Well, we all survived the 2020 Black Friday Cyber Monday surge! Now, we have just over 300 days to prepare for next year! It's never too early, right?
Hopefully, you crushed your BFCM goals this year but, if not, what better way to improve than learn from others' successes, analyze your own results, and start strategizing a plan for next season.
In this blog, I’ll share some tips for scheduling and campaign simplification I've learned over the years, as well as some key takeaways from our BFCM creatives and campaign results this year.
Priority #1: Preparation
First and foremost, the number one priority is to prepare — of course, this sounds cliche but, I can't stress it enough. If you're working with multiple brands, communicate with them at least 4 weeks before BFCM to understand their sale schedule and budget. Once you have their final approval on discounts or deals, carefully organize and layout the schedule in a Google Sheet, calendar, or other project management tool.
From there, set your internal deadlines for creative, ad copy, approvals, and campaign scheduling. The same applies to working with a single brand! Having this setup drastically improves your peace of mind and confidence leading up to launch day.
Creative For Conversions
As always, I highly recommend multiple ad creative variations for not only BFCM campaigns but regular campaigns throughout the year, that's no surprise. For each sale this year, we produced an average of 4 videos and 4 static creatives. Keep in mind, some clients had multiple sales during the BFCM period.
These creative variations allow your campaigns to learn and prioritize the creatives that are resonating with your audience, rather than force-feeding the machine with a single creative and burning through your budgets.
This BFCM, we saw overwhelmingly dominant results from static ads compared to video ads on Facebook. Three key things to keep in mind when making these static creatives:
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Include the brand logo for customer recognition
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Make the sale text apparent and visible
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Create both feed (1x1) and story (9x16 sizes)
Video creative (especially in prospecting campaigns) is normally a top performer in my clients' accounts and across Facebook as a whole. However, when consumers are being flooded with incentives, their attention span is shortened and they don't want to watch a full video to reveal a discount.
Side note: slideshows with simple sale text overlay are great alternatives to static creatives if you want to showcase multiple product options.
The same goes for ad copy: don't overcomplicate it. We produced 3 ad copy variations for each client this year. The best-performers were almost always the shortest 'top text' and headlines that simply stated '30% OFF SITEWIDE'
Consumers want to be told exactly what they're saving and what value they're getting by purchasing during BFCM. You can be concise with your ad copy and still on-brand.
A key takeaway from this year: keep your sales as simple as possible such as sitewide % savings and BOGO deals. A complex sale structure makes it harder for your potential buyer to understand the value.
Organize Your Campaigns
Once you have your final and approved sale schedules, budgets, creatives, and ad copies, you're ready to load it all up into your ads managers. Here are some things I did this year to keep the campaigns and structure as organized and simplified as possible:
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Minimize the number of campaigns. I set up most of my accounts for BFCM to have one prospecting and one remarketing campaign.
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If you have multiple sales (e.g. 25% off on Black Friday and 30% off on Cyber Monday), put the sale dates in the campaign name, it helps with visibility!
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Create and follow naming conventions to a TEE. This helps if you need to make any last-minute changes and for reporting later.
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Schedule EVERYTHING you can ahead of time. Ads managers tend to glitch and freeze as you approach Black Friday and it's best to have everything loaded and scheduled in advance.
See You Next Year...
Across all of my accounts this year, the total BFCM ad spend surmounted to $506,820 from Friday through Monday with an overall average ROAS of 5.54. I attribute this success to all of the steps I outlined above and hope you can learn something from it too! Overall, BFCM is a learning experience for everyone in eCommerce and each year, we only hope to be better prepared and generate greater results in the following year.
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