Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
Black Friday 2025: Your Digital Marketing Checklist
Here’s All the GOOD Bits:
- Prep early, win big — Start building hype weeks before, using teasers, countdowns, and sneak peeks. The brands that warm up audiences first usually cash in the most.
- Speed matters — A slow site is a dead site. Shoppers won’t wait around. Test your load times, fix bottlenecks, and make checkout lightning-fast.
- Creatives count — Dull ads just won’t cut it. Bright visuals, bold offers, and sharp copy make people stop, click, and buy.
- Email seals the deal — Personalised subject lines and timed sequences outperform generic blasts. Tease, launch, remind, repeat.
- Data is gold — Track everything. CTR, ROAS, conversions. Learn what worked, scrap what didn’t, and double down for next year.
Every November, Black Friday looms on the horizon like the final boss in a video game. The sales, discounts, and customers frantically comparing prices across ten tabs at once are all part of the yearly ritual.
So, what exactly should brands be doing to get ready? Let’s run through a practical checklist that covers everything from planning ahead to analysing the aftermath. Because let’s be honest: winging it on Black Friday is about as effective as sending a carrier pigeon to do your social ads.
Get Your Timeline Down
First things first: timing. Brands that start their Black Friday advertising prep in November are already late to the party. Customers begin scouting deals weeks in advance, and the smart players build anticipation long before the big day. Any successful Black Friday marketing strategy starts here.
Tease discounts through email, drop cryptic hints on social media, and run ‘coming soon’ campaigns across paid channels. By the time the actual Friday rolls around, your audience should be primed and ready to hit checkout.
Give Your Website an Audit
It doesn’t matter how clever your ads are if your site loads like it’s running on dial-up. Even a two-second delay in load time can increase bounce rates by more than 30%.
Do a full health check. Optimise images, test payment gateways, and streamline the checkout process so it feels smooth. Don’t forget mobile, either. Most Black Friday shopping now happens on phones, so your site should feel fast and responsive.
Prepare Your Paid Advertising
Black Friday is not the time to scrimp on ads. Costs rise because every brand under the sun is bidding.
For paid search, make sure you’re targeting transactional keywords that scream purchase intent. For paid social, segment audiences tightly. Retarget cart abandoners, lookalike audiences, and past customers who only need the gentlest nudges to spend again.
FYI: creative matters. A bland ad with ‘10% OFF’ isn’t going to stop a rampant discount-searcher. Build variations and test formats, and make sure your visuals strike hard. During Black Friday, standing out is everything.
Warm Up Your Email Marketing
Inboxes on Black Friday resemble Piccadilly Circus at rush hour — loud, chaotic, and easy to get lost in.
How do you break through with email marketing? Personalisation. Use customer data to recommend products they’re likely to want rather than blasting generic ‘SALE NOW ON’ messages. Build a sequence: teaser, countdown, live launch, and last-chance reminders.
And don’t forget: Subject lines can make or break you. A touch of urgency, a hint of exclusivity, or even a cheeky emoji can push your open rates far higher than a flat ‘Black Friday Sale Inside.’
Squeeze Your Socials
Social media isn’t just for memes. Instagram stories, TikTok reels, and Meta ads drive engagement and should be integral to your Black Friday marketing strategy.
But nobody wants to see 15 posts with the same ‘SALE NOW LIVE’ banner in a row. Mix it up. Behind-the-scenes content, limited-time flash deals, live countdowns, and influencer shoutouts keep things fresh. Use polls and interactive features to drive clicks. Prep Your Creative Assets Early
This one’s simple but often overlooked: Create everything in advance, including ads, email templates, landing pages, and social posts. Have them all lined up and scheduled. Black Friday is not the time to be stuck in Canva trying to resize a banner.
Create a central asset bank so everyone on the team knows where to find what they need. That way, when chaos strikes (and it will), you react strategically instead of spiralling.
Keep One Eye on Competitors
Nobody likes to admit it, but competitor stalking is part of the fun. What are they offering? How are they positioning it? Set up alerts and monitor their activity in real time.
You don’t need to copy them (please don’t), but staying informed helps you adapt quickly if the market shifts. If the big players suddenly slash prices further than expected, you’ll want to know before customers do.
Plan for Post-Campaign Analysis
Black Friday doesn’t end when the discounts expire. In many ways, that’s just the beginning. Analysing performance is where you learn what worked, what bombed, and what needs tweaking before Christmas.
Look at metrics across channels. How did email perform compared to paid social? Which products drove the highest ROI? Did your website handle footfall, or did it wobble under pressure?
Don't Forget Your Cyber Monday Marketing
One final note: Black Friday’s twin, Cyber Monday, often gets overlooked. But it’s another huge sales driver, especially for eCommerce businesses. Keep some firepower in reserve, like exclusive online deals, extra discounts for email subscribers, or bundles that only launch after the weekend. Customers expect it, and you don’t want to lose momentum after Friday.
Are You Ready for Black Friday 2025?
Black Friday marketing is not for the faint of heart. It’s fast and frantic, and it requires serious preparation. But with the proper checklist and having your website ready, ads on point, emails ready to go, social channels buzzing, and analytics lined up, you can turn chaos into profit.
So, the question isn’t whether you should prepare for Black Friday. It’s whether you can afford not to. While your competitors are fine-tuning their campaigns months in advance, the last thing you want is to have the brand scrambling at the eleventh hour.
This year, treat Black Friday as the opportunity it is. Done right, it’s not just a sales event; it’ll ensure you’re ready for the rest of the festive season. If you need some guidance, contact The Good Marketer today. Not to brag, but we’ve handled (and survived) several successful Black Fridays.