That One Thing Bitesized: Surviving Black Friday as a Small Business

If you are a small business and are dreading Black Friday because of the competition and pressure for discounts this Bitesized episode of That One Thing is the episode for you!

In this episode I share:

Some stats that will explain how you can make changes to your marketing strategy and plan ahead.

How to reframe the idea of offering a discount.

Some ideas that you can use instead that will still get those customers in.

If your a service based biz, fear not! there's still lots of goodness inside this episode for you, including the option to ignore Black Friday altogether (bliss!)

Remember my loves - it doesn't have to be about discounts!

Get my very Own Black Friday Bargain by signing up to my newsletter - you'll receive 50% OFF your first Empower Session (two weeks only loves!) 

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Transcript

Speaker A: Now, before I start today's Bitesized episode, I just wanted to quickly talk.

Speaker B: To you about my new Facebook ads toolkit. So that's everything you need to run.

Speaker A: Your own successful Facebook ads campaign.

Speaker B: It's a free toolkit and it's on my website. All you need to do is give me your email address and I will send you the toolkit as well as my bi weekly new newsletter with loads and loads of tips and chat. So it's a bit like the podcast, but in a newsletter form. I'd love to see you there and I really, really hope you enjoy the toolkit. See you soon.

Speaker A: Hello.

Speaker C: Hello and welcome to The One Thing, a podcast where I talk to fabulous females about the one thing that made them step out of their comfort zone and change their life for the better. Because it's only by taking brave steps that we truly grow as a person. I'm your host, mum, social media manager and general soul searcher, Vanessa Carlos. And every week I'll be introducing a small business owner, a blogger or a creative to discuss their One Thing.

Speaker A: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to that one thing. Now, as promised from last week's episode, I am going to be talking about Black Friday and how you can navigate Black Friday as a small business. I've got lots of tips in here for you, so I really, really hope you'll find them useful. Let's go. Quick caveat before I start this episode, I am speaking to you the week before Black Friday. So a lot of the stuff I'm going to be talking about is planning. And obviously, if you are listening to me live, then you're going to be thinking, oh, my God, I don't have time for any of this. But it's fine, you can take all this on board and I'm sure you'll be able to use this next year. Let's kick off this episode with a few stats, shall we, in 2020. So that's a couple of years ago. Now, 75% of retailers surveys said they offered deals before Black Friday, with some lasting several days or weeks at a time. Right? So you need to get your ads in early. You need to maybe run them from September. So I would probably start some cold ads, some cold audience ads. So you're moving brand new people into your space in September and build on those until it starts to get really heated towards the middle of November. Okay, the next one is mobile first shopping. Now, that again was a big shift that was happening over the last couple of years where people have essentially been shopping from their mobile. So what small businesses need to do to get ready for the madness ahead is to make sure that your website really has a gorgeous mobile experience that's super easy to shop with and is super easy to navigate mostly. Now, you're going to hate me for saying this, but omnichannel shopping. What the hell is that, I hear you ask? Omnichannel is when people shop on not only your Instagram shop, but also your Facebook shop and maybe even your Tik tok. Okay, so here's a quick start for you. The peak shopping season is always a prime time for brands and product discovery. Consumers often break their typical shopping habits and purchase items they've never bought before, especially when you're shopping for Christmas presents, right? So you need to harness that power of the multichannel marketing so your brand is consistent everywhere and people can find you everywhere, too. Now, I think I bang on about this a lot, actually, but video ads are 100% key to your advertising strategy at this time of year. I'm going to bang out a stat for you. On average, in the UK, an adult watches 46 minutes of video a day. I'm sure I watch more and I'm sure you probably do, too. And with everything exploding in the online space, customers are becoming more and more demanding and impatient. Okay? So lots of brands are competing for the same eyes and with the same Facebook rewarding video creative, okay? So you've got to hook them in with something just that little bit different and quickly. And video ads are key for this. So get yourself on video selling your product or create a beautiful video showing your product to its best. Should we quickly talk about email list again, shall we? I spoke about that last week, obviously, with the lovely L, when you first start building up towards Black Friday, you're going to want to start to build your email list before the big week so you can harness the power of those people that have you have been nurturing for a few months. You can either give them a lovely reward by giving them a first look at the Black Friday deals. You could offer them a small discount. I'm going to get into discounts in a little bit. But all these things will help to nurture and grow those lovely people in your email list. So whenever I talk to small businesses about Black Friday, they always feel really, really uneasy about the whole discount thing. And I get it, it's really ****** hard when your profit margin is quite small. So I'm going to give you some tips now to kind of reframe, first off, how you feel about giving discounts and also some other examples of what you can do instead of discounts that will maybe sit a little bit better with you in your overall marketing strategy. So here we go. So first off, let's start with a reframe, okay? You want to be very competitive with everybody else that's running Black Friday ads, but you don't want to put yourself in the red. But sometimes, if you do offer a discount, how I like to reframe it is you are giving that person a really nice gift and a discount, but also that person is going to buy from you in the future. It's going to buy more than one thing in the future, hopefully, because you're going to be nurturing them and making them feel really special and wanted. So start to think about the long term value of that person that you've just given the discount to. Yeah, they have got a bargain from you to begin with to say thanks for joining. But then because they're going to start to know like and trust you over time with your socials, with your emails and your ads, they will continue to buy from you and so the value is going to get a lot more than that. 50%, right? A free gift with purchase works extremely well. It's actually worked really, really well for a lot of the clients that I've worked with in Econ. And that free gift of purchase doesn't have to be massive. It could literally be something that's been sitting in your stockroom for months and you really need to shift it so you can write it off as a business expense. All these things will really help to shift your ad through from thinking about it to purchase. So it's worth giving that try. And also you could think about a discount on the next purchase, could that maybe help to entice them. So you could do free gift with their first purchase and then a discount on their next one just to keep them engaged and keep them involved in your business and also be quite competitive with the other people that are offering Black Friday incentives. And finally, if you're thinking about an email campaign, how about putting them into a prize drawer for their email so if they win they receive a really lovely prize that you have curated from your products. I think people would definitely go for that one too. So I know I have a lot of service based business people that listen to this. So I'd like to kind of give you a few little ideas as well. And especially if you do want to build your email list around this time, ready for kind of January and you start type of stuff, you could make yourself slightly different from all the Black Friday madness and offer something that would really help or serve this person instead and kind of move yourself away from Black Friday. That could be a really, really good option for you and has worked well, certainly for a lot of my service based providers in the past. So it's worth giving that a try. Now here is something that I really don't advise you to do during this time. The end of the year is always an incredibly expensive time to run ads. It's the most expensive time and that is because there is so much competition out there and people that haven't run ads all year will be running them right now. So if you're brand new to running Facebook ads, you have a brand new Facebook ad account. Do not start your ads now. For goodness sake, Strategize, by all means. Maybe kind of dabble in a few lead gen email list type things, but I wouldn't start them at all, to be honest with you. Wait for January till it starts to get a little cheaper and you can really start to test and really build up all that data and then you could really kill it next year when you really know what you're playing with and who your people really are. So that's everything, guys. I really, really hope you found this episode useful for everyone that's running Black Friday ads. Best of luck to you all. I hope your sales go through the roof. I have nothing but love for you. I will be watching all my ads that I'm running at the moment like a hawk and making sure everything's running smoothly. Thank goodness they are at the moment and then in the buildup to Christmas. I really, really wishing everyone the best of luck with everything. I'm going to be back next week, this time with another replay from another really, really popular episode with Cleo Wood because she is releasing a new book that I'm going to be talking about next week, and I hope to see you then. So take care. Stay warm, stay dry. It's incredibly wet at the moment. And I will see you all next week.

Speaker C: Thank you so much for listening to that one thing. And please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps to get my little podcast into the universe and I'll be forever grateful.