Black Friday for small businesses: do the work in October

Black Friday is 27 November this year. Just over seven weeks away, and now is when the work should happen.

Not because you need seven weeks. Because you won't have the time in November, and because what decides how that week goes is settled long before it starts.

I'm not going to hand you a list of campaign ideas. There are plenty of those. This is about what actually goes wrong for small businesses in late November, and what you can do about it in one afternoon in October.

First: should you take part at all?

Most people skip this question, and it's the most important one.

If you sell something where customers compare on price directly, Black Friday is hard going. You're competing with companies that can lose money on an offer because they make it back somewhere else. You can't.

If what you sell is really about the relationship or the expertise, a treatment, a service, a craft, then a discount week is usually the wrong tool. You teach your customers to wait for a lower price, and that bill arrives in January.

Two things work better for that kind of business. Either do nothing and say so out loud, because "we don't do Black Friday, our price is the same all year" is a message in itself. Or offer something that isn't a discount: an extra service, priority booking, a package that only exists that week.

If you decide to sit it out, you can stop reading here. It's a perfectly reasonable decision and you've just saved yourself a week of your life.

What AI actually helps with

Not the ideas. Ask for campaign suggestions and you'll get the same ten bullet points everyone else gets, and it shows.

What AI is good at here is volume and preparation. Black Friday is rarely a hard marketing problem. It's a logistics problem with a lot of text in it.

You need the same message in five formats. An email, a couple of posts, a banner, a text message, an answer for whoever asks in the shop. Writing it once and then adapting it five times is dull and eats a whole day. That's exactly the kind of work to hand over.

But write the offer itself, in your own words, once. Ask for the variants afterwards. The order matters. Do it the other way round and you get five variants of nothing.

Three things to prepare in October

This is the work, and it takes one afternoon.

The offer and all its formats. Decide what you're doing, write it in one sentence, produce the variants now. In November you shouldn't be drafting, you should be publishing.

The answers to the questions you'll get. They're the same every year: does this apply to that too, how long does the offer last, can I exchange it afterwards, will it arrive before Christmas. Write finished answers to the five most common ones. That's the single biggest time saving of the whole week.

The follow-up. Write it now, while you're calm. More on that below.

What goes wrong every year

Not the campaign. Customer service.

You spend three weeks getting people to get in touch, and then they do. All of them. Over two days. And you end up writing the same reply for the eighteenth time at eleven at night instead of selling.

That's why point two above matters more than point one. A mediocre offer with prepared answers beats a brilliant offer where you can't get back to anyone.

Take the number of questions you got last year and double it. If that's more than you can handle in an evening, prepare the answers.

The week after is worth more than the Friday

This is where almost everyone drops it.

You get a pile of new customers all at once. Most of them heard of you for the first time that week, bought at a reduced price, and will have forgotten you by Christmas unless you do something about it.

Write that email in October. A thank you, a reminder of what you do when there isn't a sale on, and a reason to come back that isn't another discount. Put it in drafts now, so it goes out on 30 November instead of joining the pile of things you meant to do.

The margin on Black Friday is bad by design. The money is in whoever bought once buying again in February.

A sensible October plan

Decide this week whether you're taking part, and write the offer in one sentence.

Set aside one afternoon before the month ends. Produce the five formats, the five answers and the follow-up email. Put it all in one place.

Then don't touch it until November.

If you'd like me to look at what your week actually involves and where AI saves you time, not just in November but the rest of the year, book a free workflow audit. Thirty minutes, no cost.