Black Friday countdown #8: Get promoting on social

Advertising via social media offers almost unrivalled targeting options when compared with other promotional channels.

In our previous blog, James described the importance of driving newsletter sign-ups and registering users on your site in the run up to Black Friday – giving you an email list to promote your offers prior to the event for maximum exposure.

This week, we delve a bit deeper into social media advertising to show you how it can boost your Black Friday pre-promotions.

First of all, social media can deliver qualified traffic directly to your site to generate leads. Secondly, it can boost your following; providing another channel on which to deliver your marketing and brand messages before the event.

Facebook and Twitter are typically the most effective networks for promoting to consumers. With both platforms being accessed by users constantly throughout the day via mobile devices, they offer you the chance to be in front of potential customers wherever they are. Each network has a comprehensive list of targeting options to make sure you can maximise the ROI of your campaigns.

Twitter – promoted tweets, accounts and trends

The two main campaign types for Twitter include promoted accounts and tweets. By promoting your account, you are encouraging users to follow your brand page. Increasing users who follow your account gives you an extra opportunity to promote your Black Friday and future marketing messages for free.

Promotional tweets give you the option of adding links to your messages and pushing users to your website, encouraging them to sign-up to your email/marketing list.

Another option is to use promoted trends. While this campaign type is likely to be more expensive, it has huge potential for events like Black Friday. The trends list appears on the left of the user interface and informs them of the topics that are popular on Twitter at any given moment, which might be a simple topic name or a hashtag.

Choose targeting options that give you a broad reach by simply advertising to users with particular interests, or be more specific and target using multiple options. Typical Twitter advertising targeting options include:

• Gender
• Location
• Followers of competitor accounts
• Followers of complementary brand accounts
• Followers of industry relevant media or influential accounts
• Users of specific hashtags e.g. #Blackfriday
• Interests

Facebook – promoted posts

Facebook offers similar campaign types to Twitter, allowing you to promote pages or specific posts. Facebook is able to collect a comprehensive amount of data from each of its users, which provides the perfect opportunity to laser-target an extremely specific audience. Standard targeting options include:

• Age and gender
• Location
• Additional demographics
• Interests
• Behaviours
• Connections

Facebook also offers the chance to set up a custom audience, allowing you to upload a list of email addresses and/or phone number from your own database. This provides a fantastic way to target your email list with multiple channels, giving you complementary exposure.

Remarketing

Both Twitter advertising and Facebook offer a remarketing option that allow you to maintain a brand presence in front of users who have already visited your website. Remarketing requires a snippet of code added to your site in order to place users who visit a specific page or pages on a list. You can then advertise directly to these users who you know have shown a direct interest in your products or services. Consequently, you can be much more specific and strategic with your messaging to these individuals.

Remarketing via social media ensures that your brand is always at the forefront of your potential customers’ minds before Black Friday arrives. It’s also often significantly cheaper than other campaign types, too.

Facebook and Twitter also offer real-time flexibility, so you can add more or less budget and are given the chance to widen or reduce your target audiences at any time.

As it forms an important part of your customers’ everyday lives, social media is perfect for guaranteed visibility and brand exposure during time-sensitive campaigns such as Black Friday.

Check out the other tips in the series

Black Friday countdown #9: Target your audience early through PPC

Black Friday countdown #7: Google’s new Customer Match feature

Black Friday Countdown #6: Make your ads stand out

Black Friday Countdown #5: How to optimise your shopping campaigns