How to Increase Your Conversions on Black Friday Weekend

[Originally published on the Dash Hudson blog.]

Black Friday aka national shopping day weekend is literally around the corner. Here’s how to make the most of it on social next week to blow up your click-throughs and conversions.

Pretty much.

Christmas merch tends to hit shelves as soon as the clock strikes midnight on November 1st, but the holiday season truly starts around Thanksgiving. That short week leading up to Turkey Day signals to all of us that the clock is ticking on, well, everything — starting with the race to gift shopping.

While the modern-day idea of Black Friday conjures visions of human stampedes, the social media era has moved the mayhem from physical brick and mortar locations to mobile and desktop, where transactions are made from the comfort of wherever people have chosen to recover from their food comas. What a time to be alive.

The Black Friday tradition wasn’t always larger than life, but it became a way for retailers to give consumers an incentive to buy stuff during the recent recession. It’s since become an important tradition for brands to engage their social media audiences over the holidays through organic visual storytelling inciting transactions.

Instagram being a place of discovery for most consumers makes it the ideal platform to drop some hot sales happenings without seeming pushy or promotional. And as we know, it’s not only about Friday. The entire weekend that follows Thanksgiving is dedicated to shopping discounts.

Social media and transactions have not always been friends, but with Instagram’s native shopping functionality enabling consumer discovery and our major traffic and sales booster, LikeShop, the channel has turned into an important one for conversions. A strategic holiday shopping content plan that involves these tools will allow you to cash in during the most important retail period of the year.

If we take a look at last year’s numbers in the below infographic, it becomes obvious that tactical CTAs paired with engaging visuals present big opportunities for year-end revenue boosts.

Strategery

This retail peak time means people have buying on the brain. If you’re going to be seeing direct mobile sales from social channels, it’s going to be now. You can build momentum through the week and into the weekend as the discounts either increase or plateau, in which case you can instill a sense of urgency in consumers to get the deals while they’re still on. Nothing makes up people’s minds like holiday promos that culminate in a big bang.

This is the ideal week to kick off holiday shopping for those who haven’t started (aka most people), so it’s important for brands to seize that energy to launch into the final stretch of the year. Time to drive December hype home.

The Past Black Friday-related posts we analyzed all had one common thread: call-to-actions in the captions that clearly stated the words ‘Black Friday,’ ‘sale,’ or ‘deal’, while also directing followers to the link in bio. Caption lengths ran the gamut from one sentence to a couple of paragraphs, confirming that it’s not about the size, it’s about announcing the deals. That’s what audiences are looking for, so give the people what they want.

Those people will be on Instagram the whole time looking for hot Black Friday deals.

Black Friday or Bust

There are countless methods to increase sales through the holidays, and one of them is turning Instagram into a meaningful conversion channel. There’s one week left before the madness begins, so prime your audience with that fantastic organic storytelling and tee up your followers to be in buying mode. Here are some hot tips to throw down this week to help increase your conversions and click-throughs.

• Make sure that all of your scheduled photos and videos have the right LikeShop links attached to them before they’re published.
• Advertise your sales before they start to let your followers assimilate the information. This will help them decide beforehand which deals they’ll want to take advantage of. Because Instagram is primarily a discovery tool, repeated exposure is important. To increase sales and max out next weekend, priming through reiteration is the name of the game. Just don’t overdo it — spamming is never cute.
• Make sure you’re publishing visuals that normally receive a lot of engagement. Do not, under any circumstances, put up images that look like promotional flyers or that have any sort of numbers to illustrate discounts. Like, never ever. If you don’t know what your top performing content is, you can easily figure it out with a Boards analysis.
• Engage consumers with call-to-actions in captions or questions about their holiday gifting plan. This will subliminally make them think about what’s on their shopping list, helping them to visuals what they’re looking to buy and be ready to pull the trigger come Friday (or Monday… or Tuesday).
• Test out various CTAs to understand what your followers are most receptive to and nail it on the days that count.
• Tie your posts back to your Instagram Stories to get the most out of your narrative. Use the swipe-up functionality to further encourage discovery and use video to drive even more interest with your storytelling.

Get your followers to scroll Insta to save them from aunt Susan.

It’s one thing to promote Black Friday sales, but it’s another to do it well with social media to turn your most important marketing channel — Instagram — into a sales driver. If you want to maximize every single content opportunity into Thanksgiving weekend and through the rest of the holidays, the race start here and now. Transactions await you.

Header image: @anthropologie

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