You Ask, I Answer: Black Friday Marketing Trends?

In today's episode, Kat and about thirty other people asked, uh, what's up with the Black Friday ads and deals? Why is this stuff starting earlier every year? What's what's going on with it? Well, one of my favorite expressions, I can't remember where I heard it. I'm not sure that I heard it anywhere actually, is that markets follow wallets.

Markets follow wallets. If there wasn't demand for it, if c customers weren't doing it or demanding it, markets wouldn't sell it. Right. We see that for the most part, in the long term, uh the laws of economics hold pretty well, supply and demand. So if customers want Black Friday deals earlier and earlier, the market's gonna fulfill that demand.

Particularly since there's so such intense competition for the customer's share of wallet. And everyone, of course, is uh is aiming at uh the the retail mega giants, you know, Walmart and Amazon. What's interesting is that uh Amazon and Alibaba and the many other companies are now looking at trying to create their own shopping holidays earlier in the year so that they can get share of wallet earlier. Amazon of course created Prime Day, Alibaba has singles day. And these are multi-billion dollar exercises, but for the average uh retailer, that's that's not something that they can do, so they have to go with Black Friday.

And so the ads come out a little bit earlier to try and uh garner interest. Now, one of the best tools to do this kind of research is Google Trends, because of course it's hooked into Google search data, which is still the largest search engine on the planet, and it informs us uh very well of what the consumer is doing, what the customer is thinking about. So let's let's bring this up here. Here we have the Black Friday uh search terms, uh, three of them. Black Friday, Black Friday, and the year and Black Friday deals.

And the year one is important because even though we all know Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, we know Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November, people still don't know the date, so they do search for that. In fact, if you go to a keyword search tool here's in RFs, you can see that the years keep showing up over and over and over again. It's the years and major retailer names are the top search terms, and these are terms that have uh crazy, crazy, crazy amounts of search volume. So when we look at just the last 12 months, in fact, let's dig into the last 90 days here in Google Trends. We see that interest in Black Friday deals really hit an inflection point right at the end of October.

So retailers understandably have been you know pitching their wares all through the month to try and garner more and more interest. And of course, it hits a major inflection point uh really about last week. Uh so it is today is the 27th as I'm recording this, so last Wednesday, the week before Black Friday, that's when you really start to see that interest to start to hockey stick up. So we know that here we're talking almost uh almost a month out is when interest starts to peak. Now, if we expand out our time frame, let's look at five years back, five years back, you can see the trend of relative search volume in general continuing to increase year after year after year, and there's no reason to expect that this year will be any different.

If we jump back to 2004, which is as old as far back as you can get, again, pretty clear, obvious trend here about what's going on with Black Friday. It is getting noticeably larger and larger every single year. So markets follow wallets. This is why we have so much more holiday shopping advertising. And I can't blame our uh marketers and sales for doing that, even though as a consumer you get that kind of tired of it.

Now, what do you take away from this? A couple things. Number one, markets follow wallets. Remember that. Number two, use this type of research to try and figure out why people do something.

I love using search data because search data tells us about implicit intent. If you did not care about Black Friday deals, you would not Google for it. Right? It's not something you would Google for. You'd be Googling for, I don't know, Taylor Swift's latest song.

Whatever it is that you have an interest in, you have to make the effort to go out and search for this thing. If I were a specific retailer, uh let me remove some stuff here. Let's do Amazon Black Friday here. If I was Amazon, for example, I would be looking to try and capitalize on uh when people in specific are searching for my company's name and the Black Friday uh projection. Let's scale this back here.

And so last year, Amazon really got started right around uh end of October this year. Uh this year is a about a week later. Uh again, the holidays a week later this year, so it makes total logical sense. So you have a calendar to operate with. Now, what are the search trends in your industry?

What are the search trends that uh would give you a head start? Right? What if you wanted to get ahead of the trend? You would start advertising just when consumer interest is starting to pick up, but not when it's full-blown hockey stick. You also don't want to start too early when there's no interest, because logically there's nothing happening there.

Um, and people might make mental note of it, but won't take any action on it. So your your action starts at that inflection point when the interest begins to peak. Now, if you want to get really fancy, you can use um predictive analytics, you can use time series forecasting to forecast the next year ahead based on your last five years of data to see when next year will this happen, so that you can plan ahead now, a year in advance. That's what I do for a lot of our our customers of Trust Insights do predictive forecasts so that we can say like this is when in the next year, specifically, you need to get things rolling. So there's a time when you plan, then you prepare, and then you publish, and then you promote.

And you have to do that according to when the market is moving. So markets follow wallets. Follow the customers' wallets. So that's why we have so much Black Friday advertising. The trend is inescapably upwards.

The uh the consumer is looking for more of those deals. And uh and until the consumer stops looking for it, stops wanting those deals, you're not gonna see an end to that advertising. So that's why it is. Uh as always, please leave your comments in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter, and we'll talk to you soon.

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