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Black Friday – Marketing strategies other than discounting
Every year, the search for Black Friday terms in the search engines increases, usually a month before the appointed day. This year even more due to the situation of confinement by the Covid-19 in which we are. In this article we will see other marketing strategies for Black Friday other than the massive discount that many brands do.
As it happened a few months ago in spring, having to stay at home, an increase in online sales is expected due to not being able to access the physical shops freely. This situation led to a change in shopper behaviour in previous months and many people were forced to buy online. As a result, both confidence in e-commerce and sales through this channel have increased, and a similar situation is expected to occur now.
From now on the consumer will be more experienced and will perform a little better when making their purchases online, offering e-shops the opportunity to provide a better service.
In addition, it is important to note that, those e-commerce that use digital marketing to promote their products / services should take into account the impact that the Covid has also had on SEO (search engine optimization). To work and improve the positioning must take advantage of trends and opportunities that are generated based on these changes and situations. Studying the keywords that were searched for most on Amazon Prime Day is a good example to start with.
Different strategies to the massive discount of Black Friday
It is clear that joining the wave of Black Friday or Cyber Monday is a good option to increase sales in the short term. But, on the other hand, you have to know how to evaluate other types of opportunities on a more global level. Taking advantage of the commercial context, there are other sales tactics that do not necessarily require creating large discounts to take advantage of the increase in sales that is linked to this era. When considering a strategy, we will take the following into account:
Long-term thinking
If the strategy is based on long term permanence in the market, it is important to give the right image to buyers in this time of mass buying. Every decision on brand communication tactics and their execution will influence consumers’ perception from now on.
In other words, making impulse purchases on Black Friday a priority and damaging the brand image during these dates can be counterproductive and affect the sales quota for the following months. It is advisable to include Black Friday marketing tactics within an annual strategic plan which allows us to see the before and after of these actions in perspective to ensure that they do not compromise sales estimates or brand positioning in the market place generally.
Brand value
Other brands choose to skip Black Friday as it is not aligned with what they want to convey at the communication level. It is a line of communication linked to environmentalism and alternative thinking that opts for quality rather than quantity. In this sense, it is also possible to think that positioning oneself “against” the high decreases in prices during these dates means positioning oneself.
What we must be clear about is that, regardless of the positioning chosen for our products/services, any action we take must convey our pre-established brand values, thus avoiding the problems we have mentioned above. At a time when people are more open to promotion, it is a very good opportunity to carry out a branding campaign that shows our value as a brand and brings us closer to our target audience.
Actions
Improving support
It is very important today to have optimized, well updated and fully functional support in the online channels. It is expected that this year will be one of the most important years for online sales and especially for mobile devices (sales for this support are expected to increase even more than last year, reaching up to 60% of purchases). In this sense, it is essential that the user does not encounter difficulties when making the purchase and its experience is quick and easy, prioritizing making our online shops responsive to both mobile and tablets. In this sense, the user cannot wait more than 4 or 5 seconds for the page to load in order to view and make the purchase. This not only depends on your internet connection but also on the speed at which the page loads.
New services/products
If discounting is not an option, the creation of new services or product bundles can help to compete in the marketplace on those days. It can be used not only as a way of attracting a different audience, but also as a tactic to build loyalty among them in order to try to prevent them from looking at the competition. Similarly, it can be a time to test new ideas and get the feedback from the market that would otherwise be so difficult.
Limited edition
Linked to the previous point, but with an even more exclusive touch. Creating a new limited edition product or service for the Black Friday days may be an option. Making urgency and exclusivity a quality for the brand is risky, but at the same time can be very interesting for the target audience.
If there is a risk of losing a large part of current customers because of not going with the wave of discounts, it is a step to be considered with a very relevant potential for success.
Content strategy
If you don’t want to play the price game during this campaign, you can focus your strategy on working on what undoubtedly attracts attention: quality words and content.
For example, getting into the world of travel positioning today is very complicated because of the great competition that exists. There are many companies that invest many thousands of euros in optimising their positioning on the search engine par excellence, Google, in an attempt to make their results appear first when their potential clients/users search for their keywords.
However, it is possible to look at it from a different perspective. Before travelling, many people want to find out about their destination. Thus, instead of trying to position themselves by getting visits through direct competition with “cheap flights to Japan”, it can be done through prior research by the consumer, “best restaurants to eat in Japan”.
This can be extrapolated to any area, in this case instead of competing to see who sells the cheapest mobile phone, you can take the opportunity of all those people who research in advance which is the best in quality and create content based on that. We will not have the fiercest discount of Black Friday, but we will capture the interest of our target audience that we can later work with other marketing actions.
It’s all about strategic planning and looking ahead. Not everything is black and white, you can take advantage of other types of opportunities and exploit those that are more akin to the brand.
If you have found it interesting, we have developed great digital and international marketing strategies and much more in our blog.