All you need to know about the Black Friday campaign
By: Farbod Ghotbi
Tags: Black Friday, Campaign, Marketing, Sales, Digital Marketing

Rather than creativity, some campaigns simply require more visibility, and the Black Friday campaign is one of them. Considering the fact that it’s only been a few years that this campaign has been employed in Iran, both customers and businesses are ready to make a deal, and their numbers are not a few. The important thing in such campaigns is to choose the right channels for advertisement in order to catch the customers’ eye before rivals and to attract the budget they have put aside before they can spend it anywhere else.

Stages of the Campaign:

In Black Friday, it’s important that you divide your budget properly between channels, and to make sure that you have 360-degree coverage in the digital space (if you have a large budget, you can employ billboards and market in the offline space, but take care that your offline and online ads be consistent).

Considering the fact that you have to attract a high number of customers in a short period of time and you also have to cover all of your products, product categorization gains importance here. Along with channels for which you get charged, businesses also usually have channels of their own like their Instagram, Twitter, Telegram channel, e-mail, push notification, SMS database, etc. The timing for each is of high importance.

For example, we have 300 brands with 40 thousand products, and due to the limits of the channels, prioritizing the brands was very vital for us.

The Channels:

Instagram, Telegram, Twitter, Ad Networks, Google Ads, Torob, Nini Site, Aparat, and Coffee News.

The Launch of the Campaign:

The campaign was going to last for two days, and in the end, we renewed it for another day due to great reception, making it three days in total.

What’s important is that you should do some things from a few days before the launch of the campaign to spread the word about it. One of these is to prepare a blog post in which to give explanations regarding the campaign and its conditions, and along with that, we prepared a landing in which we stated that people could enter their phone numbers and emails if they wanted to be notified about the discounts. We posted all of this on sites and apps and social media three days before the start of the campaign.

As we wanted to cover Instagram well, we worked both with advertising pages and influences. Advertising pages charge much less compared to influencers and similarly, they’re less effective. But as I said, the aim in Black Friday is visibility, so we went with both, and advertised through Instagram stories so we could embed links there as well to take the potential customers to the landings we had prepared. The influencers we chose were active in the fields of fashion and lifestyle, and we also chose couples who would post videos in a couple of stories, tagging our page in one, and posting the landing link in the next. We had designed two different landings for the campaign, giving different ones to different influencers.

Campaigning can be of different forms on Twitter, and due to its type of audience, special measures should be taken to employ a campaign there. There is usually resistance toward advertising on Twitter. What we did was to ask influencers to indirectly twit about their choice of our products and clothing.

Coffee News is a weekly magazine with fun content that is distributed throughout Tehran in coffee shops, and it has a section for ads. We allocated a part of the budget to it because of its wide reach and appropriate pricing.

Google Ads has great potential, and although it might be expensive due to the dollar/rial exchange rate rising, it can deliver great results if it’s done properly, especially during Black Friday where searches increase.

We have various Ad Networks in Iran, with Yektanet, Medianet, and Saba Vision being better compared to others. We allocated a part of the budget to them in this campaign.

We also prepared a commercial video for the campaign and we promoted it through Aparat, thus, making great use of this channel.

We worked with Torob and Nini Site separately for this campaign and we paid for banners on them. We weren’t very satisfied with Nini Site considering the low return we got from them, but Torob was a great advertising channel.

The Results of the Campaign:

We usually have limitations regarding sharing data in Iran, especially that of the sales statistics, but the data we are able to share were as follows:

· Total times ads were shown: 6150474

· Total followers added: 2139

· Total number of clicks: 57110

· Likes: 8225

· Sticker taps: 33299

Sadly, I cannot discuss anything related to sales, but I can say that we made three times the sales target for the campaign.

A few points I should mention:

· Usually in campaigns such as Black Friday, one of the problems would be your website being down due to increased traffic. You should prepare your technical infrastructure for this. And usually, the challenge is that this traffic is going to be only for the short duration of the campaign, so it isn’t cost-effective for you to spend so much money on the servers. What you can do as the campaign organizer is to distribute the traffic throughout the day. For example, if an influencer is going to post your ad at 10, you should post your own ad on Telegram at 10:30, or something like that to manage the situation.

Another thing that perhaps you should pay attention to during the commotion of the campaign is to recharge your SMS advertising panel. Make sure to check your panel before the start of the campaign.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign and monitor each of the channels, use websites that shorten links, UTM, and GA. Don’t forget to evaluate your campaign because it’s very important and must be taken seriously.