Billions are made during the Black Friday week end. With almost a decade of running Facebook ads campaigns, we’ve learned a lot of strategies to maximize our results. We can say with confidence that it is one of the biggest opportunity for eCommerce brands to make their mark.
Competition is fierce – big brands increase their advertising budget and CPM’s jump through the roof. In other words, you must be prepared if you don’t want to be eaten alive. You must prepare in advance as we’ve seen over and over again. This could mean the difference between making one hundred thousand and one million.
While the pandemic has accelerated the growth of eCommerce spending, it has also increased the amount of people launching brands. Standing out in all aspects of your brand for Black Friday is the only way. With Facebook ads, you need a well endowed strategy built from the ground up.
After analyzing a decade of Facebook ads data, we realized that Facebook ads were twice as expensive during the actual week end. What does it mean for you? You must focus on your warm audiences during the pre Black Friday period.
Black Friday Facebook Ads Strategies
Strategy #1 – Pre Black Friday Campaign
As we mentioned earlier, Black Friday Facebook ads don’t perform really well during the actual week end. The CPM doubles which means that you end up paying twice as much to reach the same audience. The reason is “tougher competition” and “higher budgets” from other brands.
It’s why we recommend spending on Facebook ads throughout the whole year no matter what. It will allow you to build custom audiences such as:
- Website visitors
- Facebook engagement
- Instagram engagement
- Video views
- Customers
These audiences will most likely be your highest performing ads during the BFCM week end and the period before. Here’s a graph of the increase in Facebook CPM during the month BFCM weekend in 2020.
It’s why we recommend you start your BFCM campaign on November 1st. It will allow you to profit for a little bit more than 3 weeks. You should still advertise during the BFCM week end but we recommend dropping your budgets (and your expectations).
In a more concise way, here’s how it would look like:
- Anticipation: this could be starting 2 weeks before November where the goal is to create build-up and build your email list. Have you ever tried running lead generation Facebook ads? It might be a good time to try them out.
- Pre-Black Friday: November 1st to Black Friday – keep spending to drive ROAS and create your Black Friday Facebook ads promotion. Your promotions could be gift guides or even bundles.
- Black Friday Weekend (BFCM): focus on your custom audiences (email list, clients, website visitors and social media engagers). You need a steep discount, automatically applied at checkout.
- Pre-Holiday: right after the BFCM week end all the way to December 23rd – change up your promotions with BOGO, Christmas gift packages or any other creative idea you have.
- Holiday: from Christmas to New Years Eve – now it’s time to drop your clearance sales and new year resolution deals (don’t forget Boxing day in Canada).
As you can see, the planning of your BFCM Facebook ads campaign starts way before the actual week end. It’s why we recommend creating a game plan on paper. It can be a sketch, a spreadsheet or even a Google Docs but you must have a roadmap. Most people are window shopping, looking for the best deal. They will also most likely not buy from you if you don’t have a deal running.
How much budget should I use for my Facebook ads BFCM in 2023? We recommend spending a minimum of $25 per day with an ideal budget of more than $100 per day. The cost per conversion nowadays sits around $50 – too little budget would mean inconsistent sales. If you want to exit the learning phase, you must get more aggressive.
If you want to learn about how much Facebook ads cost, make sure to read our article. Let me just introduce us your briefly to the Facebook ads cost system. On Facebook, you bid for impressions. In other words, the highest bidder gets the highest quality impressions and sales. It’s why when the BFCM weekend finally arrives, your ad cost goes up significantly. Big brands are putting high bids and the impressions you get are from the bottom of the pile. It’s why we recommend building up your custom audiences before the actual event.
What should I do with my Facebook ads for Cyber Monday? While marketing folks put an emphasis on Black Friday, we recommend keeping the same strategy. The only difference is that you could make visuals with a “last chance” marketing angle. Some people haven’t made all their purchases and need a sense of urgency on the last day. If your Facebook ads convey urgency, you will drive a few sales.
Next an expert to help you build your strategy? With our decade of experience in paid media, we offer consulting that can help truly help you skip the learning curve. Our goal is to help you grow your business through authentic collaboration.
Strategy #2 – Target Wisely
You’ve built your big picture roadmap but the question remains “who should I target?”. Should my parents see my Facebook ads? Confusion is normal at this stage – let us give you the remedy. What you shouldn’t do is go narrow with your targeting. The interest based audiences will be massively saturated and expensive. You need to aim for the widest net among your audiences.
Custom Audiences
Your custom audience represents your:
- Email list
- Website visitors
- Instagram engagers
- Facebook engagers
- Followers
- Video viewers
- Add to carts
- Purchases
- Checkouts initiated
- Viewed Contents
What do we recommend? If the total of these audiences is less than 50,000 people, group them together. Max the timeframes to between 180 and 365 days. You might be thinking “iOS14+” really messed up my custom audiences, they are much smaller now. You are probably right, hence why we recommend “group them together”. The strategy is to download your email list from your CRM and upload it to Facebook. We recommend doing this every month throughout the year but definitely right before BFCM Facebook ads campaign.
That being said, Facebook did improve its tracking abilities with the Facebook Conversions API which enhances the accuracy of ads tracking & reporting. Beyond that, we recommend using UTM tags in each of your URL’s with your social channel, campaign name, ad set name and ad name.
It’s also interesting to note that these are audiences you have built from previous campaign data. It’s why we recommend running your ads before Black Friday. With strong custom audiences comes juicy profits. Also, make you sure to run email validation on your customer list before uploading it to Facebook.
Timing: we recommend using custom audiences during your BFCM & holiday promotion.
Broad Audiences
While it seems like the counterintuitive way of running ads, not using interest is still one of the best Facebook ads strategy in 2023. Pushing even more that your ads creative is king, much more than your targeting. The reality is we rarely fail because of bad targeting – it’s usually because our ad sucks. We have tons of Black Friday Facebook ads examples here but if you need even more ideas, check out our Facebook ads example article.
Timing: we recommend using broad audiences at all stages of your campaign.
Lookalike Audiences
Every person starting to run Facebook ads will fall in love with the concept of lookalike audiences. An audience that is similar to my customers? Sign me up they say. Let’s make it as close as possible to my buyers and it’ll perform better. In reality, it doesn’t work that way. Lookalike audiences rarely perform better than broad audiences and the best ones are often the widest one possible (10%).
Timing: we recommend using lookalikes for your pre BFCM Facebook ads campaign and pre holiday period.
Hot Tips 🌶️
Make sure you create all your campaign and creatives at least 2-3 days before you launch them. You can set them up to start on a day in the future. Doing this will allow Facebook to review your creatives beforehand and make them run right away without wait.
Also, track your results more often when you get closer to BFCM week end. Your Facebook ads results might drop aggressively after Cyber Monday and already slow down on Black Friday. You can save some nice money by slowly dropping your budgets.
Strategy #3 – Freshen Up Your Creatives
With less targeting abilities comes a stronger emphasis on Facebook ads creatives. It’s how you tell your story, showcase your product and even attract new customers. In fact, it’s probably the number one reason people decide to buy or not your product.
We recommend soaking yourself in inspiration of past Black Friday creatives to understand what truly matters. You have to adapt it to your brand and be unique. There’s no other way if you want to be successful.
What we’ve learned over the years is that you need to have a promotion. It can be a bundle or a straight discount but it has be cheaper. You should also mention “Black Friday” as people are just looking for that word everywhere.
There are many Facebook ads format you can use for your Black Friday creatives. In fact, we recommend you run them all. Variety is your greatest ally when it comes to Facebook ads creative. Here a few interesting ones:
- In-Feed Video ads: you could have some influencer content talking about your product or some lifestyle video shots of your product in action with free Black Friday video templates.
- In-Feed Image ads: the most standard – we recommend lifestyle shots or graphic design over simple white background images.
- Carousel ads: get creative and showcase your products attributes or a variety of products.
- Instant Experience: share your promotion with your best sellers.
- Catalogue ads: let Facebook show your products dynamically in a carousel with a strong BFCM messaging.
- Slideshow ads: group your products or unique selling propositions over sweet Facebook ads images.
Hot Tips 🌶️
Make sure you create a story and square format of your ads so they look good if you choose automatic placements. You can do that for every creatives although some will look better with just a squared format. You will have to take it on a case by case basis.
Make sure your design is focused with only one message at a time. During the holidays, it’s normal that most of your ads talk about a discount. We still recommend running normal ads simultaneously to keep the machine moving.
A note on A/B testing, make sure you count your budget inside your A/B testing. We recommend spending 2 times your CPA on each creatives. If you pay usually $40 per sale, you would need $80 per creative. Plan your Facebook ads creatives accordingly.
Strategy #4 – Make an offer they can’t refuse
When it comes to your offer, it needs to be enticing to compete with all the other brands. Of course, your brand is better and people prefer your products but 5% won’t cut it. We recommend at least 20% off site wide if you want a chance of being profitable.
You can get creative with your offer. It can be a bundle, a discount on certain products or a plain site wide offer. The goal here is to create something you know your audience will love and rave about when they see your Facebook ad. If you’ve never tested this before, we recommend running 2 different type of offers. This way you will learn what performs best for next year.
Final warning, it goes without saying that you should test your offer before publishing it. It happened very often that the offer on the website wasn’t working properly. If your offer doesn’t work, you will lose sales and potentially customers. It’s why we usually recommend that you automate the discounts on your website – make it apply automatically at checkout.
For instance, you could offer 60% off on selected products that you are finding hard to sell. The ad would be enticing with up to 60% off. This would also allow you to have products with just 20% off. It’s what big brands do and we believe it’s one of the best offer you can make.
Strategy #5 – Accelerate budget delivery
The worst thing that can happen is your Facebook ad sitting in review while Black Friday is running. You need to accelerate your Facebook ad delivery. It’s a strategy allowing you to spend your budget as fast as possible.
You won’t be able to use it alongside Campaign Budget Optimization campaigns because you will need a bid cap. The reason is simple – Facebook wants to know how you want to spend your money. Setting a bid cap allows you to not overspend per purchase and stay within your budget.
We also recommend layering accelerated ad delivery with Facebook ads automation rules. The most obvious one being turning off ads that don’t perform. For instance, turning off ads after $100 spent with no conversions or with a ROAS below 1 within the last 24 hours.
While you’re at it, why don’t you also check out your ad account spending limit. The worst thing that could happen is all your ads being paused. We don’t recommend setting an ad account spending limit because it serves no purpose if you’re on top of your Facebook ads. This number is a total amount that you want your ad account to spend lifetime. The remedy to that is to watch your ads every day, ensuring you have no bad surprises along the way.
Strategy #6 – Scaling your Black Friday Facebook Ads
Before we jump into scaling strategy, we need to discuss budgeting. Finding the right budget will make or break your Facebook ads strategy mostly because you will spread yourself too thin.
You need to allocate a minimum amount of budget per creative – we recommend allocating twice your CPA per creative. For instance, if you pay $20 per purchase then each creative would need a $40 total budget.
It can also be a good idea to plan your budget according to the Black Friday periods:
- Anticipation: you should spend roughly 5% of your Facebook ad budget.
- Pre Black Friday: this is where you will spend the majority of your budget – 80%.
- Black Friday: spend close to 5% of your budget.
- Pre-Holiday: slowing down from Black Friday means you should spend around 5% of your budget.
- Holiday: continuing that trend we recommend 5% of your budget.
Scaling vertically is quite easy – you just increase your budget by following these rules:
- 10% if results are good
- 20% if results are very good
- 30% if results are out of this world
You might not always be able to scale up. In fact, some campaigns will perform and then stop performing. These situations call for downscaling is quite similar to the rules above with a slight modifications above. You can just take the 10% and apply the reverse effect of “reducing the budget by 10%”.
Not enough budget available? If you don’t have a lot of Facebook ads budget (less than $2,000) then it’s about testing fewer creatives. You must be much more picky with your creatives formats. For instance, you could focus on a dynamic product catalogue ad to showcase all your products during that period.
Advertising with more than $10,000? At this stage, you can start planning multiple creatives but you might want to focus only on one or two audiences. Your creatives will have the most impact on your results while you probably already know your best Facebook ads audience.
More than $100,000 to spend? You will need to plan your campaigns with 3-5 audiences and a lot of different creatives. Your goal here should be to get creative with the amount of creatives you have available. We also recommend spending more in your anticipation period to prepare your clients for your BFCM sales.
Some people like to segment their audience by retargeting and prospecting. We don’t do that – since iOS14 retargeting audiences have been shrunken. Our advice is to only use custom audiences if you have a large budget of $100,000+. The budget split you choose is based on your preferences but we have found that 30% retargeting and 70% prospecting is the best.
What about automations for scaling my Facebook ads? With high budgets come great responsibilities that a human might not be able to manage. Facebook ads rules can come really handy to turn off low performers quickly before they get too much money spent on them. You can also get notified when rules are applied just to say in the know. Here are our favourite rules:
- Safe side: turning off ads when you spent your CPA without a purchase.
- Aggressive downsizing: dropping your budget by 10% every 12 hours when your ROAS is lower than 2.
- Hourly scaling: increase budget by 10% every hour if ROAS exceeds expectations.
- Daily scaling: increase budget by 10% everyday if ROAS is performing well according to goals.
Strategy #7 – Leverage social proof
The most common strategy is to reuse the post ID of an ad you created. In certain instances, we launch an engagement ad first on our ad, transform it into an existing post and take the ID to another conversion campaign. This allows to keep all the likes and comments to make our product look more popular.
This strategy can help new brands although we’ve seen very little effect for more established brands. The mentality is that a new brand would greatly benefit from having a lot of people engaging with your ads. It can show its popularity but also it mainly shows that your ad has been running for a longer period as very few ads have that much engagement.
While not always possible, you can even take an organic post you made that has been popular and generated a lot of engagement. You can select the option “use existing post” when creating your Facebook ad and add a final URL destination to your post. The psychology is the same.
Strategy #8 – Facebook & Google Black Friday activity
Should you advertise on Facebook or Google in 2023? Most business owners we talk to have made a decision before talking to us. Our recommendation? Always advertise on both platforms because they work together. In general, Facebook ads drives a lot of visibility that Google ads retargets.
They are numerous advantages for each advertising platform. Google ads allows you to find people looking for your product by searching for it. These people have more intent but you are dependant how many times people search. Facebook has more in-depth targeting & creative options to attract new buyers and help you gain affordable visibility and popularity.
Since we’ve spoken extensively about your Black Friday Facebook ads strategy, let’s talk a bit about your Google ads. We recommend you have at least the following campaigns to maximize your revenue during the BFCM period:
- A search campaign with an ad group of your brand name, another one with your competitors and one with generic keywords related to your product. You could also just have a dynamic search ad group.
- A Performance Max campaign with all the assets filled out for display, search, Gmail, Youtube and Shopping. This campaign is very powerful for eCommerce.
Final advice, make sure your ad copy, creatives and messaging is coherent with the ones in your Facebook ads. Your brand is one person and all its messages should be coherent. The danger is that a potential client doesn’t recognize you. In other words, don’t be afraid to recycle your ad copy from one paid media platform to the other.
Strategy #9 – Black Friday Facebook ads basics
The first rule is don’t make major edits to your ads during BFCM. If you make changes to your targeting or creative elements, it can reset the learning phase for your ad. This is the time when Facebook is adjusting your ad’s delivery to make sure it’s seen by people who are likely to convert. The learning phase can take a while to complete, and you don’t want to waste valuable time during the busy BFCM period.
The second rule is to double check your ad copy and images before launching. Make sure there are no typos in your copy and that your images don’t contain too much text. These small details can make a big difference in the success of your ads.
The third rule is to adjust your ad account spending limit. If you expect to spend more on your ads than usual during BFCM, make sure you increase your spending limit so that your high-performing ads don’t get cut off mid-campaign.
The fourth rule is stay within character limits. Keep your headline under 25 characters and your link description under 30 characters to avoid truncation. Consider the text-to-image ratio in your visuals. While Facebook has removed its “20% text in image” rule, it’s still recommended to keep the amount of text in your ad images to a minimum. Studies have shown that photos with less than 20% text tend to perform better. Don’t rely on organic reach.
Remember that organic reach on Facebook declining. It’s important to consider running paid ads to reach your audience. Facebook is still the most popular social media platform, with over 2.7 billion monthly active users. Running ads can help you connect with potential customers at the right time and place.
Easy to forget mistakes for your Facebook ads are the following:
- Not targeting properly because you haven’t clearly defined your targeting persona – demographics and psychographics.
- Having a poor strategy that isn’t multi channel and uses a funnel that isn’t optimized for conversions.
- Heavy use of discounts will only get you so far, you have to be creative with your offers – BOGO, Bundles, etc.
- Lack of campaign planning can result in forgetting many aspects that would make the campaign more successful. There are many moving parts to a successful Black Friday campaign – copy, creative, audience, structure, multichannel, offer and funnel.
How to set up your Black Friday Facebook ads campaign
Before creating your Black Friday Facebook ads campaign, you must do a basic checkup. This list is an easy to follow routine check to make sure you will start on the right foot:
- Your discounts are working properly on your website.
- Campaign structure is decided.
- Creatives and copy for ads are ready.
- Facebook pixel is firing properly.
Once that is verified, it’s time to click on the “create campaign” button in your ads manager. In the first step, you should select the following if you want to drive sales:
- Campaign objective: Sales
- Campaign Budget Optimization: turned on
- Daily budget: $25 minimum
- Date: select a start and end date.
- Recommendation: have only one campaign with multiple ad sets inside.
At the ad set level, you will want to have at least one ad set with no interest targeting your specified location and another with custom audiences. We also recommend using automatic placements unless you have specific creatives per placement.
When it comes to your ads, you want to have at least 3 creatives per ad set. This will enable you to find the top performing ad and not miss out on too much opportunity. We have shared a lot of Facebook ads creative ideas and you will find examples of ads lower in this article. Here’s a simple formula you could follow: carousel ad, emoji in your copy and clear value proposition.
Optimizing Facebook ads
Analyzing your Facebook ads campaign is very important. You have to look at the right metrics but also understand them to take the best decision. Data starts with questions and we often say that the question starts with your goals. For instance, if you want the highest ROAS, your question will be “which ad brings me the highest ROAS”.
Here’s a list of our favourite metrics to look at:
- Cost per result: simple depending on the goal of your campaign, it should represent the cost per purchase you are paying.
- Cost per link click: the amount of money you are paying to get a link click.
- Click through-rate: representing the amount of people who clicked on your ad on 1,000 as a percentage.
- Impressions: the total amount of people who saw your ad, not unique.
- Return On Ad Spend: your revenue divided by your ad spend.
- Conversion value: the total amount of revenue you generated.
- Add-to-cart: when someone clicks on your ad and adds a product to their cart on your website.
- Frequency: the average amount of time people saw your ad.
All in all, you must remember what each metrics mean and create your own set of rules for optimization. There’s no one size fits all approach but we always recommend to analyze in two steps. The first step is to analyze the micro metrics (clicks and add to carts) and the second step is to analyze the revenue (ROAS, conversion value).
Here’s an example of an optimization strategy you could use:
- Turn off ads if they have a bad CPC after $10 spent
- Turn off ads if they don’t have an add to cart after $15 spent
- Turn off ads if they don’t have a purchase after $50 spent
- Turn off ads if their ROAS is below 2x after $200 spent
A few suggestions
How do you go about improving the results of your Facebook ads Black Friday campaign? This is the question we ask ourselves every single time. You could increase your budget or even increase the size of your audience. What we recommend to scale is to start early and separate the Black Friday season into different segments. This is the best way to budget and make sure you spend as much as possible when results are good.
A lot of agencies are fans of custom audiences. They say Black Friday is all about warm audiences but it truly isn’t. Those same agencies focus on optimizing for view content instead of purchases or leads. These campaigns are interesting on a very large scale but the build up is usually too expensive to be worth anything.
| Period | Spending | ROAS | Revenue |
| Anticipation | $4,568.11 | 2.10 | $9,593.03 |
| Pre Black Friday | $134,022.20 | 3.59 | $481,139.70 |
| BFCM Week End | $30,301.02 | 2.99 | $90,600.05 |
| Pre Holiday | $6,748.19 | 1.99 | $13,428.90 |
| Holiday | $10,022.95 | 2.38 | $23,854.62 |
| Total | $185,662.47 | 3.33 | $618,616.30 |
The lead to email marketing Facebook ads strategy is another interesting one. You can create image ads with the objective of generating leads and when Black Friday happens, send them an email for them to buy. To verify the profitability of this strategy, we recommend calculating your revenue per subscribers. If during the BFCM week end, you made $100,000 from emails with a list of 10,000 then your RPS would be $10. It means that you are willing to get a lead for no more than $10 a piece.
Last little piece of advice, we recommend using automatic placements, campaign budget optimization and dynamic ads. Using Facebook’s Power 5 can really make a big positive difference in your final ROAS.
Black Friday Facebook Ads Examples
#1 – Black Rooster
What can we learn from this Black Friday Facebook ad example? We always recommend using a simple ad creative with the words Black Friday and the percentage of your discount.
Ad copy is simple and focusing on the USP of the brand. The creative also fits the branding (logo, colors and fonts) to create a compelling story.
#2 – Whiteknuckler
Whiteknuckler really made an impression with this Black Friday Facebook ad example. As an eCommerce brand, always make your product front and center while keeping your branding & tagline simple.
We also recommend using 1 emoji that truly represents your brand – the goal here is to create brand recognition. Do you know what your emoji is?
#3 – The Mellow Dog
Are you already wondering how to make your Black Friday Facebook ads text all funky? This ad works because it’s using social proof (star rating), a strong discount (60%) and a product-image (dog on the bed).
The only problem is that the design of the ad doesn’t look good (testimonial on white background, ad copy font change). Also, we think there are too many emoji’s for the ad to feel unique and not spammy.
#4 – DIFF
The process of creating a strong Black Friday Facebook ad is simple – bold image and huge discount. The best eCommerce ads have images that are high quality: popping colors and crisp pixels on the product.
They also offer a single message per creative – this one is very important. This ad is perfect for warm audiences – they just want to see the huge discount and remember how awesome the brand is.
#5 – Spoke
In the same Facebook ad style, this Spoke creative speaks for itself. You will get 20% off and the text doesn’t block anything from the image itself. The ad copy messaging is also focused on the discount and Black Friday. You never want to have too many messages – people are lazy.
Now 20% isn’t an amazing discount but you can see that they offer 100 days for people to try the product. You can always get creative with your Black Friday offer.
#6 – DIFF 2
A good example of using user generated content (UGC) in Black Friday Facebook advertising. You share an offer and add the social proof that UGC brings. The important thing to notice is how easy it is to see the promotion. You don’t need a long copy. In fact, we recommend to have the same messaging everywhere – headline, copy, image and description.
#7 – Ivory Ella
Ivory Ella runs a lot of Facebook ads offers during Black Friday. This carousel example focuses on giving a VIP discount on their best selling product. Making discounts available on your best selling product is usually much more rewarding than your less popular ones.
While not being in this ad, Ivory Ella also runs mystery box offers. We highly recommend those for Black Friday if you have small products. They will boost your AOV while providing tons of value to customers who don’t know where to start.
#8 – Target
We always recommend being creative when it comes to Facebook advertising – especially on Black Friday. You can easily guess the idea – a cute dog is excited about the Black Friday deals and brings them to its owner. The most important part is that the dog is branded with the logo and colors of Target for easy brand recognition.
#9 – Dollar Shave Club
You don’t need to use humour if it’s not coherent with your brand. Dollar Shave Club has always been humorous in their content approach. The important thing is that whoever you represent as a brand, you must show it in a creative way. In our experience, the only way to be creative is to have a truly authentic brand.
#10 – JackThreads
This ad respects all the Facebook ads for Black Friday basics. You must put the product at the front and keep a simple messaging in your copy and image. If you have a big offer like 60% off, we recommend putting it on as many places as possible.
#11 – Ray Ban
A simple rule of thumb is keep it simple but add one very unique element. As you can see, lots of yellow space, a percentage off and a cool mention of Black Friday in a dreamy font do the trick. Like all our other ads, focus on the messaging part is the more important thing.
#12 – Roborock
Scarcity, massive discount and branded colors are a good recipe for BFCM Facebook ads success. Beyond those 3 elements, having the product and logo of the brand add the final touch to drive sales. Your ad doesn’t need to look like an art piece, it needs to be focused.
#13 – Satoshi
A very simple ad that almost looks like stock image with a strong mention of BFCM and the discount. What’s particular about this BFCM Facebook ad is the simple crisp image. It’s so simple you actually want to know what it’s about. When you load your ads with too much, you take off the curiosity factor.
#14 – Fashion Nova
Don’t shy away from being provocative in your marketing if it’s what your brand represents. Remember, you must stand for something in order for customers to buy from you. We’ll just repeat it – put your discount forward in your BFCM Facebook ad campaign if it’s your biggest F’n sale ever.
#15 – Pretty Little Thing
Can there be a better offer for your Facebook ads campaign? 90% off with an extra 20% off. Bring your brand colors to the front with super bold text, your message can’t be clearer. As fashion brand, it’s also a good idea to use models representing your demographic to make them visualize themselves.
#16 – Nike
The advantage of having a great branding is that people recognize your colors, fonts and logo from a mile away. This BFCM Facebook ad example exudes a simple offer and a strong call-to-action. Not all brands can get away with such a short message but your ads should be as clear as Nike’s.
#17 – Yankee Candle
Do you have what this Black Friday Facebook ad does well? It plays with the Christmas theme because it fits with their products, candles. From the choice of emoji to the imagery, you can create a compelling story to create emotions in your customers. Your offer is only as strong as the emotions you create in people.
#18 – Best Buy
I strongly believe that most people don’t have to read this entire ad. You just see the image with the words “Cyber Monday starts now” to jump right ahead and check out what’s on sale. Show to people what they want to see, don’t play them.
#19 – Titan Fitness
When it comes to fitness equipment ads, you have to incorporate motivating images in the mix. They have to stay realistic but also make your customers dream. Your deal is what will push people to think about buying but the strong image is what will make them buy in the end.
#20 – Tommy Hilfiger
This is a Facebook ad example from Tommy Hilfiger in Morroco. We actually like exploring ads from other countries because we believe creativity has no borders. The ad has some “street style” into it, the offer is well done but the call-to-action could be better. We see the locations but could we invite people to visit more clearly?
#21 – Lululemon
This Black Friday Facebook ad is very simple but speaks volume. Lululemon showcases a very clean and minimalistic image focused on the product alongside a strong offer. What I like is their added touch of “consider your weekend, energized” which aligns with their health and fitness brand. Advertising is all in the details, be authentic.
#22 – Elementor
When it comes to SaaS advertising on Facebook, it’s all about discounts and plans. You want to give a lot to new potential users to sign them up because the pain of switching is often quite big. Elementor doesn’t shy away from posting very high discounts all year long, including during Black Friday. They don’t reinvent the wheel – all their creatives look alike with minor tweaks.
#23 – Ralph Lauren
Luxury plaid vibes with Ralph Lauren always get to us. A quite big Black Friday discount and a touch of style on the creative and copy. The image choice is very important here because there is a strong contrast with the white and the dark navy blue color. People often forget but choosing an image is sometimes the most important part of your Black Friday Facebook ad.
#24 – Levi’s
A jeans background, clear logo and a groovy Black Friday font, it’s all Levi’s needs to draw us in. The strategy is simple – you need to be a member to access this sale. While you will lose a lot of lazy people, you will attract a motivated and eager audience for your Black Friday Facebook ads. Buy one get one (BOGO) is also a very good strategy for fashion brands because people often want more than one item.
#25 – North Face
Never stop exploring but with 40% off. While we’re big fans of Facebook carousel ads, a still image with multiple products does the same job. It gives a feeling of multiple options and gets people in the vibe of shopping. The only thing we don’t like on this ad is the excessive use of text and conditions – keep that for the website’s landing page.
#26 – Calvin Klein
Let’s move into Cyber Monday Facebook ads and kick it off with Calvin Klein. The interesting strategy here is we’re not talking about discounts until you read the ad copy. In general, Cyber Monday is enough to get people curious enough to read on. We also like the “today only” scarcity added and the very simple background in the image. Empty space in your ads creative draws people in.
#27 – Petal & Pup
Back to the discount, final hour scarcity but a less “product-focused” Facebook ad. Petal & pup really put all their focus on the 50% off which is a great idea for your retargeting. You don’t want to run this ad to your cold audiences because they won’t know what you are selling. The ad copy is very focused, just like we want it.
#28 – Kiehl’s
If you have custom gift boxes, we highly recommend you advertise them on your Facebook ads during the holidays. A heavy focus on “biggest sale of the year” and “50% off” makes this ads creative really focused in terms of messaging. While not every brand does it, adding your logo in your creative looks a bit better in our opinion.
#29 – Brooklinen
A tad risky but not adding any product images can sometimes work wonders with your Facebook ads retargeting audiences. To make it work, you need to know your audience well enough to craft a message that speaks to them. Brooklinen created an entire campaign with similar creatives. A cohesive marketing strategy across all your channels goes a long way!
#30 – MeUndies
Popping colors, funky font and an offer-first messaging really matches the MeUndies brand. This Facebook ad example works really well because it’s cohesive and on-brand. Again, you want to run this ad to retarget people who already know your brand. As discussed earlier, on Cyber-Monday, you want to use your custom audiences and not cold because the CPM will get quite high.
Want to maximize your Black Friday Facebook ads?
With that much information, you’re bound to be more prepared for the Black Friday season. The key is to plan ahead all the parts of your strategy. The best time for sales is usually a bit earlier than Black Friday and you also have to count the time it takes to build your Facebook custom audiences.
In terms of creatives, make sure you stay true to your brand and innovative. The basic rule is to set one messaging, show your product well and mention your discount. Once you have those, it’s time create your campaigns and optimize them on a daily basis. Don’t get bogged down with a slow day, always look at a minimum of 7-day window.
Don’t hesitate if you need help for your Black Friday Facebook ads campaign, we’re here to help. Having with over 160+ brands, we definitely have a few ideas to help you grow, faster.