For Growth Marketers, Black Friday Starts NOW!
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
Abraham Lincoln, growth marketing guru
Summer is unofficially over. For most people, that means shifting attention to the return of football, dusting off fall wardrobes, and savoring all things pumpkin spice. But, for those of us who live and breathe digital marketing, our eyes are focused on something bigger: Black Friday. That’s because if you want to enjoy sustainable success during the busy holiday shopping season, you need to start prepping now.
For many companies, especially those operating in e-comm spaces, Black Friday and the weeks that follow account for a sizable chunk of their annual sales. Q4 is a make-or-break period that you can’t take lightly if you want to keep your customers, and your bottom line, happy. If you want to attract new and returning customers, there are some steps you can take now that will set you up for success.
We asked MAVAN’s team of growth leaders, data scientists, performance marketers, and product experts to give advice on things companies should start doing now to not only survive, but thrive, in the upcoming holiday season.
Here are the top tips from MAVAN leaders and our expert advisor network:
Start planning immediately
Matt Widdoes – CEO, MAVAN
Start working on campaign planning, creative production, and messaging before the leaves start changing colors. The earlier the better. Black Friday and the holiday season are prime time to boost sales and hit (or exceed🤞) revenue targets so it’s worth getting right. Optimizing your funnel through tests leading up to November can have a massive impact on your results once the buying frenzy starts.
Dive into the data and see what worked last year. You can use that information as your starting point. Leave no stone unturned when poring over the data: channels, targeting, landing pages, email, creative. Look at everything. Identify patterns that are consistent across the funnel, and come up with iterative tests that can be rolled out and scaled quickly once a breakout winner presents itself.
Also, don’t forget to look at what your competitors are doing. What do you need to do to stand out and rise above the noise?
Identify opportunities and be ready to scale
Ed Lee – Product & Growth Specialist, Adobe
Your best bet is to get your budget approved early and identify plans for multiple scenarios. Doing this gives you the ability to quickly flex up or down. The holidays are all about finding opportunities early and scaling up budgets to capture wins when costs are low.
You’ll also want to cast a wide net across your channels and audiences. Start by planning a prioritized list of channels where you’ll want to run campaigns and have everything you’ll need ready and waiting to press ‘Go.’ The sooner you have your campaigns, assets, event configurations, and budget, in order, the better.
The best time to scale up your budgets isn’t always immediately before/after Black Friday and Christmas. It can happen at any moment, so plan to look at your data frequently for signals of positive momentum and cost reduction. What was once competitive and cost prohibitive may be feasible for a brief period of time. Don’t let those potential wins pass you by.
Refresh your creative and start testing
Malachi Rose – VP of Growth, MAVAN
Use the time in the lead up to the holiday season to ensure you’ve got a bank of your best creatives ready to go. Without the Black Friday/Christmas offer, develop some fresh creative and test them now so you can identify winners before ad spend goes up and it’s time to scale. Ideally, you can iterate on those during the promotion when time is tight.
Develop a plan to measure incrementality. Figure out the true impact of the campaigns and offers you’re running and measure what the lift is over organic.
Do the grunt work early to maximize returns
Jan Prosek - Performance Marketing, MAVAN
It takes about 50 conversions to get out of the learning phase and you do not want to be spending precious time and money feeding the machine when everyone else is running optimized campaigns. The trick? Launch your campaigns 1-2 weeks ahead of time, enable AI and automate as much as possible. According to META, you can drive up to 50% better ROI if you follow all AI pillars.
You can keep your budget low in the lead-up time, but you want to be able to collect as many learnings as possible before Black Friday hits and costs can spike between 100%-200%.
Get your customers excited ahead of time
Kabir Shukla – Head of Product, MAVAN
With all the planning and work you’re putting in before Black Friday, why not get your customers to do the same? Let your customers create a Black Friday wish list in the weeks leading up to the holiday.
Whether it’s a dedicated, Black Friday-specific list, or simply enabling the ability to ‘watch’ or ‘favorite’ a product, prime your customers to seek you out once it’s time to get shopping. Some items may be discounted, some may not, but now you’ve put what they want in front of them all at once. This reduces time spent searching and browsing and makes buying a lot easier.
Put the right products in front of the right people. One size doesn’t fit all. If you have purchase history or saved items for a user, use that data to your advantage and show them the product they want, or something that goes with something you know they already have.
Get creative and go beyond regular product pages
Rich Skinner – Head of Data, MAVAN
Black Friday shoppers have become quite savvy and now expect their online shopping experience to be an event. Create bespoke landing pages for Black Friday so when a user clicks your ad, they’ll get confirmation that they’re in the right place and ease them into the conversion journey.
As always, data is your best friend. Part of this process should be to review the bounce rate of your key landing pages. If you expect heavier traffic for certain products, it’s worth making sure those product pages are optimized – that means bounce rates should be as low as possible, and conversion rates as high as possible. If a page clearly isn’t working, now is the time to fix it, or redirect to an alternative page.
Whatever changes you decide to make between now and Black Friday, the biggest long term gains will come from learning from the successes and failings of the season. A CTA not working as it should isn’t a complete failure, but an opportunity to learn. Both positive and negative data is helpful from a Conversion Rate Optimization perspective. It highlights what works, what doesn’t and equips you with the evidence you need to avoid making poor decisions in the future.
When you’re on your second helping of pumpkin pie, and are dividing your attention between watching football and avoiding political discussions with extended family, the last thing you want on your mind is how your Black Friday campaigns might perform. If you plan ahead and get the hard work out of the way now, you’ll not only have a more relaxing Thanksgiving, but you’ll be well on your way to a profitable Q4.
If you’d like more advice or even some help putting some of this advice into action, please reach out to letsgo@mavan.com to set up an exploratory call.
The Power of Obsession: How harnessing focus can energize your entire team
By: Doug Thielen
A great coach once said, “Leadership is alignment”. At first blush, it comes across as a pithy alliteration that a coach tosses out. A throwaway line meant for media headlines. But this on-air oration from a PAC-12 football coach, is the most underrated, under the radar, leadership nugget I’ve heard in 20 years; and one that I believe has the power to turbo charge your organization’s growth, if you can put it into practice.
Find your focus
Focus is an organization’s superpower, yet a surprising number of leaders aren’t able to identify their company’s priorities. In a MIT study, only “28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could list three of their company’s strategic priorities”.
That’s terrifying.
Even more frightening, in the same study, “97% of those leaders said they had a clear understanding of the company’s priorities and how their work contributed to corporate objectives”.
How would your organization fair?
While there are likely many factors at play, I posit that the primary offender for most of these organizations was a true lack of focus– a need for a single priority–not eleven. Having 11 priorities isn't focus; it’s the dogs’ breakfast. It’s a recipe for divisional leaders to each pick the 1 or 2 that matter the most to them - which leads to teams rowing in different directions.
Focus is how you scale.
Organizational focus provides individual empowerment and accountability, letting everyone from entry level contributors to the C-suite operate independently while moving in a coordinated fashion toward the greater goal.
Harness Obsession
Focus is key, but let’s take it a step further. The brands who win in today’s environment aren't just focused on a single strategic priority… they are downright obsessed. They’ve identified their enemy, and every facet and layer of their org chart is aware of ‘the monster in the room’. It’s empowering, it’s engaging, and it provides personal value and purpose that employees are demanding in this new work environment.
Good requires motivation. Great requires obsession. And obsession can be infectious.
When your organization is obsessed, that obsession becomes a filter; an active framework teams use daily to make decisions, from sourcing and procurement, to marketing and HR.
Obsession Drives Results
One of my favorite examples of organizational obsession in action is the legendary story of Alcoa aluminum and CEO and Chairman Paul O'Neil's relentless focus. When speaking to a forum of Wall Street investors and asked for his strategic plan to grow the business, instead of speaking to EBITDA and debt ratios, he said that they’d be focused on worker safety; a comment that had him laughed at and labeled as a “crazy hippie”. But it was O’Neill that would have that last laugh, as that focus on safety led to Alcoa’s market value increasing from $3 billion to $27 billion during his 13 year run. (Forbes)
This is a fantastic example of how you go from a mission statement, to being on a mission.
Exercise: Identify Your Team’s Focus and Obsession
Here’s an exercise for your next meeting – ask everyone to write down the answer to one, or all, of the following:
- Part I
- What is our purpose?
- What is our enemy?
- What is our focus?
- What is the one thing we are obsessed with as an organization?
- Part II
- Have them hold their answers up to the screen or have them place the card in the middle of the table
- Did everyone come up with the same thing? Were the answers close?
- If This, Then That Homework
- Have each person, come to the next meeting with the following:
- What should we be obsessed with?
- If we were obsessed with that, how would that impact your work/functional area? What decisions would you make?
- Have each person, come to the next meeting with the following:
From here the real work begins. Define it. Align it. Action it. Measure it.
When you can rally around a common goal and all parts of the organization are aligned and on the same page, it removes bottlenecks, lets startups scale, and fuels ideation and innovation in every sized org.
And if you’re wondering how things worked out for the football coach who quipped this little bit of wisdom off-the-cuff in an interview: two bowl appearances in his first two seasons and handing their fiercest rivals the biggest defeat in history doesn’t sound too bad at all.
Leadership is alignment, indeed.
