A lot of business is at stake as Black Friday approaches

Brands and marketers need to see this as the make or break moment for the year

The last quarter is on and that means most online businesses need to get ready for the main season. Is your operation and digital marketing ready for it?

The Black Friday weekend is usually a period of madness for digital marketers. It’s when we are spending the highest budgets, when our audience is buying and we need to get most of it. But it is the same as a final game at the World Cup — you need to work really hard to not only succeed, but even to get there.

Now is the time (for some it might already be late) you should get ready for Black Friday and the rest of the season.

What are the common factors during the Black Friday week? High buying appetite, which means higher conversion rates than usual, but also high competition. You’re not the only one who knows that people shop a lot in November, which means more expensive clicks and impressions.

What does the higher conversion rate mean for campaigns? Your primary goal during Black Friday will be to get the highest share of impressions and traffic to the website. Because people are ready to buy this time of the year and it is expected you’ll have some good offers. Just get people to see it.

But how do you do it with the high competition in cost-perclick (CPC)? Start now!

If you start advertising just before Black Friday, you will already be competing with all other brands who want to get the bite from the best selling week of the year.

But when you start now with branding campaigns to make sure people will remember the brand, you will be one step ahead.

Let them know your unique selling points. If you do it right, you’ll be one step ahead of the competition once the third November week starts.

As the sale approaches, granularly shift from branding campaigns to pure performance. During the event itself, there’s no time (and money) for branding — if people don’t know you by that time, you won’t fix it during those few days.

Here are few a tips to keep in mind for Black Friday campaigns:

■ Make sure you’re campaigns won’t be limited by budget or account limits. Every year, some accounts pause because of spend limit or unpaid invoices. Make sure this is not the case and the accounts are ready to spend as long as it’s delivering good results.

■ Reconsider all your bid adjustments. If, during the year, you bid differently on different devices (in general, this is a good idea), you should reconsider and probably reset this for Black Friday.

People behave in a different way than during regular times of the year. Try to see what led performances during last year’s sale and don’t limit your reach based on out-of-season data.

■ Start preparing Black Friday specific creatives. There won’t be time during the event. Everything will go crazy. The least you can do is to get your creative team to prepare templates for banners where they will just insert the specific offers once they’re ready. The same way you should check with your IT if the servers are ready for higher traffic. And start planning for extended customer support hours and logistic capacity.

The Black Friday week can decide if the whole of 2018 will be considered success or not. Make sure you are ready, plan things in advance and take advantage of it.