What should you be doing for Black Friday right now?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of e commerce marketing chats with myself Charles and Jimmy. Jimmy, how’s it going, mate?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Matt, good to be back. And yeah, I think I think last week’s episode of like really focusing on one topic went well. So we’re gonna roll into that again this week and chat all things Black Friday. So, what’s happening in the preparation, what it looks like, things to watch out for. So I think in the coaching side of things that I do, like the preparations already started for Black Friday. So September is September’s really the plan. The plan, what you’re doing, planning everything out. October is kind of the execution, getting everything set up. and November’s go time. So if you haven’t started thinking about Black Friday already, like now’s the time to start planning for it because what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to be caught up on two days before the main Black Friday event thinking, I’ve just gotta run something. that’s not where you wanna be and you’re gonna lose a lot of revenue. if you do go down that path. So yeah, I think I I’ll I’ll kick we’ll touch on the different aspects of Black Friday, but I think starting off and people that are listening to this, the the most important part of Black Friday is deciding what your offer’s gonna be or or how what what you’re gonna promote or what you’re gonna do. So and I was talking a lot about this today because I think the mistake some people make is they think, I don’t want to get involved in discounting, so I’m not doing Black Friday this year. It’s like the worst the worst spot to be in for a business because Black Friday is when everyone is looking to spend money with brands. so it’s it’s almost like going

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: to a marketplace and shutting down your store during the busiest hours because you decided to go have lunch. Basically. that’s the equivalent of what you’d be doing in Black Friday if if you’re not getting involved in some way. Now, one of the examples that I give a lot because I like how they do it, is there’s a brand called Merry People. They sell, they sell gum boots. The reason I know they sell gum boots is because my wife earned several pairs of them. and they are notorious for no discounts ever. So you’d be thinking, How do they get inv involved in Black Friday? So the last couple of years, they still don’t discount their product even during Black Friday. But what they do is they do give like a free pair of socks away with their with their gum boots during Black Friday. But it also gives them marketing collateral. They can go out with their messaging around, hey, we don’t discount ever, including Black Friday. But you know, here’s a little thing on top for everyone. Here’s a here’s a bonus gift. So what you really It’s sometimes it’s not even about the offer. It’s just having material that you can go out to your audience with, either telling a story or just promoting your products. Everyone everyone that hasn’t done Black Friday before just thinks, I’ve got to discount my store as much as I possibly can. And that’s what Black Friday is. That’s not what Black Friday is. And in fact, some businesses can lose a lot of money going down that route, just massively. discounting everything and they they don’t actually make a profit. So I think yeah before you even before you even start approaching Black Friday and what it looks like, you need to decide what your offer is. And like we we can give some examples. You can you can have a a store wide discount. You can have a discount on a certain range you can have an automatic discount on your site or a coupon code discount. You can have a mystery

Charles Travers: yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: discount. You can have a buy

Charles Travers: Okay.

Jimmy Dalgleish: one, get one free. You can have a free gift with purchase. If shipping is really expensive in your industry, you could have like a free shipping thing over Black Friday, which is really good for kind of furniture and like heavy items that you typically pay a lot on. There is there’s so many options that you could go with your offer. another one that I like too is if you’ve got a store with a lot of products, you can create like a Black Friday bundle of like all your products. and use that as collateral to go out. Now there’s that’s just off the top of my head a few ideas, but I just for people that are listening to this, I just don’t want you to get into the frame of mind that, I have to discount everything as much as I possibly can. In fact, I would advise you to do the opposite.

Charles Travers: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, isn’t it? It’s like obviously we talk about the marketing side of things, but economically it’s gotta make sense. and there’s no point doing it if you’re if you’re potentially losing money. Obviously it’s great exposure and we’d we both recommend that you you do do some Black Friday sales in most situations. I would assume, Jimmy, you know, all of my clients are We’ll be doing Black Friday sales and and and I’ll kind of preparing for that now. But yeah, I think from the the mass has to mass it’s gotta make sense, basically. Otherwise, yeah, it’s it’s not gonna be worth doing. So I think that’s a really good point to start with before we even delve straight into the the marketing side of things.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, well maybe let’s touch on now like what you’re doing from an SEO perspective, Charles, and then I can go into kind of what it looks like from a Google Ads perspective, and then we can chat around marketing as a whole, the other pieces. So from the SEO perspective, because SEO probably does take a little well, definitely does take a bit longer than ads, you have to probably prepare SEO things earlier than what you would ads. Like what are what are you doing client side to prepare from an SEO perspective for Black Friday.

Charles Travers: Yeah, so simplistically what we’re doing is we’re building out dedicated collection pages. and I’ve actually I’ve built a document that I’ve I’ve shared with my clients and I think it would be really useful for me to share that on on the call today and go through it. Now obviously if you’re listening in on on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and you want to actually look at this document. then head over head over to YouTube and have a look. But I’ll try and go through it in as much detail as possible so the you know anyone that’s listening can understand what we’re going through. But yeah if you want to actually have a look at this then check out the YouTube version of it of this episode. So let me just share my let me just share my screen And move this over here. Okay. So J Jimmy, give me a shout if that if you can see that. Okay,

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yep, all good. Yeah, I’ve got it.

Charles Travers: so basically the premise of this is and this this can apply to whether you’re a a small e-commerce store and you’re selling, you know, a handful of products, or you’re a larger store and you’ve got, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of of products that you’re selling. and what we’re fundamentally doing is the first step is we’re creating one Master Black Friday collection page. So the what I would advise is building it on a if you’re using Shopify, building it on a collections URL. So collections slash Black Friday deals, or you know, dash Black Friday deals. you can potentially include the keyword that you want to go after in the URL, but personally I would just keep it as Black Friday deals. one thing I wouldn’t do, and this is something that I always advise against, regardless if you’re doing Black Friday or even other pages, is I don’t like to include the year in a content page. unless it’s you know the model of a product. because if you’re updating that page, for example, what we want in this situation is we want this Black Friday. deals page to effectively be live throughout the year. And I’ll explain in a bit more detail what I mean by that. I don’t mean that the sales are live all year, but we want to have this page live and indexed. So we want to be able to use this for multiple years. And if you put the date in it, then you know, say we go to Black Friday 2027, you’re going to have to then redirect and you lose the authority that that page has built up over time. so yeah, I would first create this page. Now we kind of break this down in three steps. Jimmy, feel free to to jump in if you’ve got any questions and I’m sure probably the people that are listening or watching will will be asking the same. So yeah let us know if you’ve got any questions.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Well dick.

Charles Travers: so first step is basically we want to create kind of a Black Fridays coming soon page. So I’ve basically just used this as an example. If you’re watching this on YouTube, you’ll see here this brand. it’s a I’m just it’s a made up brand, Kestrel’s. I think I’m pronouncing that correctly. and effectively what you’re doing is you just want to create a collection. With a hero banner that just says, you know, Black Friday, in this case, 2026 is coming soon, with an email sign up. So ideally, people are potentially going to be landing on this page before Black Friday, and we want to be able to capture their details so we can then send them emails during that period leading up to Black Friday. And this is also something that you could share as well. you know, on on other marketing channels as an option if we want to try to drive more clicks to the page. So we get that page up live. you could even just put a few products that are currently on sale. you could just talk a little bit about you know what’s gonna be happening during Black Friday. You could add an FAQ section. Again it’s getting more content on the page. and what we also want to do at this stage is start having a look and seeing what people are actually searching for during Black Friday. So you could use a tool like you know S E Rush, A Revs, I use S E Ranking, and see if, for example, anyone is searching for if we’re using this this. made up brand, you know, men’s clothing, Black Friday deals. Whatever it is you’re selling, if you’ve got a big if you’re in a big enough market, typically people are searching for a particular keyword related to what you’re selling and then Black Friday deals or Black Friday sales. So we want to effectively find out what that main keyword is and include that. In your your SEO title, which if it if you’re running a Shopify store, it will be at the bottom section of the page, which is the search engine listing section, and it will be your page title, is what you’re looking for. I mean in this example, we’ve we’ve included the brand name here. I’d actually be looking to include the keyword that you want to go after. So say Like said, men’s clothing Black Friday Deals 2026. Make sure you put the year in there. And then at at the end of your page title, your SEO meta title, you’ll wanna put actually you’ll wanna put here the your brand name. You can do the the the horizon the the vertical line here and then your brand name and then include yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Just on just on the year, Charles. So just for the S people not in the SEO. So just to clarify, Charles said don’t put the year in the link. So the link for the page, but he he is he is putting

Charles Travers: Yes, yes. The URL. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: the year in in the kind of headline for the page. So like the meta the meta title and the meta description. I’m just looking at it now. The the date is in there. So if you’ve just heard him say don’t use the date, he meant don’t use the date in the URL. that’s going to the page ’cause then you can keep that URL every time and then you can just update the meta title and the meta description. So just for clarity on that one.

Charles Travers: Yeah, correct. Absolutely correct. Yeah. and typically most you know, most stores what most stores tend to do and what probably your competitors will be doing is they will just be taking an existing sales page and revamping that to fit Black Friday. The problem with that is every time you change it to a new type of sale Google can’t tell what that page is related to. So it kind of defeats the object. So that’s why we’re creating these dedicated Black Friday collection page, which builds up authority leading up to Black Friday. And then we can just use that again the following year. So, you know, ideally in this situation you want to be looking at you know I at least two months out. The earlier that you can get this live, the better, to be honest. and then once you’ve done it, because you’ve already got it set up and live, the following year, you already have that page, so you don’t have to rebuild it. and then again, it depends on when you decide to actually publish your Black Friday sales, you’ll want to then convert that. Coming soon page to your actual live Black Friday collection page. You’ll also want to update the SEO title and description to say now Black Friday sales are here because we’ve got on the the coming soon is we’re yeah, we’re putting you know Black Friday is coming soon rather than Black Friday is here because what we don’t want to do is people to find the page early. It says on the meta title Black Friday is now live, and then click on that page and there’s no sales. So we effectively want to change the SEO metadata as we’re going along through this process. so we have stage two, like I said, is yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: How long does that take to how long does it take to update, Charles? So if you change it, how long will it take to be reflected on Google basically? On the SEO side?

Charles Travers: So one thing I yeah, so one thing I recommend is within Google Search Console, you can actually request to ask Google to reindex the page. So I’ll kind of what we call false index it. and by

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, okay. Makes it.

Charles Travers: doing that, you’re gonna get Google to show up that new metadata a lot quicker than if you’ve just leaving it for Google to to automatically crawl your site again. So that’s one thing I would recommend. each stage once you’re changing the metadata is to go into Google Search Console. You basically take the live URL, you put it into the top search bar, click enter, and then it gives you the option to effectively it will show that the page hopefully is indexed, but you can actually request to re-index it again. yeah, and that will speed up that process basically. So once you’ve obviously got your your live page, that is gonna start building up authority and rankings on Google, hopefully, and also within AI platforms as as well. So I’ve seen this work really well for some of my clients where they’re like during for the for this coming year, they’re already ranking in the top position for their Black Friday keywords. And when you go onto Chat GPT and and ask the right questions related to their their market, they’re also being cited as well. So it this is working as well, not just on Google, but also showing up for LLM searches as well on some of these AI platforms. And then basically once you’ve once the sale has ended, rather than what most people all most brands do is they just unpublish that sales page and then you’ve just basically got a a four four. What we’re gonna do instead is we’re gonna take that live page and convert it effectively back to kind of a a landing holding page and just say, you know, Black Friday twenty twenty six has ended. You know, j you could like again, you can add a an email, sign up, you know, join our list to let us be notified about future sales or be notified about next Black Friday however you want to do it but basically just keeping that page live without the obviously the the Black Friday sales on there and you may want to you know show some some other products that are just discounted on your site that could be another option as well The other stage of this also is actually building out a Cyber Monday page as well. but that won’t necessarily have as many people searching in from my experience. Most people are searching for particular keywords around Black Friday. but that’s kind of the next step of the process. and if you’ve got, you know, you might find Kind of the next level onto this, you may find that you’ve got your you’ve built out your Master Black Friday deals page where you’ve got all the different products and product categories you’re selling, but you might find from your keyword research that there’s actually some search volume for kind of specific product categories that you’re selling. So in this situation. You know, Black Friday coats or Black Friday knitwear, Black Friday denim. You can create sub collections and then from that master collections link to your sub collections. And that’s going to help pass authority through to those pages and you apply that same optimization principle and basically get more than one Black Friday page ranking on Google as well. So that’s really if you’re, you know, a larger store that’s selling a lot of different. product categories. and that’s simplistically the strategy that I’m I’m kind of applying to the large majority of my clients. There are some more kind of advanced things. but just to summarize here in terms of like a step by step process. So you know ideally what’s the date today? 22nd of September is when we’re recording this. 2026. So this is kind of a perfect time to actually start executing on this specific strategy. You know, I would su s suggest trying to get this page live at the latest by kind of late September. and effectively once you’ve gone through those elements that I’ve just talked about, you know, you leave it alone. You leave it alone until you know that. when you’re gonna actually launch your Black Friday sales and then you converted it to your live page around, you know, well, it depends. It could be you know early November. it it could be, you know, on Black Friday itself. I don’t know, Jimmy, in your experience when, you know, you you typically find your clients start actually you know publishing their their sales but f f fr but

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, and they all differ. It depends it depends on what the sale is and like how many products they’ve have to put offers on and things like that. So some some of my clients will be starting November one. So they’ll be starting like it’ll it’ll be a Black Friday month. It won’t be like, Hey, this is the last week of November. This is when we’re running our sale. Some of them will be running for the in the entire of November. I think you’ll see some brands start late October.

Charles Travers: Yeah. Yeah. but yeah, that’s that’s basically a you know, a breakdown of of the strategy that I’m applying. And like I said, there’s a few advanced things to try and get more clicks and awareness to that page earlier on, which will also help with rankings. You know, maybe you run a a pre Black some pre Black Friday deals and you put those on the page and then you publish that to your email list and you’re getting you’re getting clicks to that page which Google would never say but that’s a kind of a ranking signal in itself. The more clicks you can actually get to a page, that’s an indication that Google should rank that page higher. Maybe you again you do the same principle with push notifications, paid ads, anything that’s gonna drive more clicks to that page earlier before Black Friday is gonna get that page to be more visible during that Black Friday period when someone’s actively searching on Google or Chat GBT. So yeah, that’s basically the the strategy that I’m applying for for this year’s Black Friday, Jimmy.

Jimmy Dalgleish: nice. So yeah, get up get up your collection page for Black Friday. don’t put the year in the URL. Get if you’ve got some products on sale currently, maybe just put them in there as placeholders ready for your Black Friday. But yeah, have a coming soon form in there and get that rolling. I think I kinda so I ran a I ran a class on preparing Black Friday for Google Ads, which is a lot different for SEO. What you’re aiming for in Google Ads is to Be present on each part of Google Ads. So what I mean by that is the discount codes and the promotions show in different places depending on what like channel you’re going on, whether you’re going on the search ads, whether you’re going on the shopping shopping ads, whether you’re using display. So it differs across all the platforms. And I think it was a I What I’d say is if you’re running a promotion and you haven’t told Google about it, they’re not gonna dis they’re not gonna display it in the way that you’d want anyway. So and a prime example for this today is someone that I was coaching that watched the coaching call, they’re like, Jimmy, I had no idea about any of that stuff and I haven’t done any of that. We had a look at their sale. They were they were running a flash forty-eight hour sale on their products. and What happened was I I looked it up. okay, I’m like, okay, I looked up this I looked up their site and their shopping ads had the full price that you would pay for that product. It had didn’t have a slash through it through it. It didn’t say it was twenty-five percent discounted, didn’t let them know how to promotion at all. They didn’t update the promotion in their kind of branded text ads. So unless they clicked through to the site and saw the banner, they would have no idea that this website Is even having a sale and Google doesn’t know that they’re having a sale either because they haven’t done anything to tell them. They haven’t gone in the merchant center, set up the promotional discount, or told the merchant center that hey, these products are gonna be twenty five percent off just for this period of time. and they hadn’t updated their branded ad copy. And when I say that, it means let’s just say the brand was called Let’s say it was a trampoline company. It’s called Jumping Jimmies. and if I if I have a branded text ad, it means that I’m running an ad for anyone that’s searching for jumping Jimmies. That’s what I’m talking about when we’re talking about a branded search ad. So you’re actually bidding on your brand’s own keywords. Now, when that ad comes up, you don’t want it to look like the organic listing that’s just an organic thing about your brand. You want it to be there front and center, and the top headline for your ad should talk about your Black Friday Friday sale and specifically what it is. and the the length that it’s running for. and basically the ad is pretty much a billboard for what is happening in your business and at this moment in time. And that’s how I use the branded search campaigns. So many people will just almost make a duplicate of their organic listing. And it’s it’s like, what’s what’s the point? You’re already ranking there organically.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Use it as use it as a billboard for what’s kind of happening right now. and they typically get a lot higher click through rates too than the organic one too because you’re really punching out the best part of your brand in that ad. so I’m just having a look at some of the things we discussed today. So number one, we’ve kind of already discussed a little bit. It’s it’s choosing your promotion type. So whether you it’s a discount, it’s a free gift with purchase, whether it’s a buy one, get one, a hop, whatever it is, choose what it is because you need to get specific in the merchant center about what your promotion is, so that Google can present it to the audience. If you want to update all your text ads across Google Ads without changing every single ad, there is actually an ad extension that you can use in Google Ads called the headline asset. And you can do like a short 30-character Black Friday headline and you can apply it across every text ad in your account. Save you changing every single ad if you want to do that. I don’t know how you feel about this, Charles, but some some of the tactics I used in the product feed, which will affect how the products display organically in the free listings as well, is I take bundle products and I put in a rule in the merchant center that says if the word bundle exists in this product title, change it to Black Friday bundle. So we actually we actually change in the merchant center. It will affect organically, but it also will pref affect the paid ads. I put Black Friday bundle in the title for Black Friday. I like to push bundles during Black Friday. What you shouldn’t do is you shouldn’t add Black Friday to just every single product in your feed. Don’t go doing that. if you are gonna add it to some products in your feed, add it to your the the ones that you’re promoting. or the ones that you want to move more of. you need to submit the promotion to Merchant Center. So that’s number four. And this is where people miss out a lot. They put all the work into planning the promotion, getting it all set up, but they just don’t tell Google about it. And it doesn’t display in the shopping ads. And if your shopping ad is showing next, let’s just say you’re selling trampolines again. If if two people are selling the same trampoline and one at One shopping ad is showing that, hey, this is 25% off. it’s a Black Friday deal. They’ve got all the extensions working next to yours where you are running a sale, but Google doesn’t know about it. So they’re just displaying the full price. It’s pretty obvious which product listing is going to get the click-through rate. and that’s where you’re missing out on. people aren’t gonna click on your full price product in and magically find your deal on your website after that. you’re gonna lose them to your competitor at the first click. there is a promotional asset in Google Ads too, which you also need to use. That shows the Black Friday deal under your text ads as well. And the last thing, I’m kind of rushing here because we’re running out of time, but just for a quick overcap. The the last thing you want to do is launch a performance max campaign if you are only running performance like a Black Friday deal on a certain segment of your products. If you are, you want to start a new campaign and put that s put those segment of products in that campaign and and just have that as like your Black Friday edition campaign. So extra budget is actually going through the products that you want to promote. So Yeah, I think that I think the biggest thing for for Google Ads specifically is letting Google know that you’ve got the sale. Now, we won’t get the chance to touch on all the other channels in this call today, but there is one that I wanna I want you to pro kind of prioritize everything over everything else, and it’s setting up your email campaigns. So making sure that your flows are set up and you and are ready to go, but also Setting up your campaigns for Black Friday. So one of the brands I was looking at at the moment, we’re setting up kind of the email campaigns that will start from December, sorry, November one and will run through to January 7. So we’re doing basically our Q4 email campaign because it’s the busiest time of the year. So don’t miss it. If you’re if you’re planning on sending two emails over Black Friday, like good luck. So I think we had 48 emails planned over that period from November one to January seventh. So that kind of gives you an indication of of what you’re working with. 47 emails versus two. let’s just say you get two grand from each email that goes out. If you’re sending 47, you know, you you’re looking at close to a hundred grand worth of revenue. If you’re sending two, you’re looking at four. So And and that’s honestly some of the difference between the brands. So email should be your priority. And then yeah, we’ll we’ll give you some more insight into Black Friday. But for the Google ads side, make sure that you’re telling Google about your promotion. And as Charles said earlier, get your Black Friday sales page set up now for the SEO portion. So there’s some really good tips just to get the ball rolling for your Black Friday sale. And we’ll probably cover I don’t want to talk about Black Friday again next week, but we will cover it probably halfway through October, I’d say. We’ll d we’ll do another we’ll do another episode on Black Friday as well, because it’ll it’ll be in the pinch and people will be getting set up and ready to go for November. But yeah, I hope I hope this episode’s provided you some value on where you should be and and getting set up for your Black Friday promotion or at least getting you thinking about what you want your promotion to be. And if you weren’t going to get involved in Black Friday, I hope we’ve changed your mind in the fact that you don’t have to just run a huge discount. Look for another creative way to get involved just to send your audience kind of marketing material to keep your brand front of mind during that period. You don’t have to run a massive discount. It could just be like what Mary people do, giving away a free pair of socks with a full price purchase. So Yeah, there are other ways to get involved in Black Friday without just discounting your store enormously. So we’ll wrap it up now. If you guys have more questions, you can reach us on Facebook at Shopify Marketing Secrets or hit us up on any other platform at e-commerce marketing chats and we will chat to you guys next week.