Black Friday Marketing Strategy: 26 Ideas to Drive Sales
Meaghan has provided content and guidance for indie retailers as the editor for a number of retail publications and a speaker at trade shows. She is Fit Small Business’s authority on retail and ecommerce.
Brigitte is a retail specialist and staff writer with brick and mortar management experience. She is versed in retail sales analysis, merchandising, and buying with an emphasis in retail sales and marketing across platforms. She has a BA in writing from Washington University, St. Louis.
This article is part of a larger series on Retail Management.
Black Friday is one of the biggest retail shopping days of the year. Following a dip during the pandemic in 2020, Black Friday shopping traffic rebounded in 2021 and looks to remain strong in 2022.
As a retail business, you do not want to miss out on opportunities to boost your sales over the Black Friday weekend—in-store and online. Let’s take a look at some of the most successful Black Friday marketing strategies that will help you capitalize on buying momentum and ring in the holidays with profits.
1. Build Hype Early (But Not Too Early)
In an age when people are constantly bombarded with ads, it is more important than ever to start marketing for any event, especially Black Friday, as early as you can. Repetition and a long-term marketing strategy will help you stand out in customers’ minds and boost the likelihood of people thinking of you on the big day—when their choices are endless.
Did you know?
According to Google Analytics, 40% of holiday shoppers say their past shopping experience has made them consider shopping much earlier this year.
You do not, however, want to start your push too early. This will only annoy your customer base and make you seem pushy. Here is a timetable that you can use to guide your Black Friday marketing campaign:
Late September/Early October | Start with a soft marketing initiative where you aren’t sending customer marketing materials directly or running long-term ads, but rather are using word of mouth or social media posts to begin building recognition and hype around your brand. |
Late October/Early November | This is when I would begin your bigger and more aggressive Black Friday campaign. Start sending promotional materials like emails and texts and running Facebook and other ads around this time to maintain top-of-mind recognition and keep your customer base in the loop. |
Black Friday Weekend | On the weekend of your Black Friday event, it’s time to get loud—online and in-store. Send out emails each morning of your sale to let customers know about your deals and how long they last. Use social channels to show people what your sale looks like and the products they can purchase. Don't hesitate to post both on your feed and at your stories—at this point you want your online presence to be strong so customers get excited about coming. You should also decorate your store, making it as festive and eye-catching as possible to entice any passing traffic. |
You can learn more about how you can plan marketing initiatives and stay on schedule for any event with our 2023 Retail Marketing Calendar: Planning Guide (+ Free Download)
At my local boutique, for example, we would start with a soft marketing push in early October for Black Friday—think social media stories and word-of-mouth promotion with in-store customers. A month or so from Black Friday, we would ramp up our efforts and try a more intense marketing strategy, using tools like SMS messaging, social media partnerships, and email campaigns (all of which we will discuss below).
2. Account for Black Friday in Your Marketing Budget
When writing your annual budget and considering where you will spend money, set aside capital to invest in marketing around Black Friday. With consumers ready to buy and excited to engage with retailers, the time around Black Friday is a great opportunity to leverage social media, buy ad space, and use in-store marketing materials to promote your sale and business and capitalize on consumer buying potential.
As a general rule of thumb, small retail businesses allocate 5%–10% of their annual revenue to marketing. The best thing that you can do to ensure that you have enough funds to execute your Black Friday outreach campaign is to start planning early and get your roadmap sketched out.
When you have a marketing plan, estimate how much each piece of the puzzle will cost. Some initiatives might only be a few dollars—like in-store flyers or social media posts—while others, such as ad space or paid influencer partnerships, might be more of an investment. Once you have a cost picture, you can either allocate funds throughout the year to make your initiative possible or adjust your Black Friday plan to fit the budget. Either way, planning and setting a budget early will allow you to execute a great Black Friday marketing strategy without affecting your bottom line.
Don’t forget that Black Friday typically requires a larger staff to manage traffic and keep your store tidy. The holiday might even demand that people work overtime. Learn how you can keep your staff motivated with our guide to holiday pay.
3. Try a Black Friday SMS Marketing Campaign
As part of your more aggressive social media push closer to Black Friday itself, send your customers SMS messages to alert them of your specific upcoming deals and remind them about your store. You can even send them special promotions and offers to build exclusivity.
Keep your business top-of-mind with SMS marketing campaigns that remind customers of everything you will have to offer.
(Source: SMSBump)
You can consider a customer loyalty program to collect phone numbers and accrue a customer base. This will allow you to exchange customer information for exclusive deals and discounts while also fostering loyalty. Additionally, you will want to choose a marketing text messaging service like Klaviyo, TextMagic, or SimpleTexting.
Black Friday Alerts
Another SMS marketing strategy that can boost engagement around your Black Friday sale is to let customers sign up for Black Friday alerts. This way, you can send customers excited about your sale instant updates and additional texts without fear of annoying or pestering them.
This is also a great way to maintain top-of-mind recognition on sale day and let your loyal customers gain a sense of exclusivity.
4. Leverage Social Media (Don’t Forget Those Black Friday Hashtags)
One of the most powerful tools that you can use to promote your Black Friday sale and ring up hype is social media. In fact, according to a report from HubSpot, 77% of social media marketers say social media marketing has been somewhat to very effective for their company this year.
Did you know?
More than a third (36%) of U.S. social media users use Instagram to follow brands and get updates from companies.
To begin your social marketing push, you will want to be sure that your brand has active Instagram and Facebook pages, at the very least. You can also add Pinterest, Twitter, and other sources, but Instagram and Facebook should reach the majority of your customer base. Here you can share promotions, images, and sneak peeks to drum up hype around your Black Friday sale.
As we talked about before, even on social media, I would start with your soft push by using stories and hashtags to avoid being overly pushy to your followers. Then, closer to the actual sale, ramp up your social marketing with posts, influencer partnerships, and ads (all of which we will cover below).
I would also suggest making your Instagram shoppable so customers do not have to leave their social platform to browse or complete a purchase.
Let’s look at some of the best social marketing strategies you can use to promote your Black Friday sale:
Influencer marketing is when your brand partners with an influencer, and you agree to compensate them in exchange for promoting your product, brand, or sale. In an age when people seem to follow more influencers than actual friends, working with these quasi-celebrities will help you boost your reach and influence when promoting your Black Friday sale.
Did you know?
In 2021, 68% of marketers’ companies worked with influencers on social media, with two-thirds working with micro-influencers (10K-100K followers) and nearly a third working with mega influencers (more than 1 million followers).
For promoting a Black Friday sale, you have a couple of different options in terms of what your partnerships could look like:
- The influencer can hype your brand by showing off your merchandise and telling their audience more about your brand, only briefly mentioning the upcoming Black Friday sale. This type of promo, which should be done further out from the event, will help expand your reach and create top-of-mind recognition.
- The influencer can strictly promote your sale by telling people about the deals, the timing, and the exact discounts you will run. This type of influencer advertising is best suited for closer to your actual event, not as part of your soft push.
As an example, Boyed, a small women’s streetwear brand, recently launched its clothing line and used influencer marketing as the primary way to reach its audience and drum up excitement. Months before Boyed even launched, I started seeing people on my feed showing off Boyed merchandise and telling me more about the brand itself. This intrigued me, and I started following Boyed to stay up to date.
Boyed’s feed features influencer-generated content to build customer trust and drum up hype among multiple audiences.
(Source: Instagram, @shopboyed)
Then, a week before launch, much more detailed information, including pricing and sizing started to come out and get promoted by influencers (and the brand, too). By the time Boyed’s line finally dropped, I had gotten excited, built recognition, learned the products and deals, and was ready to buy.
You can look to this guide on influencer marketing for a more detailed roadmap to acquiring and successfully using influencer partnerships.
You can make your Black Friday (or any other) posts more effective by using hashtags. Including hashtags in your posts will create another avenue for users to find your sale, increase your posts’ searchability, and boost the likelihood that social platforms will put your posts in people’s feeds or on discovery pages. Think of your hashtags as road signs for social media platforms; they can help the algorithm understand what kind of information is in your post to put your content in front of the best audiences.
So, for Black Friday, you want to use hashtags to tell the algorithm a little bit about your brand and that your post is related to the sale. For example, for Black Friday at my boutique, we used our normal hashtags like #bohostyle, #coloradoboutique, and #mountainchic. And then, to indicate that our content was Black Friday-related, we would add tags like #blackfriday2020, #blackfridaylocal, #blackfridaycolorado, and #blackfridaysales. These tags helped to get our content in front of potential Black Friday shoppers, as well as specific audiences interested in our brand.
Did you know?
According to research from CompareCamp, on Instagram, posts with 11+ hashtags have the highest interactions with 79.5%.
The best way to use hashtags is to add them to the bottom of your post captions. However, you do not want to add them directly to the end of your caption text where people can see them, but rather separate them by using dots to push them down out of people’s sight or by placing them in a separate comment, like the example below.
Add hashtags to a comment rather than the caption to avoid cutting off your tags or overwhelming your post.
(Source: Instagram, @inspyreboutique)
The final Black Friday strategy that you can use to market on social media is running ads. All social platforms run ads—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube—and you can buy space from them for anywhere from 75 cents to $10 depending on the website, its traffic, and the time that your ad runs.
As we discussed previously, you should reserve running Black Friday ads until a few weeks before the sale as part of your more aggressive marketing push. Your ads should focus on your discounts and deals, letting people know exactly what you will be offering. If possible with your budget, running more ads as your Black Friday event gets closer will also help your brand stay on top of customers’ minds when the sale day finally comes.
5. Run Ads in Your Local Paper
A great way to reach local audiences for your Black Friday sale is to advertise in your local Thanksgiving Day paper. Many families look to this source before checking online, and by advertising locally, your ad will be well situated to reach potential customers.
Most newspapers also have an online website where readers can access content. Ask your local paper whether your ad will appear online as well or if it is restricted to print.
Run an ad in your local paper to attract local shoppers and promote your sale. (Source: Tampa Bay Times)
6. Partner With Your Neighbors for Black Friday
You don’t always have to look far to reach new customers and promote your sale. Try partnering with neighboring stores so you both can expand your customer base and benefit on Black Friday. Your partnership can take several forms:
- You run a joint Black Friday sale advertisement
- You hang flyers in your partner’s shop
- You host pop-up tables in each other’s stores
Whatever the case, looking to your neighbors will help you target traffic already in your vicinity and reach and convert new customers. For example, in my store, we partnered with a local coffee shop for the morning of Black Friday. They simply set up a coffee stand outside of our store which, in turn, attracted customers, made them stay longer, and helped the coffee shop sell lots of coffee and introduce their brand to new customers.
Some partnerships may require contracts or cash investment. Be sure to discuss these terms in advance and factor any associated costs into your budget.
7. Use Your Email List to Promote Black Friday Deals
While social media is a great tool to expand your reach and build brand recognition, marketing via your customer email list will help you reach existing customers and get them excited about your Black Friday promotion. Pitching to people who already shop with you might seem like a waste of resources, but marketing to loyal customers is the best way to boost your sales. In fact, a commonly cited statistic says loyal customers make up an average of 65% of a business’s annual revenue.
As with SMS messaging, to acquire a list of customer emails, you can start a customer loyalty program or, at minimum, collect emails by offering digital receipts. From there, you can start sending soft and hard promotional emails for your Black Friday sale. Unlike with your other marketing channels, you can actually start promoting your Black Friday sale more aggressively early on in the soft marketing push. Rather than annoying shoppers or feeling pushy, this will feel like a sneak peek or special treatment.
Send emails to promote your Black Friday Sale among your existing customers. (Source: Cloudways)
8. Send Black Friday Invites
Another Black Friday strategy for reaching your audience and building excitement is sending out invitations for the big day. This will make the day feel like a holiday party and not just another sale; it will also make your brand stick out and foster a sense of exclusivity that shoppers will want to capitalize on.
Create a sense of excitement and exclusivity with a Black Friday Sale invitation. (Source: Pinterst)
Make your invitations festive and holiday-inspired. Anything you can do to make your sale more enticing to your customers will pay off and get people through the door.
Continue the holiday party theme by bringing out the food, drink, and holiday music (or even carolers)—anything to make it festive. This will make coming to your store an experience, help to harness that holiday spending potential, and entice holiday lovers to visit your storefront.
9. Release Holiday Gift Guides
Another way that you can harness that holiday spirit and give people a glimpse of your Black Friday promo is by creating a gift guide with all your discounted products. This will give people an idea of what they can expect to find on sale and give the stumped gift giver some inspiration.
For example, around the holidays, we always got a lot of boyfriends and husbands shopping for their partners. Rather than letting them walk around the store aimlessly, we provided gift guides “for your girlfriend,” “for your wife,” “for your daughter,” etc. These made the shoppers’ lives so much easier and kept them coming back for a stress-free gift-giving experience.
Gift guides make customers excited and provide inspiration for uninspired shoppers. (Source: Pinterest)
10. Use Your Black Friday Promotions Strategically
If you are not planning to run a storewide sale, you can use your Black Friday promotions to target specific products that you want to sell. Before your Black Friday sale, count your inventory and determine what you have on hand. Once you have a picture of your merchandise, you can incentivize the items you need to sell through. This might be seasonal items, old merchandise, more expensive pieces, or products that have not sold well.
For Black Friday at my boutique, we brought in four sales racks of last season’s winter pieces and sold them for 50% off. The deal was such a huge draw that we could always sell through our racks, which made for successful sale days and freed up space for new inventory.
You can use sales to strategically target certain products. (Source: BBC)
11. Carry In-store Exclusives
With Black Friday increasingly moving online, one of the best ways to drive traffic to your physical storefront is by holding exclusive in-store discounts. You will also want to be sure that you are advertising these exclusives on your website to alert online shoppers and give them a reason to visit and check out your savings.
Did you know?
Experts agree that in-store traffic levels are returning to post-pandemic levels and might even surpass them. In fact, after a 52% drop in Black Friday in-store traffic in 2020, Sensormatic Solutions data showed 2021 Black Friday traffic split the difference in bridging the gap back to pre-pandemic levels with a 47.5% increase in traffic volume.
For example, for Black Friday at my store, we would release an exclusive color of our top-selling sweater as an in-store exclusive. The piece had a cult following, so this in-store exclusive drew women in droves.
12. Offer a Free Product With Minimum Purchases
One promotion that you can use to attract customers to your Black Friday sale is to offer a free product with a minimum purchase. For the holidays specifically, you can make your giveaway special by making it holiday-themed.
For example, at my boutique’s Black Friday sale, we held a promotion where we offered a free mini Christmas candle with any purchase of $100. While we normally sold these candles for $10, we found that shoppers were spending $20 to $30 extra to reach the minimum and get their free product.
Don’t forget to remove your free product from your sales floor before running this promotion.
Another free product that you could tack onto minimum purchases is a gift card. Gift cards are some of the most desirable holiday gifts, so people will be incentivized to reach their minimum to get their prize. Besides that, gift cards work to build loyalty by making people come back after the holiday season.
13. Focus on Gift Cards
As we mentioned above, gift cards are popular items for gift-giving during the holiday season. In fact, the National Retail Federation estimates that consumers spend an average of $163 on gift cards during the holiday season, and Digital Commerce 360 reported that holiday gift card purchases rose 114% in 2021. You should capitalize on people’s desire to purchase gift cards by promoting them in your Black Friday sale.
In addition to offering free gift cards with minimum purchase, ways you can highlight your gift cards include:
- Discounts: Offer your gift cards at 10% off.
- Merchandising: Use displays and smart placement to draw attention to your gift cards.
- Rewards: Make people want to add more value to their cards by rewarding them with free dollars. For example, you could offer an additional $10 for every $100 loaded onto their card.
If you don’t want people to use their cards during sale day, you can restrict their use until after the Black Friday weekend. This will help to encourage people to come back to you after the holiday season.
14. Don’t Compete With Black Friday Doorbusters
A doorbuster sale is when big-box retailers offer a steep discount to get a high volume of people into their store at opening. While it would be nice if every mom-and-pop operation could run their own doorbuster sales, small businesses just can’t compete with the deals at Walmart and Best Buy without sacrificing their margins.
Instead, you should maintain your margins and run sales and deals that are in line with your revenue goals and will leave you with a healthy profit. Plus, most shoppers won’t expect small businesses to offer the same massive discounts they might find at big box retailers.
This is also a good time to point out that you shouldn’t be discouraged if your store doesn’t experience that Walmart-like morning rush. Most morning traffic will be diverted to doorbusters deals, but, as shoppers leave the larger stores after their morning “doorbust,” your store will be waiting with fresh deals and promotions that will capitalize on their buying intent.
15. Offer Curbside Pickup for Black Friday Purchases
According to Adobe, in 2021, curbside pickup orders accounted for 18% of all Black Friday purchases. With people only getting more accustomed to shopping online this year, offering curbside pickup is a great way to increase your sales and accommodate all shopping preferences. Not only that, but for the savvy shopper trying to hit as many stores as possible on Black Friday, curbside is a convenient and fast option that will make them more likely to visit your business.
If you decide to offer curbside, be sure that you staff a curbside crew, create a curbside pickup area, and incorporate the associated costs into your annual budget. You can check out our guide for additional guidance on setting up a curbside system for your business.
16. Utilize Cross-selling to Promote Gift Sets
One of the best ways to boost your Black Friday sale is by using cross-selling promos. A cross-selling promotion is when you sell complementary items together at a discount—say, a scarf and a hat. This is a great way to entice buyers to purchase things they might not have considered, increase the number of items they buy, and inspire ideas on how to use your products.
During the holidays, market your bundles as gift sets to inspire shoppers, make their lives easier when shopping for friends and family, and promote gift sales.
Another way you can promote cross-selling is by merchandising well, or in this case, by cross-merchandising. This means you strategically place (or merchandise) complementary items near each other and showcase how they might work together. You might not even need to run a promo to get them sold as a pair.
This retailer cross-merchandised bread with cheeses and jams to inspire a picnic or charcuterie board. (Source: Pinterest)
17. Try Black Friday BOGO Deals
Another way that you can boost sales for Black Friday is by running a buy one, get one (BOGO) promotion. This is a great way to move through high-volume inventory and get people to purchase things they might have never considered.
BOGO sales are also great for people shopping in pairs. In my own retail experience, I can’t even begin to count the number of times a pair would come in, and one would purchase a BOGO item just so both people in the duo could have it. Without the BOGO promotion, their buying motivation would not have existed, and we would not have made those sales.
Drive sales with BOGO offers. (Source: Racked)
18. Run Hourly Black Friday Deals
For stores that see high traffic flow on Black Friday, hourly deals are a great way to get people excited and promote all-day shopping. You can also structure this promotion to be on top of your storewide deal. So, you might offer 25% off storewide and hourly deals where t-shirts go to 50% off at noon and you get a free pair of socks with your purchases at 1 o’clock. Keeping things interesting and maintaining elements of surprise are great ways to engage shoppers.
To entice customers to shop outside of peak shopping times, try running your most tempting deals during lower traffic periods.
19. Make a Holiday Deals Calendar
In addition to hourly deals on the day of your sale, you can also create a daily or weekly deal calendar from your Black Friday sale through the end of the holiday season. This is not only a great way to keep people engaged and excited about your offerings long after your Black Friday sale ends, but it also will save you from having to run massive storewide deals that cut into your bottom line.
For example, you might offer 20% off one department the first week of the holiday season and then 15% off another category the next. Or, you might just host a Friday deal that changes weekly. The deals can change however you need them to—your calendar is fully customizable. This is another great opportunity to target stock that you want to sell through.
20. Offer Surprise Black Friday Savings & Deals
Maintaining the element of surprise is a great way to get people to check out your site on Black Friday. Surprise savings, however, do not mean that people don’t know they are coming. You should still market your surprise and build excitement for your secret deals like you would any other. You also might consider revealing a storewide deal and saving secret discounts for smaller deals on the day of Black Friday.
21. Give Your VIPs an Exclusive Black Friday Discount
One of my favorite Black Friday strategies is to give special offers to your VIP members. As we said before, your loyal customers are your biggest asset, so rewarding them typically pays off and continues to nurture their loyalty. Try offering early access, exclusive deals, insider information, or other rewards and prizes that will inspire them to shop.
At my boutique, we let our VIP members come in an hour early on sale day. Early access let our VIPs see and shop the merchandise before anyone else, and because we were offering limited quantities and sizes in sale items, this was a huge draw for our loyal customers. Not only that, but it let us open before other stores on our street, so there was limited competition.
Capitalize on existing loyalty and make your VIPs feel special with VIP-exclusive offers. (Source: Email Tuna)
22. Multiply Gift-giving Opportunities With Bundle Discounts
Another deal that you can try for Black Friday is bundle discounts. This is when you offer discounts to people who buy certain combos or quantities of products. For example, you might offer three puzzles for $10, when an individual puzzle is $4. Bundle deals are a great way to get people to make unplanned purchases, buy more than they planned, and clear out old or excess inventory.
Market your bundled products as stocking stuffers or gifts. This will incentivize people to buy because the purchase will multiply their gift-giving potential and save them money.
23. Donate a Percentage of Your Sales to Charity
Get in the holiday spirit and donate a percentage of your Black Friday proceeds to charity. Not only will this benefit a cause you care about, but it can appeal to shoppers who aren’t reeled in by discounts. The holidays are the season of giving, so there is nothing more festive than donations.
Another way that you can raise money for charitable causes in your store is by creating a place where people can donate, like a toy donation bin or a secure way that customers can give cash. You can also partner with local charities and host events in your store to drive traffic and support a cause at the same time.
24. Create a Black Friday Discount Code for Your Online Store
There is no longer any way around it—if you want to compete this Black Friday, you have to expand your sale online. According to Adobe’s findings on the 2021 holiday season, online spending grew 8.6% over 2020 and 44% over 2019, amounting to over $204 billion in online sales–breaking $200 billion for the first time ever.
While in-store shopping is certainly projected to continue to rebound from the pandemic, you don’t want to miss out on online sales this Black Friday. Provide users with a Black Friday discount code for your website and be sure to market that code throughout your Black Friday marketing campaigns.
Open that code for use at midnight on Black Friday, and be sure you have staff that can manage your online orders as they come in. The last thing you want is to save your orders for the end of the day and realize you sold out of things that people already paid for online.
If you use a POS system integrated with your website, your inventory will update in real time online, so you won’t have to worry about advertising out-of-stock merchandise.
25. Extend Your Black Friday Sale
As people have continued to spend more and more money around the holidays, the trend has been to run your Black Friday sale through to Cyber Monday, at the very least, and more often than not, through the next week or longer. This will help to capitalize on buying potential and drive your bottom line.
As we discussed in the holiday deals calendar tip, you don’t have to carry the same sale throughout the extended Black Friday period. You could offer daily deals, limited-time offers, and other promotions to protect your margins. Either way, any promotion will help drive traffic and—with all that holiday buying intent—boost sales.
26. Tease Your Next Campaigns
Lots of people will be coming through to your store on Black Friday and the extended shopping period it kicks off. Start fostering their loyalty and enticing them with a return visit by teasing your upcoming holiday deals during Black Friday. Put up posters, send follow-up emails with your next campaigns, and train employees to mention upcoming promotions at checkout.
People are ready to spend during the holiday season, so keep them shopping with continuous deals and offers. Black Friday doesn’t end Friday anymore, or even on Cyber Monday for that matter– it kicks off a season of savings and promotions that lasts through Christmas.
Bottom Line
There is plenty of consumer buying potential around Black Friday. With the right Black Friday strategy, you can capitalize on this potential and boost your sales for a successful holiday season. Use the guide above to learn about all the Black Friday campaigns you can use to make your sale a hit.
You May Also Like…
- Get inspired with our Christmas retail display ideas.
- Keep driving sales all BFCM weekend with our Cyber Monday strategies.
- See how brick-and-mortar stores fared during 2020’s BFCM weekend.
- Read our guide for how to start a retail business.
