Web coupers: digital marketing tips your business needs to maximize sales on black Friday (small business) guide too black Friday

This is almost that season of the year again (it’s amazing how the year went so fast right?), and many people have started drawing up – or at least making mental notes of – their Christmas shopping lists in anticipation of the sales season. Traditionally, prices of goods and services increase in Nigeria as the end of the year approaches, but this trend has been changing in recent times thanks to the introduction of the Black Friday culture to Nigeria. The shopping season is traditionally opened with Black Friday sales followed by Cyber Monday and other sales campaigns. Usually, the big e-commerce players such as Jumia and Konga rule the day – with massive marketing and discounts. According to reports, last year Konga raked in over ₦1 billion in revenues during the Fall Yakata (Konga’s Black Friday equivalent) sales campaign. As a small business owner without a huge marketing budget to compete for share of mind and a limited budget for discounts, here are a few tips to maximize sales and make the best of this shopping season; Market to your Loyal Customers Acquiring new customers always requires more time and money than getting repeat customers to come back, and this is especially true during the holiday season. While the big players can afford to spend hundreds of millions on marketing and publicity for their Black Friday sales event, the reality is that as a small business owner you can’t afford to. Therefore it’s far cheaper to define a new customer acquisition strategy with your existing customers at the centre. Your strategy should have two broad aims; 1. Encourage existing customers to buy more. 2. Reward existing customers for bringing in new customers. An example of a great plan is to generate unique discount or referral codes for all your existing customers that gives new users who sign up and make a purchase with the codes discounts and also qualifies the referring customer for great discounts. Cross-Sell other SMBs on your website Another way to gain new users is to partner with other small businesses offering complementary and non-competing products or services. Such small businesses coming together can leverage on their collective numbers and individual reputation to drive awareness, split discounts and increase sales during the Black Friday sales season. A discount code can be generated for each business with which to drive traffic to the other business website. For instance, Deborah, a makeup artist can partner with Yomi, a photographer to provide a Wedding Promo Offer that includes bridal makeover and wedding photography at a reasonable price. They could even partner with Deji, a web designer to provide a website that contains a gallery of the wedding photos. So whichever way, it’s a win-win-win situation for the three of them and they get to leverage on their individual customers to drive sales and adoption for one another.