The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 158: Mapping Your Black Friday Sale
Today, I am talking all about planning your Black Friday sale. I dive into why you should be having a Black Friday sale and why you should be getting ready now. I also share some important tips on how to plan your sale.
Mapping Your Black Friday Sale
By: Melissa Lin
Welcome back to another episode of The Fierce Business Babe Podcast. I cannot believe how quickly summer has just flown by. I love fall time. I absolutely love big blankets, big sweaters, scarves, boots. I’m already starting to pull out some decorations, find some pumpkin patches, and just get ready for this next season we're stepping into, and the season actually also lines up with today's podcast episode, surprise surprise, which is all about knocking out your Black Friday sale for your business. And you may be thinking to yourself, “well isn't Black Friday like in another month or so? Why do we need to prep so early?” And if you know me, I always recommend wrapping ahead of time. The last thing that you want to do is scramble around last-minute during the holidays when you're wanting to spend time with friends and family who've maybe traveled to come and see you. So let's get wrapping.
My goal for you is to be able to have your Black Friday prepped and ready to go, and it's definitely what I would recommend. That way when Black Friday comes you can basically just click the button and turn everything on or it's already pre-scheduled, automated, ready to go, and you don't even need to turn it on. However, technically, you'll probably need to turn one or two things on, but we’ll definitely get into later. I have hosted many, many, many Black Friday sales of my business over the years and I laughed supporting my clients, my audience with it. While I was chatting with my clients about this a few weeks ago on one of our coaching calls one of my clients asked, “Do they sell during the holidays? Am I allowed to sell during the holidays? What does that look like?” And I really wanted to share this with you because a lot of coaches and service-based entrepreneurs believe that they aren't allowed to sell during the holidays, or that nobody will buy during the holidays because they're too busy buying other things and gifts for other people. And I want to share a little spoiler alert with you. Number one: there are no rules. This is your business and you can just sell whatever you want. Grocery stores don't shut down during the holidays. They’re a store, right? Almost every department store you can imagine is having a Black Friday sale. Things don't shut down. The cool part about having your online businesses is you don't actually have to be running it 24/7 for your Black Friday sale. You can prep it all ahead of time and click the button, have it ready to go and run. You get to sell as you would any other time of the year, plus some holiday fun on top, right? I truly don't believe that there are any bad months to sell. If you ever thought to yourself, “they're not going to buy because they'll be busy with family. They're not going to buy during Black Friday because they're wanting to save it for Christmas. They won't buy because they are waiting on their tax return.” Whatever the story is in your head right now, we can reframe it and shift it because you get to sell. These stories that I just shared are not always true, and most of the time money is not the reason that's holding someone back from working with you. Typically they have a deeper fear that you as a coach get to help them push through. Maybe they don't feel worthy enough of the result. Maybe they're not sure if your process is going to work for them. So 99% of the time, it's not the money.
Planning Your Black Friday Sale
So we're going to chat about how to plan your Black Friday. How to let it be easy and simple. Let’s remove anything difficult. You don't need fancy systems or anything like that. I'm going to get into that today and I'm going to also give you some ideas to help you brainstorm and knock out your own Black Friday in your business and so much more. Black Friday is an amazing, amazing time to scoop people up in your audience. Maybe they've been lurking or creeping or what I like to call silently supporting you without buying from you yet. What’s really cool about Black Friday is most people will have some pretty big sales and so it's an easy way to get people in the door. If they can get their foot in the door and start to get used to buying from you then it is very likely that they'll buy again. So it's okay to add in some lower ticket items into your Black Friday sale because they help create that habit for them, buying from you.
So the big question is how do you start to plan for it? What I would recommend is to start brainstorming some low-level items that you've got, some mid-level items, and some high-level. And I do recommend that you use something that you already have instead of trying to create something brand-new. However, if something brand-new is just something you're so passionate about, maybe you've got this great idea that came to you in the shower and your ears are so aligned with it. Yes, definitely go for it. However, don't create something brand new just to create something brand new for Black Friday coming up. Utilize your energy in other areas. You can definitely bring something back out that you haven't sold in awhile instead of trying to create something brand-new. A quick little side note is with newer products, you know, even if you were to bring a brand new product to life for Black Friday, it can take a bit more time to create brand awareness versus something that you already have, something you have sold before.
Structuring Your Black Friday Sales
So I’m going to give you some ideas on what to sell for Black Friday, and personally, I like to have a few items available. So I prefer to have one low level item, one mid-level item, and one high level item. You usually see that most folks will price their Black Friday offers at 50 to 80% off, so like amazing, insane deals. I do want to share that this is your business and you can have things priced however you like them to be. So I may sell one of my courses that we've had locked in our vault, since it's just a self-paced course and I’ll sell it at 50% off. However, for something larger, like a coaching program, I may have an extended payment plan instead of 50% off. So just be planning if you are going to do a low, mid, high, again up to you. I've had one or two years where I've made just one big offer instead of a few because we were having a big launch, so it made sense to weave Black Friday in with it, but most of the time I will have the three: low, mid, and high. That's the way I like to have it. And so you can start to plan your Black Friday. Start to think about something that you could put together or something you could use for Black Friday. And again, we'll get more into some ideas and examples a little further in the episode as well. And so I did give a sneak peek about recording this episode over on my Instagram and I already have questions popping into my inbox about how to actually schedule out your Black Friday and what that's going to look like, and so I will most likely do that in a future podcast episode and it's going to most likely be very soon. So definitely keep an eye out.
Making Your Black Friday Sale Easy
So if you are in the earlier stages of your business, you may not have your website created, and that's okay. I want to help you with creating the simplest plan and letting it be easy. If you don't have a website or even if you do have a website, you can still let it be easy. And so if you're in the earlier stages, again, you may not have a website, and that’s okay. I didn't until I was at consistent 10 to 15 K months in my business. It's definitely not needed and that doesn't need to prevent you from hosting a Black Friday sale for your business. You can most definitely keep it simple. So, if you don't have a website you can create some captions for the week about your Black Friday offers and a few Instagram stories and emails about your offer. You can ask your audience to DM you for the payment link, right? You can keep it simple. You don't need to have sales pages and things like that. If you don’t want to automate that stuff, it's not necessary. If you don't have that stuff set up yet just focus on the sales portion of this, as you get going you can keep it simple. Your audience will be ready to buy as long as you do create some awareness and give them a heads up. So that's why I really want to do that. Fueling your Black Friday, either by using Instagram Stories or podcast episodes, whatever works here for you. So again, keep it simple. Most of us will be spending Thanksgiving with friends or family. Maybe you're traveling. If you have people traveling to you, but don't really want to be on social media or in your businesses during the holidays, definitely prep as much of it ahead of time as you can. You can definitely schedule things ahead of time. Have things automated and ready to go and just have fun with it. Enjoy the holidays. Everyone has worked so hard this year already and I know there's still plenty of time this year to continue to grow your business, but enjoy the holiday. Have fun with your sale. Don't overthink it. Let's not let perfectionism get in our way. Have fun. Talk about your offer. Share about it with some captions, some stories. Do you have a website? Put together one simple sales page bar. Let people know about it ahead of time and enjoy it. I'm so excited to see everyones Black Friday sales come to life in the next month or so as well.
What to Sell for Black Friday
So now I want to give you a few more ideas of what to sell for your Black Friday sale. I know we talked about, you know, low, mid, high, but I want to give you a couple examples of things that you could create as your own Black Friday offer. So it's something that you could do as a PDF download. If you already have something ready to go. Again, we can reuse things that you already have created. So, if you've done a free three-day challenge prior or if you posted a five-day training series before that was free, you can bundle that up. It's no longer available, right? You can bundle it up into a mini-course for $27 or $37, right? That's one example of how you can create a mini-course without actually creating something new. Let's get creative and recreate or reuse or repackage other things that you already have, maybe a workshop that you posted. You can definitely do something like a 60-minute intensive call. A course or a coaching program, if you have any one-on-one spot you can definitely sell those, right? Maybe your one-on-one spots are filled right now, but they're still available for the next month. Then pre-sel, some for November or December or even for 2022. You're always allowed to do it. This is your business, you are going to make the rules. I want to think back to what I had last year because I was just looking at our sales page for last year and we were starting to get our 2021 sales pitch and Black Friday ready to go. Last year I had one large ticket item that offered a product suite, like a workshop that I had done in the past week, and reused something I already had. I brought my launch course we called Five-Figure Launch out of the vault and sold our courses that are not usually available for purchase at all times. So anyways, that was last year and this year is going to be different. I'm so excited. I can't wait to see you create your Black Friday sales and what they're going to have inside of them as well. So today, we've touched on how to plan your Black Friday, how to let it be easy and simple, right? We don't need tons of websites and things like that to help you brainstorm and map out your own Black Friday in your business. We will see you next week in another brand new episode of The Fierce Business Podcast bright and early next Monday morning. Thank you for hanging out with me today. I'll see you next time.
Topics we cover include:
How To Plan Your Black Friday Sale
Structuring Your Black Friday Sale
Making Your Black Friday Sale Easy
What to Sell for Black Friday
And so much more!
Times to check out:
(08:35) How to plan your Black Friday sale
(12:45) Structuring your Black Friday sale
(15:05) Making your Black Friday sale easy
(18:12) What to sell for Black Friday
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