From Deals to Dollars: BFCM 2023 Marketing Strategies for Success

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) have come and gone, and now it’s time to reflect on the success of your marketing efforts.

Did you see an increase in sales? Did you reach your target audience? Did you effectively utilize digital advertising?

It’s always an exciting shopping period, but I was eager to see how impactful it was going to be this year given just some of the headwinds:

• The United States is currently over $1 trillion in credit card debt.

• Even though the annual inflation eased, consumers have become accustomed to tightening their belts.

• With a two-year slump in electronics sales, a weak holiday season was more or less expected.

Regardless, challenges are important and it felt great to be a digital marketer that prepared well for the season – aiming to exceed all projections!

Over the long weekend, here are a few observations I had from this year’s shopping frenzy.

High AOV Made the Difference

Brands that sold higher ticket items seemed to perform well, driven by folks holding out through sales periods in September and October to capitalize on BFCM.

Successful brands removed friction from the shoppers’ journey. Deal-seekers are looking for one thing, so brands with messaging and offers that were loud, clear, and direct, ultimately won.

Building on urgency was critical. Countdown timers, limited quantities, and flash sales – those are some of the tactics that deal-seekers responded to this year.

By emphasizing the limited time or availability of a deal, you can also create a sense of exclusivity that customers respond to very well.

Brand Awareness Mattered

If people already knew your name and wanted your product, you were set up for success for BCFM 2023. As soon as sales turned on for brands, consumers that had waitlisted or wishlisted products earlier were ready to pounce.

Throughout the year it’s easy to focus on low funnels tactics or the blocking and tackling of performance marketing to support your e-commerce strategy. However, building brand awareness pre-Holiday really helps you capitalize on that investment when BFCM arrives.

Many marketers and big brands fall into the trap of solely focusing on direct response KPIs. This myopic approach misses the bigger picture of the customer journey and fails to build organic buy-in. Without a strong top-of-funnel strategy, brands miss the opportunity to cultivate genuine interest and establish a connection with potential customers. Instead of merely selling a product, they should strive to be seen as cool, interesting, and integral to the target lifestyle.

For brands, this is also where consistent/unique content, brand or media collaborations, good customer experience, and positively reviewed products, make up the four key ingredients of building strong brand perception to be most relevant when it really matters.

If your brand isn’t easily associated with a product they want to buy, start early and ensure your pre-BFCM efforts solidify your brand's connection to the products customers crave.

Build on Anticipation

In the weeks or even months leading up to BCFM, building out a specific opt-in list could help unlock incremental sales for brands. So too can emails with a “Back in stock” message.

One idea to build on this list is to create a page to unsubscribers from your emails with an option that says, “Only send me Black Friday/holiday offers.” Again, it’s just another way to cater to the single-minded needs of deal-seekers.

Simplified Media Won

As already mentioned, deal-seekers are looking for one thing. As such, static ads with a clear message won this year.

Shoppers looking for the best deals want to see the product, the offer, and then decide whether they want to click.

UGC was another type of content that seemed to perform well, signaling why people should buy your product outside of an ad. This is also easily consumable while shoppers are at home, on their phones, while potentially polishing off Thanksgiving leftovers.

Offer More Than a Discount

Big brands weren’t necessarily relying on deep discounts this year.

Many brands might have dropped prices, but some offered a free gift with purchase instead to show greater value. For those brands, higher revenue was on the table, without serving up a discount.

Focus on Gifting

It’s easy to forget that this season is ultimately about gift-giving.

Segmenting your customers into gifters versus self-purchasers can be extremely beneficial.

At the very least, you’ll want to try blended messages in your marketing that appeals to both types of purchases.

BFCM really started much earlier

There’s a misconception that starting a sale too soon can cannibalize what you might see on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. That simply was not the case this year.

If you watched major retailers, sales started well ahead of the Black Friday. For example, Target’s BFCM marketing strategy focused on deals starting on October 29.

Many brands started early and amplified their holiday sales message over and over again. When tapping into existing customer lists, this proved to perform well.

Black Friday Has Given Way to “Cyber Weekend”

“Black Friday Sale” messaging is still impactful for truly limited time offers. But if your sales run through Cyber Monday, consider “Cyber Weekend” messaging instead.

This strategy lets you continue the sale throughout BFCM without any confusing messaging or mis-naming sales period. Also, keep in mind that Cyber Weekend is even starting to give way to Cyber Month.

Landing Pages Work

Custom BFCM website experiences continue to perform. Once again, deal-seekers are on a mission in this critical but narrow window of time. So, think of ways to showcase offers, value props/benefits, unique merchandising, and messaging, that directly resonates with these shoppers.

Landing pages dialed into the seasonality of this period will drive higher conversions than when using more evergreen customer journeys.

What Else Resonated this BFCM?

Send me an email with other realizations you had from this year’s BFCM.

5 Ways to Maximize Content Marketing ROI

Content marketing is one of the best ways to drive awareness, purchase intent and favorability. According to Nielsen, content such as video or native advertising can increase brand lift by as much as 42%!

The creation of content that’s both informative and helpful is also key to improving trust with customers. It’s especially powerful in the mid-funnel, helping to drive consideration through education. So, it should be no surprise that nearly 70% of consumers also prefer to learn about products and services through content rather than traditional advertising. 

Of course, not all content is created equal. As you build plans around high-quality content, here are a few tips to ensure it’s both profitable and flexible. 

1. Keep it Evergreen

The best way to maximize return is by creating content that’s going to last. 

Leverage original research and data, fact-based information, and visual charts, to tell a compelling story. 

A solid SEO strategy should complement these efforts, driving both link-building and search traffic around targeted keywords within a larger topic cluster.

2. Improve User Experience

Quality content isn’t enough to improve the return on content marketing without a strong design and information architecture that removes friction. 

Users should be able to read and interact with content without hurdles. But if the site takes too much time to load, has confusing navigation, and way too many pop-ups impeding their forward momentum, the content you create isn’t going to be consumed. 

Remove obstructions such as ads and pop-ups, and always be looking at ways to make navigation simpler and more intuitive. Remember that the user’s experience with your content is important for search.

3. Improve Calls to Action

As a marketer, a call to action or CTA, always seems obvious. But it’s amazing how easily they can be minimized or completely forgotten. You won’t be able to maximize content marketing ROI if you aren’t clear about what you want users to do next. 

Of course, leading up to CTA, you need to consider the user’s journey and keep their intent in mind.

What do users need? What are the pain points they’re trying to solve? What will they want to achieve after viewing or reading your content? Perhaps it’s to learn something, acquire a specific benefit, or make a purchase decision. Help your users narrow down those choices and take action – that’s a big key to increasing your content’s return. 

4. Great Headlines Sell

Whether it’s a banner ad or long-form article, your headline should catch attention by speaking to your users’ needs.

Headlines can have a direct impact on the return of content marketing, which is why A/B testing headline variations is also an important tactic to employ. The strongest headlines ultimately should convey a value proposition to users. 

Test several headline variations to help increase click-through rates on your content by as much as 5-10%.

5. Repurpose and Extend

Content curation is just as important as content creation. 

In many cases, improving return of content isn’t about creating something all-new, but rather editing or refining what you have already created. 

Summarize blog content into infographics. Use snippets from email newsletters for social posts. Expand a series of blog posts for an ebook. Embed a YouTube video on a landing page to drive organic search performance. Syndicate blogs within a sponsored article campaign.

The more you can reuse and repurpose content for other channels, the more you’ll get out of the content you’ve created. Plus, this strategy will help you maintain consistency in new formats as you reach different audiences.

In Closing

Content is critical for businesses large and small, but planning and creating high-quality content that customers will respond to isn’t easy. To ensure you’re maximizing your content marketing investments, following the above are just some of ways you could improve the ROI on your content development.

7 E-commerce Trends That Will Dominate 2023

Shopping continues to evolve. To succeed in 2023, brands and marketers need to adapt to the ever-changing, ever-evolving buying behaviors of consumers, especially coming out of the pandemic.

While digital touchpoints are more important than ever, brands should be thinking about the entirety of the purchase journey and how they might be able to make the path to purchase smoother everywhere.

Here are a few e-commerce trends that will impact brands in the year ahead.

1. Social Commerce is Growing

Social media has given rise to social commerce, a growing trend that integrates shopping into our normal social media usage.

Already, nearly 50% of Instagram users leverage the platform for shopping each week. That means brands need to start using tags or hashtags to speak directly to those audiences who are already researching.

Influencer marketing is of course part of the mainstream as well, with countless personalities partnering with brands to help their followers learn about products. Over 70% of US marketers have participated in influencer marketing this year, and that’s only expected to increase.

Live streaming is another way that brands can tell a more robust story around their products. Instagram, Facebook, and Amazon, are just a few of the platforms that have embraced selling via live broadcasts.

The big challenge for brands is targeting the right audience through the right channels. Remember that one size doesn't fit all. Specifically, each channel requires content to be tailored to it’s consumer mindsets:

• Facebook: Users are mainly keeping in contact with close friends.

• Instagram: Visual content, stories, and influencer advice reign.

• Pinterest: It’s all about inspiration.

• LinkedIn: Focus is on professional content and contacts.

While each channel has their own focus or use case, note that social media is rapidly evolving. Increasingly, social channels like Facebook and Instagram are supporting e-commerce, and followers are ready to buy!

Social media serves as a place to discover brands, research products, get help and support. And now, it also gives click-to-buy simplicity to users, all built within the platform.

2. Content (Marketing) is King

While attention spans may be dwindling in an increasingly short-form world, the adage that content is king is alive and well.

High-quality content is critical for making consumers feel like they’re in control, empowered with everything they need to make a decision. The trick is to avoid the traditional sales pitch.

The focus of content marketing is about creating helpful, educational materials to inspire purchases. Brands should not only be creating detailed product page information wherever items are sold, but also supporting that content with videos, blog posts, an email newsletter, and social media posts, that are a mix of inspiration and education.

Instead of selling, brands should be positioned more as a thought leader and as a potential source of advice within their broader market niche.

Not only does building content around expertise in your category help to educate potential customers, but it can also attract new customers who are looking for advice but might not be in-market just yet. So ditch the product-focused sales pitch and you’ll start expanding your reach. Sales will follow.

3. Think Omni-channel All the time

The importance of an omni-channel strategy isn’t a new trend, but it is one that will remain relevant for most brands.

While e-commerce and online shopping continues to be the norm, shoppers today demand a seamless and robust experience wherever they may be shopping. The transition between channels should also be easy.

This may include offering ways for customers to browse online and buy in-store. It may include buying online and returning items in-store. Maybe it is also shopping online via retail partners or online via social social commerce.

Wherever or however a customer chooses to shop, the experience must be tied together whenever possible. An example is a hybrid event that gives shoppers a real life look at a product in either an in-person or virtual format. It could also mean experimenting with Augmented Reality (AR), allowing consumers to use their mobile devices to get a sense of scale or fit before they make a purchase.

An omni-channel presence not only leads to more sales overall, but the right experience can make shoppers more comfortable with brands, give confidence in the product they're considering, and help to reduce returns later.

Voice search is another shopping behavior on the rise, providing yet another way for retailers and brands to communicate with shoppers.

All of this means you can’t be too narrow in your focus and all customer devices – across desktop, mobile, and even the smart home – must be considered.

4. Mobile-first, mobile-must

Omni-channel strategies are about supporting all channels. But regardless of plans to buy online or in-store, chances are that our smallest screens are going to play a big role in the journey.

As discussed, it’s important to ramp up inspiration and education content for 2023. As time goes on, it is easy to realize we live in a world with increasingly shorter attention spans — some argue that our attention span is less than 9 seconds, shorter than that of a goldfish!

That’s more reason to keep mobile devices top of mind and optimize visuals for these smaller screens. Desktop visuals should be secondary, as most brands’ desktop web traffic has been on the decline.

Mobile-friendliness, vertical orientation of imagery, and short-form video, should all be in your content mix.

5. Social Proof with Online Reviews

Whether we’re selecting a new dentist or buying consumer electronics, most of us leverage ratings and reviews whenever we shop. While as many 95% of consumers already do this, the shift to e-commerce will only make reviews more impactful in the shopping journey.

There are many ways brands can illustrate their product, including high-quality imagery, video, even AR, but there’s ultimately no way for a consumer to interact with or feel the products they’re browsing online.

Ratings and reviews are key to painting a real-life picture of the product, and help shoppers feel comfortable making a purchase decision. For brands, embracing ratings and reviews also provides transparency which builds trust with customers.

6. Online and In-store Events

Brick-and-mortar stores offer many ways to educate and inspire shoppers. In-store events, such as cooking classes at Sur La Table, are ways physical stores can influence purchases.

With fewer shoppers going in-store for their purchases, it is still important to create unique experiences. In the same way that omni-channel strategies help bridge online and in-store purchasing, virtual or hybrid events are key to delivering that seamless live in-person and online education.

Hybrid events are unique in giving more people the option to attend, including for those looking for an opportunity to interact with products in-store before they buy. Additionally, hybrid events are engaging because shoppers get to choose how they want to experience the event, even if they can’t make it to a physical store. Together, these unique benefits offer huge opportunities for sales.

7. Connecting with Customers

E-commerce, and technology in general, continues to change retail. Today, shoppers benefit from speed (same-day shipping!), convenience (shop from anywhere 24/7), and consistency (access everything you need to make a purchase decision, regardless of retail environment).

However, customer experience is key, and that goes far beyond making a great lifestyle image of the product in-use.

Coming out of the pandemic, we’ve seen shoppers wanting to connect with smaller businesses, or even buy direct from big brands. Moreover, shoppers were happy to pay more to make their purchases away from traditional retailers.

The reason for this is simple – people are increasingly loyal to the retailers and brands that provide both value and minimum friction. Delivering the right experience impresses shoppers. When that happens, customers reward brands with loyalty, and they also spread the word!

On Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance is an important topic in this always-on, digital world we all live in. The last couple of years has also given new meaning to the idea of balance as we’ve all adapted to “new normal” conditions. 

Heavily focused on how people structure and manage their days is Balance the Grind, which hosts conversations about work, life, and balancing the two. The editors talk to people from all over the world, in different careers and backgrounds, to give readers insight into what work-life balance means and how it can be achieved. 

There are always some incredible conversations at Balance the Grind, plus explorations of daily habits, schedules, rituals and routines of successful world leaders, artists, startup founders, business executives, writers and world class athletes. I was honored to be featured to give my two cents on an important topic for young professionals.

Shout out to Hao Nguyen and the editorial team for taking the time to chat, and for building an amazing community.

SEO and its Role in Your Business

According to SmallBizGenius, 93% of all online activities start with a search engine. Moreover, 75% of searchers never click past the first page of results.

Those are impressive stats that indicate how important Search is in a consumer’s path to purchase. It also shows how SEO continues to be essential to any brand’s marketing strategy, just as much as traditional ad campaigns. 

These new stats shouldn’t be too surprising. In the omnichannel world that we live in, Search continues to be at the center of how we research a product before we buy.  

At the very least, these trends also should reveal how important SEO is within the marketing mix. And what’s more, many companies still diminish the impact that SEO brings. 

These stats are only the latest in a slew of data that says any marketer should be utilizing SEO as a powerful tool within your marketing toolbox. Here’s why:

Search Experience Optimization

At its core, SEO is about optimizing all aspects of the searcher’s experience, aiding their journey to find answers.

While some will consider SEO a temporary solution (or at worst snake oil), it's really the process in which a website’s health, performance, and visibility are improved. 

SEO, when done well, is focused on establishing a foundation that includes designing an effective user experience, writing great content, and providing a clear path to conversion. From there, more technical SEO tactics can help improve performance and provide a faster, more responsive experience for the user.

E-A-T for Results

Today, SEO is a blend of art and science. It’s also more about the quality of content and UX  than anything else. But it can be summed up by one acronym—EAT. 

E-A-T stands for: Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

Google's algorithm is ultimately searching for content with these attributes. It shows preference for and ranks sites that achieve it. 

Sites that rank well for competitive keywords are those that show expertise in a related field, prove themselves to be an authoritative source of information, and demonstrate they could be trustworthy. 

For many websites that demonstrate expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, organic search quickly becomes one of their top performing channels for traffic. The bonus is that it’s free traffic; you don’t have to pay for each visitor!

Sure, there’s also the ability to run ads in search, and paid results can be easy wins that are also important to an overall marketing strategy. But it’s an organic search strategy that leads to a brand’s ability to really saturate the first page of results for a query in Google. 

Your Brand and SEO

SEO takes time, which isn’t always a luxury that all brands have. 

Perhaps you have a new content content management system (CMS) that isn’t SEO-friendly. Or worse, you have a homegrown or proprietary CMS that doesn’t allow certain SEO elements. 

This is a common challenge, as many brands have a CMS that isn’t built with canonical tags, no-index tags, or schema. Moreover, some e-commerce CMS options help brands sell directly to consumers, but won’t necessarily have the URL structure to accommodate custom queries, or navigation to support natural SEO queries. 

If this sounds familiar at all, it is worth looking into how to upgrade your CMS. Finding workarounds to basic SEO challenges are essential, but also finding helpful SEO professionals to fine tune the content you have already might be worth investing in as well.

Help Customers Find You

As mentioned, SEO takes time. It isn’t a flash in the pan, or guaranteed quick fix. But it is part of a long-term strategy that certainly drives return. And more than likely, it’s something your competitors are already employing. 

SEO principles won’t just help you keep pace with your competitors, it will help you build stronger relationships with new customers actively looking for your product. The key is remembering the EAT concept, and to consistently create pages that are credible sources of information about a specific topic that provide real value for users.

5 SEO Myths You Shouldn’t Follow

SEO was really my gateway into digital marketing. Learning SEO in the early days of my career years ago served as my introduction to marketing on the Web. It’s what opened me up to a new world that included analytics, HTML, user experience, and so much more.

It’s an incredible feeling to build a fantastic website, create great content, to see people find it, and ultimately have those visitors convert. In a nutshell, that’s what made me fall in love with digital marketing in the first place. The outcomes, feedback, learning, and constant refinement is addicting.

Today, this practice blends art and science, and being successful is more about the quality of content and UX than anything else. Unfortunately, SEO has gotten a bad wrap and myths continue to be perpetuated.

Here are just a handful of my favorite myths, in no particular order:

1. SEO Myth: Google Only Ranks ‘Fresh’ Content

Google wants to provide users with the most relevant content for any search query. That’s often been interpreted to mean that to have content rank it must be fresh, new and timely. In other words, the most recently published content has the best chance of near-term success, while older content is bound to decline in organic traffic.

‘Freshness’ is indeed an important signal, but it’s also query-dependent. That means that how fresh a piece of content is likely depends on the query. For sites operating in fast-paced news, fresh content may be key. But for the majority of websites, freshness is less of a factor. Consider the topic that you’re targeting. If it’s one that’s constantly evolving, then it could be important to refresh and/or republish that content regularly to ensure Google doesn't consider it stale.

2. SEO Myth: You Don’t Need Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are the snippets of content that can be found under a website’s title tag in the search engine results page. They are basically a short summary of the web page that gives users an idea of what they are potentially clicking into. In many cases, Google will develop one automatically based on the page content.

It’s true that meta descriptions by themselves are no longer directly influencing rankings. However, they play a huge role in the searcher’s behavior and in driving engagement with your page’s SERP listing, click-through, and on-site conversion. If users don’t find what they’re looking for in the meta description, or it doesn’t accurately describe the page, they’ll probably move on to a competitor’s listing.

3. SEO Myth: Google Will Penalize a Website for Duplicate Content

It’s widely believed that duplicate content is a website’s kryptonite, paralyzing it from visibility in search engine results. While it can influence what organic results Google shows, duplicate content doesn't necessarily bring ranking doom.

Instead, Google will just ignore the duplicate content altogether. Keep in mind: if you have instances of duplicate content on your website, those pages may be ignored by search engines, which won’t help or hurt your organic rankings. Luckily, there are some tools out there that can help identify duplicate content on a website, such as Copyscape, but know that some duplicate is not completely unusual.

4. SEO Myth: An SEO Agency is the Best Way to Get Fast Rankings

Always be weary of any promise from agencies of rankings or fast results. If you have the budget, there can certainly be good reasons to hire an SEO agency to help with a host of activities, particularly if you’re short on internal resources or want a fresh perspective on how to improve your search traffic. However, SEO needs to be considered an ongoing effort, not a one-time project or something to get a quick win. It’s driven by data and planned, periodic spurts of increased activity scheduled ahead of time.

Google handles over 100 billion searches per month, so no SEO can predict how or what people are going to search tomorrow, or be able to make any guarantee of fast search rankings. SEO is a long-term practice that’s impacted by the age and history of domain names, authority links, and in-depth, high-quality content, among many other factors. There are many websites out there that check these boxes, but still struggle to rank well. Know that playing the long game is what it takes to not only get to the top of results, but to stay there.

5. SEO Myth: SEO is Dead

Last but not least. Google is more sophisticated than ever and makes it more challenging for SEOs to crack the formula to higher rankings. Moreover, search engine results pages look much different now than they did a decade or more ago. Increasingly, Google is serving up its own answers to searchers’ queries, before they reach traditional website listings. Even voice searches are becoming the norm in our smart homes.

However, the truth is that as long as search engines still exist and show organic results for users hungry for answers—answers that can be influenced in some fashion—SEO isn’t dead. At its core, SEO is about finding ways to satisfy user needs, answer their questions, and it’s about tailoring a website’s architecture or content to meet a searcher’s expectations. That’s something that will continue to be an essential practice.