Black Friday. Stress, anxiety, excitement. It kind of reminds me of theater.

You recruit and cast your best actors, do the rehearsals, perfect your blocking, and finesse the costumes and makeup. All of that preparation for a relatively short amount of time that’s going to make or break everything.

Fact is – Black Friday, Cyber Monday, pretty much the entirety of Q4 is pure madness for everyone in the industry. And BFCM will absolutely throw you curveballs you’ll need to be ready for.

However, a lot of teams make it harder on themselves than it needs to be. Your budget flies out the window on last-minute collaborations. Your gifted products are sent into the void, never to be heard from again. Your team burns the midnight oil managing campaigns and collecting campaign performance metrics.

We call this the Black Friday Chaos Tax. The more chaotic your campaigns are during BFCM, the more of this tax you’re going to end up paying – one way or another.

I polled over 50 influencer marketers about how they managed their BFCM campaigns, and I found that the Black Friday Chaos Tax has such a deep impact in so many ways.

What is the Black Friday Chaos Tax?

The Black Friday Chaos Tax is the price you pay when the chaos blurs your vision. It can manifest in a few ways – but most often, it ends up trickling out of your budget (or your free time).

Missing out on opportunities:

Creators book out so early for BFCM. Even those tried-and-true creators with whom you have a solid relationship are likely going to be fielding offers months in advance.

Influencers have so much demand, their supply goes down and their prices go up. This means the later you book them, not only do you run the risk of your top-performers being overbooked, but you’re looking at potentially paying more than you otherwise would.

In fact, almost all of the marketers we polled said they’d missed out on an opportunity to book the influencer they wanted for BFCM. The biggest reason? Their fees were too high or out of their budget.

Many marketers also said that often, influencers were either already under exclusivity, or they just simply didn’t have the availability to add yet another brand to their roster for the season.

How do you combat that? Lock in your best and brightest ASAP – and it would help to have them on a retainer. This will save your budget during BFCM, and make sure your creators are being adequately compensated – a win-win.

Marketers needing to work overtime to compensate

Last year, on average, influencer marketers worked an extra 7.5 hours per week during their BFCM campaigns.

Mostly, that extra time was spent watching their campaigns unfold, staying on top of emails with influencers, and collecting data for reporting.

For some, keeping campaigns on track meant checking socials hourly, or being glued to their inboxes for updates and putting out the eventual fires.

Black Friday chaos leads to stressful campaigns

“Intense, hectic, chaotic, overwhelming, and stressful.” This is how most marketers described their BFCM experience. The intense pressure for their campaigns to succeed was the most commonly cited stressor for BFCM – with over 71% of marketers ranking it their top overwhelming stressor.

In fact, I asked marketers to rank how overwhelmed they felt during their last BFCM campaign, and only a quarter of them felt like they were handling things well.

More importantly, feeling unprepared or like you’re constantly putting out fires puts you in a reactive headspace, rather than a strategic headspace. And if you’re only reacting, you’re not able to tweak your programs throughout the holiday season and maximize your returns.

I don’t need to wax poetic about the effects of stress on us. We all know them: we miss details, send the wrong product to the wrong person, and we mess things up.

Whether you feel it in your budget, your health, or your personal life (or lack thereof) – the Black Friday Chaos Tax makes a real impact on every aspect of your team.

Here’s the problem: You can’t eliminate the tax completely.

Black Friday goes hand-in-hand with chaos. There are always going to be “surprises.”

So what do you do? How can you reduce that chaos and thus, the tax that comes along with it?

Yes, I know. But you need to start early. No, earlier.

If you look up any article on how to prepare for Black Friday, they’re all going to tell you the same thing: start early.

Well, I’m going to do something wildly innovative. Because we’re not like other articles here.

Ready?

You need to start early. I know. Groundbreaking.

But, however early you think “early” is, it’s not early enough.

We asked our marketers to lay out their timelines for us. I found that, on average:

• By late July: Began planning their campaigns
• By mid August: Had a finalized plan for BFCM (at least 75%)
• By mid August: Began outreach to creators
• By mid September: Hired at least 75% of their creators
• By late October: Had their BFCM content live

Here’s the thing, the earlier you start thinking about BFCM, the less of the Black Friday Chaos Tax you’ll pay.

• Start ASAP (preferably, before September): Locking creators in early means they won’t be under exclusivity, unavailable, and chances are – you may not pay as high a fee as if you contacted them in October.
• Get at least 80% of your plan figured out before outreach: Having a solid plan and budget means you can start getting your products out well in advance, and vet creators throughout the summer in preparation for BFCM.
• Spend time onboarding tools/processes now: Investing in and onboarding tools that will make your life easier today will reduce extra hours worked over the BFCM period.

And on that note – it’s time for you to do a Pre-BFCM prep campaign.

Do a pre-BFCM prep campaign

You’re doing campaigns throughout the year. The summer and early fall is the time for you to get as many eyes on your products as you possibly can.

We asked marketers if they did any kind of prep campaign going into BFCM, and just under 40% said that they run them in September, focusing mainly on brand awareness.

There are a few facts that we know about how people shop for BFCM:

• They begin holiday shopping earlier and earlier (45% shop before November, according to the NRF)
• They prioritize the brands they already know – often with a plan for who they’re going to check for deals

So if we know that shoppers start earlier, and they already have a mental list of who’s discounts they’re looking out for – it’s really important for your brand to be part of that mental list.

Running a pre-BFCM prep campaign has a ton of helpful benefits:

• It helps get audiences primed for your products and brand
• It helps pre-recruit and pre-vet influencers you’ll want to collaborate with for BFCM
• It helps for budgeting – as you can likely negotiate lower BFCM rates with a retainer carrying you through BFCM
• You can use it in a variety of ways: contests, increasing social media following, email capture, etc.

But, if you’re going to do this, you need to keep this critical point in mind:

Do not, and I mean absolutely do not, use any holiday or BFCM language, imagery, or even the slightest whiff of holly leaves or pine cones.

Shoppers are filled with blinding rage when they hear even the mere mention of Mariah Carey before Halloween. If you’re going to do a pre-BFCM campaign, call it an End-of-Summer or Fall campaign. If not, you risk fatiguing your customers long before they have the chance to shop.

Take a page from Amazon – they call it “Prime Day October.” Most other retailers opt for “Fall Sale” or something similar. Just keep the holiday themes tucked away until at least November.

Plan for 80%, leave 20% for the inevitable surprises

Rigidly plan flexibility into your campaigns. Things are going to go wrong, posts will be weird, and sometimes, they may not go live at all.

But, having a solid plan going in will help you smooth out wrinkles over the course of your campaign, and help reduce the stress.

• Keep everyone, including stakeholders, aware of timelines. An anonymous marketer mentioned keeping their BFCM campaigns on track by building a centralized timeline with check-ins across everyone involved, from stakeholders to influencers.
• Iron out any red tape, logistics issues, or anything else internally that might cause friction on the day of. This means get content pre-approved, get marketing materials worked out long before BFCM, and make sure you have enough stock of any product you’re promoting. A few marketers mentioned running out of stock for products while content was still going live for them.
• Factor in delays as part of your timeline. This is a huge one. Delays are going to happen. Things are going to be held up. If your campaign is planned down to the minute with little to no wiggle room, and one influencer gets held up, you’re going to have a bad time.
• Make sure you have all of your tracking in place (and tested). Whether that means 10 solid go-to spreadsheets or an influencer marketing tool, it needs to be ready, and both your team and any internal stakeholders need to be aware of how to use those processes come BFCM. The last thing you want to do is to be onboarding brand new software with BFCM a few days out.

For example, one anonymous marketer from our survey mentioned that you need to be ready to roll with the punches. Apparently, an influencer accidentally posted the discount from another brand to their brand’s post during peak traffic hours. Not only did it cause confusion in the comments, but it led to a few support tickets on top of it.

Luckily, the marketer caught it quickly, the influencer updated the caption, and they were able to post a Story about it to clear things up. Having a solid plan won’t stop all of the chaos, but you won’t be too bogged down in your own processes to not notice the occasional hiccups.

Diversify your BFCM content portfolio

I’ve mentioned before that when it comes to influencer marketing, you should think like an investor.

If you invest all of your limited budget into one kind of content, one kind of collaboration, one kind of influencer, or, heaven forbid, one influencer, that’s a huge risk. If it flops, you have no cushion for your one basket full of fragile eggs.

My advice?

• Invest the most of your budget into the creators you’ve been working with all year – the ones that you know are high-performers for you.
• Invest some of that budget into short-term collaborations and one-offs with smaller, niche communities with high engagement.
• Put a chunk into affiliate programs, which is a lot of low-effort, high-reward.

Think about whether or not gifting makes sense for BFCM. Depending on your products, it might be a huge winner, or it might make sense to do more gifting in the months leading up to BFCM rather than during the holiday season itself.

We asked marketers to write down which percentage of each kind of collaboration they were using for the holiday period, and on average, they split the majority of their budgets between short- and long-term collaborations. The next chunk was split between affiliate and gifting/seeding campaigns.  

In fact, not a single person responded that they were only investing into one collaboration type. The absolute minimum was split between at least two categories.

Invest in your own success

Speaking of being smart with your budget, now is the time to think about what you’re going to need to manage BFCM this year.

This means taking a hard look at your team, your tools, and your processes, and trying to visualize what your workload is going to look like.

Try asking yourself some hard questions:

• Do you need to hire people? Do you need to snap up a few freelancers to help manage the workload?
• Are your logistics completely solid? What kind of workload can your logistics team feasibly handle?
• How are you going to manage communication between the whole team? What will you do to keep campaigns on track and running smoothly?
• Is your tracking in place? Who will be responsible for gathering content metrics and reporting? Can you manage this all in one (or several) spreadsheets – and is that scalable for BFCM?
• Will you need any tools or new processes to help you manage that workload?

That last one is especially important – because the absolute last thing you want to be doing the Monday before BFCM is onboarding new processes or a new piece of software.

Listen – spreadsheets are great. I, personally, have no fewer than 5 spreadsheets open at any given time.

But that’s not scalable. And the single best way you can reduce your BFCM chaos tax is by investing in tools that are going to take a lot of the manual, minute work off your plate. You have bigger things to worry about than updating the spreadsheets.

This is where Modash comes in – and you knew it was coming.

Fact is, Modash can power your current team with the ability to:

• Find and vet new influencers lightning quick with audience and performance metrics transparently shown under their profiles
• Connect your Gmail or Outlook inbox to keep communication in one place and send emails in bulk (including cross-team comms so you can pick up where a colleague left off)
• Organize your discount codes, tracking links, etc – all deeply integrated with your Shopify store, so there’s no duplicate work
• Save creators to lists and create campaigns that allow you to track everything (plus drill down into individual creator performance)
• Track all performance metrics (even when creators forget to tag you, use the right hashtag, use ad disclosures, etc.). No more Friday night Story downloading.
• Export all metrics to CSV or XLS to integrate with the spreadsheets you’re already using

But don’t take my word for it – and don’t wait. Test out Modash today and figure out if it’s going to be your superhero that reduces that Black Friday chaos tax. You can even try it out free for 14 days!