The Vicki Kotris Podcast

Episode 56: Is Black Friday Marketing Annoying or Genius?

• Vicki Kotris

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Can repetition really transform your marketing strategy? Discover how the power of repeated messages can turn curious onlookers into loyal customers, especially during high-stakes shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Through personal tales of how holiday shopping has evolved over the years and the impact of those catchy tunes we just can't shake, I uncover why consistent brand communication is more vital than ever. By sharing insights from a client in the real estate sector for the 60+ community, I illustrate how keeping your audience consistently informed can make all the difference.

Whether you're a business owner aiming to grow your social media following or simply seeking to add some sparkle to your marketing journey, join me for insights that promise to illuminate your path from cubicle to creator.

Thank you again for tuning into another episode of the Vicki Kotris Podcast! I want to support you, cheer you on a HYPE you up!! If you're celebrating anything (and I mean ANYTHING), send me a DM and let me highlight you on a recent episode.

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Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Vicki Kotris podcast. I am your host, none other than Vicki Kotris. I'm a retired corporate girly, two-time six-figure founder who's obsessed with brand building, sales generating and digital marketing. My mission with this podcast is to share the lessons I've learned, to help you make more magic and money with your own marketing efforts, and to feel inspired to continue on your own journey as a creator and entrepreneur. Here I'll share real life strategies, marketing tips and mindset shifts that have helped me go from cubicle to creator. This podcast is for business owners, creatives or those just looking for a little more sparkle in their day. So let's kick off this week's episode. Hello and welcome back.

Speaker 1:

I hope everyone had a wonderful and special Thanksgiving weekend. I had a relaxing, just sweet as it comes time with family and friends and made the best out of it, and I will tell you what. It is so cliche to say, but it is such a nice time to just reflect on the things that are important, the things that we are thankful and grateful for, which, for many of us, is to be surrounded by people that we love and be in good health and find something in our lives to be thankful and grateful for. So I felt all the feels this weekend, but what comes along with the feels of breaking bread with those that we love is also the reminder of the consumer driven world that we live in because of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So if you are like me, who signs up for every single list and coupon and exchange that we could possibly get, odds are your text messages, your inbox, your push notifications were flooded with every Tom, dick and Harry trying to sell you everything that you need and do not need. And I was a fly on the wall this Black Friday season. I didn't have anything that I particularly needed and I'll tell you what. If you are with me and you are a child of the 90s, then you remember the whole breaking down. You know the the door at Walmart at 3 am because they had an $89. You know 60 inch flat screen or something. And I was one of those crazy people because my mom and I turned it into a fun event. We would go shopping and have lunch and I always loved Black Friday shopping Like I thought it was so much fun. And now, as an adult, I feel like I've taken a little turn into I wouldn't say a minimalistic lifestyle, because I still love a good tchotchke, but being more intentional about the things that I buy and where I put my money.

Speaker 1:

But that is not what we're talking about here today. What we are talking about here today is what Black Friday and Cyber Monday continue to remind me and continue to teach me, and it is the perfect time of year for this message to be echoed, especially for you. If you see a large bump in holiday sales or you are in gifting or consumer based products, you know that are perfect for holidays. And the reminder is that repetition is the queen of all marketing strategies. And I'm thinking about this outside of the context of Black Friday, of how this makes sense and really hammering home this idea. Number one is today I'm feeding my son breakfast and we're turning on Miss Rachel as just kind of like some background noise. If you have little ones at home, if you watch Miss Rachel, you know that those damn songs will get stuck in your head all day long because they just say the same thing over and over and over again. So if you know sticky, icky, icky, icky, icky, icky, icky, icky bubble gum, which is the whole song, and that is how it continues, then you know how easy it is for that to get trapped in your brain and you to seriously hear it at 3 pm when you are thinking nothing of Miss Rachel.

Speaker 1:

And then I think about the same kind of principles that apply when I was a teenager, even younger. I would listen to a song on repeat and after hundreds of times of listening to it, I'd know every lyric. I would create a music video in my bedroom, like there was, there was like this, there was like this thing that clicked and I'm like, okay, well, now I'm the super fan and now I am transforming into Christina Aguilera in my bedroom with orange colored walls. And the reason why I bring up all of these different examples and why you may even be able to identify it because you have been targeted by all of these ads over the past week or so, specifically related to Black Friday is that repetition wins the game. So never assume that someone who has seen you once or seen your message in one way doesn't need to receive it in a new way. And I think there's two things that go along with this, because I help people create digital marketing strategies and specific social media content strategies that are very repetitious in nature but rooted in a what I like to call a monthly mantra that helps connect them back to their overall brand mission. And so when we break that up and talk about the repetition of content, is that new followers are coming in all the time that you may, even for small accounts, and I try to make that very clear that you do not need a big following to have a super huge impact on your business. So even if you have a small following of a couple hundred people and you're adding on two people per week let's say those two new people they may be the perfect customer for you. They may need the product that you are providing or selling, but they don't know what you do. They may have been brought into your account or brought into your ether. There's something else that you said which is fantastic. That means that you're creating content that converts, that engages, but now we need to start reminding them of what it is that we do.

Speaker 1:

So, for example, I was working with one of my clients and last week we were talking about OK, what you know? What are we going to say? What do you specialize in? So she happens to specialize in helping the 60 plus community find homes in their next phase of life because she's a realtor. So you know people who. When you're looking for a family home, you might need that five bedroom, three bathroom, versus 60 plus. You're in retirement, you want someone that's going to come cut your lawn. You maybe only want two bathrooms to clean. We're going to, we're going to minimize the amount of work that it takes for us to actually live in our space, and so when I'm talking to her about what kind of content that we're going to create, a lot of it was rooted in what was what will speak to the 60 plus community, and she had asked well, won't this be kind of old, like won't this get stale? Cause that's all we're promoting.

Speaker 1:

And I think that surface level, it's easy to say oh well, I want, I want to have 80 different messages and I want everyone to know that I'm this and I do this and I can do this and I might do this, um, or if they gave me a chance, I could do this. And what we're doing is we're not being specific and talking directly who our ideal client is, and once we and we've talked about this before is honing in on that ideal client allows you to create a message that can be repetitious without being stale and without being boring, because nobody wants that. So your job as a entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a marketer, is to figure out how to tell that story time and time again, using different creative storytelling techniques, using different mediums, and it's always going to be an experiment of what works best for you and what is going to engage that ideal audience to you, your brand or your product. Okay, so I said there were two ways that we're using repetition. One, as a recap, is we are reminding our ideal customer why we are the expert, what it is that we do that makes us so well suited to give them this product or service, and we need to do it consistently and often so that we are reminding our customers of that on the daily. However we choose to engage and I don't I just because I help clients on this on different social platforms, doesn't mean that I think that is the only way to connect with your customer. I think you can do that through weekly email campaigns, through newsletters. I think you can do that through podcasts, you can do this through live events, you can do this through webinars. Whatever client attraction strategy feels the best for you is what is going to connect people directly to you.

Speaker 1:

The second reason repetition is important is rooted in sales psychology. We as humans do not see something once, typically, and say we are going to go ahead and buy this product. There are certainly industries and product designers that have benefited off of that feeling of urgency or those impulsive purchases, and certainly I am one of those consumers Like, if I am out and I see a cute shirt at Target or something like that, when I really just ran in to get like you know, you know dish soap or something, then I buy it. So there are certainly impulsive decisions that are being made, depending on our mood and all different things that are happening in our life. But primarily, buying behavior is rooted in seeing something multiple times, and a study has proven that this is eight times that we need to be exposed to something eight times before we make a purchase. And so what that means is, when you are a small business owner and you don't have the budget of Nike, where you can create a $5 million commercial on the Superbowl, where you can, where you can run incredibly detailed online ads to be shown up on absolutely every single site of your customer, you have to be a little bit more scrappy and intentional of how you are going to connect with your audience.

Speaker 1:

So that's where repetition becomes so key because, again, we are not in the business of assuming that everyone knows that we, what we do and how we do it. We have to be the ones to tell them. And as, creating three businesses over the past seven years, I know how scary that is. I know how scary it is to plant your flag and say this is what I do, this is me when you've made approximately $0, you are not this person. You are moonlighting as this person who is creating this business or brand, and you're just waiting for the day when money rains from the sky and you can say, yep, it all worked out and I did great. And I am still waiting for that day. But I will tell you that it feels like that day is a lot closer the more you keep going and the more that you affirm to yourself that you are this expert in whatever your product or service is. So, since we don't have these multi-million dollar advertising budgets, we have to remember that we have to create a strategy that works best for us, especially if we use the holiday season as our example. People need to know about our product and we get to decide how they find out about it.

Speaker 1:

I follow this influencer on Instagram who talks a lot about using digital marketing and she has a digital marketing course. Okay, so I I connect with with her material. I like her. I think she's a fairly interesting person and she has a um. She had a course that I, a free course that I signed up for, so I immediately got added to her marketing emails. I get emails from her pretty regularly, at least once a week, but during Black Friday she was doing two emails a day and then she was doing up to three text messages a day that said the sale is ending, it's time to buy. It will never be this low. Sale is ending, it's time to buy. It will never be this low.

Speaker 1:

Now I know, I feel in my own business, that there is a difference between being a little bit scammy and just letting people know what you do and you have to find what your, what your range is, what your scale is. I don't necessarily think that I would be texting people three times a day, but I'm going to tell you that the psychology again rooted in that eight times someone needs to see something before making a purchase. It did make me go and research what it is that she was selling. Take a look back and say is this something that I think would be valuable to me? To look back and say is this something that I think would be valuable to me? So there is so much truth to that of being.

Speaker 1:

When you say that the saying is like being in the right place at the right time, it doesn't mean you accidentally fell into this hole. That dropped you into the right place at the right time. It means that all of the work on the back end and all of the seeds that you planted up until this point worked for you so well that they brought you the right opportunity. And that's what I think we should all keep in mind as we're using the holiday season to continue to build our pipelines, to continue to market our products, or even for that 2025 sales strategy of how you're going to get in front of those customers, because building that client attraction strategy is really just picking the right ways that you want to connect.

Speaker 1:

If it's all through social and you want to go all in, then let's start talking about organic marketing campaigns. Let's start talking about how you would want to use some paid ads to be able to boost your presence. If you're doing social plus email marketing, maybe you have a podcast. There's no right or wrong way to do this. It's just how you best show up and present yourself so that you can best tell your story, so that you can bring your incredible energy, service and product to your customer and help change their lives. So if you have seen many examples of Black Friday, I encourage you to be a fly on the wall and see how you can use some of those in your own strategy and planning for the new year and the holiday season. As always, if there's any way that I can support you or talk about growing organically on social, would love to help. You, would love to connect. Please shoot me a message and, as always, I hope you have a fantastic week.