Black Friday, holiday prep coming at you right now.
It is not too late for you to get your head around things
and what I'm gonna do in this episode right now
is I'm gonna walk you through exactly the Black Friday
and holiday prep that I'm giving to my team internally
and our clients at AGF Growth
and they give you the exact same prep that I would give them
in a short version, I'm gonna try to do this
in 30 minutes or less.
So you have a 30 minute one place to look
for a spend plan, a creative plan, an offer plan,
all of it, all of it not too late
for you to implement right now for Black Friday.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
All right, I'm gonna lay this out in three big sections
and the first is gonna be your spend plan, okay?
Your spend plan for the month.
The first thing for the couple of months,
for the first thing for you to know
is the general revenue shape of all of the days
they're informed about, okay?
So I'm gonna pull up a chart here that you can see.
All right, so check this out.
This is for one client that doesn't actually
have a huge Black Friday for a bunch of reasons
they're sort of counter seasonal, et cetera.
But this is actual numbers
and this is the basic shape of the way your revenue
and your spend essentially ought to look.
And I want you to notice a few things.
Now you're gonna look a little bit different
in some ways than this, but this is the basic idea.
You could see from October, and by the way,
if you're only listening to this, you'll be fine.
I'm gonna describe it all, but here we go.
There's basically two major spike moments
that you should know are coming.
The first is the actual Black Friday moment.
The second is the lead up to Christmas, okay?
The actual dates may vary based on your shipping cutoffs
on the Christmas one, doesn't matter.
You get the basic idea here.
And what I want you to notice is first,
October is pretty low.
For most brands, October is very low
as a percentage of revenue.
For the year, October is kind of a tough time
unless you have a Halloween value and e-commerce.
In November, you start spending
into the moment more and more as Black Friday goes.
Now, I want to point out right away
that this brand is not gonna do a month-long
November Black Friday sale.
Some brands can and should do that.
And again, it's not too late to do this
if you're one of these brands.
And I'm gonna come back to that in a second.
So just assume this is a brand that's not doing
like a month-long sale.
They are still though, as you can see,
spending into the moment.
So they're starting to increase their spend.
They could maybe even stand to do it more aggressively,
but they're really expecting the spike doesn't come
until Black Friday and Cyber Monday,
and the launch of that sale.
What they're gonna do is they're gonna launch their sale,
the few days before Black Friday, Monday or Tuesday,
something like that of the week.
Have everything ready to go.
They're gonna do a week-long sale.
It's gonna end Cyber Monday.
And you want to notice right away here
that the two biggest revenue spikes on the graph
are Friday and Monday.
Friday and Monday tend to be very close to each other
in revenue.
I have Friday slightly bigger than Monday here,
but to be honest, I didn't work that hard
on getting this exactly right.
It should be pretty close to each other.
When and then it's a big drop off,
you increase revenue and spend again
as you go into Christmas.
Some brands will keep their sale going basically
from Cyber Monday all the way through their Christmas run-up.
That's fine if you're doing that.
Either way, once again, the shape of the revenue
will look something like what I'm showing you here.
Where once you start your Christmas sale,
then you're getting a run-up increasingly more
as you get closer to Christmas.
So December 8th, 9th, 10th, et cetera,
on through December 16th, 17th, 18th,
wherever your shipping cutoff's gonna be.
And that's the basic shape of the revenue
than a big decline from there.
You might be offering free two-day shipping
or something after that
and you decline into the last week.
Again, some brands will also add
like a last week of December extra sale
when CPMs are super low and things like that.
But those are all nuances.
This is the core of the way it will look.
The other thing I have pointed out here
is that we have a pretty big spike
on the day you launch the Black Friday sale.
So if you launch it on Monday leading into Black Friday,
then you'll probably get a pretty big spike there.
It'll come down a little bit after that
just because the first day of the sale tends to be pretty big.
One more thing I wanna point out here
about Cyber Monday in particular
is don't ever forget that Cyber Monday revenue
looks really different than Black Friday revenue.
Black Friday revenue spikes in the morning right away
and stays steady all day long
and is a really huge day.
Cyber Monday actually looks more like Saturday and Sunday,
which would typically be very good days
but not as good as Monday and Friday.
It looks very much like that during the day,
but then Monday people are working on Cyber Monday.
So they get home and they do the shopping at night
and you get like four so big really, really big hours
at the end of the day that spike your whole day.
So wait for it, keep spending on Cyber Monday.
Don't be too disappointed yet, get excited,
end of the afternoon and evening on the East and West coast.
It starts to pick up and then you have a really big evening
where sometimes you'll do the biggest hours
of your entire sale in those three to five hours in that time.
So that's the way the revenue basically looks,
expect it, spend into it.
Spend in November on the expectation
that you're going to have a spike coming after that.
Okay, number two, that varies as I said,
depending on how long you run your offer for.
And here is my advice on how to think
about running your offer.
What you don't want to do is get caught in the middle.
You should either run a very long basically month long offer
started on the first weekend of November
and run it all the way through Black Friday Cyber Monday
and maybe even through holiday, maybe through Christmas.
Or you should have a relatively short offer.
But the thing I think you should avoid
is like a November 16th launch or something like that.
If you're going to launch it early,
just launch it super, super early.
And there is a reason for this as well.
And once again, I'm going to show you graphic.
And this time I'm going to use a graphic
that is, I'm going to make it for us in real time here
with a handy-dandy version that I love of Microsoft Paint.
So here we go, online Microsoft Paint.
Let me show my screen here.
All right, here we go.
So if you imagine that on the far left of the screen here,
these little dashes are a bunch of different weeks.
Okay, something like this.
Those represent different times.
And these first few days are the end of October.
You've got basically four weeks where you are in or excuse me,
where the three to four weeks in October,
where things are going.
And then there's a cutoff and then November starts.
Okay, and so each of these dashes is one week in November.
During that time, what tends to happen with revenue
in week one of November is that you get a big spike.
So if revenue happens,
future dashes are weeks, October's going to be super low.
You get a big spike in revenue
and the first week of November if you launch your sale then.
Okay, that starts to happen because you've got a new sale,
et cetera, people are excited, they're buying your sale.
And then after that, it comes back down some
but stays relatively high in terms of just,
in terms of the way your sale will perform
for the next couple of weeks.
Okay, and then it spikes again.
Whoops, it spikes again for Black Friday, Cyber Monday.
Okay, so if this is BFCM, then you've got it,
something like that.
Okay, and then of course it'll like come back down
and go into holiday from there, whatever.
Okay, but the reason I say don't get caught in the middle
is because you want to capture,
if you're going to launch your sale,
you want to capture this spike, okay, that first spike.
That first week of November is a big revenue week.
And it actually, and revenue tends to actually,
and spend tends to actually come back down a little bit
in those middle weeks in November.
And I've seen a bunch of data on this,
including data from Netta themselves
about this dynamic happening.
And my point is just that if you're going to launch
your sale early anyway, you want to capture that first bump
because that is actually a disproportionately good time.
And the reason that's a disproportionately good time,
I think it's 'cause you've launched your sale,
you're getting some of the beginnings
of holiday, shopping, intent, et cetera.
But here's I think what is happening
in the middle two weeks in November
between the first week and Black Friday, okay?
In those two weeks, more and more brands
are launching their sale, so things are getting more competitive.
But on top of that, getting more competitive,
there's two reasons why I think there's some drop-off
in revenue here.
The first is that you're all a bunch of liars, okay?
Marketers are a bunch of liars.
And you will all tell people during those two weeks
that like, or you know, during a whole month in November,
this is our Black Friday sale.
It's our best sale of the year.
It's never going to get better.
Go ahead and buy it right now.
But then you bunch of liars on Black Friday
will offer somebody one more free gift
if you buy this weekend only or an extra 10% off
or Black Friday's every Monday or whatever it is.
Now, that probably is illegal to do that,
but nobody's going to catch you most of the time,
especially if you're not a huge brand.
And so a bunch of you will do that kind of thing
and customers know this.
And so I think they will just say,
I'm going to wait 'cause I know for sure
I'm getting my actual best offer at Black Friday,
and that's my sense.
I'm guessing a little bit, I'm reading the two leaves
a little bit, but I'm guessing that's part of it.
But the second thing is the more obvious one actually,
which is that, so anyway, on the first one,
customers will wait for Black Friday
'cause they want to make sure they get the best offer.
Secondly, though, there's a share of wallet question.
In the first week of November,
it's not quite as competitive yet.
It's still far enough from Black Friday
to where people might make the purchase.
Once you're starting to get to it in a week or two
of Black Friday itself, customers know that there are probably,
maybe there's your brand, but there's maybe five,
10 other brands who's Black Friday's sales they're going to shop.
And they may very well want to look at the offers
on all of those sales and see how they're going to deploy
their money.
Endless dollars. So they have to decide of the five,
the 10 brands I'm going to look at.
I'm going to spend two or three or four, five of them,
or whatever it is.
If that's the case, then they become to share of wallet question.
Now, they may not even be thinking about it in those terms.
They may not have a fixed budget or whatever it is,
but at some point, they'll be spending
and they don't want to do that, and they don't,
they can't spend on everything.
And so they may want to compare and shop you.
And so there's some drop off there.
So the point is, if you're going to launch early launch,
way early, if you're going to wait and launch,
go ahead and do a week long sale.
That's perfectly fine too.
I think some brands do over discount during this time.
It does hurt them.
I talked to a former client of mine just yesterday
about how they are pulling back a little bit this year
because they feel like they train their customers
too much to wait for discounts over time.
It is a real thing, but for some brands,
it then extends to be on sale for a very long time.
I have another client right now
who's essentially on sale for three months
and they're fine with that.
They understand the customers are trained for discounts
and they're okay with that.
They've priced in such a way
to where they still make plenty of margin on the discount
and they're gonna make those moments really big.
So that's the way I would think about it.
One way or the other, don't get caught in the middle.
I was just on a call with a client who was looking at
getting somebody to handle some creative operations
around contacting, seeding, et cetera,
working with nurturing influencers.
And it's influencers in a really specific niche.
It didn't really make sense for them
to go the full sort of mass affiliate route.
Instead, they wanted to cultivate a community of influencers
and creators in a specific niche that made sense
for their specific niche and their product.
And I told them exactly what they should do,
which is they should go to more staffing.
They should look in the Philippines
for a really good, talented, operationally savvy person
who will care about this brand.
They should pay them at good market rates
in the Philippines so they attract good quality talent there
and that even though this client is not even based
in the US, that that's very likely
to still be less money than they would pay
for equivalent talent where they are.
And certainly if they were in the US,
it would be less expensive than paying
for equivalent talent in the US.
That is the core value proposition of more staffing.
A staffing agency that helps you get connected
to great talent in the Philippines,
they were built off the back of US-based
commerce businesses so they know
what kind of job descriptions you need
for all kinds of different positions.
They know how to evaluate that talent.
They know who helps you.
Instead of looking for $5 an hour virtual assistance
in the Philippines, go get the best
of a really good talent pool that is there
into your business, pay them well by Filipino standards
so that you create a great living, great wage,
great loyalty in your business and at the same time,
save you money for equivalent hiring in the US.
More staffing is awesome.
They'll even give you one year guarantee
on that kind of person.
I have built my business with their help.
I intend to build any business that I'm working on
with their help because I like them so much.
Go to more staffing.co right now if you have any open positions
in your business, in your e-commerce business
or e-commerce related business.
And just collect some resumes, see.
Go look and see if there's something for you.
Take some interviews.
They're gonna rather make the whole process easy for you.
And we've loved working with them.
We've got great talent from there.
They're great.
More staffing.co.
Number three, either way, spend into it in advance.
Like I showed in that first graph,
people are gonna click on November 2nd
and they're gonna buy on Black Friday.
They're gonna even click on October 25th
and they're gonna buy on November 16th
if your sales live or on Black Friday or whatever it is.
Right now, in my mind, there's a pair of shoes
that I'm considering buying and I am waiting until Black Friday.
I don't need them today.
I'll be fine for another month.
I'm just waiting and because I have already thought about it,
I'm going to keep that aside
and I'm actually literally building a list
of things that I may want to buy.
And lots of customers are doing that.
So spend today.
Customers, no sales are coming.
They know they're gonna happen.
You're gonna capitalize on that later.
I have one client right now
who built a really, really cool program
where they caught some early access email addresses.
They were getting like a 1.2 ROAS
or something like that on one day click
and their meta ads account
by collecting email addresses early
and then giving people an offer right away.
And they were telling people,
we're gonna collect an email address
and then we'll give you an extra offer
come Black Friday if you just give us your email address
right now and when you actually measured
the performance of that campaign
leading into Black Friday on 28 day click,
they were getting an 8 to 1 ROAS on that
in part because they captured the email addresses
because they just knew there was an intent reality
to where people were going to submit their email address today
and they were gonna buy and you know, whatever
and they're gonna buy later.
That person has declared themselves as high intent.
They've given you access to their inbox.
That's a good idea, by the way.
Feel free to run that little playbook and it really works.
So there's that.
Number four, when you actually get to Black Friday
and I want you to listen clearly,
let me be your marketing therapist right now.
When you actually get to Black Friday's Cyber Monday,
resist, resist, resist the urge to overspend on that day.
I know it is a big moment.
I know it is a huge moment.
I know it may or may not meet your expectations
or blow through them or whatever it is.
But overspending Black Friday's Cyber Monday
is the actual number one enemy.
Turning it into a moment where especially
because you're gonna probably discount the most you have all year
where it actually sucks down profit
and where you get beat up on profit.
That is actually the ultimate enemy of this moment.
And so you should, as best as you possibly can,
resist the urge to do that.
Overspending Black Friday's Cyber Monday
is very likely coming from a place of FOMO
and of anxiety and of not measuring up or whatever it is.
It may not even be a financial consideration.
There's a lot of humaneness in this,
especially if you're looking at all the reports
of all the brands who are absolutely crushing it
on Black Friday.
I've done it.
I've seen it.
I've felt the anxiety around
am I giving my clients enough value on those days?
They have big expectations.
Resist that urge.
Drive contribution margin, make money.
Yes, it can be the biggest best moment of your year.
Yes, it can blow through expectations.
That's all true and it's great if it happens.
But if it doesn't, it's okay.
It's okay.
Make money in that moment.
Keep trucking on.
Do your very best to do that.
Literally find somebody to,
if you think this is gonna be you,
talk to somebody about it at a time.
I'm serious, like vet your emotions here
because in the heat of the battle,
you may make some bad decisions, okay?
All right.
Number five.
One of the ways you protect against that overspending possibility
is with very good, very careful,
very detailed forecasting in that moment.
And I don't mean you have
the best forecasting methodology in history of the world.
I mean, you have a very clearly laid out plan.
For us at AGF Growth,
that's gonna happen in two ways.
The first is we're gonna have a daily spend plan
for the entire month of November and December.
We don't always operate on a daily spend plan.
Some brands do, some brands don't.
Depending on brands needs, et cetera.
For some brands, it's overkill.
For some brands, it's really important.
But we're gonna make sure we have that
so we can pace our spend,
new customer revenue, return customer revenue
and contribution margin all month long
and see where we're at,
see if we can be spending more aggressively,
less aggressively, whatever,
watching inventory, all those things.
But when you get to Black Friday several Monday,
we can do itself.
The best thing you can do is take that to another level
and do an hourly spend forecast.
If you've slotted for 500,000 in revenue on Black Friday
or 50,000 in revenue or whatever a big number is for you,
just know having that set up
so that you have a clear sense of how much spend
you need to deploy each hour
and how much revenue you need to drive each hour is really good.
You'll note, and the simple thing to do here,
as long as this is not your first Black Friday,
go look at last year's number
and see how it played out.
See how the relationship between spend and revenue went.
It's possible you'll spend in the morning,
it won't look good at first,
but revenue will come at night.
So your row-ass at seven a.m.
is gonna look like a one-to-one row-ass,
but in the 8 p.m. hour,
it's gonna look like a three-to-one row-ass.
Well, it's very likely that's because actually,
you drove some clicks at seven a.m.,
where people bought at 8 a.m., or whatever.
Or 8 p.m., excuse me.
So give that hourly forecast,
make sure you have that in place.
And number six within the spend plan, okay?
Is if you are running manual bids,
if you're running manual bids,
know how that is going to operate
in the moment of Black Friday several Monday.
It can be really, really tough.
If you're running manual bids only,
this is the hardest part of running manual bids.
You can under-spend the moment
because you will have a much better conversion rate
during the Black Friday several Monday hours
than you normally do.
And therefore your manual bids will be set to conservatively
and you will have a hard time competing in the auction.
The CPMs are gonna double on Black Friday,
something like that.
And Meta will go, oh, we can't spend at that.
We're not gonna make enough money.
At some point, Meta will get the feedback
that you're getting purchases
in your account and therefore,
it should spend more money on your ads
because you're getting more purchases and you thought
and the expected conversion rates are good.
But that can take some time
and you can miss some moments there, okay?
So again, be careful.
It depends on how conservative or aggressive
you're trying to be about the day in general.
There's a bunch of different ways to handle this.
I'm not going to detail how to handle this right now
'cause I've done it a lot in the past.
Instead, I'm gonna link out to a different
podcast episode I have made in the past.
And I will say, go make sure to watch that episode
and see how this all plays out
and how to handle this with manual bids.
It's really important that you get it right.
It's a big deal and it's really hard to do well.
So there you go.
Okay, so that's the spend plan, okay?
Hopefully we've laid all of that out as clearly as possible.
And I think we're on track to do my 30 minute
or less Black Friday plan for you.
Let's move into the offer, okay?
So offer part one, generally speaking,
aim at a high AOV, generally speaking aim at a high AOV.
Bogos, bundles, stack discounts, these things work well,
buy more, save well.
And the crucial reason for this is that high AOV
pretty much always helps your margin to some degree.
But in Black Friday, it can be a really, really big deal.
First of all, you can push very high AOV
sometimes at Black Friday,
which can make a really big difference.
But if you're gonna be discounting,
one way to get some of the margin back
that you're discounting is to get people to buy more upfront.
And particularly to ship more stuff in one box upfront.
That can make a real difference,
especially if you're in that sort of lower margin
or lower AOV range to begin with.
Like if you have a $40, $50 product,
but you can get people to spend $60 to $70 at Black Friday,
it probably costs you at least $5 to ship
your $40 or $50 product to a customer.
Let's call it a $50 product with a second VZMath.
$5 in shipping cost on a $50 order.
Let's just say that order includes
that whatever you're charging for shipping
is 10% of the cost.
That is a 10% cogs essentially cost of delivery
right away before you have an account
for the product or anything else.
And so if you can actually get the order value to $60 or $70,
not only did you get the customer to spend more upfront,
but it probably only costs you one more dollar
or something like that to ship that much more stuff.
And so if you can go from $5 and freight to customer cost
to $6, but you can get the average order value
to $70 or $75.
You actually get some margin percentage back, even though you're discounted some and it
can make a big difference.
That's also true with your pick fees, with your 3PL processing fee, things like that.
Those all have margin values by getting more stuff into the box.
They all create additional margin space.
And again, you can claw back some margin that you get in giving the discount.
So you can get people to spend more.
That's the obvious reason for increasing the AOV, but also at the same time, you can get
some margin backing to really make a big difference.
So generally speaking, I think aiming at high AOV works well.
They're also excited to spend, they're excited to shop.
People like shopping, right?
So on those moments, it's fun.
It's fun to go buy stuff.
And if they can get more stuff in there, just getting more dollars per customer per order,
it can be really, really valuable, okay?
In TeleGems is the tool you should be using to get more value out of every click that ends
up on your website.
You can do that by doing two things that IntelliGems does above everything else.
The first is IntelliGems is the CRO beyond the basics tool for e-commerce.
Every one of my clients, literally every one of my clients that is doing any kind of
on-site testing is using IntelliGems as the tool to do that kind of on-site testing.
And they're testing really cool stuff.
Right now, I've got a client that is testing stacked discount offers versus buy two get
one free.
I've got another client testing a two month subscription instead of a one month subscription
to see if it is what the take rate on that offer is and how that's going to play out
in retention rate and all those kinds of things.
That's all kinds of cool stuff happening by using IntelliGems to test way beyond the basics
of what most people test.
So really cool tool, really intuitive.
You can see everything that you'd want to see discount take rate, subscription take rate,
AOV profit per visitor because they tie into your cogs data.
So it's not just measured at the level of conversion rate and that sort of thing.
Just a great tool for CRO testing.
You probably know it for that.
You may or may not know that IntelliGems also has a fantastic AOV building element of the
tool, which is that they've got a series of cross cells and upsells now built into the
tool.
So, you know, cart in checkout upsells, which is really cool and post purchase upsells.
So you can actually replace your post purchase upsell tool with IntelliGems, have everything
consolidated into less tools, one place, which is really cool.
Just a great tool.
So go to IntelliGems, check it out and get using it.
IntelliGems.io, Ferris 20, FARIS 20 to get 20% off your first three months.
Or go to IntelliGems.io/audit, AUDIT, use their little AI tool to get some suggestions
for what test you should be running on your website right now.
Really cool.
You plug in your website and it gives you some ideas for things you could test, see if
you can get more profit.
Go play with it.
IntelliGems.io/audit, for that, go get IntelliGems.
It's great.
Number two, having said all of that, clear, easy and simple really does work.
There is some advice I think that came out.
I haven't even heard it exactly, but I think it was Sean Frank said something like, don't
oversimplify your offer on Block Friday.
Do all the things you need to do to get it right for every segment of customers.
And I think if I was running Ridge, I would say that's 100% true because there's a lot
of different products, a lot of different customer types, a lot of different customer relationships
over a very long period of time to that customer.
And you have a lot of team organized around doing these kinds of things really well.
So you can put the resources you need to to doing that.
It's worth a lot of additional dollars to the company to get that right.
If you are running a materially smaller business than that, let's call it sub $30 million
in revenue.
That's an arbitrary cutoff point, but basic idea.
It actually, I think, sometimes the juice there is actually not worth the squeeze.
That like the additional value you will get out of running much more complicated series
of offers and things like that is not worth it relative to reallocating that time and effort
and potential to break things, which is a real thing, into other parts of your business,
including generating more creative and getting ready for the next year, whatever, all kinds
of stuff.
So there's all kinds of places your time and money should go.
And it is actually okay to run a site-wide discount that has this auto applied at checkout.
That is a really good offer for the customer.
And maybe you have a separate 20% off the site or 30% off of the whole site or whatever
you're doing.
And maybe you've got some clearance section where things go up to 50% off.
And so you can still put black Friday up to 50% off in your ads because you've got clearance
stuff that's like that, or you can put 20% off site-wide if you want.
All those things work.
But you can actually be simple and it can work really well.
You can have a really, really good moment here and keep moving the whole business forward
without feeling like you have to make a breakthrough here in this moment by getting every
little detail right.
And people are going to want to go get every little detail right and again, have different
crazy offers for the retention audience who hasn't bought in a year versus the three-month
audience versus product A versus product B versus what.
And that's fine.
I think that's fine.
If you do all that stuff, that's great.
But you don't have to.
And you can still have a really good moment by having a simpler offer here.
Also, auto applying at discount code works well or having a discount code on your site.
Don't freak out about which one of those you should be doing.
All of those can work just fine.
Customers know how to use discount code.
It's a small bit of friction, I prefer an automated discount, but whatever, not a huge
deal.
The discount code will work fine.
And there you go.
Okay.
Okay.
So on top of that, number three, within the, within the offer section.
Okay.
We've got nested lists here.
Hopefully you're following me.
Number three, have a December holiday sale ready to go.
So this is the other thing on the offer.
Think about what you want your December sale to be, the one.
The example I showed you a second ago, had a black Friday and a December sale.
I had that of the same sale in my mind.
So it's the same offer, the same promo for both moments.
I think that's totally fine to do the exact same offer both times.
It is easy.
Just re-skin it.
You know, one of them's got Christmas lights on it or whatever, and one of them's got
turkeys on it.
I don't know.
Whatever your black Friday messaging is, you know, re-skin it, but basically you can
run back the same offer or you can tweak it a little.
You don't have to do something where your, your Christmas offer is a little worse than
black Friday.
Not a terrible idea to just tell customers like, hey, black Fridays are best offer of
the year.
So go buy it.
If you want to do that, great.
If not, like you can always, like I said, just run the same offer both times and I think
that can work well, have some kind of a break in there if you need to.
Have it ready to go.
Be ready to follow up, but there you go.
Okay.
All right.
So there's the offer portion of it.
Now let's talk about the creative portion of it.
Okay.
We've got five minutes left, I think, or maybe, maybe even less.
Maybe a little more.
We'll see.
Creative.
Okay.
I've got four parts of how to think about ad creative in this moment.
Okay.
Number one.
Do not overthink it.
Super clear offer ads work.
If you are running a 20% off sitewide discount, here's a good idea for you.
Jump into cloud, work with your agency, whatever, to make some ads that say 20% off everything
and show your products.
The message is the most important thing to make ads work, right?
The message is the most important thing.
I said that all the time.
In this case, the message you should be promoting is the offer because that is actually
what you want to be messaging to people, including people who are not currently customers
of yours who don't know your brand.
Most brands are actually simple enough in what they are selling to where you can actually
just say 20% off and show a picture of the product that people will know what it's
talking about.
If you're an apparel brand and somebody has never heard of your brand before, but they
get an ad on their feeds as 20% off and it shows a photo of a beautiful piece of apparel
that you have made, a shirt, a pair of pants, whatever.
Okay.
If it shows something like that, people don't need a lot of explanation about the pants
at that moment to know that, oh, those pants look nice.
I'm going to click on that ad and I'm going to buy and, uh, or at least go check it out
from the PDP and see if it's something I want.
The PDP will do work for them, et cetera, but yeah, that is, uh, that, that can just really
work well.
Make a range of ads that have different visuals that show different offers.
You know, again, if you have some products that are marked down 50% off, make some ads
for that product that sends the traffic straight to the PDP, then make, if you have, uh,
everything else is 20% off site wide besides the stuff that's supermarked down or whatever,
make those ads too.
Make it all, make a bunch of ads, make them look different from one another, but just promote
the offer, don't overthink it.
There isn't actually any magic to that necessarily.
Now, there may be for the greatest creative minds in the world, but again, I want you to
just consider that your time is valuable and that you can actually reallocate efforts
towards other things as well and that most likely a brilliantly made 20% off ad is not
going to perform that much differently than a run of the mill 20% off ad.
And so, so you can put your time and effort into other places.
So there's that.
Oh, within that, by the way, part of the reason that works well is because one of the ads
that's going to spend a lot still during Black Friday is your evergreen ads.
But whatever ads you're already running, people know Black Friday is there.
And so if they are on Black Friday and they see a great ad for your product, I think
there's a good chance they're going to click and buy during that moment anyway, you know,
I just look at it and say, like, great, they are going to get ads that have your product
on it and they're going to spend on those ads and it's going to be good and it's kind
of that simple.
So, so don't be surprised if your evergreen ads also spend a lot during Black Friday and
only some of your spend goes to your Black Friday ads.
I think that's, I think that's perfectly fine.
That said, a couple of ways to get your evergreen ads to go further for you.
So here's creative insight or creative advice number two, add gifting hooks to your top
spenders.
Take your top spender.
Just add a hook of some kind whether it's text overlays or even a little intro video
or something like that.
That's something about gifting, you know, take, take some of those core products and just
make them about gifting in some ways.
So more, more fully put gifting into people's face, that can work really, really well.
We've seen some brands actually perform extremely well by doing this.
And one of the things we're going to do internally is just take, you know, the top 10 or so
spending ads and ask the question with our creative strategist, how do you make this more
explicitly about gifting and just just make those remake them and put them in add accounts
for Black Friday's Cyber Monday and for the holiday season in general, if there's no
offer on parts of it, etc.
So add gifting hooks to your top spenders.
Number three, similarly, add offer overlays to your top spenders, okay.
Just like I was saying before, put 20% off on your ad.
Another thing you could do is if you have an ad that you know works, like turn around and
go make your top ad again, but have an overlay that says 30% off from Black Friday, well,
it also goes through the app.
Like that is so simple, but just go do that.
You may find some easy wins and all that.
And number four, on the side of creative, okay.
Build gifting landers.
These are really easy to make now with with cloud or with with with a chat to you or
whatever AI tool you're using.
Put your highest value products on the top, your AOV builders on the top, especially
if you are building an AOV focused bundle, tell people like, hey, if you if you go spend
this much money, you get some off and give them an easy way to spending that much money,
point them towards the stuff you have.
a lot of inventory of, point them stuff towards them,
point them towards your most popular products,
your best deals, your highest AOV deals,
but a simple gifting offer-based lander can really work.
And like I said, put that highest value offer
on the top of the page.
Many people will go right past that,
but it will anchor the rest of the page
and it will be a good thing to advertise.
So go do those things, make the gifting lander,
take some of your top performing content
and send traffic there.
If you are running an early sale,
if you're launching in the 1st of November,
this is probably one of the advantages
is that you can get pages like that live
and see how they're converting and all that kind of stuff
before you go.
That's probably one of the best advantages
and one of the best reasons to launch your sale early
because you get some time to kind of play with what's working.
All right, we have done it.
The 30 minutes or less, Black Friday guide offer,
probably will look a little bit longer than 30 minutes
once we add the ads in and all that,
but should be right around there.
Hopefully that's helpful to you.
Hopefully it's simple and clear.
Go and do a great job.
Look out for Dave Recook's annual Thanksgiving day tweet.
I'm already looking forward to it.
It says enjoy your turkey tonight for tomorrow.
We get bread.
That's when you know Black Friday is really started.
That tweet is coming from Dave Recook.
And have a great Black Friday.
I hope it goes awesome for you.
I hope it goes great.
Let me know if you're trying any of this stuff
how it works for you.
Hopefully it's helpful to you.
(upbeat music)
All right, thanks so much for watching your listening.
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Like if used correctly.
So it's sort of a guide to AI creative operations.
Alex is so helpful and stuff like that.
Tom Beverly from Mother Root really fascinating brand.
Sort of a non-alcoholic, aperitif alternative.
I drink it like every night.
First time I've ever mixed a drink on this podcast.
Talk about them.
They're about to get 25 million in revenue
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Andrew Eudarian talking financial lessons for founders,
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Got more Patrick Cadue coming.
Got Taylor Holiday coming.
Some thoughts on brand.
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