How to Prepare Your Digital Marketing Strategy for Black Friday
Black Friday used to be just a single day in the calendar, following the US’s Thanksgiving holiday. Then, in the early 2000s, we saw the introduction of Cyber Monday which made it a weekend-long affair.
Now, Black Friday is more like a season than a date. The sales and promotions typically stretch across an entire month now, if not longer, and more and more brands try to get in on the action with a bigger pie than ever to grab a slice of (UK shoppers were estimated to spend almost £6.5bn around Black Friday last year).
Black Friday might be in need of a rebrand, but whether it’s a day, weekend or a month, it’s no secret just how important this period is to brands of all shapes and sizes today. If you’re hoping to leverage this lucrative period and take advantage of some of the highest consumer intent you’ll see all year, we’ve put together some Black Friday digital marketing tips to help you do just that.
Set your Black Friday marketing strategy and goals
Before you get to work building your Black Friday campaigns, it’s a good idea to start at the end and work backwards.
What do you want to achieve with your Black Friday marketing this time around? Is it X amount of sales? Y pounds of revenue? Z number of new customers? Whatever the answer, that will help you shape your strategy to suit.
Defining your objectives, setting measurable KPIs in line with your margins and priority products, and reviewing last year’s performance should all be key parts of your Black Friday digital marketing strategy.
Another important thing to consider is your audience themselves. Whilst Black Friday is a huge opportunity for many brands, it isn’t always as appropriate for some brands as it is for others. Think about your target audience, are they the typical Black Friday buyers? What about your product?
In 2025, Gen Z (80%) and Millennials (81%) were the most active Black Friday spenders, with men spending around £45 more per person than women. On the other side of the coin, those aged 61-79 were much less inclined to spend (31%), as well as for those 80+ (22%).
Smaller ticket items have also seen a rise in Black Friday purchases in recent years, with technology and consumer electronics seeing some small dips. Clothing and apparel, health and beauty, and other sectors like home appliances, jewellery and toys grab a strong share of the market, too.
In short, are your products sought-after during the Black Friday period, and are your audience likely to be shopping at that time? If the answers to these questions are yes, then take the time to map out a carefully formulated strategy for success or call in some extra help if you’re not sure where to start.
Start early with pre-Black Friday campaigns
In the past, setting up your Black Friday campaigns during November might’ve been an effective strategy with most of the activity and spending happening at the end of the month, however this is far from true today.
Head anywhere online and you’ll see Black Friday ads or teasers as early as October, and it gets earlier every year. In order to make an impact when the buying season really opens up, you need to be sowing your seeds well in advance.
Depending on the size of the promotions you’re planning to offer, consider running teaser ads or early access programmes weeks in advance to whet the appetite and capture your audience’s attention before every other brand is trying to do just that.
As the summer season starts to wind down, we’d recommend getting to work on your Black Friday creative assets, landing pages, email sequences and campaign ideas as soon as possible. Building a promotional calendar is a great way to stay on track with this, ensuring that everything is lined up and ready to go.
No-one wants to be the last one to arrive at the party!
Make the most of every channel
The best Black Friday strategy is a consistent one. That goes for scheduling and campaign rotation but also for the channels you use.
PPC for Black Friday
Paid advertising (like PPC or Paid Social) is often one of the first ports of call for many brands around Black Friday, and for good reason as it is one of the most direct and effective ways to get eyes on your brand and its promotions. However, as it is so effective, plenty of other brands will have just the same ideas as you.
Every year, we see significant increases in CPCs around Black Friday, which is a surefire indicator that the marketplace just got more competitive. More competition means higher costs associated with paid advertising, and bigger budgets needed in order to maintain a similar level of exposure vs the competition.
If you’re a brand working with a tight budget for Black Friday, putting all your eggs in the PPC basket can be a tricky one to contend with, so make sure to consider the organic side of the coin, too.
SEO for Black Friday
As you would expect, search volumes for Black Friday-related keywords and phrases explode throughout October and November, and strong SEO positioning doesn’t happen overnight. You won’t be visible via PPC ads in every single search, and when CPCs start to rise amidst the increased competition, cementing your spot in the organic search rankings is a crucial part of the Black Friday equation.
Drip-feeding blog content related to Black Friday throughout the year is a great way to get and maintain your foothold in the SERP, before every other brand starts pumping out content in the weeks before the event. You can also consider building out a Black Friday-specific landing page for some of your top products, as a simple ‘running shoes’ search becomes ‘running shoes black Friday deals’ and organic rankings start to look a little different contextually. This comes with the added benefit of being a very functional piece to use for your paid advertising, meaning you can swap out your usual landing pages for Black Friday-specific ones and providing a more seamless experience for users clicking your ads.
Something which is also becoming more and more influential with each passing year is AI-assisted search. Traffic to retail sites from AI/LLM sources grew a massive 329% year-on-year during last year’s festive period, and this change in consumer behaviour isn’t likely to go anywhere anytime soon. With that in mind, strengthening your AI visibility is going to be a huge driver of Black Friday success.
Mobile vs desktop strategy for Black Friday
Another golden nugget of information to be aware of when devising your strategy is just how important it is to be mobile-first with your website, ads and any other campaigns you might be running. Mobile devices accounted for ~62% of spending during the 2025 holiday season, and whether it’s Christmas or Black Friday, catering to the masses on mobile is crucial.
Remarketing vs prospecting for Black Friday campaigns
There’s always more than one way to cook an egg, and the same can be said for your targeting methods around Black Friday. You might be looking at Black Friday solely as an opportunity to reach a new customer pool and extend your brand reach by hooking ‘cold’ prospects with an enticing offer, but don’t forget those users don’t disappear once Cyber Monday has passed.
Upping your marketing activity and going hard on new customer acquisition is always going to lead to hundreds, if not thousands, of users visiting your site without making a purchase. This doesn’t mean they’re lost. In fact, the Black Friday fallout the perfect time to increase your remarketing activity to help nurture these users through the funnel and keep them in contact with your brand. They might not buy today, but they might tomorrow!
Also, don’t forget your day ones. If you’re running a very strong offer or sale during Black Friday, why not give your existing audience a chance to get ahead of the game, particularly if you’re likely to sell out pretty quickly when the sale launches. ‘Soft launching’ the offer to your existing email database a few days in advance is a great way to build some early interest and say thanks to your current user base.
Create Black Friday campaigns that stand out
There were more than 50,000 individual Black Friday ads running on Meta every week throughout November 2025 – in the UK alone! Just running a Black Friday campaign isn’t going to cut the mustard anymore, your brand needs to stand out and be noticed if you want to drive success.
There are a host of ways to ‘stand out’, whether it’s a unique tone of voice, eye-catching branding or extremely enticing promotions, but one of the most objective ways in today’s digital marketing landscape is creative diversity. Meta’s newly updated algorithm, Andromeda, calls for more creative variety than ever and even targets users based on the data it gathers from the creatives themselves, rather than just from the signals you input. Whilst this is a Meta-specific concern, the creatives you produce can also be repurposed for other channels such as PPC, Programmatic or even across your website itself.
In short, if you’re looking to make an impact with your marketing this Black Friday, set the wheels in motion early so you have enough time to develop a full suite of creative variations for your ads (we’re talking 10-20 per ad set, if you can).
Ensure your CRM and site are fit for Black Friday
Even with the best PPC ads and organic rankings, your Black Friday hopes and dreams can quickly be dashed by a poorly optimised site or ill-equipped CRM which isn’t set up to handle a dramatic increase in traffic and demand.
If your site struggles with a spike in users, you’re going to suffer from slower load times, processing issues or crashes, all of which are sure fire ways to turn off a potential customer. Even worse than this is a CRM failure. There’s a myriad of issues related to this, but one prime example of a struggling CRM is customers being charged without the order ever injecting into your CRM, meaning lost orders and broken consumer trust. That’s without mentioning things like out of stock products being listed as available or missing confirmation emails, both of which will often see your customer service channels flooded with complaints, queries and concerns.
One of our clients generated almost half (41%) of their total annual revenue and 28% of all their web traffic in November and December alone last year. For many businesses, the value of the Black Friday through to Christmas period can’t be overstated, and ensuring your site is audited, optimised and maintained regularly is one of the best things you can do to make sure you’re ready when the seasonal masses come knocking.
Measure performance and take the learnings
Whatever the outcome by the time Cyber Monday passes and attention turns to the festive period, it’s important to measure your results and evaluate performance comprehensively.
Detailed reporting and data analysis after the fact can be infinitely useful for your in-house teams or agency partners, and not to mention your stakeholders. You’ll be extremely grateful you took the time to build reports and assess the wins and losses of the season by the time next Black Friday rolls around – and it won’t be long before it does.
Even if you feel like the last Black Friday was an abject failure for your brand, there is always much to be learned from the data if you dig deep enough (or know the people who can).
Prepare Early, Keep Eyes On, and Measure Effectively
An effective Black Friday marketing period starts well before November rolls around and ends well after Cyber Monday. Take the time to set the planning wheels in motion as far in advance as your team can handle, craft a well-designed and clearly outlined strategy for everyone involved to follow, and ensure you evaluate and analyse everything you’ve learned from the period.
If you’re struggling to make Black Friday work for your brand or you just need the additional resource of an experienced, cross-discipline digital marketing team, get in touch with us today.
If you’re already investing in digital marketing, whether it be paid advertising or organic search, and would like a second opinion on how your accounts stack up against the competition, you can also book a free digital audit with our team.
