Black Friday Marketing Pitfalls To Avoid This Festive Season

The Friday following Thanksgiving is informally known as Black Friday. Several holidays surround this day, which often results in a buying frenzy, making it one of the year’s biggest shopping days. Initially just associated with retail marketing, today, the tradition of alluring people to buy stuff on this day has expanded to the B2B companies as well. B2B companies definitely too can benefit from this occasion, provided they avoid some common pitfalls. That’s what we are going to discuss in the article below.

1. Not Taking Into Account Buyers Budgetary Cycle

Although the holiday season is when the buying frenzy starts, some of your buyers may not have fiscal years that align with the calendar. So before you start promoting your offers, always research when your customers are the keenest to spend. It is generally seen that around the last quarter or Q4, businesses are the most willing to spend on products due to leftover budgets that are on the chopping block if unused.

2. Not Leveraging Email Marketing

Several companies use paid search and social media during heightened activity, but these channels experience an increase in cost and a decrease in conversion around this time. Spending all your money on just these channels can cause your budget to burn rapidly.

Email marketing is relatively inexpensive, and it offers you the advantage of reaching your entire audience multiple times in quick succession. Using email marketing to promote your best offers helps to improve engagement and keep your budget in control. It also provides you an opportunity to reward your loyal subscribers. 39% of customers wait to receive emails from brands for information on deals and promotions. So, make your email subscribers feel special by offering them email exclusive offers, like the example below.

Not Leveraging Email Marketing

3. Not Paying Enough Attention To Your Presentation

When you promote your offers around a particular time of the year, keep in mind that you are competing with several other great offers. Just blasting email offers without paying attention to your presentation can lead to a waste of time and resources. So, focus on your presentation to make your offer stand out. Below are some steps to take your offer from good to great.

    1. Think about why your business should be the buyer’s number one choice. Contemplate why the buyers shouldn’t even consider your competitors.
    2. Use a powerful headline or subject line to grab their attention. 47% of email subscribers decide to open email after reading the subject line.
      Not Paying Enough Attention To Your Presentation Source: Optinmonster
    3. Whether you’re offering a free trial, an unbeatable price, free shipping, or a bundled package, once you have your irresistible offer ready, make sure that you market it effectively using all your marketing channels. When pitching your offer, don’t forget to talk about what’s in it for the buyers and what benefits they can expect from the offer.
    4. Make your offer as risk-free as possible. When people know that they don’t have anything to lose by purchasing your product or service, they will be more likely to give it a try.
    5. Encourage buyers to click on the CTA and encourage them to act now by creating a sense of urgency. One approach to doing so is by making your irresistible offer time-limited.
      Sleeknote

Source: Sleeknote

Don’t forget to add exciting graphics, images, or videos to your emails or advertisements.

4. Not Optimizing Your Landing Pages

70% of B2B buyers go by company reputation when choosing which company to do business with. Before making the final purchase decision, your prospects will be trawling your website and viewing your content to ascertain if you are a reputable brand.

Not optimizing your landing pages and keeping your website un-updated and unorganized is only going to fend your prospects off. So, design your landing pages to captivate your target’s attention and convince them to spend money with you. Practice good search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Make your site and emails optimized for mobile.

5. Targeting the Wrong Customers

One of the main aspects of a successful Black Friday campaign is knowing your ideal customers and directing your marketing at them. If you have been running Black Friday campaigns with no results so far, you’ll need to adjust your campaigns and targeting strategies to reach the right people. Get granular with your audience segments and experiment with different calls to action and content to see what appeals to each segment.

6. Not Planning Ahead

You can’t just launch a Black Friday marketing strategy at the last minute and expect it to bring great results. Without a well-developed plan, you could miss out on important touchpoint events that draw in customers. Spend time researching and developing a strategy. Observe the performance of the early parts of your campaign. Based on the metrics and performance, adjust your messaging and designs to capture more consumers.

7. Waiting Too Late to Launch Campaigns

Even if you have a well-researched, carefully-planned, and well-rounded campaign, it can all go down the drain if you wait too long for it to launch. Staying too late can mean that other brands have already contacted customers, and they have mentally allocated their budget to them. This could lead to missed opportunities. Keeping this in mind, your Black Friday marketing should start well ahead of Black Friday. A Preview Sale can help to market your deals well before the actual date.

8. Lacking Variety

The key to a profitable Black Friday marketing campaign is to offer a variety of products suited to different consumer needs. Your offerings should be filled with a mix of innovative new products along with tried and tested popular favorites.

If you don’t offer various products and solutions, your buyers will look for them elsewhere. So, provide the right mix to your buyers, and don’t forget to describe the variety you offer and their USP when sending your marketing messages.

Wrap Up

Black Friday may not be directly an instant selling frenzy for B2B businesses, but all that rise in demand for restocking, movement of people around the country due to the holiday season, and end of the year budget are reasons enough for B2b businesses to consider buying during this season. By avoiding the above pitfalls and following the best practices, you can prepare well for Black Friday and push sales early to Christmas.