Every year the same pattern repeats. Budgets are approved in early November, campaigns launch the week before the weekend, auction prices are already at their annual peak, and the results are judged against a season that was effectively decided six weeks earlier. The Growth Bully, a Malta performance marketing agency, treats the run from Black Friday to Christmas as a single campaign with three phases, because that is how the auction actually behaves.
The seasonal advantage does not come from a better advert in November. It comes from arriving in November with an audience you have already paid for at ordinary prices, and a plan for what happens to those customers in January.
When should you start advertising for Black Friday?
September and October, with audience building rather than selling. The weeks before the season are the last time you can reach the same people at normal costs. Advertisers who wait until November are buying cold traffic in the most competitive auction of the year and paying a premium to introduce themselves.
This is the part most businesses skip, because it does not produce sales it can point at. Autumn spend on reach, video views and site traffic looks unproductive on a weekly report and is the single highest leverage money in the season. It converts later, at a fraction of what the same conversion would have cost in the last week of November.
Why do seasonal campaigns get so expensive in November?
Because every advertiser in the market arrives at once and bids for the same attention in the same fortnight. Auction pricing responds to demand, so costs rise regardless of how good your creative is. Your ad is not competing on quality alone, it is competing against a temporary flood of budget.
The consequence is that November is a bad month to be discovered and a good month to be chosen. Advertisers who spend the peak weeks converting people who already know them get the season at a sensible price. Advertisers who spend the peak weeks on introductions pay the surcharge and usually conclude that seasonal advertising does not work for them.
What should the autumn actually look like?
Structured, unglamorous and cheap. The work in September and October is to assemble the assets and the audiences that the November campaign will spend against, so that nothing has to be built while prices are at their highest and attention is at its most expensive.
- Decide the offer before the creative. What the discount is, who it applies to and what it excludes. Everything downstream depends on this and it is the decision most often left until the last fortnight.
- Build the warm audience deliberately. Run reach and traffic campaigns against the people you want to sell to in November, so the retargeting pool is full before the auction turns.
- Fix the tracking while it is quiet. A measurement problem discovered on the Friday itself cannot be fixed on the Friday itself. Verify events, values and the purchase path end to end.
- Grow the owned list. Email and messaging subscribers acquired in October cost what October costs and are reachable in November for nothing.
- Produce the creative in a batch. Enough variations to run four to six weeks without repeating, made once, rather than under pressure at the peak.
- Check stock and fulfilment against the plan. There is no worse outcome than a campaign that works on a product you cannot ship.
Two of those items are technical rather than creative, and they quietly decide the season. Conversion tracking that survives covers the measurement half, and splitting the budget across channels covers how much of the year should sit in this window.
How much should you discount?
As little as the market will accept, decided from your margin rather than from what everyone else is advertising. A discount is a permanent piece of information about what your product is worth, and a deep one bought once tends to be expected every year afterwards.
Work out the gross margin on the products you intend to promote, then the discount that still leaves the campaign profitable after media costs, and treat that as the ceiling rather than the target. If the number that clears the market sits above the ceiling, the honest answer is that the product should not be in the promotion. Bundles, added value and free delivery all move the perceived deal without moving the price the customer will remember next year.
Does Black Friday work for businesses that are not retail?
Sometimes, and rarely in the form retailers use. Service businesses, B2B suppliers and anything with a considered purchase get very little from a discount weekend, because the buying decision is not made on impulse and the season does not compress it.
What the period does offer non-retail businesses is cheap attention afterwards. December and early January are quiet in most non-retail auctions, budgets are exhausted and the same audiences cost noticeably less to reach. Planning to spend when your competitors have stopped is a better seasonal strategy than inventing a sale nobody asked for. For a lead generation business the equivalent move is described in when to increase ad spend.
What should you do in the weeks between Black Friday and Christmas?
Keep selling to the people the weekend surfaced. The gap between the two events is where most of the season is lost, because campaigns are switched off after the weekend and switched back on for a last minute Christmas push, discarding everything the weekend produced.
The audience built during the weekend is the most valuable one you will hold all year. People who viewed products, added to a basket and did not buy are still in market, and they are cheaper to reach in the first fortnight of December than they were in November. Sequencing that follow up rather than repeating the same advert is the difference between a weekend and a season, and retargeting that works covers how to structure it.
- Split the audience by behaviour. Basket abandoners, product viewers and past customers should not receive the same message.
- Move the reason to buy. After the weekend the argument is delivery in time for Christmas, not the discount.
- Cap the frequency. The same people have now seen you a great deal, and irritation converts nobody.
- Set the last order date early and advertise it. A real deadline outperforms a manufactured one every time.
- Keep the email flows running. Owned channels carry the December margin because they carry no media cost.
How do you keep the customers the season buys?
By planning January before November. A discount weekend buys a large number of first time customers at a low margin, and the campaign is only profitable if a reasonable share of them return at full price. That second purchase is what turns a costly season into a good one.
Treat every seasonal buyer as the start of a relationship rather than the end of a transaction. Post purchase email flows, a reason to come back in January and a genuine welcome sequence do more for the annual result than another point of discount would have done. The email side of that is covered in the revenue email flows produce, and ecommerce advertising returns explains why first order profitability is the wrong measure to judge the season on.
Seasonal campaigns are where planning beats budget. If you sell to consumers, our retail and ecommerce work is built around this rhythm, with paid social and search run as one plan rather than two, and the wider programme holding it across the year. If you want the autumn build done properly rather than in the last fortnight, book a call and we will map the season backwards from your margin.