Black Friday and Cyber Monday, in short BFCM, is the biggest sale season for ecommerce businesses. 

Last year, Shopify, a provider of internet infrastructure for commerce, announced a record-breaking BFCM weekend sale, crossing USD 7.5 billion from independent businesses worldwide. 

That’s a whopping 19% increase from 2021’s sales of USD 6.3 billion. If you’re an ecommerce business, it is the right time to gear up for this year’s BFCM sale. 

Among other marketing strategies, brands are now leveraging the power of social commerce, and if you don’t want to miss out, here’s what you need to do!

Role of Social Commerce in BFCM

Social commerce has been a game changer in ecommerce businesses. 

A Statista report mentions that the value of social commerce sales is expected to reach USD 2,900 billion by 2026. 

Undoubtedly, social commerce has a significant role in BFCM sales. As social media usage rises globally, more brands are leaning toward various social media strategies to boost their sales. 

Social commerce has been a key factor in driving sales during the BFCM weeks for the last few years, from launching new products to offering limited-period attractive deals. So, if you have not considered social commerce, you’re leaving mullah on the table. 

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Recommended read: Measuring social campaigns - takeaways from eTail Boston 2023

How to prepare your social commerce strategy for BFCM

However, jumping into social commerce without a solid strategy wastes time, effort, and resources. So here are some last-minute social commerce tips and strategies for trying out this year's BFCM sale. 

1. Know your audience

Remember, no strategy will work on social media if you don't know about your audience. So, before anything else, gather as much knowledge as possible about your prospective buyers. 

Who are they? What are their demographics? Which device do they prefer for shopping? What is their convenient time to shop? What are their product preferences? How well do they know of your product? 

The more information you can gather, the better you can strategize your marketing plan. 

2. Choose the platform where your customers are

It's not wise to jump into any or all the social media channels available. Instead, choose one or two platforms where your audience spends most of their time. 

Knowing your audience's demographics and buying behavior can help narrow your research. Here is some data to give you an idea: 

Source

As the above data shows, Facebook has the highest number of users, closely followed by Instagram and TikTok.

Further, as a study mentions, Facebook usage has dropped among younger Americans while the usage has increased among the older audience. So, if you’re targeting older Americans for your product, it would be wise to double down your efforts on Facebook. 

On the other hand, the global Instagram audience is between the ages of 18 and 24 years (31%), while 30.3 % of users are between the ages of 25 and 34. So, if you’re targeting a younger audience, you know which platform to choose. 

Recommended read: How to choose the best social commerce platform for your eCommerce business 

3. Harness the power of user-generated content

While brands are competing among themselves to garner the attention of their customers right before the upcoming BFCM sale, socials are getting cluttered with tons of images and videos of products. 

What can you do differently to stand out amidst the crowd? 

The answer is leveraging user-generated content. A report by Adweek mentions that 85% of people find user-generated content more influential than the content posted by the brands itself. User-generated content can be in any format — text, video, or images. 

So before your BFCM sale, use user-generated content on your home page, sign-out page, social media, etc., to engage and bring an authentic shopping experience to your customers. You may also use user-generated content to create shoppable content through stories. 

SimplicityDX offers AI-powered storefronts for social commerce to help brands acquire more customers and drive campaign revenue from user-generated content on social media by creating multichannel and campaign-specific ecommerce stores in minutes. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oqzgHTECo0&ab_channel=BusinessWire 

Recommended read: How to use user generated content for social commerce

4. Collaborate with micro-influencers

Peer recommendations and reviews on social media strongly influence buying decisions. Today, customers pay more attention to what other customers say about the product than relying on product ads sponsored by the brand. Seeing this trend, brands now collaborate with micro-influencers to boost product awareness, engagement, and sales. 

Micro-influencers are content creators with a strong social media presence and 10,000 to 50,000 followers on social media platforms. They have a highly engaged audience and regularly interact with them through valuable social media posts. The biggest advantage of micro-influencer marketing is it makes the promotional content look organic as the influencer adds their voice and style. 

Influencer marketing brings in huge ROI for brands and is expected to grow to USD 21.1 billion by the end of 2023. So, collaborating with influencers in their respective industry before the BFCM has a high possibility of maximizing sales and boosting user engagement. 

5. Chat commerce for personalization

Today, customers place a high value on personalized shopping experiences. When the brands are fighting it out to gain a few moments of customer attention during the rush hour of BFCM sales, a personalized shopping experience adds brand brownie points. 

But how do you offer a personalized shopping experience when there is the shopping madness and huge rush that the BFCM sale is known for? Thankfully, you have chatbots to your rescue. You can make chatbots respond to some of the most common questions customers may have. 

For example, responding to product recommendations based on customer preferences, stock availability, delivery updates, etc. can be managed well with chatbots. 

Apart from responding to the customers immediately and freeing up the bandwidth of your customer agents, you may also utilize the messenger webview to share post-purchase updates, sale receipts, shipping info, etc., to keep the customer updated. 

6. Offer an omnichannel shopping experience

Shoppers today get exposed to a product on one platform, learn more about it on other platforms, and finally purchase it on another platform. Hence, brands today set up their social commerce framework across key social selling platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snap, etc. 

A strong omnichannel experience will increase your brand affinity right before BFCM sales when the internet is cluttered with promotions and offers of different brands. Creating an omnichannel shopping experience is easy —- you may use high-resolution images, videos, and text related to BFCM along with your brand’s tone and voice.

To offer an omnichannel shopping experience, brands must have a unified messaging system to automate and optimize all customer messaging. 

So, in the BFCM rush, the customer messages receive a consistent response no matter which channel. 

7. Content and community-first social media strategy

As brands experience challenges in retargeting, their primary focus is to shift from a paid media marketing strategy to a content and community-based social media strategy so that it becomes easy to retain customers and drive more sales from BFCM sales. 

Consistently posting content on social media and partnering with influencers are the key factors driving a content-based, community-first marketing strategy. As organic content blends well with paid media, it's time to take your social commerce to a new level during the BFCM sale. 

Recommended read: Master social media ad targeting for eCommerce success

Bonus to stand out: Set up AI-powered edge storefronts 

And here’s an opportunity to earn some brownie points! 

Set up AI-powered edge storefronts to get ahead of your competition before a BFCM sale. 

SimplicityDX ensures real-time integration of content with products. So whether you want to use influencer-created content or user-generated content, the edge storefront can synchronize it to the product on-site and show it on the Storefront page in real-time. AI-powered social storefronts reduce the drop-offs between social and ecommerce by creating a whole new shopping experience on the social media platform. 

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Recommended read: Complete guide on social storefronts

Conclusion 

We are just a few weeks away from the BFCM sale, and if you’ve not yet planned your social commerce strategy, it’s high time to do so. 

Implement the strategies discussed here and make the most of social commerce to drive more sales from BFCM. 

Want to know how leading brands are doubling their sales with social commerce? 

Book a demo of SimplicityDX today.