Get Ready for TikTok's Black Friday! How Can Cross-Border Sellers Stand Out?

The annual overseas shopping promotion event - Black Friday is coming! This year's Black Friday marketing time will last from 4:00 p.m. on November 13th to 11:59 p.m. on December 2nd, Eastern Time, for 20 days, which is hailed by industry insiders as the "longest Black Friday in history." Since TikTok Shop was officially launched in the U.S. last year, the gross merchandise volume (GMV) of each e-commerce event has continued to rise, becoming the golden stage for this year's Black Friday. Many cross-border merchants are gearing up to show their talents on TikTok Black Friday. So how can cross-border merchants seize the opportunity on TikTok Black Friday to increase customer orders and stand out from the fierce competition?

TikTok Shop's Black Friday Advantages

1.TikTok traffic bonus

According to a report released by Statista, as of April 2024, the number of monthly active users of the international version of TikTok has reached 1.582 billion. This huge number of active users provides convenient conditions for TikTok to participate in the Black Friday event. So far, there are more than 940,000 posts with the Black Friday tag on the TikTok platform.

In addition, TikTok's official survey data shows that 79% of TikTok users are looking forward to this year's upcoming Black Friday promotion, and half of the users said they would view Black Friday-related content through the TikTok For You Page. This shows that TikTok is not only a platform with huge traffic but also has high user activity and a strong willingness to participate, providing a huge market opportunity for cross-border merchants.

2.TikTok Shop platform policy support for Black Friday

TikTok Shop attaches great importance to Black Friday in 2024 and has launched a series of preferential policies to attract merchants. During Black Friday, the platform will provide more than 5 billion off-site exposures, three modules of on-site traffic, platform concessions and subsidies for goods, exclusive slots for celebrities and influencers, and incentive policies for achieving GMV targets, providing merchants with huge exposure and sales opportunities.

How can cross-border merchants develop effective TikTok Black Friday marketing strategies?

1. Content e-commerce marketing

Creative short video

As a short video platform, TikTok’s content creativity is the key to attracting traffic. On such a short video e-commerce platform, TikTok users are more looking forward to an entertainment experience on the platform, rather than simply hard advertising implantation. Therefore, the key to content marketing on TikTok is to naturally integrate products into entertainment videos and to achieve seeding through video content marketing, which can attract customers to place orders and establish an emotional connection with users.

Leverage TikTok hashtags and popular trends

The TikTok hashtag is an important way to gain initial traffic exposure. Cross-border merchants can use popular tags for marketing when posting videos. For example, the topic of Black Friday on TikTok has been very popular recently. Companies can refer to and use these related topics when posting videos, #tiktokshopblackfriday (947.2k), #BlackFridayDeals (431k), #blackfriday (51k), to increase the traffic of the video.

2. Overseas influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is particularly effective on TikTok. Businesses can collaborate with influencers to leverage their influence and creativity to create engaging short video content. These contents can not only increase brand awareness but also promote product sales.

3. Live e-commerce marketing

During TikTok's mid-year promotion, the sales of live broadcasts increased significantly, up to 139%. TikTok has been increasing its support for the live broadcast field. During the mid-year promotion, TikTok Shop issued more than 300,000 discount coupons for live broadcast products to encourage merchants to participate in live broadcasts. During this year's Black Friday, TikTok will lock in traffic subsidies and large discount coupons for key live broadcast rooms to help merchants achieve better sales performance during the Black Friday promotion.

For ordinary cross-border merchants, live streaming can not only display the characteristics of products more intuitively, but also better interact with customers and answer customers' questions on time, thereby improving conversion rates.

4. Advertising

During the Black Friday event, competition becomes more intense due to the large amount of traffic. Companies with a budget can try to increase their advertising budget to seize more favorable traffic positions and improve the effectiveness of advertising.

Key Strategies to Increase Customer Conversion Rates Using TikTok

1. Marketing urgency promotes sales

By pushing and notifying users of limited-time special offers, you can stimulate their desire to buy. You can also set a countdown on the product page to increase the customer's sense of urgency and prompt them to make a purchase decision as soon as possible, thereby effectively increasing the conversion rate of the product.

2. Strengthen customer service support

During the Black Friday event, the number of customer inquiries on TikTok will surge, which is a huge challenge for the customer service team. To reduce the pressure on customer service and provide customers with a quick response, the TikTok account can be integrated into the SaleSmartly backend to provide quick solutions, accelerate user ordering behavior, and reduce refunds and customer churn.

SaleSmartly is an omnichannel private domain communication tool that can aggregate accounts of multiple overseas social media platforms such as live chat, WhatsApp, WhatsApp Business API, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Line, Email, WeChat, etc. If merchants use other overseas social media for marketing during Black Friday, they can also integrate the accounts into the SaleSmartly backend to manage customer consultation information from various channels on one platform.

3. Guide related sales

On the customer ordering page, we recommend combinations of related products and provide certain discounts for the items that customers are guided to purchase, thereby increasing the average order value.