Get your BFCM marketing strategy for social media ready.

The year is almost coming to an end and the holiday season and all of its fun-filled festivities are right around the corner! For businesses, this means getting ready to run some awesome holiday marketing campaigns. This is especially important since BFCM or Black Friday, Cyber Monday is just a few weeks away.

For the uninitiated, Black Friday falls on the Friday after Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday falls on the following Monday. The key difference is that Black Friday is more for retail shopping while Cyber Monday is all about online shopping. Businesses offer massive sales and discounts on products and services during BFCM much to the delight of their customers. Essentially, it is a big season for businesses irrespective of whether they are B2B, B2C, or D2C.

To put it in perspective, research shows that American shoppers spent $8.9 billion during Black Friday 2021 while Cyber Monday the same year attracted a total sale of $10.7 billion.

Clearly, it’s time to start preparing your business for BFCM 2022.

A great way to reach your audience this shopping season is through social media. You can run BFCM promotions on social media to garner attention and ensure that you are not losing out on this amazing opportunity.

However, social media planning for BFCM has to be approached very meticulously and strategically. In this blog, we elaborate on how your business can make the best out of BFCM 2022.

How to use social media for BFCM marketing and promotions

1. Create a social media calendar in advance

Your BFCM social media strategy needs to be planned at least 3 weeks in advance to get the most out of your campaigns. This involves ideating and preparing the different types of content, creatives, offers, etc. This is especially important if your business has a social media presence across three or more channels. Ensure that the content you create resonates with your audience and attracts them to make purchases. Visual content is key here.

Source: Privy

2. Segment your campaigns to ensure maximum efficacy

The fourth quarter of every year gets everyone in their festive spirits. This means that if you plan your campaigns strategically, you can drive profitability as well as acquire new customers in one go. For this, you need to divide your campaigns.

For instance, you can have a pre-BFCM campaign running for two weeks prior to BFCM and then you can have a Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaign running from 24th November to 28th November. Post this you can also launch campaigns centered around Christmas shopping and gifting.

Source: Free Stuff Finder

3. Run tiered discounts for driving higher volume of sales

Since BFCM is notorious for their huge promotions and discounts, a great way to attract more sales is to run a tiered discount program. In this method, the higher the amount the buyer spends, the greater is the discount they get.

For instance, customers get a discount of 2.5% for a spend of $250. Now, if they spend $500, they get a discount of 5% and they get $100 off on a spend of $1000.

The advantage is that customers are motivated to spend more in order to earn better discounts, thereby driving more sales.

Source: Glossense

4. Run compelling early-bird discounts to increase interest

A great way to increase engagement and interest and hit your promotion goals is to offer attractive early-bird discounts and offers.You can send out emails or special coupons to a targeted audience to drive more sales. Combining a sense of urgency with a significant discount is a sure-shot way of ensuring that your products or services sell out. Plus, your risk of loss is significantly lower since early-bird offers run only for limited periods.

Source: Drip

5. Buy one get X% off on next to increase average order value

This is quite an effective tactic to increase the value of an order. You can also run a similar campaign along the lines of buy one get one free as well. Both have been proven, time and again, to be killer methods of driving sales, especially during BFCM and the holiday season.

You can run these campaigns on specific products or run it as a general offer on all your products. For instance, buy a perfume worth $100 and get a moisturizer worth $50 absolutely free! Or buy ABC Foundation for $100 and get 50% off on any ABC product.

Source: Sephora

6. Run gift guide ads to simplify holiday shopping

A large number of people are likely to kickstart their gift shopping spree for the holiday season during Black Friday and Cyber Monday owing to the huge discounts. Gift guide ads are a perfect way to take advantage of this buying behavior. As the name suggests, gift guide ads are perfect for suggesting products that can be gifted to friends and family.

However, a number of businesses simply consolidate a huge list of products in the name of gift guides. This simply confuses customers. Instead, put some thought into it and maybe even group products by different categories such as price, tech, clothing etc. 

Source: Dana Berez

7. Live shopping events to motivate impromptu shopping sprees

The advent of several live streaming social platforms has given rise to a new trend in shopping called live shopping. However, this is nothing new. A lot of you might remember televised shopping from brands such as QVC. Live shopping is simply televised shopping elevated to suit the current age of smartphones. It involves influencers and ecommerce brands using video streaming platforms to showcase different products and launches. The advantage is that you get to showcase your products to millions of viewers which is highly likely to generate quick sales.

You can simply add product links to the live shopping videos and experience the benefits of live shopping.

Source: Social Nation

8. Develop visual storefronts for your social media platforms

One of the key aspects of your BFCM social media strategy should be to create visual storefronts for your social media pages. This means leveraging attractive visuals and social selling features to motivate shopping within the social media application itself. This makes it a whole lot easier for your shoppers to make purchases rather than adding an extra step by redirecting them to your website or landing page. 

You can make use of such storefronts to display a range of products belonging to different categories and pricing tiers.

Source: WWD

9. Leverage data and analytics to find out the right social media platforms

Prior to ideating for your BFCM social media campaigns, first sit down and gather the engagement, traffic, conversion rate data of different social media platforms over the course of the past few months. Use this data to understand your best performing social media platforms and also to understand how different sets of audience react to different types of content on these platforms. 

You can then leverage this data to get an idea of what kind of campaigns are likely to work across which platforms. This is key to running profitable BFCM campaigns.

10. Ensure you have enough people and resources to engage with your audience

One thing about using social media for your BFCM campaigns is that you can expect a flurry of comments, messages, and queries from your audience regarding various details of your promotions. It is important to make sure that you have enough resources to engage with your audience and answer any questions they might have. It is important to plan this in advance so that you are not overwhelmed during BFCM and also so that your customers are in no way unhappy with your business.

11. Don’t forget to run post-holiday campaigns

If you think your job is done once the holidays are over, think again! The truth is that most businesses face a slump in sales right after Christmas. People are done with their holiday shopping and gifting and gearing up for the New Year. Which is why post-holiday marketing campaigns are necessary.

Running attractive offers and promotions on your stock and promoting those on social media may just help you overcome the holiday slump. People are likely to spend more on themselves, especially with the new year in sight. Clearance sales, self-care promotions, and year-end promotions are some great ways to run post-holiday campaigns.

Pro tip: Stay on top of BFCM campaigns with social listening and monitoring 

BFCM is going to be competitive this year. The only way to ensure you don’t end up running campaigns that don’t appeal to buyers or get lost in the volume due to lack of engagement, is to leverage social listening and social monitoring. 

Social listening can help brands uncover BFCM trends, predict products that can turn hot-selling and optimize their campaigns accordingly. Similarly, using social monitoring can help them keep the engagement going, giving you a chance to turn consumer interest into a purchase. 

Want to learn more about the role of social listening and monitoring in ecommerce? Read this article. 

Final thoughts

Looking at the calendar, it might just feel like BFCM is a month away and you have enough time to plan and launch your social media campaigns. However, to make the best out of this season, it is important to get started early and plan ahead so that you have everything in place.

Of course, the number one step in your BFCM social media strategy is to identify exactly what your target audience is engaging with and also to gauge their interests. A great way to do this is to monitor what your audience is saying through social listening. A tool like Radarr can convert online conversations into critical brand insights. 

If you’re curious to learn how, book a demo of Radarr today!