LoftTalk Episode 1: Is Black Friday Really Worth It?

I won’t keep you waiting, Black Friday is worth it. 

Whether you’re a small brand or a well-known, bigger one, there is a lot of opportunity out there, but you just need to know how to approach Black Friday heading into 2023.

Preparation is key.

Create a specialised Black Friday team who can make relationships with journalists ahead of the big day and who will be able to solely focus on Black Friday in the run-up to the day.

Of course, you will have other clients to service who are not getting involved in Black Friday this year, so having a dedicated team means all your clients will still be serviced. 

This is, of course, dependent on the client, but the earlier you have the deals for 2023 confirmed, the better.

The latest you should have the deals ready to go should be the first week of November, as this gives you 3 weeks to focus solely on outreach. 

Create a master media list.

If you have done Black Friday before then make sure this includes all of the people who covered your brand’s Black Friday deals last year and check that they are working on Black Friday again this year.

Also, add anyone who covers products throughout the year and manual searches of who covered your deals last year.

If your client is doing Black Friday for the first time, create a master media list looking at contacts who have covered similar brands and make your introductions early. 

Make sure to update your media list throughout your Black Friday outreach, for example, make sure to search for similar product roundups that your client is not included in yet and if a journalist is out of office or their email doesn’t send, delete them from the list and replace them immediately. 

Once you have your master media list finalised, get in touch with all of your contacts ahead of Black Friday. 

We know from looking back at 2022 that journalists were doing a lot of pre-Black Friday round-ups of last year’s deals to give consumers an idea of what deals those brands would have on this year, so if that is going to be the same this year, we want to capitalise on it and maybe earn a few links before the big day.

Getting in touch early ensures we can check that they are still covering Black Friday this year and that you’re putting your brand at the forefront of their mind.

You should know your client’s products they will be pushing on Black Friday, so get the hi-res images downloaded and uploaded into a Dropbox folder ready to go. 

Create separate folders for different journalists, i.e. Lifestyle, Fashion etc and name your images clearly to make a journalist’s job easier.

Always include the % off and the monetary value for each product in your pitches as this makes it easy for a journalist to understand.

As well, include product descriptions where possible, especially if you’re pitching to get included in a round-up. 

When putting your pitches together, make sure you don’t put all your deals into one pitch or one email, instead show that you know the types of deals that journalist covers and only share appropriate deals with them.

As well as a master media list, make sure you also have a master document of all your pitches and leave comments when outreached and to which contacts, this makes it easy for everyone in your Black Friday team to know what has and hasn’t been done yet.

It’s important to not totally discount brand mentions or affiliate links.

As we know, from a brand perspective, brand mentions, still carry weight and hold further benefits to you as a brand, such as referral traffic, visitor engagement and building brand awareness. 

An affiliate link is essentially a tag that allows a publication to earn commission from any sales made through that link.

Although they do not directly impact rankings, you can rely on them as additional help for generating traffic and revenue for your website. 

The key to Black Friday is remembering it is no longer a one-day event, instead, it extends over 4 days, Friday of course, the weekend and Cyber Monday.

To maximise this, speak to your clients about extending their deals to ensure they do not simply just end on Friday at midnight.

But it doesn’t stop here.

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday come to a close, so too do a lot of brands’ deals. However, this is the prime Christmas shopping season, and you’ll be surprised at the number of journalists still covering deals in the run-up to Christmas – headlines such as, “The Black Friday Deals That Are Still Live”, are notorious during this time and again, making sure we’re having these conversations with clients are key to ensure they know these opportunities are out there.

Of course, clients don’t need to keep every single Black Friday deal live on site, however, if there are some key product focuses for your client, then it might be worth keeping it on and outreaching to press.

As we get into the thick of Black Friday, it is important to have regular updates and be in continuous communication with your clients.

This is especially true if you have a client who has not done Black Friday before, as they’ll want to know how it is going, so keep them in the loop where possible.

Even if you have a big brand on board who’ve done Black Friday every year, we know each event can be different, so while we can prep as much as we like and make predictions, we will only know how this one is going when we’re in the thick of it, so report back.

After your client’s deals have ended, it is important to report back on your findings.

In these reports, make sure to include coverage, links, traffic, Avg DR, affiliate links and learnings.

Reporting should be an honest look at how the deals performed over the Black Friday weekend and beyond, including what we observed happening in the wider news cycle, what we learnt from this and how we’ll take these learnings with us into next year.