As many of us
may know, the day after Thanksgiving (Friday) is known as Black Friday, an unofficially
date start of Christmas holiday shopping season.
But does it work
and what does this event mean? Before stores openings people stand in line for hours,
to grab the bargain of the year.
Since 2005
Black Friday has been the largest retail shopping day in the U.S. going from
Thanksgiving Day to “Cyber Monday”.
Looking at the
trends it is impressive to see how preferences for online shopping are
continuously growing since 2011. In fact, Black Friday’s online sales grew from
$816 million to $3,07 billion in 2015. Although this trend is very interesting,
it is also relevant to analyse the average spent per shopper: from 2011 to 2012
we discover a consistent growth (from $398 to $423) but from 2013 to 2015 we
notice a slight decrease.
People are more
or less willing to spend the same amount of money during the years: a bit less
than $400. This means that the number of online shoppers are growing.
What are the online strategies for Black Friday?
The main characteristic
that makes this event so unique in just one specific weekend is the excitement
and the critical role of time to get the best deal. Traditional marketing still has an effect, but digital
online marketing has the speed and adaptability to do more at the end of the
day. It is such important to understand Cost leadership, with this strategy the
business offers the product for the most affordable price because of consumers
want to have the opportunity to buy a lot and at the meantime to save money, so
we can really say that this means a “smart shopping”.
The interesting fact is that for this weekend
companies create new e-commerce webpages with special discount marketing
campaigns. When the weekend is over you can click and delete these pages. So,
once companies create these special discounts, to gain visibility and become a
Cost Leader, a work of Search Engine Optimization has to be done. In fact, most
of these websites rank very high for valuable Black Friday related keywords.
Regarding keywords, since Black Friday is a seasonal
event, a huge amount of that is only used in November, but all these words won’t
mean so much during the rest of the year.
This graph can clearly explain what this means:
consumer behaviour when doing keyword research.
There are also
many long tail researches based around Black Friday that will create traffic to
websites. Companies have really just to provide relevant contents. One of the
most relevant strategy for this black Friday is to publish sharable contents.
Digital
advertising network can help even small retail shop to sell products nationwide
even if a company isn’t willing to spend a huge amount of money. Some tips to
be successful are, for example, to start the ads in November and keep them
through cyber Monday, advertise on relevant websites (the major adv networks such
as Google display ads, AdBlade exc.).
Furthermore, studies
have shown how it is such important not to forget hashtags, in particular
companies have to:
- Post
pictures on social media
- Be different
to others and original
- Be careful
on timing, between 6am to 8pm the tweets will be blasting off (it is advisable not
to use more than 50 hashtags)
In conclusion we can say that Black Friday is a
huge opportunity for both companies and shoppers. Since this event is
continuously growing we believe that companies have to benefit of this fact and
being always more active, creative and attractive on digital platforms and all what
concerns this world. Digital marketing, in particular related to this seasonal
events (such as this one before Christmas), can generate huge revenues in every
product range. Today we are in an era in which consumers are completely
digitalized so even if small retailers have to catch up this occasion in order
to keep up.
Mattia Boscolo
