Long before you’ve even started gorging on your Thanksgiving feast, retailers start throwing out words like “doorbuster”, “75% off”, and “BOGO”. What’s a shopper to do? Better yet, what’s a small online business to do?
It’s pretty rough for a small business to stand out amidst the frenzy that is Black Friday/Cyber Monday. The ad space suddenly becomes wildly competitive, as many large corporations have bookoodles of ad dollars to spend. And boy do they spend them.
So how does a small business manipulate the masses on this global shopping holiday? It comes down to three main things:
- Extremely captivating creative
- Specific and segmented audience targeting
- A good ass deal (I’m talking 70% off, folks)
What was your inspiration?
The inspiration was mostly the eagerness for hitting our sales goal, and a little bit of the competition factor.
What was the concept?
To reach potential customers through creative (and highly specifically targeted) means and convince them that they can’t live without what we’re selling to them. In regards to the creative means, we wanted to develop content that was engaging and easily shareable (see video below), and utilize content from our fan base that featured our product. Coincidentally, both of those concepts include cute dogs, so it wasn’t exactly challenging to develop the creative part of our campaign strategy.
How did you create / execute?
The strategy was three-fold: we ran a “teaser” type of ad that announced the sale we were launching the next day. This way, users would know in advance to look out for (if not search for) the sale details. We targeted website traffic, engaged users on Instagram, and fans with this ad, which resulted in over 1k engagements at a cost of $0.03 per.
Next, we launched the sale, sent an email to our email lists, and started running a couple of ads to our target audiences (including this video of @fredthecorgo being a good fulfillment boye).
Important note: running ads was a huge part of our strategy, but what’s even more important is consistently monitoring those ads. Your family might be mad that your face is glued to your computer screen, but you gotta do what you gotta do, right?
The final step was to target abandoned carts. If this kind of targeting isn’t a part of your strategy, you’re doing it ALL WRONG and missing out on a huge opportunity to recover those carts, which in turn means more conversions for you. We offered cart abandoners free shipping in addition to the 70% off discount. The results from this one ad accounted for 20% of the conversions for this campaign.
What did you learn? Any obstacles?
We learned that being on your toes and providing a great customer service experience is of the utmost importance. Which I, admittedly, had a rough go of it, seeing as I was visiting my parents. And when I’m home, they want all of my attention on them (kinda needy, right? Ugh, parents).
An obstacle we faced was not being CRYSTAL. FREAKING. CLEAR. about how the discount was applied to customers’ carts. We encountered a lot of confusion with our customers, making the whole being on your toes + giving your parents undivided attention thing even more difficult. But we made it through.
What were the results?
From our Facebook ad campaign, we received over 600 conversions within just a few days at an average cost of $1.24 per. The real success was seeing that the overall ROAs was 23x. Plus, we made our customers pretty happy with the 70% off discount, and we know that many of those purchases were Christmas presents. Which kinda makes us… Santa Claus?
If you need some assistance with getting the best return on your ad investment, hit us up. We’ll help you out.
