Hello! I'm Luna, a marketer at Spray, bringing you insights that help in practical work.
Do you know 'Black Friday,' the flagship event of the year-end shopping season that starts on the last Friday of November?
Starting from major US retailers' discount events, Black Friday has now established itself as the world's largest shopping festival that both domestic and international consumers eagerly await.
For brands, it's an opportunity to simultaneously pursue brand awareness enhancement and new customer acquisition, while for consumers, it's a special season to purchase products previously added to their carts at reasonable prices.
The purchasing fervor during Black Friday is hotter than ever.
Since it's a period when purchase conversions actively occur, most brands engage in fierce competition by deploying aggressive discount promotions.
However, since large-scale discounts inevitably increase cost burdens, Black Friday campaigns absolutely require sophisticated strategic design considering ROAS above all.
So what strategies should brands use to prepare for the Black Friday season?
One effective method to make our brand stand out amid fierce discount competition is securing sufficient UGC.
The reason is clear: UGC forms trust and empathy for brand messages, significantly influencing purchase decisions.
In other words, consumers' voluntary reviews (UGC) have stronger persuasive power than what brands directly communicate (BGC).
Therefore, if you accumulate UGC before Black Friday, consumers will consider purchases already having positive perceptions and social proof about our brand.
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What is 'Social Proof'?
A phenomenon where people follow others' behaviors or opinions when making decisions in uncertain situations. Here, UGC acts as powerful social proof containing actual user experiences, becoming a key trigger significantly influencing consumers' purchase decision-making.
Since UGC is highly effective in inducing consumer purchase conversions, securing it sufficiently in advance is important.
One of the most efficient methods to accumulate this is influencer seeding marketing.
By collaborating with influencers to create content like product unboxing videos and actual usage reviews before promotions, consumers naturally encounter this content and form favorable impressions of brands and products.
As a result, they perceive it as 'a product I definitely want to buy this time' before the sale, add it to their cart in advance, and convert to purchases when the sale begins.
As one example, domestic cosmetics brand COSRX achieved great results with influencer-based Black Friday marketing.
Before and during Black Friday, they provided products to influencers to create and share video content containing discount news and usage reviews. They particularly provided COSRX products to US local YouTubers to communicate Black Friday discount information.
As a result, COSRX's popular product 'Snail Mucin Essence' achieved first place in Amazon's beauty category sales after Black Friday, recording explosive sales volume.
This case clearly shows how local consumers' voluntary review content can build greater trust and lead to sales growth compared to paid advertising.
As mentioned earlier, since advertising efficiency (ROAS) is key in events with large discounts, strategically utilizing secured UGC to increase conversion rates and reduce unnecessary costs is important.
One effective method is repurposing UGC secured through influencer seeding as Meta ad creative.
In fact, ad creative utilizing UGC shows efficiency over 4 times higher than regular advertising and can maximize campaign performance.
Therefore, consider strategies actively utilizing content created by influencers as advertising creatives in major campaigns like Black Friday.
However, in this case, clearly establish licensing agreements for secondary use and be careful to avoid copyright infringement issues.
During periods when traffic surges like Black Friday, attention must also be paid to brand website operations.
One method to effectively increase purchase conversion rates on brand websites is UGC-based user reviews.
Since many e-commerce consumers refer to other customers' reviews and ratings before actual purchases, effectively reflecting UGC on product detail pages to build trust is effective.
Rather than just listing text reviews, placing customer-uploaded photo or video reviews together can provide consumers with more practical purchase decision materials.
In other words, UGC created by consumers like me acts as powerful trust assets.
Therefore, placing such content throughout brand websites and actively utilizing UGC secured through influencer collaborations is advisable.
So when should such UGC marketing preparation begin?
To conclude, preparation should start much earlier, not just before Black Friday.
When sufficient positive UGC accumulates before major promotions and is continuously exposed across various channels, consumers naturally perceive the brand's products as 'popular items.'
Conversely, if UGC marketing hastily begins just before or during promotions, there's high risk that content reach will decrease, already buried among countless ads and messages.
Therefore, when preparing for major sales like Black Friday, it's advisable to secure UGC in advance and consistently expose it over time to create a foundation that can lead to purchase conversions simultaneously with campaign launch.
Indent Corp.