The Ultimate BFCM Guide

The only BFCM Guide you’ll ever need

To start things off: What is BFCM ?

Black Friday is the first day after the U.S Thanksgiving holiday. The origins can be traced back to a financial crisis that followed as a result of the declining gold market in the 1800s. The etymology is that back in the day, retailers used this day after Thanksgiving to generate revenues to become profitable in the year and to "go in the black". Although this expression did not become mainstream until the 1980s, this fun anecdote has become history.

Owing to the gains that businesses made during this sale, the burgeoning tech sector wanted a piece of the pie, too. This led to the birth of Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is the first Monday that follows Thanksgiving and focuses solely on electronics and electrical appliances. Everything from LED TVs to premium headphones is on sale at astonishingly low prices. Over the years, discounts and offers run through the entire Thanksgiving weekend.

What began as (and still is) people camping out for nights outside Walmarts and Targets has slowly started shifting toward online sales. While a significant section of people still do this, there is a growing population who want discounts but without having to inconvenience themselves too much. Cue - eCommerce!

Now, more than ever, it has become so easy for people to sell online. With tools like Squarespace and Webflow coming into the mix, setting up a responsive eCommerce website has become easier than ever. Gone are the days when you need developers to build complex WordPress or Shopify sites for you. This “ease of access” has led to so many more businesses selling online and a bunch of seasonal businesses that surface during the holiday season and disappear as soon as it’s done. What it means for you is that there are so many more people competing for the same ad space.

With more people advertising online, rising Cost per Thousand Views (CPMs), make it harder for you to reach the people you actively engage with throughout the year. Last year alone we observed that CPMs went up 2x and in some cases even 4x for some businesses. What typically happens is that these businesses with larger pockets tend to squeeze smaller businesses that are on a shoestring budget until they cannot compete anymore. And for businesses depending on holiday sales, this can make or break.

But all’s not gloom and rain: high CPMs make it harder to reach people but for the people who you do reach, their intent to buy your products is so much higher! Click-through rates increase by almost the same degree as CPMs and here’s the best part - so do conversion rates! So in a nutshell, what that means is - yes, you’re paying more to reach people. But the people you do reach are very likely to buy your products. So all you need is a strong advertising strategy to cash in on the holiday season.

Ad Strategy

In all facets of life, it is important to approach events with a clear strategy and a way to measure their success. With the challenges that BFCM presents, everything right from new customer acquisition, engagement, purchase, re-purchase and a whole lot more needs to be planned to a tee. There are several ways to advertise, but they need to be effective and must be backed by a plan that aligns with your brand's overall goals.

Just generating traffic is not enough, they need to have a clear intent to purchase. This has to start from the highest level of your advertising funnel (where you reach out to cold audiences) so that it can trickle its way down right into your pockets!

Meta’s Seasonal Advertising Campaign Guide

Every year before the holiday season Meta releases their Holiday insight guide and based on our experience Facebook focuses on the broad picture and does not focus on immediate actionable pointers but this year the Guide is different the guide has some action pointers that marketers can consider using during the holiday season in general and specifically during the BFCM Sale.

Here’s a link to Meta’s BFCM Guide.

And here is our breakdown of the Meta BFCM Guide Breakdown.

Document Breakdown

Facebook has stated a few key pointers across the document that we’re highlighting for you in a way that it’s plan and simply, taking away all the jargon.

Break the balance: On days leading up to the sale the CPM increases, so does the CVR and therefore we do not see a huge variation in the CPA during the sale. So contrary to popular belief: acquisitions are not higher!

Ad Metrics

💡 Teal Tip: If marketers are able to increase their CTRs during the sale they can counter the the high CPM double down on the increased conversion rate during the period. To improve your CTR, you need to make sure that your offer, targeting and content is on point.

To increase your CTR, refer to our other blogs to help you create offers for your business, leverage Customer Personas and understand funnel content better.

Facebook’s Strategy for the Holidays

Facebook has in effect validated what we’ve come to realise about holiday season marketing: start building audiences prior to the sale when CPMs are low and only focus on converting them during the Black Friday Sale.

Conversion API

‍Unlike last year, the guide talks about implementing conversion API for the business but the actionable insight that they have shared is around how to check the quality of the conversion API implementation.

Aim for an Event Match Quality score of 6.0 or higher to get better campaign optimization

How to achieve it is something you should discuss with your developer or member who implemented conversion API

Account Setup

If you are starting campaigns, Facebook has recommended to keep the budget of the campaigns lower while launching the ads and having a simple ad setup. This is something that we feel is completely dependent on how you run ads but you can test this for your business.

High Budget for Bidding Strategies

If you are familiar with cost caps and bid caps, Facebook has recommended using cost caps over bid caps and keeping the budgets high.

💡 Teal Tip: We’ve seen great success with cost cap using a “10X CPA Rule”. If you want to get purchases at a $50 cap set the campaign daily budget to $500.

Meta Talks about cart abandonment

‍The Meta Guide spoke about cart abandonment rate this year which is usually a taboo. If you have not been creating a separate campaign specifically for people who have added to cart and not purchase this is a good starting point for you. Make use of catalog ass (advantage + catalogs) to drive conversions through retargeting ad sets during the sale

‍

The Guide in a nutshell

‍

Meta’s BFCM Battlecards (Just the Good Ones)

‍

‍

‍

Advertising Pre-Requisites

Just spending money on ads isn’t enough. You need to be aware of all the components that comprise the customer journey right from ad messaging to the website checkout process. The entire funnel needs to be optimized to make sure it is ready to receive and convert the traffic it receives.

Offers

Ad messaging, landing pages, and everything else is fine; but let’s be honest: during BFCM, customers want discounts.

An offer by definition is a proposal made by a seller to acquire and convince someone to buy your product or service. There are infinite ways to think about offers but there are only a few ways that make sense for your business.

To know more about offers and how to construct them, click on the link below.
HOW TO CONSTRUCT OFFERS THAT MAKE SENSE FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Audience

Once you have your offer, it’s important to know who you’re selling it to. Understanding your buyers or nailing down your audience targeting is vital. This is multifaceted and involves everything from studying customer demographics, to geographical locations, and more. A vital part of this is understanding customer personas.

To know more about customer personas and how to think about them, click on the link below.

CUSTOMER PERSONAS - A COMPLETE GUIDE

Content

Communicating effectively with your customers is crucial to getting you those clicks and landing people on your website. Analyzing competitor ad content, looking for patterns, and replicating them in your ads is one small part of what you need to do.

To know more about content and how to build it, click on the link below.

UNDERSTANDING FUNNEL CONTENT

Infrastructure & Tools for Success

While ads are important, it is only 50% of the advertising journey (or maybe even smaller). It is important to have a solid customer journey on your website so that the people who do see your ads and make it to your website don’t go away without buying your products. You would also need to plan your media buying ad spends effectively so that you’re able to keep the traffic coming to your website going.

To know more about website infrastructure, how to set them up, and working capital financing, click on the link below.

WEBSITE INFRASTRUCTURE AND TOOLS FOR SUCCESS

Attribution & Attribution Models

With the events leading up to the infamous iOS 14 update and its ripple effect on the paid media space, advertising has become increasingly difficult. A term that probably was not very heard of and has not become mainstream is attribution. Attribution in marketing involved determining those events that are leading up to you receiving a conversion. it evaluates all touch points that consumers typically encounter in their path to purchase to determine which channels had the most impact. Attribution is important to identify which of your efforts are getting you results.

Based on this, Meta, Google, TikTok, and more have created multiple attribution models that perceive these touch points differently to help you understand data in a better way.

To know more about marketing attribution, attribution models, and more, click on the link below.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT MARKETING ATTRIBUTION

Marketing Objectives

While running ads, it is important to know what your marketing objectives are and how to identify how far off you are from them. More often than not, people don’t realize those discrepancies in singular key-performance indicators (KPIs) are not the only reason behind dips in performance. To put it plainly, let’s say you’re running ads with the objective to drive down your customer acquisition costs or cost per purchase. If you are only trying to optimize your ads to reach more people or achieve a higher CTR, then you’re looking at a segment of the bigger picture. There are several other metrics like CPMs, bounce rate, cost per landing page view, and more that you aren’t even looking at.

Before launching your campaigns (for BFCM or otherwise), we strongly recommend you go through this pre-live checklist.

PRE-LIVE CHECKLIST

Funnel Battlecards

Battle Cards are some of our tried and tested formulas that you can apply to your business which, if executed correctly, will make a remarkable difference in your festive season.

‍

If you need any help with the Battlecards, want us to audit your setup, ad account or just want to chat. Feel free to schedule a call with us here.
Please download all Battlecards for an optimal experience.

‍