is an engagement ad that creates awareness for my offer. The second one is an ad to my entire warm audience for conversion or sales that promotes my offer, even if they haven't seen it yet. And the third one is a retargeting of the sales page for my Black Friday offer that's running to people who have seen the offer and I want to encourage to make the purchase.
Now, if you're listening to this going, oh my gosh, that's a lot of stuff, I'm not sure I want to do all of that. In order of importance, it's the reverse. So to me, the sales page retargeting ad, set that one up. It's such low hanging fruit, you can spend five to $10 a day and you'll potentially see sales from that. So that's the one I would set up if you're like, I'm super limited on time. If you're like, I'm somewhat limited on time, but I want to maximize my sales, then include the conversion sales ads to your warm audience, promoting the offer directly. That one is going to be the second most important.
If you are like, I've got all the time, I'm ready to spend the budget, I'm going all in, then layer in the engagement ad. The reason that I say it in that order is that we're going from highest buyer intent to lowest buyer intent. So we're targeting the people most likely to buy first and less likely to buy as we kind of work through that list. So that's what I would do depending on your budget and situation and how you want to position it.
So here's the big takeaway. If you're going to promote on Black Friday, stack the deck in your favor, run these ads. You could get away with 25 to $30 a day for all three, and you'd still be generating really great interest, really great engagement. I can't sit here and legally, morally, ethically say you will get sales if you run these ads. What I can tell you is historically, when we do promotions, whether it's Black Friday or not, these ads have worked really well for us. And so I hope that you're listening to this and thinking, okay, I really want to do this and I'm willing to give it a shot, right? That's my hope for you, is that you think Black Friday is this great opportunity if it is for your business, and this is just a way to maximize and capitalize.
So I hope you got immense value from this episode. If you want to recap, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nYap048. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nYap048 for Not Your Average podcast, episode number 48. We'll have some brief show notes, a couple of links that we might have mentioned on the show along with a full transcript for those of you that like to read along or just want to read to start with, you know the deal, we've got the full transcript for you.
So I hope you have an incredible week, a crazy successful Black Friday, and if there's anything I can ever do to support you, don't hesitate to reach out. You can always DM me on Instagram at heartsoulhustle, because I love hearing from you. Have an incredible week, and until next time, stay not so average.
