What types of businesses are running Black Friday discounts?
From what we’ve all noticed over the years, it’s the big and medium-sized businesses that are preparing and launching Black Friday discount campaigns.
This is because they already have experience and maturity of the process, have the necessary logistics and budgets that can support marketing campaigns.
Small businesses face problems related to either no marketing budget or a small budget insufficient to support marketing campaigns, or a narrow range of products on which they can offer discounts or discounts would be too small compared to what competitors can offer, or low inventories, or lack of courage – something you rarely find in developed companies.
Black Friday 2020 – major changes under the impact of the pandemic
For several months now we have been discussing major changes in user behaviour following the installation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Even though the online shopping trend was on the rise, the pandemic has further accelerated this type of shopping.
People have come to buy faster, so the number of interactions with the product has decreased, but their expectations have increased – people want products to be delivered quickly, smoothly, and to order easily and quickly.
Changing behaviour and consumption has prompted business owners to adapt to new requirements and expectations so that the user experience with the website is as pleasant as possible, delivery times are reasonable – courier companies have changed, existing contracts have been renegotiated, and they too have had to readjust.
Basically, we are talking about: change, adaptation, reinvention.
All in all, the preparations for the Black Friday sales marathon could not help but be influenced, and it remains to be seen what sales figures will be achieved during this period. However, we believe they will surpass last year’s.
The big online retail chains have already announced that they have prepared themselves with much larger stocks, with expanded receiving and parcel processing locations, some of them, have even made special hires for the Black Friday period.
If we look at this pandemic period, where we hear a lot about the economic crisis, about people who are out of work or whose incomes have fallen, we might think that people are more careful about what they spend their money on and how much they spend.
On the other hand, we see that they continue to buy, with many niches where sales have increased in this period compared to previous years’ data. An example for the fashion industry, is Fashion Days, which has now reached its forecast level of receipts for the period 2024-2025 – they had months where they sold more than during Black Friday (source).
Below, we present a top of the product categories that sold the most before the pandemic vs. the top of the product categories a few months after the pandemic – a situation that continues today:
Most bought products before the pandemic
Most bought products during the pandemic
Therefore, we believe that Black Friday will also see the highest sales in the product categories that have seen increases during the pandemic period.We predict that Black Friday will be perhaps more complicated and complex to organise, but with higher sales than last year.
Recommendations for preparing Black Friday 2020 online campaigns
I said at the beginning of the article that small businesses generally don’t organise Black Friday campaigns. We want to encourage them to do so, because everything has a beginning, and if they have chosen to enter this market they need to learn slowly, slowly to use it to its true value.
Here are some recommendations / tips for business owners to help you get more organised, avoid some unpleasant situations and improve your results:
- Set your goals – make a list of products to which you can apply discounts and set the discount grid – also take stock into account. If you’ve run Black Friday campaigns in previous years, analyze that data as well.
- Start or start with what you have – website, facebook page, etc.
- Update website banners with specific Black Friday information and social media accounts.
- Develop a dedicated landing page in the website.
- Make sure your site will handle more traffic – talk to your host and take all the measures you can.
- Check the site very well so that there are no errors or functionality issues.
- Check the loading speed of the site on all devices and display mode – perform as many tests as possible.
- Make sure your site is safe for users.
- Update any section of the site and highlight it if you think it might be of major importance to users.
- Make sure the information related to the discount period is found.
- Announce the start date of the discounts and on social media accounts.
- Send newsletters before the discount starts and during the discount period.
- Make sure you have well trained and informed staff for the phone calls that will come from the website and from the other accounts you own.
- Include in the Black Friday 2020 promotion strategy: email marketing campaigns, Google Ads campaigns (search campaigns, shopping ads, display remarketing, etc.), Facebook Ads campaigns – create and test more lots of ads, play with audiences, do a lot of A/B testing, implement retargeting campaigns.
- Make presentation videos for products you want to highlight or where you know their usefulness could be more easily understood that way.
- Prepare ahead of time!
A general recommendation, which we always tell our clients and potential clients, is to allocate budgets and consider brand awareness campaigns (to be included in the marketing strategy) and not just direct sales ones – because, those who will win at any time, regardless of the context are those who understood and acted in this direction.
We can help you with integrated online marketing campaigns.
Don’t hesitate to contact us contact!
Black Friday 2020 will take place on November 13 – Emag has announced this date and probably, the other stores will also join starting this day.
If, however, you are thinking about a long-term strategy and not just during Black Friday, you can lay the foundations of a promotion strategy by detecting what problems your website has by requesting a SEO audit.