Build out your Facebook Funnel for BFCM
In this episode, you'll learn a three stage strategy to set your Facebook ads funnel up for success before and during Black Friday.
Facebook Ads are more expensive than ever, and Black Friday is going to bring the muppets out of the woodwork which will drive costs up even more.
You'll the hear answers to:
Kurt Elster: Hello and welcome back to the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster recording from beautiful Skokie, Illinois, high atop Westfield Old Orchard Mall. And today, we are discussing Facebook ads. We've discussed it many times, but not just Facebook ads; prepping for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays. Because as you know, in 2019, Facebook ads have become more expensive than ever. Which means, when you run your Facebook ads for Black Friday, they're going to be more expensive than ever, because everybody is coming out of the woodwork. The Muppets are coming out, everyone's running Facebook ads. It's going to drive costs up. But we've got this very narrow window to capture this highLy engaged, highly qualified traffic. So it's worthwhile spending the time and effort to get our ads dialed in right. So to help us talk through that is one of the most adept, successful Facebook marketers I know: Kurt Bullock, who is the Founder of eCommerce marketing agency, the ProduceDept, and our strategic marketing partner for many years. If you've worked with us, you know Kurt Bullock, as well.
Kurt Elster: So, Mr. Bullock, give me the 10-second elevator pitch. Why should I listen to you on this topic?
Kurt Bullock: All right so I think that there's a lot of stress associated with this time of year, so I have attempted to break this down into three simple stages. We'll talk about the creative, the audiences, and how to set up the campaigns. But essentially, you captured it in your intro; we're going to try and make the most of this narrow gap of time, where purchase intent is at an all-time high, so that we can get the most revenue or volume out of this week and the weeks leading up to the holidays.
Kurt Elster: All right so what's the big difference, here? Why can't I just ... If I've got a successful Facebook funnel running now, that has worked through the previous months in a year, why can't I just do nothing and leave it alone?
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. Good question. So for one thing, the cost of traffic is going up. And so it makes sense to switch things up. A lot of times, if you're running your campaigns and you've got a funnel going, you've probably developed some pretty narrow habits. There's probably certain audiences that you go to all the time. Maybe a certain ad type that you're using all the time. And as things get more expensive in this ramp-up to Black Friday, we want to diversify all of this so that we can tap into new audiences that we haven't reached; maybe it's less expensive, and give ourselves more options.
Kurt Bullock: If you go with what you've already been running, there's a good chance that it could stop working well during this time period, and so you want to have lots of options built into your plan.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And certainly, I think that, for me, anyway, that was a softball throwaway question. Because I'm like, "Well, duh. Of course you're going to have a different strategy during this very strange microcosm of consumer behavior," and what you're normally doing isn't necessarily going to work.
Kurt Elster: I want to start with the five-minute executive summary version. If you've only got five minutes to tell me, "All right, here's just the one thing; just do this, and you'll improve." Somebody, they're getting out of their car, they're in their driveway already; what's the one thing they can't miss out on doing?
Kurt Bullock: I think keeping things simPle, which is not a super sexy answer at all, but I think that simplifying ... It gets super easy to get stressed out and to spread yourself super thin. So if you're just trying to make this work well, I would focus on planning ahead for your offer, making it simple for people to take advantage of, in terms of maybe using a site-wide discount so that it's really easy to take advantage of the offer. And then during the week of Black Friday, you're going to focus on these audiences. So you want to warm up audiences now. People on Black Friday, very rarely are purchasing from brands they've never heard of before. Right? If you're being exposed to a brand for the first time ever on Black Friday, you're much less likely to purchase, than if you've been seeing them around in the weeks leading up to Black Friday, they've been showing you their products, you're getting to know them. Then, you maybe are adding this brand to your holiday shopping list. And when you see an awesome deal pop up on Black Friday, you're much more likely to take advantage of it.
Kurt Bullock: So we need to warm them up in the weeks, there. And then during Black Friday, you're going to focus on these warmer audiences, in a nutshell. So you're going to focus primarily on retargeting and slash your prospecting audiences way down, or turn them off completely.
Kurt Elster: Okay so during Black Friday, during the holidays, the chances of me acquiring a new customer, like a cold customer, are slim to none.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: And that's also where I'm going to blow a ton of my budget. So the quick and dirty version of this is, for Black Friday; Thanksgiving through that weekend, turn off those top of funnel ads, move all the budget into your retargeting ads, and you'll be in a better position than you were.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Okay. So let's ... Does that cover most of the lay of the land?
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. I would say that that sets the stage for us to go into some of the details of the plan.
Kurt Elster: Let's move into the high-level overview of the strategy. You've broken this down into three stages. Let's hear the 10,000-foot view.
Kurt Bullock: So the first stage in all of this is now up until the week of Thanksgiving. And this is the time for you to be building those audiences, getting people to ... exposing them to your products and really building up retargeting audiences, is one of your primary objectives, here. So that's stage one.
Kurt Bullock: Then, once we get to the week of Black Friday, you may want to turn off your campaigns or your retargeting for a few days before this, to kind of give your audiences a break. And then so stage two, this is the big game. This is when you're going to launch all of your promotions. You want to have different offers, potentially, for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Those would be the two offers I would focus on.
Kurt Bullock: And then stage three is that time period right after Giving Tuesday. So that's going to be Wednesday the 4th up until the last day to ship before the holidays. And so you're going to want to change your messaging and your audiences slightly between those three stages. And so that's what we'll talk about.
Kurt Elster: All right so stage one, we want to focus on building that audience and warming them up, since we're not going to be able to acquire new customers during Black Friday. And then we're going to go into our big Black Friday through Giving Tuesday promotion, so we got about half a week in there. And then stage three, we just want to try and get as many repeat purchases and new purchases in December as we can. Right?
Kurt Bullock: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: All right. So let's dive in. Give me the prep work. How do I get ready for this?
Kurt Bullock: So the first thing I would start with is, if you've got a Black Friday under your belt, then look at last year's data. We've learned a lot from our accounts, just doing a review of last year's data. And the things that I'm looking for is just a general impression; what went well and what didn't go so well? And I look at that in terms of the audiences. So which audiences worked well? Which placements worked well? There's going to be different value audiences in all of this. And well talk about that in the details, but as you look through your campaigns, you can think of them in terms of high, mid and low funnel. You're going to be dealing, primarily, with mid and low funnel audiences over the week of Black Friday. So look at those, and the specific audiences that worked well, and which offers you were using. Hopefully you had different versions of creative. So creative is something else that you'll want to consider in your review. And placements. And in most of our accounts, many of our accounts, it looks like we could have pushed thing harder for certain audiences. There were other audiences that we eliminated right out of the gate; they didn't work well, or the ad type didn't work well, or the placement.
Kurt Bullock: So this will give you an idea, going into it, what you should be focused on this year; what were the real hard-hitters from last year, and that can be where you start this year.
Kurt Elster: How do you define what is ... This post-mortem, how do you define what is and isn't successful? Are you looking at just row as?
Kurt Bullock: That's a good question. So that has to do with your goals going into all of this. So it may be max profit, and so that could be ... Row as is one way to look at that, although that won't give you your actual profit, but it'll give you your return on ad spend. Another approach is volume. Some of our clients are going into Black Friday looking at it as a way to acquire as many customers as possible. And so profit may not be the biggest component, there. For most of the stores that we're working with, and probably many of the people listening to this podcast, it's going to be a balance. You want to come out of it making profit, and you want to do that as many times as possible. So it'll be a balance between profit and volume.
Kurt Bullock: So yeah, the first thing I'm looking at is my return on ad spend. I just look down those columns and you'll be able to see things that are standing out. A secondary metric is your cost of acquisition, and so you can compare how much it costs you to get a new purchase across all of your campaigns.
Kurt Elster: So step one is, I want to know what's worked in the past, and what didn't work. So I look at ... Ideally, if I've run a campaign last year, I can look at it. If I didn't, I could look at sales I ran this year and ads I've run this year to determine what does and doesn't resonate with my audience. Then I want to decide on my goal: What am I trying to get out of this, here? Is it profitability? Is it just straight volume? Is it acquiring new customers?
Kurt Elster: And then after that, one of the number one questions I hear, even from experienced marketers is, "Well, hey, how much should we spend? What should our budget be?" So how do you go about that? How do you plan your budget?
Kurt Bullock: So that is a great question. And I think that it comes down to you, your store, or your clients if you're working with clients. So it is individual, but there's a few ways that you can look at it. I would start by looking at last year's data, if you have that, and adjust based on how that worked. So in some of our client's accounts, we looked at it and we said, "We actually underspent by quite a bit." So this year, we're going to focus on spending more, and we're going to increase it by X amount.
Kurt Elster: How do you know you underspent?
Kurt Bullock: So I think that if it worked well and if your frequency stores aren't too high ... So row as is one way. If things are strong and there's lots of margin, you could've probably got more volume out of it if you pushed a little bit harder. And another way is looking at those frequency scores. So if you are seeing low frequency scores, that means that you aren't hitting people over the head with your message over and over again; you could've reached more people. If your frequency scores are really high; three or four times per person for each of these campaigns, then you know that you are reaching the limits of your audience.
Kurt Elster: Okay. So frequency score is the magic number, along with row as, of course. Anything else, there, in planning the budget?
Kurt Bullock: So, yeah. I would look at last year's data. Another way to do it is to take your normal budget and multiply it by some amount. And I think that this applies more to stores that had really consistent spending in the last six months. Because most of your retargeting audiences, it's going to be a six-month lookback window, and then the other audience is going to be your customer and newsletter list, which is as long as you want to go back, because you're uploading those lists.
Kurt Bullock: So in the last six months, if you have really consistent spend, then you may look at it in terms of maybe a multiple of your normal monthly ad spend. So that could be, "Hey, we normally spend $10,000 a month, so let's focus $10,000 on this week so that we can really tap into all those." And some clients are doing maybe two or three times their monthly budget. So that's another way to approach it. As I said, if you've had real consistent spend, that means you're going to have large enough retargeting audiences that you can really go in there and multiply that budget.
Kurt Bullock: The third way that I think of it is if you ... Some stores, they say, "Hey, this is our budget. We've got $20,000 to work with over this time period of November and December." I would look at breaking that budget up across those three stages, and maybe 30% in stage one, 50% in stage two, and 20% in those weeks after Black Friday and Cyber Monday, leading up to Christmas or the holidays.
Kurt Elster: I like that. I like how data-driven all of this is. It's like, "All right, here's the formula. Plug your past success and stats into this to get a guideline for how you should approach this."
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: That certainly makes life easier when you can quantify things like that. And that's what's wonderful about Facebook ads in general, is ... Yeah, it's not without its issues and the dashboards bugging, and everybody tears their hair out with it, but part of the reason you're able to do that is because they have given you so much data to work with; you know exactly what's going on, if only I could make sense of these tea leaves.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Okay so let's say I know how much I want to spend, but what am I spending that on? What kind of offers work? What should I be considering?
Kurt Bullock: So I think that one of the first questions is going to be how much you're discounting during that time period. There are some stores, maybe super-high order value stores, or stores that are really trying to maintain their brand that aren't discounting, but Black Friday is for people to get discounts. So you want to consider a discount. And I would say that you don't want to go less than 20%, as a general rule, because often times you have maybe 10%, 15%, or even 20% discount for new customers when they sign up for your email list. So it needs to stand out from what you're normally doing, and get people excited. So I would say in that range, 20% is a minimum, but I would say 25% to 50% is a good place to go. So that's what I would start with, in terms of discounting.
Kurt Bullock: The next thing to think about is how you're going to make that work. So for instance, coupon codes or no coupon codes. I think that when I'm doing these, I try and go as simple as possible and make it easy. So a coupon code can be kind of a good incentive. People like entering a code in and getting that discount, having it show up in the line. But also, it is one more thing for your customers to do. Site-wide discounts, that's the simplest way to go. Coupon codes can work well if maybe you're going to have it apply to specific collections, or there's other details that need to be sort of administered on the back end. Coupon codes can help you facilitate that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, coupon codes are ... What people don't realize is the coupon code itself is a friction point. It is an extra step in the checkout.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: So some ways to work around that, Shopify offers you discount code links, so you can have a link that automatically applies the discount code at checkout, which is super cool.
Kurt Bullock: Good call.
Kurt Elster: And that's available across all stores. And buried in the support documentation for that, it tells you ... By default, the link they give you goes to the home page with it applied. But buried in the support doc, they tell you how to write a query string so you can change the URL, and you can send that to wherever. That helps quite a bit.
Kurt Elster: If you're on Shopify Plus, you could use Launchpad to automatically schedule discounting the products, or you could use a Shopify Script to do this. But I'll tell you, if you're on Plus, the discount strategy I love the most is tiered discount. Because this drives average order value, and it lets people turn your Black Friday sale into a choose your own adventure. So you do something like, "Hey, spend up to $50; it's 20% off. Spend up to $100; now, it's 25% off. Spend $150," and you go as far as you're comfortable with.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: And then that way, anyone ... You're encouraging people to spend more, you're encouraging the higher average order value; but you're not punishing anyone who doesn't want to spend huge sums with your store. So it kind of rewards everybody, it's totally automatic, it appears in the cart, they see the discount. If you want to get really clever, you add a little bit of liquid code so it says, "Hey, you saved X dollars on your order. Spend just $14 more, and you save 20% on your order." That's a clever way to do it.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But again, that one requires Shopify Plus, and it's a little more complicated. I'd say the safe answer is if you're like, "Listen, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do," just do a site-wide discount. Just one. Whole site is X off, go. That'll certainly make life easier. You don't have to do these very complicated sales if you can get away with it.
Kurt Bullock: Right. And then what have you seen work in terms of ... So let's say you're explaining your offer on your site. I've seen popups where you get to the site and it explains the tiered offer, or headers, or that sort of thing. But how do you typically approach that?
Kurt Elster: I think the universal easy safe answer is send the person to a collection page that has all of the products that are on sale in it, with a themed banner and description and a headline that just spells everything out three different ways for people. And on the home page, you want the announcement bar, you want the hero image to spell it out. And you want to do featured collections or products on the homepage, where you have headlines saying, "This is on sale. This is the discount." And if you want to get fancy, you can include a countdown timer in there, as well; that's like, "Okay, this is how long you have left in this sale," to really drive that urgency home.
Kurt Elster: So I'd say over-communicate the sale. Like, "This is what the discount is, and this is what it applies to," and add some urgency to it like, "Hey, it's limited by inventory," or it's limited by ... It's time-boxed.
Kurt Elster: So on the topic of website preparations, what else? Anything I'm missing there?
Kurt Bullock: I think you covered it, there. I mean, I'm always looking at things on my phone to make sure that it looks nice on the phone. I was just looking at one client's site where there was a popup window coming from the bottom, there was a chat bot. And on the top, there was a window that came down. And then there was a module popup asking for the email address in the middle. You couldn't see anything. So just make sure that you don't have too much going on with all of these different plugins and things that you've got going on, and that it looks good on a mobile phone. Because across my client accounts, I'd say 80% of this traffic that we're driving from Facebook and Instagram is mobile, these days. With some exceptions. But, yeah. Mobile first, for sure.
Kurt Elster: And I think this is one of those times where you probably want to make sure you've got that popup strategy in place to capture emails. Because I bet even if your conversion rate stays the same, traffic spikes. So use this as an opportunity to collect emails and build that list for later in the season, because you're going to run sales. You could run a post-Christmas sale. You could run a New Year's sale. There are opportunities down the road. So even if you're not making a ton of sales, you can at least build that audience during Black Friday.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And I would do ... Oh, shit. I had another point, and I completely forgot what it was, in terms of setting your site up for success. Oh! If you're not using live chat, or you only use it periodically, this might be a good time to do it. Because you've got a very short attention span to capture people and bust any objections. Like, "Hey, this sale's only going for 12 hours." They're not going to wait for your response to an email, so this may be a time to run live chat so if people have questions that are stopping them from purchasing, you can be right there answering them immediately.
Kurt Bullock: That's a great point. And that reminds me of one other sort of related point, and that is on these lines of preparation. For some of our clients last year and our strategy going into this year is to have ... We use ManyChat, but you can do a similar thing on-site, where you're sending traffic to some form of email collection so that you can be on the early notification list: Be the first to be notified of our Black Friday sales, that sort of thing.
Kurt Bullock: It was interesting. So last year, I did that for one of my clients, drove it ... We did Facebook ads with a button that was connected to ManyChat. And it was a dialog, where it essentially gave that pitch; be the first in line. And then we collected their email address, and then the bot responded saying, "Hey, great. You're on the list. And by the way, here's a discount code for right now." We gave them just our normal email discount code of 10%, but we noticed that we were, in addition to collecting email addresses, we were row as positive. It was doing two and a half X row as off of our Facebook ad campaign.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Kurt Bullock: That was pretty cool.
Kurt Elster: That is cool. So that covers all of our preparation. So now we're in the best position to actually set up these campaigns, go into our three stages. What's stage one? Where am I starting with? How am I getting ready?
Kurt Bullock: Right. Okay so stage one, just a reminder, is now until the week of Thanksgiving. So your focus here is to be prospecting heavy. All right? So you're going to focus on prospecting audiences and you're going to use messaging to ... You want to prime them, is the way that I think of it. I'm sort of priming these audiences for Black Friday. So again, Black Friday shouldn't be the first time that your prospects are learning about you. Now's the time when you want to establish yourself in their mind.
Kurt Bullock: And then the second thing that we're thinking about through all this is that we're looking at retargeting audiences. So let's just start with the audiences that we're targeting, here. So I like to try and be varied in my approach. And so to me, that looks like using a combination of small look-a-likes, like 1%, 2% look-a-likes. I'll shoot in the middle here, at maybe 4% or 5% look-a-likes. And then I'll go big, in 10% look-a-likes. So I'm trying to break out of any habits where I might just be targeting the same 2% or 3% look-a-like month after month. This is a time to expand your horizons, bring in lots of fresh people. So look-a-likes, use a wide range.
Kurt Bullock: The next thing that you're going to look at in your audience targeting is interests. Interests have been on and off for me. And right now, they're working well. So I'm running interests in all of my campaigns. And then another one that's been working well is broad targeting. So if your ad accounts have much history, then Facebook is actually able to do a pretty good job of finding people on its own. So broad targeting is where you're essentially just setting anything like demographics; if you're selling specifically to men or to women, indicate that to Facebook. If there's a clear age range, or clear ages that you can exclude, then indicate that to Facebook. But otherwise, we're not putting in an interest or a look-a-like; we're just letting the algorithm go out and find people.
Kurt Elster: And-
Kurt Bullock: So that's called ... Yeah, so that's broad targeting.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And that is not something we'd normally be doing, that's something you're switching to?
Kurt Bullock: So that's something I'm doing right now, but it's something I just wanted to bring up, because people may not be thinking of broad targeting. So right now, all of these things are just taking up a slice of my prospecting pile. I would say that most of my spend is probably on look-a-like audiences right now, and then I've got two minor roles with interests and broad targeting. So that's just varying the audiences that we're reaching.
Kurt Bullock: And then one last way that I'm targeting is using DABA ads. And so DABA stands for Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences. It's basically a dynamic catalog-based ad. So if you have your Facebook catalog set up for dynamic product ads for retargeting, now you can use them top of the funnel, as well. And you can specify look-a-likes, interests, or broad targeting. And Facebook is going to match products with people. And this works because everybody's got the Facebook pixel installed on their websites. And whether you're spending money on Facebook ad traffic or not, Facebook is learning who's coming to your website.
Kurt Bullock: So if they see me going to wallet websites on my own, just looking around and browsing, then Facebook knows that I'm in the market for a wallet, or I'm looking at wallet-based websites, and so that helps Facebook match people using these dynamic ads for broad audiences.
Kurt Bullock: So I'm spending maybe 10% of my prospecting budget on DABA ads, too. And that's working really well. So-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that's really cool.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I've seen that in our retainer clients, those DABA ads. Really are surprisingly performant. They do really well.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, they're pretty resilient. Where I see other things going up and down all the time, a lot of time my DABA ads, even though they're not super high volume, they just kind of chug along and generate results. So it's really great to have those running in your ad account.
Kurt Elster: Cool. Any other stage one prep stuff?
Kurt Bullock: Okay so that is your audiences. Creative ... I think that what you want to think about is giving people that window shopping experience. I think that that works really well. So Instagram Stories is great for that. Facebook recently did some surveying, and it was 60% or 70% of people said that they learned about new products on Instagram Stories, and they purchased after seeing it on Instagram Stories. So that's becoming a great way for people to discover new products and brands.
Kurt Bullock: So really good to use those right now. And then I sort of think about what's the reason to believe, right? Giving people these things that they can latch onto when they think about your brand. So this can be stuff like how you make your products. You can talk about the way that it's environmentally friendly, or the materials that you use, any social good that your business does; causes that you donate to. But this is one you can think about, what makes your business unique, and start spreading that message in this time, so that you're warming up your audiences.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Kurt Bullock: So that's how I typically think about my creative in this phase.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Kurt Bullock: And then just the very last thing on there is just your campaign types. And again, this is the time to be varied. So I'm going for conversion-based campaigns, primarily; but I'm trying to be varied in my approach with different placements, in terms of using single image ads, carousel ads, collection ads, DABA ads, just to make sure that we have lots of different sources. So that is stage one.
Kurt Elster: Does format matter, or should I just try all of them and see which resonates?
Kurt Bullock: Format. So I think that this can be a continuation of what you've been using in your strategy in the previous months. It doesn't need to change too much, there, other than ... again, Instagram Story ads are ... I think that they're still less expensive than traffic overall. And people are using them to shop more and more, and for product discovery. So I think that I'm definitely using a lot more Instagram Story ads this time around.
Kurt Elster: Hmm, okay.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And does that wrap up stage one, in which we're trying to build our audiences and warming them up pre-Black Friday?
Kurt Bullock: Yes. So just think top-heavy. Prospecting heavy is stage one.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Now run me up to stage two.
Kurt Bullock: All right, stage two. So this is the big game, the Super Bowl. Right? So this is going to be the week of Thanksgiving, and then goes through Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday. So this is when you are focusing on conversions. You're talking to people that already know who you are. So let's step into our audiences that we're targeting. So during this week, I'm going to turn off my top of funnel ads, probably completely, for most of my brands. And I'm going to focus on middle and bottom of funnel audiences. So that's going to be my email lists, my customer lists, people who have viewed videos; so my video views audiences. My engagement audiences. All your website custom audiences, so all the people that have visited your site, added something to cart, initiated checkout. All of these retargeting audiences, and also deep in your dynamic product ad audiences, which are sort of their own unique subset of all these audiences.
Kurt Bullock: So that is who we're targeting. We're targeting people that know about us, they've been to the site, or they've engaged with us in some way with social media or email.
Kurt Bullock: So creative I think is the next thing to talk about. And again, this is the time to showcase your best offer. Your best products, best promotions. You want to keep it really simple. So the main is to communicate that there is a sale happening right now and these are the details; this is how much you can save. I usually keep these really simple. You know, "Black Friday sale. 25% off, site-wide," and then rely on the image to catch their eye.
Kurt Bullock: So in terms of-
Kurt Elster: And this is where-
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Clarity trumps creativity.
Kurt Bullock: Definitely. I think you want to keep it as clear as possible, and if you're doing a tiered discount, make that really simple. Have one tier per line, and maybe a little emoji to kind of break up the text for tier one, tier two, tier three. But yes, clarity is what you're going for, and simplicity.
Kurt Bullock: As far as the formats, again, I like to have lots of options going into Black Friday. So I usually will build out ads as my single image ads, square image ads are doing well, they work well across Facebook and Instagram. So if you're looking for the most bang for your buck, I would do square, or you can also do tall, which is instead of one to one, it's four to five ratio. But just choose one of those, and you can run it across Facebook and Instagram. I'm also building out Instagram Story ads, as I mentioned. I would definitely use those this year. And then video. So for a lot of our ad accounts, our video could just be a still image with some sort of motion in it. Right? So maybe a piece of it is animated, or the letters are moving around, and or there's something that catches your eye, though. So that has worked well. I mean, I had one client that sells prints, and it was him on the screen and it was 50% off deal, and so he ripped one of the prints in half, and said, "Half off all prints," and then at the bottom we said, "Don't worry, we won't rip yours." And that one worked really well. So just something that catches your eye and stops people as they're scrolling through the feed.
Kurt Elster: A thumb stopper, as they say.
Kurt Bullock: Exactly, yep. Yes. And so that is, I would say, your strategy for creative. And then as far as bidding, the simple way to go into it is just to use auto bidding. If you're not going to be getting super in the weeds with all of this, I use auto bidding in all of my client ad accounts, and that works great. If we're going to be pushing really hard, then we'll get a little bit deeper into the bidding strategy, where we'll do manual bids, where we're bidding three to maybe five times the average order value, and sort of doing things to indicate to the Facebook auction that, "Hey, we want to win this bid. We're willing to pay for it." And because conversion rates are so high and purchase intent is so high during this time period, it makes up for it. You just know, "If I can win these auctions, it's going to convert well." So that's a strategy that you could go through, is just doing these manual bids.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Kurt Bullock: The easy way is to go auto bids, and start with that.
Kurt Elster: Keep it simple. Just do the auto bids. Why make your life hard?
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, exactly.
Kurt Elster: Especially for an ad that's not going to ... It's running for a few days, not even a week.
Kurt Bullock: Yep.
Kurt Elster: All right, what else?
Kurt Bullock: So, I mean, I would say that's stage two. And then just plan out ... You know, I like to have a little timeline. So if there's going to be a teaser campaign running on the days leading up to Black Friday, I'd put that on my calender; make sure that I've got my images prepared for that. I would say, at a minimum, the two things you want to focus on is just your Black Friday, and it's good to have another deal on Cyber Monday, if possible. But I have also run, essentially, the same deal and just changed the wording across both of those. I think that it's more engaging if you do switch it up, though, during those two days. But if you're going for simplicity, pick a deal and run with it through that weekend.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Kurt Bullock: Yes. So that is stage two.
Kurt Elster: So that wraps up ... That runs us from what day to what day?
Kurt Bullock: So that's going to take you from, depending on when you start, I say it's the week of Thanksgiving, but it really starts on Thanksgiving Day. A lot of times, people are launching their things in the evening, now, on Thanksgiving. That's the 28th this year, I believe. And then that's going to take you through Black Friday, which is the 29th; and up until Cyber Monday, the 2nd. And then on Giving Tuesday, you may choose to run your Cyber Monday deal through there, or have a different deal. So it's going to take you right up to Giving Tuesday, and then that's where I start to switch into sort of my stage three, which is that time from Cyber Monday all the way up until the last day to ship.
Kurt Elster: And one of the things that you pointed out that you've noticed with Facebook ads, is it's taking longer and longer for them to approve your ads. So when should I be submitting these and scheduling them to stay safe and not have them ... If I wait until the day of, is it possible that my ads don't run?
Kurt Bullock: Huge possibility. That happened to us last year for a few ad accounts, where people made changes at the last minute. We submitted those changes, and then Facebook didn't approve them until it was too late. So you definitely want to avoid that problem. My goal is to get things in a week early. Just get them scheduled, then you can get it off your plate. So if you can get it in there and then Facebook, give them that week to get it approved and make sure there's no hiccups. That's what I would aim for, if you want to really keep all your bases covered.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, good point.
Kurt Elster: And then that brings us up to stage three, where post-Black Friday, there is still plenty ... We still got a couple weeks to make our sales. What are we doing there?
Kurt Bullock: So exactly. This is going to be the people that are still just doing holiday shopping. I focus on ... I keep it holiday-themed. In terms of the audiences that we're targeting, it's going to be similar. I'll focus primarily on those warmer audiences, but I will usually throw my top of funnel back in there. Maybe I've got 30% top of funnel, and 70% lower funnel, in terms of breaking up my spend. So I'm reintroducing my top of funnel in stage three. It's holiday-themed, typically. Focused on messaging around gift giving and showing giftability of your products, because that's-
Kurt Elster: Hmm. I like that idea.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: How do you communicate that?
Kurt Bullock: So, I mean, for some of them, we would write it clearly in the ad copy and say like, "For the art lover that's hard to shop for," or something like that. You know, "Here's your gift." So you can make it really clear in the copy that way. Also, you can use sort of gift themes in your images. So you can show an open box and then your product next to it. Right? So it looks like a box has been unwrapped, and then your product is there. So just kind of that message of, "Hey, this is your gift idea."
Kurt Elster: I think the easiest thing to do is, the chances are you have a Christmas tree in your house. If you don't, you know someone who does. Or, you could even go to literally any retail establishment, take a photo of your product in front of a Christmas tree and some gifts.
Kurt Bullock: Right.
Kurt Elster: Duh, that's it. You have now communicated and sold the idea in a single image. Oh, you want to get fancy with it? Take your phone, set it to video, set it on something that'll let you slide it across, so think a roller skate, a Hot Wheels car, I don't care, and roll it past. You now have an effective, 10-second slider video of your product in front of a Christmas tree communicating that idea.
Kurt Bullock: There you go, exactly. Ties your product into ... This is your holiday idea. So I love that idea. And it would catch your eye, too, if you have some motion in there, sliding it across the screen.
Kurt Bullock: So one other thing to consider there is, I like to promote the urgency around the last day to order products to have it shipped in time for the holidays. So that's something that I'll usually use in that last week leading up to ... Last year, I think it was the 20th. It may be the 21st this year, but it depends on who you're shipping with. But it's that weekend. So that's a good time to use a little bit of urgency. And also, if it's really coming down to the line, there, then I'll also throw in gift cards and use that as part of my messaging and show the gift card.
Kurt Elster: Oh, that's smart.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I like that idea.
Kurt Bullock: Yes, giving people some options that are down to the last minute.
Kurt Elster: Okay, anything else? Am I missing anything?
Kurt Bullock: No. That is it. I mean, the goal here, again, is conversions. You're not really trying to reach new audiences as much as you are in stage one. So focus on conversions of primarily your middle and bottom of funnel audiences.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Give me the five-minute recap for stage one, two, three. Run me through it again.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah. So stage one, this is where you're going to focus on getting new audiences into your funnel and warming them up; priming them with product ideas and who you are. That's what you're wanting to communicate in stage one. And it's to cold audiences, primarily.
Kurt Bullock: Stage two, you're going to slash the cold audiences, because now they've been warmed up. Now you can re-target them, because they have engaged with your ad, they've opted-in for your email, or they've visited your website. And so you can target those people now during that week of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. It's all about simplicity. It is all about conversions. So you're just trying to communicate, "Hey, this is the sale. These are the details of the sale." And I would say that you want to give yourself options. For me, this is a stressful time of year. There's so much going on. So I like to go in there and have a few different images that I can use and maybe a few different formats, carousel and single image. Right? So that when you get there and you start running them, you're going to see that some things are outperforming others, and you can push those harder. You have a couple options that have already been approved by Facebook. You're not trying to submit things last minute because your offer isn't working well. So be prepared and give yourself options. That'll lower your stress levels during that week.
Kurt Bullock: And then stage three, this is going to be just those final weeks leading up to the holidays. So focus on urgency, the last day to ship, and giftability of these products. And again, you might want to throw in some gift card ideas for those last minute shoppers.
Kurt Elster: Cool. Yeah, I like that gift card idea. That's kind of a no-brainer, just offer it at the last minute, see if it sticks. What are some general tips, here? Some of the theme I'm hearing is, "Don't panic. Hey, you only have to make this as complicated as you want." You can keep this super simple, as long as you're doing something to actively manage it. You don't have to do the full crazy bit. You can simplify it down to, "Hey, we've got a site-wide sale, and this is when it's happening," and we've reallocated our budget in our Facebook ads. That's the minimum viable version of this, if you're feeling stressed out about it.
Kurt Elster: And then the super advanced marketer version would be like, "We're doing different ad formats, we're trying out DABA," which I love. It works well for a lot of our clients.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah, exactly. Just make it easier on yourself. Make sure you kind of have that minimum viable offer and campaign structure built out, and then you can start getting a little bit more complicated, if you want. Getting more complicated could be things like doing product-specific retargeting. So you know that people have visited product A, build a retargeting audience for product A. Sometimes I'll do that for my top-selling products. So if you've looked at it within the last year, now I'm going to come by and show you a great offer for that. So that's the more advanced version. Simple version is just target all of your site visitors. Target all of your engagement audiences. Target all of your email and newsletter lists.
Kurt Bullock: But yes, try to get stuff done now so that you're not feeling the stress over this week, because there's a lot going on. And also, keep a focus on simplicity on your website. Make sure that everything is super clear, the details of the sale, and I would say eliminate those coupon codes in many instances. So don't stress. It's going to be okay.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Yeah, you ... The fact that you're worried about it at all says, "Hey, you're probably better prepared than 80% of merchants." Right? Just be thinking about it, get it done early. If it feels like homework, then treat it like homework. Don't procrastinate, don't sit on it. Just decide the level of commitment you're going to do.
Kurt Elster: And often times, just going, "All right, I'm just going to do that minimum viable version of this," that's enough to get you unstuck and get you started, and then start working. That's one of those productivity hacks that even I do with myself. I'll go ... I never want to work out in the morning, and so I go, "Oh, all right. I'm just going to do five pushups." Well, okay, by the time I start that, "Ah, that got me unstuck of going," and then I do the whole bit.
Kurt Bullock: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You could do that same mental hack with just about everything. You, to make this easier, because obviously listening to this and taking notes is a big pain. We've started doing transcripts of these episodes that appear if you go on the site, unofficialshopifypodcast.com. It's got the transcripts. That'll make doing it easier. You can print that out and highlight it. But even better, you, smart cookie that you are, have produced a strategy guide for us. Tell me what's in that, where can I get it.
Kurt Bullock: So it is going to be an outline of these audiences and essentially, it's going to be the game plan. And so you can download that at my website, which is producedept, so produce D-E-P-T .co/q4. And there's a link, if that's the easiest way, to just click on that.
Kurt Elster: And I've got that in the show notes. So type, tap, or swipe up on the episode art on your phone, and then scroll down. You'll see the show notes. It's the first link.
Kurt Bullock: Excellent. And then if you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. It's just Kurt Bullock, K-U-R-T B-U-L-L-O-C-K. And happy to answer any questions or shoot me an email, or visit the website.
Kurt Elster: Very good. Thank you, Mr. Bullock.
Kurt Bullock: Thanks, Kurt.