Our Step-By-Step Guide to

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Content Planning

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge days for eCom and retail in general. If you have an eCom website and are planning to offer Black Friday or Cyber Monday specific deals, it’s time to get organized and create your plan. I know, it may seem early – it’s summer, you’re thinking BBQ and drinks poolside, not pumpkin spice everything and gigantic turkey dinners but if you want to be ready and be able to sit back and enjoy the gigantic turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day, you need to work now. Black Friday and Cyber Monday content is going to take time to develop.

Do Black Friday and Cyber Monday Matter to Your Business?

If you knew 154 million people would be shopping on any given weekend, would you think it was essential to your business to get some of that revenue? Well, that’s the opportunity that Thanksgiving weekend represents for retailers. If you have an E-commerce website or a brick and mortar location, then the simple answer is yes Black Friday and Cyber Monday matter. A lot. The average consumer spends nearly $300 in just that one weekend. 154 million people are spending $300 each…. That’s a whole lot of potential revenue for your business.

According to the National Retail Federation, 154 million people shopped during the Thanksgiving weekend in 2016. The original estimate from NRF was 59% of the US population, 137.4 million people were planning to shop over the weekend. Nearly 20 million people who didn’t expect to shop over the holiday weekend still shopped.  And more than 60% of the population bought. In one weekend.

As a retailer, eCom or brick and mortar, this is a big opportunity for your business. And if you want to have a chance to rank well for terms like, “Black Friday 2017 or, “Black Friday Sales” you’re going to have to do your prep work early. Now, it’s unlikely you’re going to land on page 1 for these terms as they’re super competitive and the big box retailers and deals sites own the results. However, you can work now to ensure you have visibility for Black Friday and Cyber Monday local searches and I’ll explain how shortly.

As we’ve talked about in the past, local searches are a tremendous opportunity for your business. If you’re not sure why local search matters, check out this blog post we wrote on it recently.

Consumers Shop Local  

According to NRF data, 11.9% of the 154 million shoppers frequented local or small businesses in their communities. That’s 18 million people who bought from small business owners or local companies in one weekend.

More Purchases Happen Online than In-Store

Here’s the real key to all of this – more consumers shopped online Thanksgiving Weekend than in person. Yes, you read that right. 44% of shoppers bought online while 40% were in store.

And, if your business targets Millennials (18-34 last holiday season) that your website be ready. 8 in 10 Millennials shopped during the Thanksgiving weekend. 80% of the entire generation was buying. 62% of them shopped online and 56% in store.

What do you Need to do to be Ready for Thanksgiving Weekend Sales?

To be ready for the holiday season, start preparing today. If you wait too long, you won’t have the necessary lead time for SEO and content to work for you. You may have to rely on paid search ads to boost your site’s traffic. And while that can be a good strategy, it’s one that costs money. If you plan ahead, you can drive as much traffic as possible without an added expense. Then you can decide if you want to supplement with paid media.

It’s time to get to work. Determine the following and start your planning process.  

1. What will you offer for your holiday weekend sales? Yes, your offers matter. Consumers want deals, they’re not interested in paying full price during the Thanksgiving Weekend sales. If you have a great deal, they will buy. Shopping is for both gifts and personal. According to NRF data, only 7% of consumers said their purchases were not on sale. 36% said everything they bought was on sale. 74% of consumers purchases Thanksgiving Weekend were for gifts, the other 26% were not.

2. How will you educate your consumers about the deals you’re offering? The first step is to create a landing page for Black Friday and another for Cyber Monday. Creating two pages allows you to target your keywords better and hopefully rank for Black Friday and Cyber Monday local searches.

Pro Tip: Keyword Targeting

Your targeted keywords will likely be Black Friday/Cyber Monday (city), Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sales City, Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2017 City or some variation of these.

You’ll need to complete keyword research on your own to determine which terms you should target. Be sure to consider which words you can rank for, not just the terms with the highest traffic. As I said earlier, it’s highly unlikely you’re going to rank for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, but you should have a better chance at a long-tail search that includes the date and local information.

3. Once you have your sales information and your targeted keywords chosen, it’s time to create your landing page. Yes, you should publish the landing page in July. Google takes time to rank pages and having it there today should help you in November. You don’t have to share your sales information yet. You can use evergreen copy on the page for now.

Pro Tip: Sample Copy

Include information on what type items will be on sale (you don’t have to give specific product information yet), tell consumers when you’ll list the sales, how long they’ll be valid, etc. Let them know if sales will be available online or in store.

ProTip: List Building

Make your landing pages work even better for you by adding a call-to-action to sign up for your email list and be the first to know about your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. If you do this, be sure you create an email campaign and share it with your list prior to adding the information to your website.

4. Create your content strategy to support Black Friday and Cyber Monday searches. If you have a blog, a topic that I’ve seen work exceptionally well is a Black Friday or Cyber Monday Sale Sneak Peek. Consumers like to feel that they’re, “in the know.” Share these posts with your email list as promised. You could create a social strategy that includes some inside looks and sneak peeks too. Starting your planning early should allow you enough time to develop a robust plan and some great content.

ProTip: Keywords for SEO

Google will only rank two pages on your website for each keyword so choose your targeted keywords carefully.

5. At the end of the Thanksgiving Weekend, don’t remove the newly created landing pages. Remove the sale information and update the copy, so it has evergreen content. Leaving the page live helps you keep your keyword rankings and hopefully, have an even better ranking next year.

Planning is the Key to Success for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Really understanding the opportunity that Black Friday and Cyber Monday represent for businesses helps most business owners prioritize content development. Take time, do your research, make sure you have offers that your consumers want, and then create the content to help spread the message. If you wait until October or worse, November to get started, you will either run out of time or create less useful content for your audience. You’re reading this post in July. I planned it in May. Advance planning works.

To Learn more about our content planning process or have the Etched team create your Black Friday and Cyber Monday content, contact today.