With Halloween fast approaching, many brands and small businesses just like you are preparing their content for their Black Friday eCommerce strategy.
The key is to start your campaigns early. In fact, most shopping starts in October (or even September!) and continues all throughout December, right up to Christmas. This means you should think beyond Black Friday to boost your holiday sales this year.
But don’t worry, we’re here to make things easier for you. In fact, we’ll look at 5 ways you can increase sales by taking your social media marketing efforts beyond your Instagram profile.
1. Display your Instagram posts throughout your website
Keeping your branding consistent is a key factor in creating a memorable experience for your customers. You might have noticed how your favorite brands stick to the same themes throughout their marketing channels. This helps customers look out for certain colors, phrases, and even hashtags.
Getting Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and your website to all display the same digital assets emphasizes the fact that you are a professional business. This, however, can be time-consuming – that is … unless you’re using the right tools.
Many scheduling apps allow you to prepare your content in advance and schedule it throughout the holiday period.
But what about your website? Adding an Instagram feed to key places such as your footer, home page, or Black Friday landing page, takes care of this for you. An Instagram feed plugin like Spotlight will automatically bring in your Instagram posts and keep your site updated.
In this way, all you need to do is focus on what’s most important – your content.
2. Design a seamless mobile experience
Now that you’ve got your content set up and scheduled, you need to focus on another important aspect. Most customers nowadays are marking purchases while using their mobile phones. In fact, “almost 43% of Black Friday sales happened through mobile phones” in 2021. That’s an incredible number!
This is where it becomes really important to make sure your shop, product, and landing pages are all well-designed for mobile navigation.
Extending your mobile experience to include the user journey from Instagram to your website should be your next focus. Many millennials and Gen Zers do a lot of shopping and bookings through Instagram. Now more than ever, your link-in-bio becomes an extremely powerful tool.
If you haven’t heard of it before, I’ll introduce you to Spotlight’s link-in-bio feature. You can now create a page that links your Instagram posts to your blog posts, landing pages, and, yes, you guessed it, products!
This allows you to create a shoppable feed that takes a customer from your feed, directly to your products where they can make a purchase.
3. Try out flash sales
Rather than providing the same coupon code throughout the holiday or Black Friday period, you might want to change things up by introducing flash sales.
These types of sales will create a sense of urgency and might bag you a few more sales than the regular fixed discount would.
Social media platforms are the best for fast-moving sales such as these. Use your Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook accounts to push content every hour. Then, display your deals on your website by displaying your Instagram feed on your Black Friday landing page.
Every time you publish a new post, your page will automatically update with new information.
4. Focus on user-generated content (UGC)
We’ve written a lot about user-generated content and for good reason. UGC is one of the best ways to get new customers to invest in your business. Let’s look at why.
UGC is content created by your existing customers. It can take many forms, including video testimonials, written reviews in captions, posting photos of your products in use, and much more. The great thing is that you can use this content on your website to convince potential customers.
You can do so by creating hashtag or tagged feeds and adding them to your product pages throughout the holiday period and beyond. These types of feeds will help you persuade visitors to buy without being pushy.
5. Focus on stories and reels
Video content is becoming increasingly popular. With stories now an integral part of Instagram, it’s the fastest way to get your customers’ attention in quick and memorable ways.
There are many ideas you can try out including reposting UGC mentioned above, creating countdown timers to sales, as well as adding links to your key pages.
Reels, on the other hand, allow you to create longer and more in-depth videos that live on your feed. They are perfect for testimonials and well-crafted behind-the-scenes videos to get your customers excited about the Black Friday sale!
Whatever your use case, Spotlight allows you to show both stories and reels on your website, ensuring that your content is being opened up to followers and non-Instagram users alike.
Our top 5 Black Friday eCommerce ideas
Start planning early this Black Friday to get ahead of the game and get those sales skyrocketing.
Let’s recap our top 5 ways to boost your eCommerce sales this holiday season:
- Display your Instagram posts throughout your website.
- Design a seamless mobile experience.
- Try out flash sales.
- Focus on user-generated content (UGC).
- Focus on stories and reels.
