AuthorSacha Mooney
LinkedIn
Black Friday and Cyber Monday can be incredibly fruitful times for businesses from a backlink perspective - a digital PR’s dream if you will - and the perfect opportunity to land multiple PDP links which are great for driving traffic to key product pages as well as driving sales.
Like many key calendar dates, Black Friday can be a very competitive time for brands, with each and everyone out to achieve the same thing, more customers on-site and more sales, so getting your DPR plan right is paramount to success.
In this blog, we’ll explain how we tackle Black Friday and get results for our Digital PR clients here at NOVOS. We’ve also written a comprehensive BFCM guide that is a must read for any eCommerce brand!
Step 1 - Plan Ahead & Get Prepped
Preparation is key for successful Black Friday outreach and should begin as early as September, and no later than the beginning of October, with follow-ups continuing right up until Black Friday.In the preparation period, you should be in communication with your client to find out what deals and offers they will be running across Black Friday and Cyber Monday, identify key products they are keen for you to present to journalists, as well as agree on any key messaging.The next thing you will need to prepare is your image folders. Providing journalists with everything they need is paramount, especially during a period as busy as Black Friday. They won’t have time to respond asking for assets, so the more you can provide in the first instance, the better. Breaking your image folders down by product will enable journalists to find exactly what they are after with ease. Make sure to include both lifestyle and product images and ensure they are high resolution - good quality images could be the difference between getting coverage and not!
Step 2 - Perfect Your Pitch & Nail Your Headlines
Once the initial prep work is complete and your clients have provided you with all the details, you’ll need to create your email pitch. Journalists are time-poor at the best of times, but Black Friday is particularly busy for them, not to mention they’ll also be bombarded with Christmas pitches on top of this, so ensuring your pitch includes all the details they could possibly need is so important.
A good Black Friday pitch should include the following information:
- The start date of your client's Black Friday sale
- Discount details (example: 20% off everything on site)
- Product suggestions
- Clear links to product imagery
- The current retail price of each product
- Black Friday price of each product
- Details of how much of a saving is being made on each product
- Product description for each product
You can see an example email template below:
To catch the journalist's attention, you must ensure your headline is strong, as this is the first thing they will see. We always include the brand name and savings amount, as these are the two things the journalist and the consumer will care about the most.
An example headline could look like:
‘[BRAND NAME] slashes prices by up to X% this Black Friday with prices as low as £X!’.
Something else to consider when you’re creating your pitch email is trends. Does your client have a product that is similar to a product that has gone viral due to celebrity use or a product that has gone viral on social media? If yes, then use this to your advantage with headlines such as “The dupe of Hayley Bieber's favourite perfume is 50% off this Black Friday!” OR “This viral pyjama set is just £X this Black Friday!”.
Step 3 - Build A Detailed & Targeted Media List
Once you have nailed your pitch, you’ll need to start building your media lists, and yes we said ‘lists’. These pitches are not a one-size-fits-all, and you will likely need to tailor them and tweak them slightly depending on who you are sending them to. Initially, you’ll want to do some journalist research to see who has previously covered Black Friday product round-ups and brand deals. Don’t search beyond a year or so ago as journalists tend to change roles quite often. It’s worth sticking to journalists who covered similar articles last year and checking to make sure they are still in the same role. Outside of Black Friday coverage, you can also look to include general shopping and e-commerce editors who cover the day-to-day round-ups.
To make smaller, more targeted lists, break them down by product type. For example, if you have a client that sells homewares and sleepwear, you could create a media list for interior-focused shopping editors and one for fashion-focused shopping editors and amend your pitch to include the products that are suited to that specific media list. Doing this gives you a better chance of coverage and saves journalists scrolling through irrelevant products.Once you have pulled together your media lists and tailored pitches for each, you’re ready to hit send and cross your fingers that the coverage starts to roll in.
Step 4 - Mop Up Missed Opportunities
We know it’s not always possible to get pitches to every publication before they publish their round-ups, as we can’t predict exactly when journalists will start posting their articles. This means you’re likely to see several articles that don’t feature your client’s products but could have.
At NOVOS, we go the extra mile to secure links and coverage for our clients, which includes targeting existing round-ups.
To do this, we create a list of round-ups that were published before our Black Friday outreach or by journalists not initially on our media list. We then reach out to them as part of our follow-up efforts. The key difference in these follow-ups is that we acknowledge the article has already been published and simply suggest additional products that could be valuable additions to the piece.
Below is an example of an email we use for this approach:
This allows us to turn missed opportunities into links!
What To Do If Your Clients Haven’t Finalised Their BF Deals in Time?
Clients don’t always have their deals confirmed as early as we—or journalists—would like, but that doesn’t mean Black Friday outreach is off the table for them.In this situation, you can create a ‘what you can expect from [BRAND] this Black Friday’ release, detailing your client offers from the previous years to give journalists an idea of what deals and offers your client is likely to have this year, highlighting any key products that might grab the journalists attention.
Ready to elevate your owBlack Friday PR success? Find out more about our award-winning digital PR services to help you secure valuable coverage when it matters most.
