The costs for ads during Black Friday will skyrocket and many small brands do struggle with this. However, if you currently run ads, now is the time to start planning how much extra spend you can put into your ads during this time. Have a budget in mind and set this budget before running your ads, if they are performing well, you can adjust your budget accordingly and increase if necessary.
Get your creatives ready for your ads early and ensure you have all of the aspect ratios set for your Meta/Instagram/Instagram Reels etc, so no text or imagery is cut off. Submit and test all of your ads for approval early to ensure they will all look and run effectively ahead of time.
Make sure your offer is clearly stated on the creatives, it needs to be front and centre and easy to read so your customers don't even need to think twice about what the offer is.
The Black Friday period is not the time to be testing new audiences, if you already run ads, stick with the audiences that you know work and then supercharge them with more spend. Typically, your warm audiences (site visitors, email list, social engagers, past customers) will be the ones to target during this period rather than new customers who will eat up a lot of your spend. Your warm audiences are the ones who already know and like your brand, and are the ones who are much more likely to make a purchase. Cold audiences can still be targeted but allocate less spend to these as they are more likely to be bargain hunters who might click, waste your money and not buy.
I have seen brands run ads and send their customers to a dead link and waste £££’s on wasted clicks. DON’T DO THIS! It sounds simple but in the rush of getting everything ready for Black Friday, it can easily be missed. Make sure your links are being sent to the correct pages, collection pages and product pages to avoid wasting any money.