3 ways to start getting your e-tail store’s target customers excited about Black Friday and Cyber Monday
Black Friday and Cyber Monday might both be annual retail occasions with relatively short histories – the latter term, for instance, only really began to be used by the ecommerce community from around the mid-2000s onwards – but their cultural power has reached a formidable level in the 2020s.
So, if your own e-tail store has intended to tap into the power of these dates in 2023, you should have already been planning your related initiatives for quite a few months now.
This blog post, then, isn’t about how to get started putting together a Black Friday or Cyber Monday campaign. Instead, we will be focusing on how you can cultivate the hype that really will get your target customers utterly excited, given that it is around about now you will need to put in place the foundations for compelling marketing messaging in relation to these dates.
Before we go any further… what are Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
For the benefit of those store owners who somehow haven’t engaged much with these retail dates in the past (or who would simply appreciate a refresher), here is a quick explanation:
- Black Friday is an unofficial term referring to the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States. It is traditionally regarded as heralding the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the US, so unsurprisingly, many stores look to take advantage of it with targeted sales. In 2023, it falls on 24th November.
- Cyber Monday is a term applied by retailers to the Monday following Thanksgiving in the United States. It was created to encourage customers to shop online, and has subsequently become one of the biggest shopping dates of the year. In 2023, it falls on 27th November.
Predictably, the use of these terms by retailers and marketers has extended beyond the US down the years. So, your store not being based in the US is not necessarily a reason to ignore Black Friday or Cyber Monday (especially if you are concerned about staying competitive with US-based stores in your ecommerce sector).
So, what are three things you can do to cultivate Black Friday and Cyber Monday hype?
There are a few different steps that you might look to take with your brand’s content over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period (this year, or any other year), to help hook in those much-desired shoppers.
Those could include such measures as:
- Using humour in your content. Perhaps you could create a marketing video for your website or social media channels that evokes those TV shopping channels of yesteryear, or certain iconic cheesy advertising campaigns? A lot of subtle, ironic, and often just downright bizarre humour flourishes these days online, so there could be scope for your brand to tap into some of that (while being very careful in relation to anything that could come across as controversial or even insensitive).
- Putting the focus on particular brands or products. While many ecommerce stores might publish blog posts based around a particular “pain point” a customer may have, and then write about products that might assist with the given pain point, this isn’t the only potential approach to go for. You might like the idea, for instance, of writing a blog post that shouts about a specific item or supplier of yours (as long as it’s done in a way that is fun, relevant, and useful for your customers).
- Assembling tailored online gift guides. There’s always someone out there who is on the lookout for the ideal present for a loved one, or even just a more distant relative. And of course, they might not necessarily be shopping specifically for Christmas, as birthdays, anniversaries, and other special dates still occur throughout December and January. So, putting together some online shopping guides with titles along the lines of “5 gifts to consider for your wife this Christmas” or “How to save money shopping for your grandchildren’s birthdays” could be just the thing this season.
Are you eager to learn more about how Piranha Designs’ services and expertise in such areas as website design, graphic design, ecommerce, search engine optimisation, and database solutions could greatly help bolster your brand’s online presence? If so, we would be delighted to hear from you in Gibraltar, the UK, or Spain.
