Black Friday is the largest consumer spending event of the year and Black Friday marketing is the gateway to cashing in as an entrepreneur. My e-comm company Rugby Bricks produced a 3-step marketing tactic that helped us generate nearly $40,000 in sales from a 3-person team in a week. The best part about this process is that it can be used on any holiday event and will often yield similar results. Before we start this article we’ve got a mixture of the written word and how-to videos so I’d recommend bookmarking this article for your next future sale. Let’s dive in.

1. Engage Your Hottest Users In Pre-Sale Hype

At Rugby Bricks, we’re big on organic marketing and leveraging our existing audience to maximise sales. Two weeks before the Friday we created a Typeform to capture emails and phone numbers by asking people to sign up to a mailing list to be the first in the know for our Black Friday sale – we shared this on Instagram, Facebook and with our existing mailing list.

With this data, you’ll get your most dedicated followers and buyers to:

1. Sign up to a mailing list not only for Black Friday but also for any future promotions you want to run (which you can then segment from your normal mailing list as high-value customers)

2. Use their emails and phone numbers for building lookalike audiences on advertising platforms which I’ll explain further in part two

For those who we felt were too lazy to fill out the Typeform we also added a story post on Instagram that said “Send us a 🖤 to gain early access to the Black Friday Sale Details”. This extra swipe up gave us some more data to play with and also a second shot at sending the Typeform again and capturing more customer data.

We ended up capturing just over 480 emails and with this data in hand, we turn to Black Friday marketing tactic number two, paid media.

2. Use Your Best Video Content To Entice Potential Cold Buyers

While we were capturing user data from our organic channels we were also advertising our best content to people who had never heard of us before on Facebook and Instagram.

P.S (For those of you who are not familiar with setting up Facebook and its advertising platform, I have an entire video series here on how to set up everything you need for this from installing the pixel I mention here on your website to running ads from your ads manager.)

The first place to start is to build a custom audience in your business manager from previous customer lists (export these from Shopify or the platform you’re working from) and your new superuser list from our pre-sale hype list. Facebook has made some recent updates and if you haven’t verified your business manager or aren’t the owner of it you can’t do this step but you can use data from those who have:

1. Added to Cart
2. Entered Payment Info
3. Purchase
4. Initiate Checkout

Take a look at this walkthrough on how to build this audience here. The reason we’re building this audience is so that we can build a lookalike audience from it which are the people who look like your best buyers.

The next phase is to now grab your best performing video content with the key product you want to sell and run this as a paid ad to your newly built lookalike audience. Here’s a video explaining how to do this and find the right content to match. Once you’ve run this content to your lookalike audience you’re now going to build another custom audience of people who have consumed at least 95% of your video or more.

Here’s how to do it.

Now that you’ve got your audiences prepared the last part comes down to building the perfect offer via paid.

3. Craft An Offer That People Will Love

The last piece of the puzzle is to build an offer that is backed up by social proof and creates a sense of urgency for (warm) 95% watch audience. Here is the anatomy of the ads we ran.

1. The copy

The goal is to create copy that builds urgency. The keywords you use are designed to build FOMO. The best phrases for this type of urgency are:

“Don’t miss out”
“Only 72 hours left”
“Once a year deal”

Another way to test your titles is using a tool like Co-Schedule to test the cut-through of your copy.

2. Relevance To Real-Time Events

The next part of your ad needs to be built around the timing of the actual event itself. When you’re looking to create buyer urgency remind them of this by including it in your ad imagery whether you’re using video or static images.

3. Add Trust Builders

If your product has customer reviews add these trust builders into your creative you can see we have a (100+ 5 Star Reviews) as a constant static sticker throughout the entirety of the video.

4. Link People To The Product Page

Lastly, you should have an offer that is great for people to jump on. We offer a Buy One Get One (BOGO) as people have a greater perceived value when getting something completely free as opposed to 50% off.

This formula is a winner and generated a ROAS of 6.05 for the five days we ran it with a cold consumer base. Have a crack and let us know in the comments how much you make off the next holiday season.

Thanks for reading, I hope you found this useful and you start killing your online sales. If you want to learn more methods like this one that we’ve used to build multiple 7-figure businesses please join our newsletter.