Hope you’re having a great week.
This year feels a little weird. It’s my first year not deep in Black Friday, and it’s bittersweet. I’ll definitely miss a lot of it, but it’s also nice not to have the pressure.
Today I am going to be giving some tips for right before and during BFCM. But if you need some last-minute ad creative before BFCM, I highly recommend Insense. They're a trusted partner for high-quality creator content. In one place you can streamline the sourcing, briefing, sending, revisions, uploading, etc. Important for any time of the year, but especially prescient since it's almost go time. Insense is trusted by thousands of DTC brands that you know and love. The team hooked it up with $200 off your campaign when you book a call here. Ad.
If you’re getting ready, best of luck to you. Here are some random tips, in no particular order, to help you get prepared.
1. Prep the ad account strategy
I’m a big fan of running some offers in the lead-up so you can test scaling strategies, especially, if you’re using manual bids. This helps you go into the big days with your strategy already calibrated. Hopefully you had some moments in October and early November to do so. If not, plan it for next year. You should know whether you’ll launch new campaigns or scale existing campaigns and ad sets more. Take note of how the ad account reacts; does your account successfully take to large new budget increases or does it take a while? If the latter, you'll want to find ways to accelerate the spend. If you're running any manual bids, this can help you set your targets and know how aggressive you need to be. Go into the big moment with a plan based on past recent experiences, but also look at last year's performance and data.
2. Align on targets and how aggressive to be
You should have daily forecasts for spend and all your key metrics throughout the year. Your team also needs to agree on which way you’re willing to push. Is the goal to maximize volume and revenue, even if that means accepting a lower MER? Or is the goal to maximize contribution margin?
I think of setting budgets like betting. You’ll never be exactly right, so you’ll either overspend or underspend. It’s really important to know in advance which way you’re willing to miss. This should be based on your goals for this particular period, how you're pacing on your annual budget coming into it, inventory, and risk tolerance. But it's extremely important to be aligned here. For example, lets say you're beating on both efficiency and revenue. You can pocket the extra margin, but what if you have a bunch of inventory to ove through and you're also down for the year? I'd want to be more aggressive and push spend. I can't tell you what you should bias for, but it's important your team knows. Align ahead of time and have frequent conversations to confirm the goal is still the same throughout.
3. Lock in, but be ready to adjust
The big things should be locked: your offer, your overall forecast and your inventory. Everything else should stay flexible. That gets harder at bigger companies, but do everything you can to keep it that way.
You can still tweak your site experience. You might have some Intelligems tests running, but also keep an eye on heatmaps and your other data. I think it’s totally reasonable to change things on the fly, especially with Claude. It’s really easy to go in, find something that might be hurting you, and ship a quick fix.
You can also keep iterating on ads. If you have a creator army through Tribe or TikTok Shop, those people already know the brand, already have the product and are motivated to make great content. Give them a few insights so they can make some bangers and capture some of that spend.
4. Check your limits, cards and pixel
Check and raise your ad account limits. If you still pay with credit cards, make sure they’re working and call the card companies to warn them about a high volume of transactions ahead of time. Also check with your rep and make sure your ad account spend limit is sufficient.
It's also worth doing some final QA on your pixel, website functionality, and page speed.
I've seen brands save hundreds of thousands of dollars by catching silly things like buttons not working of pixels that somehow stopped tracking perfectly.
5. Know How You're Going To Make Spend Decisions In Real Time
You also need to know how you're going to make spend decisions in real time. Which attribution source are you using? Meta in-platform will likely look rough. Plus, do you want your spend paced evenly or do you want to frontweight it? I'm a bit fan of frontweighting it because you will get a delayed effect on the final days of the sale. I think you can usually best optimize by being more aggressive leading up to it and earlier in the promo, and then getting a big catapult of efficiency as it ends. We talked about specifics of it here and how to analyze your data. Good watching for a final tune up.
Good luck out there. Hope you are rewarded for all of your team's hard work throughout the year and enjoy any milestones.
- Cody
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