If you’re not already thinking about Black Friday, NOW is the time to start. The holidays have a way of sneaking up on all of us, and as a business owner, you do not want to lose out on the next few weeks of planning before the big day. Plus, the shopping season is getting earlier, it seems, by the year.

Salesforce reports that last year, online sales in the U.S. reached $62 billion, which was up 4 percent compared to 2020. The company’s data suggests that sales grew in early November, while sales during Cyber Week (a span of late-November dates that encompasses Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Small Business Saturday through Cyber Monday) experienced “muted growth” in 2021, presumably because folks were shopping early.

How early? Salesforce’s report says consumers spent $74 billion during the first three weeks of November 2021 (up 10 percent compared to the same time period in 2020), while Cyber Week’s year-over-year growth was just 4 percent. The largest single shopping day, though, was still … you guessed it—Black Friday. So how can you prep your business for Black Friday and the weeks leading up to it?

Here’s our business owners’ guide to Black Friday:

• Start early and plan in advance. We’re repeating this here because we can’t stress it enough. Get on this now! Please don’t plan Black Friday the week before.
• Do your research. To prep for the biggest shopping day of the year, you should figure out what your audience likes to buy and what types of deals they like. (Maybe you could set up a poll on social media asking your audience to vote for their preferred Black Friday deal!)
• Put your deals out early. As discussed above, all of November is “official” shopping season, and you don’t have to wait until Black Friday to start offering good deals on your products or services. In fact, we suggest you don’t.
• Increase visibility leading up to Black Friday. Again, this takes planning, because one does not simply “increase visibility.” Ahead of Black Friday, see if you can book yourself as a guest on a podcast or two, do an IG takeover with someone who speaks to your target audience, or connect with an influencer who is willing to share about your product or service right before your promo period begins.
• Promote and network once your deals are live. Share your deals using all of your channels. Send some DMs and emails to your network about your awesome deals. Hopefully, a handful of people will want to share them with their audience. 
• Check stats after the fact. How did you do? What worked and what didn’t work? What should you repeat or build on next year? Write all this down, because you don’t want to rely on memory or guesswork next year!

In case you didn’t get the memo, it’s time to prepare your business for Black Friday. Be strategic, creative, and for the love of pumpkin spice lattés and all else that is holy, get a head start. You’ll be glad you did.

If you need help with your Black Friday business strategy, book a call with us!