Black Friday

By Lynn Viljoen
3 min read
Black Friday

Feeling the pressure to offer a Black Friday offer in your business or do you feel like you are missing out? 

Black Friday in Australia is no longer a single-day race — it’s a weeks-long promotional season. In 2025, shoppers are doing more research, seeking value, and expecting seamless experiences across mobile, social and offline touchpoints. 

If your Black Friday strategy still starts in November, you’re already behind. Let’s map out how to stay ahead — and how we can help.

Trends & Context for 2025 

  • Black Friday is now a major retail moment in the year, often eclipsing Boxing Day in spend. Being close to Christmas, consumers love to use this for gifting or large appliance purchases before the festive season. Service businesses should not be discouraged as you can tap into the market as well that wants to paint their house, fix up the interiors or invest in a home upgrade before the festive season. 

  • This year, consumers are more deliberate in their purchases, they may spend as much as last year but regardless they  are taking a longer research phases, higher expectations on site performance, and they are looking for value over a big discount. 

  • Getting closer to Black Friday, Ads for “Black Friday” and related keywords become more expensive closer to D-day — launching early helps with cost efficiency as you can get your customers on a waitlist for your sale. 

  • AI, generative search and chat assistants are increasingly being used in product discovery. Well structured pages with well thought out content (FAQs, comparison lists, schema markup) may be surfaced more in AI summaries. 

  • Omnichannel expectations are high — shoppers expect offers to carry across web, social, in-store and apps. 

Best Practices & Tactics

Phase What to Focus On Tactics
Pre-season (Oct) Build awareness, collect audiences, tease offers Launch a “Countdown to BF” teaser campaign, use quiz / polls to drive engagement, promote early sign-ups for VIP access
Ramp-up (Late Oct – Early Nov) Warm up audiences, test creative & messages A/B test hero offers (flat % off vs bundling vs gifts), build remarketing pools, test copy with urgency
Peak (Week of BF → Cyber Monday) Execute with precision, scale what works Use dynamic countdown timers, rotate ad creative daily to avoid fatigue, monitor pacing hourly, shift budget to top-performing audiences
Post-sales / Retention Re-engage, extend value, convert new customers to repeat Trigger post-purchase flows, cross-sell, push limited “after party” offers, start remarketing for Christmas



Specific tactics worth trying:

  1. Tiered / early access discounts — give your best customers first crack (e.g. 24-hour head start) before opening to everyone. If you sell a higher value item, make this period longer for your customers to give them time to evaluate.

  2. Bundles and gift sets — combine popular and slower-moving SKUs to raise average order value without eroding margins.

  3. Flash deals with scarcity reinforcement — limited time or limited stock deals can create urgency.

  4. Shoppable content / live commerce tie-ins — use social commerce (TikTok, Reels, Instagram Shop) to let users tap to buy during content consumption.

  5. Influencer & UGC amplification — creators releasing real-world usage or “top picks” content, then amplifying it with paid partnership ads.

  6. Optimised product feeds + rich schema — ensure sale pricing and metadata are properly formatted for Google, Meta and AI discovery.

  7. Checkout and payment optimisation — simplify form fills, support PAY-IN-4 / Buy Now Pay Later, support digital wallets.

  8. Failover / contingency buffers — pre-approve alternate creative offers, caps, and shifts in pacing in case early performance deviates.

What to Avoid

  • Starting too late or waiting for “the weekend”

  • Discounting blindly without margin control

  • Creative fatigue (using the same assets too long)

  • Ignoring micro-conversions (like adds-to-cart or newsletter signups)

  • Broken or slow checkout experience


If you’d like to walk through your Black Friday plan, validate offers, pacing, creative or risk mitigation — book a session with us. Let’s make sure your 2025 plan is watertight.