This year’s Black Friday (27th November) is set to be the first time in history when Brits spend over £1 billion in a single day, according to research by Experian and IMRG. It works out at around £16 per individual, and will be followed by Cyber Monday (30th Nov) which is expected to add a further £943 million in sales for British retailers. Combined with the weekend sales, these four days represent over £2 billion worth of revenue for retailers. An intense focus on Black Friday deals and sales may drive revenue on the day, but with smart utilisation of Twitter analytics and a mapped out follow-up plan, you can turn Black Friday into longer-term retail gold.
Why Twitter in particular? Firstly, its open network is one of the best sources of data when it comes to understanding and targeting your customers, and also because Twitter users are more likely to spend money on you that regular Internet users. A GlobalWebIndex study found that 75% of active Twitter users had bought something online in the last month, compared to only 67% of all Internet users. Here’s some Twitter tactics to implement into your social strategy.
Use data from past Twitter campaigns
Use Twitter data from previous campaigns to help research and identify Twitter users who engaged with them. This information can then be used for Tailored Audience campaigns this Black Friday to directly reach people who you know are already receptive to your brand, at a time when they’re likely to be considering making purchases. Look for people who Tweeted a specific hashtag, discover retweeters of key campaign Tweets, or who shared links to key pieces of content.
Segment to succeed
Facilitating a significant amount of sales during Black Friday and the period following it will naturally be the major goal in any social strategy for this time period. The most cost-effective way of doing this will be via segmentation techniques that isolate your ideal target audience for precise targeting. Ways to find this audience include techniques such as:
- Look at the followers of your competitors, sub-segments may have the same makeup as your own audience
- Using tools to identify major influencers relevant to your industry and targeting their followers
- Researching other advertising campaigns that resonated with your audience and analysing who used the hashtag
- Searching for users with specific keywords in their bio
- Targeting users based within specific geolocations
- Look for people who were Tweeting from major events or festivals that have a significant crossover with your audience.
Remember: When conducting these techniques to find groups of people to target, checking a sample of the individual users within them can be a worthwhile insurance measure. This allows you to check that the people within these groups align with your audience personas. If there is little correlation between these users and your target persona, then it may be worth changing the parameters to find an audience that’s more relevant to your brand.
Target first-time buyers
By effectively segmenting your audience according to previous shopping habits within your CRM, you can use an email integration tool to discover Twitter accounts associated with those emails. These users can be put into a list that can be used to deliver customised Promoted Tweets to them. One way you can utilise this technology at a time like Black Friday is by offering a first-time buyer offer for people who have opened accounts with you but not purchased anything yet, or put stuff in a cart but never made the purchase. Special discounts to these Twitter users could be the push needed to get potential buyers to stop procrastinating and convert.
Deliver messages based on the personality of your audience
By analysing your audience using cognitive computing, you can uncover Twitter users with certain personality traits who are 40% more likely to redeem a coupon, or twice as likely to click on Twitter Ads. These can either be from your own followers, or a group of hand-picked Twitter users that you would like to target. Not only that, but using Personality Insights powered by IBM Watson, you can understand the individual personality traits of your audience at a granular level, allowing you to create appealing and effective ads in response to these insights. To discover more on this technique, check out our blog on how to implement personality insights into your Twitter marketing strategy.
A small sample of the audience data available to brands using Personality Insights powered by IBM WatsonHave a mapped-out follow-up Twitter strategy
With some intelligent preparation, the benefits of Black Friday can be spread further than a single day. In the short term, 68% of Twitter users shop on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so having a cohesive strategy for follow-up campaigns on Cyber Monday can also be rewarding. In the mid-to-long term future, an additional benefit for Black Friday lies in its potential to provide you with a unique opportunity for performing Twitter analytics on your audience, monitoring key terms in real time, and building an audience for future campaigns. The data derived from forward-thinking activity now could be the difference between you starting 2016 with fireworks or sparklers.
If you plan to include Twitter in your strategy this year and want to implement advanced targeting capabilities, please click here and request a demo or create a test account.
This blog is based on one from our Spanish blog, the original was written by Leticia Polese.
