Writing Compelling Online Ad Copy for Black Friday
All businesses understand the importance of Black Friday. It’s the official start to holiday shopping and the last opportunity to make sales for the calendar year. When advertising this year, do you know what your content strategy is? How can you write an online ad copy that stands out? How do you create excitement for your upcoming sales in a way that builds engagement and eagerness to buy your products and services?
Build up to Black Friday
Don’t rely on the week before Black Friday to build relationships with customers and promote your products and services. Sales won’t appear just because you paid for a few ads highlighting your deals. Instead, see Black Friday as an opportunity to continue the conversation.
Create your strategy early and be active online consistently before November. Remember, your business is more than just the sales you make on Black Friday. What happens the rest of the year? What does your relationship with your customers look like before and after Black Friday? Marketing is building a relationship and requires more than just one week of effort out of the year.
In other words, don’t let the week before Black Friday be the first time someone hears about your business. Build the introduction first, then grow the relationship with a customer by sharing your upcoming sales. In the weeks leading up to Black Friday, begin sharing upcoming sales or consider offering small deals as a pre-Black Friday event leading up to your grand sales.
Know who to Target
As with all advertising, the most important decision you can make is who you send ads to. With advertising prices even higher during the holidays, it’s important to be strategic. You want to send ads only to the people most likely to buy. Now is the time to focus on re-engagement and retargeting.
Re-engagement and retargeting means reaching people who have already interacted with your brand in the past. This may be people subscribed to your email list, who have added your items to their cart in the past, or who have engaged in some way with your company through social media. This could also be people who have purchased your products in the past, both previous Black Fridays and throughout this past year.
In addition to targeting this audience through how and where you choose to pay for ads, you can also reach people through organic online engagement. This could be your website’s blog or social media presence. Use Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, to lead your audience to you. What are the common keywords this target audience is searching for? Write all content with these keywords. In this way, you can save money and reach people organically by increasing your organic reach on online search engines.
What + How to Emphasize
Now that you know who you are going to target, what do you put into your written copy? What words and language should you use? As always, follow the current trends for advertising. Engage quickly, get straight to the point and personalize. Focus on using keywords as mentioned above so people can find and connect with your content. Emphasize sale details and show the difference in before and after sale prices.
How should you emphasize your copy? Put important words in caps and bold. Or consider italics. Use emojis to evoke emotions or show that a point is important. Decide what story you’re telling. Is this post going to need just a few sentences that grab an audience and get people to click right away? Or will there be a longer hook and journey to your site?
Regardless of the unique strategy you curate for your Black Friday copy, make sure to keep it consistent with the style of the platform you’ve chosen. For example, you may choose three platforms to advertise on. All three will tell the same overall story about your sales. But they are all catching different audiences at different stages. Something whimsical and informal may work on one platform and not the other. Be mindful of each platform’s style as you customize your copy.
Stand Out above the Rest
While Black Friday is a huge sales day for many companies, it is also just one point in your relationship with a customer. Black Friday is a great day to get customers to commit to your product and buy. It’s also a great day to reach previous customers who avoided buying at full price but will buy during a sale. The copy you write is your road map to these sales. And higher advertising prices mean strategizing is even more important. This Black Friday, know who you are targeting, be quick and personal, and optimize keywords for organic reach as much as possible. After Black Friday, continue the conversation and relationship with the customers who purchased so your funnel is prepared for the long game.
