Introduction
Every year, Black Friday turns into a shopping spree full of big discounts and attractive deals. Consumers now prefer to shop online on Black Friday rather than going to crowded stores. Last year, consumers spent a total of $9.12 billion online on Black Friday, and this year that number is expected to rise even more. In addition, new payment methods, such as "Pay Later" payments, have increased by 78%.
These impressive statistics present a huge opportunity for businesses. However, as competition is fierce on Black Friday, businesses need to adopt smart marketing strategies to make the most of this special day.
In this blog, we will focus on some effective ways that businesses can use to stand out from the competition. We will also discuss in detail why Black Friday is a great opportunity for businesses, the importance of traffic campaigns, and how generating quality website traffic can make businesses stand out. Now, let's take a closer look at the strategies you can use to get the most out of Black Friday.
As the fourth entry of the Black Friday growth guide, this blog will focus on ensuring you have better-paying ad audiences this Black Friday, so if you haven’t read the “types of ad campaigns for this Black Friday” blog, make sure you do!
We’ve previously discussed the different types of ad campaigns and covered search, display, and video ad optimization; however, there are a few missing details. What audience are we marketing to? What rules should we follow to ensure our company has the tools to tackle Black Friday effectively? What type of ad campaigns should I be launching first? These are all questions that will be answered in this blog.
Chapter 1: Understanding Audience Behavior
Before starting the analysis, it’s good to have a primer on audience psychology on Black Friday. In the coming months, all businesses will aggressively use paid marketing, allotting higher bids and trying to win customers by sheer force. However, if they’ve seen your website or interacted with your brand before, why are they clicking on your ads? According to a study, the answer is more straightforward than you think.
So out of a total of 100%, 37% of them were drawn to your product, 28% are already actively trying to reach your e-commerce site, but the ads allow them to access it faster, and 21% said that they simply want to find out more about the product.
This is a fancy way to describe your customer’s psychology, but what if we reverse-engineer the process? What if we create the ads with this psychology in mind? To an e-commerce site, it would mean the following:
- 37% are drawn to the product shown: flashy ads with your products in the absolute center, no distractions, just plain traditional marketing.
- 28% make it easier to visit a website they had intended to visit: Dynamic catalog ads can make it easier for your potential customers to buy from your e-commerce site.
- 21% want to find out more about the product: consider creating ads based on features of your products as opposed to traditional ads, so if you’re a clothing brand, think “100% vegan”; if you’re a makeup brand, feel “smudge-proof,” etc.
Chapter 2: Remarketing Audiences
Ironically, if you understood what I’ve written up until now, it means you’ve grasped the basic concept of remarketing, even if you’ve never heard of it officially. Remarketing means that you’re interacting with people who have interacted with your brand somehow. It can be through social media by leaving likes or by the interactions they’ve had on your website. Accordingly, you might wonder, what information do we have on them when they visit our website?
Imagine you see a fabulous, flashy t-shirt ad, and out of interest, you decide to check out the new brand’s website. You may not know this, but the website tracks your every move, every click, the amount of time you spend on each page on average, and the number of pages you’ve visited in a single visit. Sounds creepy, right? But the truth of this situation is that your behavior on their website can help them predict if you’re likely to convert to a customer, and traditionally, businesses have used three critical variables or audience types for remarketing.
- All website visitors: if you visit any website, you automatically become a website visitor audience member no matter the behavior on the site, and if you have a smaller budget for your ad campaign, it can be risky choosing this audience type; we will delve more into that in the following section.
- Product Viewers: After entering any website, you become a product viewer audience member if you decide to click on any product.
- Add-to-cart: If you’ve viewed a product and expressed interest by adding it to your purchase cart, you become an add-to-cart audience member.
- Bounce: if you’ve viewed a single page on the website and left the website, it’s considered a bounce. Typically, you want to minimize the number of bounce visits to obtain higher-quality analytics in your e-commerce.
- Purchase: if you buy any product from the website, you become a purchase customer and join the respective audience.
To better understand the size of these audiences, let’s consider the breakdown of your website visitors.
Out of 100%, 71% are product viewers, 24% are bounce, 1% purchase, and 4% add-to-cart. With that in mind, let’s delve into the challenges that each audience type presents if you select them for Black Friday.
What are the challenges for audience selection?
All website visitors:
- Wasting money on bounce visitors who are not interested in your product.
- If you have a smaller budget, with the amount of money lost on uninterested visitors, you might be unable to cover all your website visitors with the remainder of your budget.
Product Viewers:
- It can only be effectively used with dynamic product campaigns. Conventional ads could be more efficient for this audience type because you might be marketing the product to an audience that expressed interest in some of your other products.
- Typical business problems such as pricing or shipping affect product viewer campaigns more since they’ve viewed your product to inspect the details but, for some reason or another, have not decided to take the first step to buy your product.
Add-to-cart:
- If you’re a small or medium-sized e-commerce, Facebook will not pass the learning phase in launching your ad campaigns; essentially, Facebook will not be able to optimize your ads due to the smaller size of this campaign audience.
- You can never grow by launching add-to-cart campaigns alone since the audience size is too small.
New User Marketing
So, we’ve delved into audience psychology and the behavior of remarketing users. Still, we have to discuss another critical category of marketing audiences to create the best strategy for your e-commerce success correctly: New User marketing. New user marketing is marketing your product to audiences that have never heard about your e-commerce. The structure of the new user ad campaigns starts with finding new customers. However, after they click on your ads or interact with your brand, these customers leave the new user cycle and join the remarketing funnel.
It sounds hard to market if they’ve never visited your website, and it is, but are there any segmentations of new users? There are two main types:
- Interest-Based: this audience consists of people who have been sorted into their categories of interest. It’s easier to imagine if you compare it to people’s music interests. Just as there are people whose playlists consist of predominantly blues music or mostly rap or pop, it doesn’t mean that their playlists are 100% one genre or that they are guaranteed to be interested in a new blues song. It means they might be more likely to enjoy more music from the same category. If you apply that logic to ad marketing, you get interest-based audiences.
- Lookalike: this audience consists of people who share similar characteristics to your customer base. Typically, meta allows you to filter this audience type by percentages, i.e., 10% lookalike, 1% lookalike, and it’s essentially a balance of scale vs. effectiveness so that it could find people with similar characteristics to your top 1, 10.... percent customers.
What are the challenges for audience selection?
Interest-Based New Users
- While the user will be interested in the same product category, they might not be interested in your products.
- The user might share one of the necessary demographics but might belong to a completely different customer base than the one intended.
Lookalike-Based New Users
- No control over audience selection, completely blind guess.
What's your optimal strategy for Black Friday Success?
Your optimal strategy consists of starting to launch new user campaigns now!
- You need to bring in much traffic as early as possible before the competition and bidding cost starts to increase.
- This will let you retarget them using remarketing campaigns later, closer to the Black Friday period.
Launching your new user campaigns now, before the bidding prices go up, can help you get an edge on competitors who will pay more for the exact placements of ads. Furthermore, by doing so, you’re sending these new website visitors into your remarketing funnel, powering your remarketing funnel more!
What’s more? Maximize your growth with AI Ads.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably found the buzzword “AI” in every nook and cranny of your everyday life, and although you might be skeptical, it seems that AI ads are the future of paid advertising. Let me break it down for you.
You must admit it: the manual labor involved in making paid ads is exhausting. First, you have to create the optimal ad setup and specify your audiences; every step of that is incredibly delicate. Did you overspecify your target audience? Or are you starting and have no clue what the optimal age group for your product is? You might as well have launched no campaign because marketing your product to the wrong audience type is incredibly damaging to your ad campaign. You get worse analytics that way and might not be able to get the proper insights to grow your brand and launch better campaigns. Now, bear with me as I attempt to break down how AI ads turn that manual labor into a 5-minute job - 3 minutes to prepare your coffee and 2 minutes to launch the best possible campaigns!
What are AI Ads?
Think of it this way: an AI-trained program automatically finds the best audience for your campaign by analyzing your website behavior, and then when the time comes to launch your campaign, the only step you have to do manually is to press the launch button and voila! Then, the AI Ads platform automatically starts to readjust the audience members to maximize your growth. It’s like having an entire marketing team working for you 24/7! Using AI Ads, you can skip the manual labor, get your best audience, get more sales and faster campaign insights. What’s more? Your competitors might be using AI ads as you read this blog, so your brand might lag as we speak!
Don’t worry though, we have you covered
With Enhencer’s AI audiences, maximize your growth and get 300% higher revenue, 800% more sales , and 500% higher returns.
AI Ads help boost e-commerce on Meta, Google, and TikTok campaigns by automatically creating the right target audience. It means more time to think about other aspects of your e-commerce while at the same time boosting your growth with AI paid marketing.
Here’s how enhancers can help you every step of the way this Black Friday.
1st: Launch Enhencer lookalike audiences to accelerate your growth
and ensure your audience grows with the best new customers.
2nd: Enhencer’s Remarketing allows you to target the best audience
with the highest likelihood of buying your products. It’s practically a
refined version of your product viewers. However, its audience size is more
significant than add-to-cart and more powerful!