Black Friday is a big deal for consumers, and it’s typically the busiest shopping day of the year. This means that everyone who’s selling something will be thinking about how they can maximize engagement.
There’s a lot of noise from everyone promoting their deals, so it’s crucial that your Black Friday design ideas don’t blend into the background. But how can you stand out and create great promos when you’re short on time?
Folklore suggests that the name Black Friday was popularized by merchants, who referred to it as the day when companies went from making a loss for the year, to being profitable. Essentially, their finances went from ‘in the red’ to ‘black’.
Black Friday activity is almost a full month long these days. During Covid, promotions were drawn out online for longer to compensate for the lack of revenue coming from the high street. Now, the whole event has become longer online, as some businesses are promoting earlier to make sure they are seen. That means that you need some methods to produce promos that’ll keep you from spending too much time and money and reducing your profit margins.
Whether you’re a small business owner or you’re running a marketing team, here’s a few things to help you with making your Black Friday promos a success in what is now a frenetic, full week of promotion. You can apply all of our Black Friday design ideas across the week, right through to Cyber Monday.
According to Venngage, original graphics are the most successful visual medium at helping marketers reach their goals (40.8%). Research also tells us that we remember about 10% of the information that marketers present to us, which goes up to a staggering 65% when combined with visuals. If you’re looking for visuals, you can help yourself to a range of illustrated scenes in our catalogue, which covers many topics across a range of styles.
4 Places to Focus Your Sales Promotions
Great promotions are important, but the places that you distribute your promos is an important part of the equation. This can be anything from a digital Black Friday flyer, to Black Friday Instagram posts, and banner ads.
Build your Black Friday Momentum with Social Media.
Whilst almost everyone will be posting their deals on Black Friday, creating quality outputs will give your marketing a better chance to stand out from the crowd on TikTok and Instagram. It is crucial that you build interactions with people before the week of Black Friday to stay top of mind.
For social media, the lifecycle of a post is short. That is especially true of a story, which only lasts for a day. One way that you can take advantage of this and tap into this short timespan is by creating urgency. Stories are a big part of the promotional mix as more and more people find it easy to quickly interact with them, or skip them. For Black Friday Instagram Posts, it’s important to create a variety of different formats to stand a better chance of capturing more peoples’ attention.
An impactful social media post makes a bold statement, quickly. This is because users will move to the next post or story very quickly on social.
Activate Your Core Audience with Your Newsletter
A great subject line is what gets people to open your email. But a captivating header image is what creates enough curiosity for them to keep reading your message. If someone’s already on your email list, they generally have a good idea about your products and services.
There’s a few good ways to make your email header image attractive. One thing you can do is combine your product images with visuals, and make these into an animated GIF. These moving images have an engaging effect and draw peoples’ eyes directly to your products. Another idea is to use colors as part of your product images. The use of strong colors is another thing that naturally leads us towards our product images.
Newsletters serve as that last-mile push when it comes to deals, discounts and new products. The content of your emails can tell them more about benefits, or something they don’t already know that creates value for them.
A range of Black Friday Email Headers using designstripe assets and scenes. These offers are front and centre, as your email list should already be quite familiar with it.
Promotional Banner Ideas to Amplify Your Reach on Black Friday
Paid media can be a great investment if you have a budget and strategy in mind. When it comes to a promotional banner or any Black Friday ad template, a design can make or break how effectively it performs. The designs that work best are usually bold, are always easy to read and have a clear call-to-action that connects with a well-thought-out landing page.
There’s not a lot of visual real estate here, meaning you should avoid using too much text. For any Black Friday banner ideas, sticking to these principles will encourage action and prevent you from losing otherwise interested users along the way.
Banner ads should be somewhere visible, and bold enough to draw the user's attention to them. They should be on-brand, but shouldn't blend into the rest of your webpage.
Build Trust with Your Website Landing Pages
The hero section of your landing page should reassure people that they’ve reached the right place, that your services match their expectations and that you’re able to deliver on the promises you made to them in your promotions that led them to your website.
There’s only one opportunity to make a good impression, so a captivating title, combined with strong hero image, is crucial to keep people browsing your website.
You should show your promotion above the fold, where people can see it as soon as they land on your website.
Ideas for Creating Eye-Catching Black Friday Promotions
A great promo starts with finding creative ways to showcase your products and services. Creating compelling promotions for Black Friday starts with materials that genuinely stand out. It is not enough to have well-designed visuals, as many more businesses have access to resources and skills to create designs that ‘look good’. Here’s some great ideas that inspire us, setting these businesses apart from the competition.
Crafting your Message
Clear and engaging copywriting is also very important. No amount of design will save a message that isn’t creating value for the reader. Your promotional messages should show the benefits of your products and services, especially to those who aren’t familiar with what you do.
There’s a number of AI-assisted tools to help inspire you when it comes to creating copy, such as Copy.AI, Jasper and Quillbot. A good rule of thumb is to use them when you are formulating ideas, and then add your own human touch when you find something that is along the right lines.
Too much technical jargon can also make things a bit exhausting for your reader, too. Using tools such as Hemingway App will really help to make your sentences simple and readable at a glance.
Creating Movement in your Designs to Grab Attention
Impressive motion designs are a great way to increase engagement and create extra meaning, even without words or symbols. A Black Friday motion graphic that converts will emphasize what you want to tell your audience. Whilst your designs can be elaborate, the real power of motion for promotions is being able to communicate extra information in less pixels, whether it’s textual or visual.
Motion can be used for many purposes. You can cycle through a range of objects on sale, show products in a novel way or change your header to switch between a compelling title and the nature of your promotion. If you don’t have access to motion design resources, you can still create eye-catching Black Friday visuals for free with Crayon.
Create More Focus on Your Message with Topical Illustrations.
Illustrated objects are a great way to be bold with your Black Friday promotions. We have a library full of illustrated assets that are perfect for your designs. There’s discounts, sales tags, gifts, coupons and much more to pick from.
You can use them individually to support a single promotional message, or even superimpose them on real world visuals to get an exciting, dynamic effect. As with anything you find in the designstripe library, there’s objects available in a range of styles. For each object, you can play with the colors and experiment with the look and feel of the asset to suit you.
Creating Great Black Friday Promos Doesn’t Have to be Complicated
Great visuals are an important part of the equation for making effective Black Friday content. With promotions beginning some time before the date, and lasting for a good while, you need to plan ahead to create enough value across this frenetic period. We also need to be ready to react and adjust to activities we might not expect. Black Friday can be unpredictable. If one of your products performs better than expected, it’s great to have some spare promotional materials to help give it an extra push.
Whether you’re creating Black Friday flyers or Instagram posts, finding creative ways to showcase your products and services will set you apart from the Black Friday noise. This is especially true when used with well-crafted content that demonstrates the benefit you can give to people.
There’s a number of places to focus your sales promotions which means people will see your promotions across a number of touchpoints. It will also create a unified look from one touchpoint to the next.
If you want to showcase your Black Friday design ideas with us, then feel free to tag us on Instagram by using the #designstripeworks hashtag.
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