5-Minute Friday | Black Friday Edition

A lil' check in on how you're doing on this, the day of your daughter's biggest sale of the year.

Well, today’s the day. The biggest sale of the year for many businesses. And it’s a day that can be very stressful.

So much so that a lot of little things that can help whatever promotion you have going be successful can get missed. So today’s tips are a check-in to: 1. see how you’re hanging in there, and 2. go through a checklist to make sure you’re getting the most out of this big marketing push.

Also, I want to remind you that even if you are doing all of these things and your sales still aren’t where you hoped they would be, don’t beat yourself up too much.

There is *a lot* of noise around this time of year, and a lot of people are choosing to opt out of consumerism this year, for financial, personal, or political reasons. As a small winery, it’s hard to compete with the louder voices in every other industry but that doesn’t mean you can’t wiggle your way into people’s brains with repetition.

Hence today’s 5-minute tip:

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Your 5-Minute Task: Make Your Sale Impossible to Miss

Pick one of these (or, if you’re feeling really wild, you can do all of them!):

1. Update your bio link on your profile to your Black Friday offer.

I recommend skipping the LinkTree if you can and instead linking directly to the sale. The fewer distractions and clicks your customer has to make, the better. You can go back to using the multiple links once the promotion is over.

If you DO choose to use a LinkTree or Instagram’s multiple-link feature, make sure it is the very first link on the list.

Bonus: If you pay for Meta Verification on Instagram (or have a paid LinkTree account), you can add photos to the links and make your primary link stand out:

FOXEN is Meta-Verified, and so we can not only add supporting photos to our links to make them stand out, but we can also highlight the primary link so it stands out even more. We want to make it so our customers use as few brain cells as possible when purchasing from us.

2. Pin a post about your sale to the top of your Instagram grid.

Pin whatever post you’ve already made about your promotion so it’s easy to find. This is the easiest thing on this list to do, assuming you’ve already made the post! Just tap the three dots in the upper right-hand of the post (or long-press on the post from your Instagram grid) and select “Pin to main grid” from the menu.

3. Add your sale to your Instagram Story Highlights.

This helps people who don’t check stories in real time or even folks who are binging your content or searching for you. If you don’t already have a highlight created for your wine specials, just go to the plus sign on the upper right of your profile and select “Highlights” from the menu. Or if the Story is live, just tap the “… More” in the bottom right of your story and select “highlight” from the menu.

4. Make your homepage banner painfully clear.

If someone lands on your website today, they should immediately know:
—what the sale is
—how long it lasts
—what to click
—how to get the discount (if it’s not already applied at checkout)

5. Put your promotion on your homepage above the fold.

People don’t scroll as much as we wish they did. If there’s something you want them to buy today, put it at the top of your homepage (yes, literally replace your “Committed to Excellence” “Learn More” b.s.—which, by the way, is not a compelling headline, but that’s a topic for another day—with your primary call to action.)

Out of all of the websites I searched to show an example of this, Willamette Valley Vineyards was the only one who has this at the top of their homepage.

Why this works

On Black Friday, people are overwhelmed and getting hit left and right with Black Friday deals. They want the path of least resistance, so your job today is to remove at least one friction point for them!