TBBVA 035: Ideas For Black Friday Promotions

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Tweetables:

Your Black Friday offer gives people a chance to test-drive your services. #vatip Gotta Tweet!

A Black Friday special is something that your clients can’t get normally. #vatipGotta Tweet!

Be very specific about what the Black Friday offer is and when it expires. #vatip Gotta Tweet!

In Words:

If you live in the United States, then you’re already familiar with Black Friday. It is the biggest shopping day of the year. It’s the day after Thanksgiving. In fact, I think it was last year, a lot of stores starting doing Black Friday on Thanksgiving, like starting it at 6:00 or 7:00 on Thanksgiving Day. It’s a big deal. Everybody is looking for a steal pretty much, you know, a TV for $50 or something crazy like that.

I’m on a Mac now, but when I used to have a PC for my laptop, I found that November, right after Thanksgiving, was a perfect time to get a new computer when I needed one. Of course now, transitioning to Mac, Apple doesn’t go on sale like that and I so wish it did.

You may be thinking that as a virtual assistant you can’t provide a Black Friday offer, and that’s not true. I want to share with you what you can do based on the services you provide for your clients today, or plan to provide for clients if you haven’t already started your VA business.

What you can do as a Black Friday special.

Here’s something very important to keep in mind that as virtual assistants you may be playing a dual role this year for Black Friday. On the one hand, you may be helping your clients with their Black Friday promotions, and then you also have your own Black Friday. You don’t want to be overwhelmed because all of the Black Friday promotions have to be done at the same time.

You want to get yours done as soon as possible, and that’s why it’s a good idea to make your offer based on something you already are doing, or a service that you want to add to your list, or to get you started. It’s your first service, something that clients aren’t already utilizing. You don’t want your current clients to feel like, oh shucks, I should have got that offer instead.

This is about helping you to get some new clients or get some clients that maybe you worked on one project. This is a way to get them back, to let them know that you’ve got this Black Friday offer available.

Let’s say you offer social media graphics. Say, you’re offering graphics for people to share on Facebook. You could do like a 10 pic pack is what I call it, a 10 pic pack where you’re doing 10 images for a flat rate. The rate you want to charge is not the normal rate of what you provide. Remember, this is a Black Friday special and you want to offer something that they can’t get normally. You want them to feel like they’re getting a deal.

A great rule of thumb is for it to be under $100.

So ten, the number of images, that may not be a good number. Maybe you would do five or eight or six, whatever your number is. It doesn’t have to be a ten. But the point is you want it to be very specific, a specific number of images that you’re offering for your special rate. All of the services I’m talking about, I want you to tweak based on what you provide and what your rates are. Again, for Black Friday, you want your offer to be below $100.

If you are a social media virtual assistant, there are different things that you could offer for clients, breaking it up for your offer. You could do scheduling for one week. Maybe you have a holiday scheduling pack where they can buy the pack now and you schedule them for the holiday. Maybe they’re taking two weeks off for Christmas, so you can take advantage of that now and go ahead and offer a service where you schedule their social media for the holiday.

Say, your client, they’re just getting on Twitter. They don’t even have a Twitter account. So maybe your special is to get their Twitter account set up and have a certain number of followers for them. That’s something you could put together or separate.

If your client already has a Twitter account, they’ve got everything, maybe they don’t have a Twitter timeline cover. For my graphics VAs, you could do Twitter timeline covers as your Black Friday offer. I’ve seen where some people will do like a Facebook timeline cover and modify it for Twitter and charge like $39. That’s totally up to you what the rate is. I’m just throwing it out there as an example.

If you are a VA that does transcriptions, what you could do is do a transcription for 10 minutes or 15 minutes and have your special rate. This is realistic because when I do my podcast, I used to do a BlogTalkRadio show, and it would be like 10 to 15 minutes every week and I needed it transcribed. So the 10 to 15 minutes is a realistic time. You’re giving people a taste.

Now, having said that, what you don’t want somebody doing, and there’s always someone who’s looking to take advantage of something, is say you’re offering 15 minutes at a certain rate, you wouldn’t want to have someone say, “Oh, well, I’m going to buy four of those packs so I can get a full 60 minutes.” If that’s the case, you want to make sure that when you calculate it, that it’s a rate that works for you, or limit it one per person or one per recorded audio, however you want to do it.

The reason why Black Friday is a great time for you right now as a virtual assistant is because it gives people a chance to test drive your services who’ve never worked with you before.

It gives existing clients a chance to test-drive a new service that they’ve never outsourced to you before. Maybe they’ve been on the fence about it or they don’t have the full budget for 60 images a month, but they might have the budget to do 5 images or 10 to test it out, and they may find, hey, you know what, I think I’d just better let her handle these graphics. She does such a great job. It takes the burden off of me, and let’s make it happen.

Your Black Friday special gives new or current clients a taste of what you offer.

What it does for your business is helps you to grow. It helps you to grow and expand. Encourage clients to share with others that they know who could also take advantage of this offer. When you’re promoting it, you want to make sure that you’re letting people know to share it, to refer people, anybody they know who could use the service.

If you’re looking to add a service that you’ve never offered before, say it’s something you’ve done for yourself but now you want to offer it for a client, or maybe you used to do it at your job and now you want to provide it in your virtual assistant business. This also gives you a test run of providing that service and whether you like doing it for someone else or not. By giving people a small taste, you also get to test drive the service yourself.

What differentiates your special offer from your regular services?

Write this down. You’re going to have a set time limit for this special offer, and that’s really easy since we’re talking about making it a Black Friday promotion. You can have it available for just the 28th, have it available the evening of the 27th through the 28th, for that whole weekend, however you want to do it. But you want it for a limited time only and stick to that, because if your offer takes off and all of a sudden you get these people that want to take advantage of it and you let it go on and on and on, it could be overwhelming and you don’t want that to happen.

You also don’t want to have those people that just want to go for the cheap, cheap. Okay. You don’t want those clients. You want the ones who are willing to take a test knowing that this is just a special rate for right now. That’s why we have that limited time offer. It’s just for right now.

It’s just like during the summer, Old Navy had a sale, and they may have had it in your area as well, where they had flip flops on sale for $1 and it was just for that whole day. It was early Saturday. I want to say it started like at 7:00 until they closed that night. Just that one day, and when I tell you it was the longest line in that store ever. Yes, I was in the line for $1 flip flops. I really just wanted to go for the experience. I think the regular price for their flip flops is like $4, but I just was curious about how it all worked and it was fun just being with the crowd and seeing how it all worked.

But because all of us in that store knew they were only going to be $1 for that one day, we got up earlier. We were patient in line because we wanted what we wanted for that price. But if you came on Sunday, guess what, the flip flops were back to their regular price. The same flip flops that were $1 the day before. So you want your special offer to have a specific time limit. It has an expiration. It ends on whatever date, whatever time.

If you’re a bookkeeper VA, I’m guessing that your clients are coming and some of them have probably been keeping up with their own books and so it’s probably gotten behind. So maybe you do a one month catch-up plan for them, and that’s not to say that you provide a month of bookkeeping. But listen to what I said. A one month catch-up plan. You create that for them, a one month catch-up plan or something like that because remember you want your offer to be below $100. Everybody knows the different rates that they’re offering, so base it on that.

If you do WordPress, you do blog content management, you could do a certain number of blog posts at a select rate, limited time, and they could get signed up for that.

Be very specific in what the offer is. Be very specific about the time and expiration, and very specific about how much. How many blog posts? How many graphics? How many social media posts? How many minutes in the audio?

While your clients are checking your services out and checking you out, guess what you’ll be doing? You’ll be checking them out as well. Anytime clients come to you, whether it’s for your Black Friday offer or on a regular day, they’re checking you out. You want to check them out. How is that communication at the beginning? You get to decide if this is someone you want to continue working with or not.

This leads right into the next thing and that is what happens after this Black Friday promotion is over? You want to encourage that client to continue with your services. Because they already know up front this is a special rate exclusive for Black Friday, it ends on November 28th or November 29th, whatever the date is that you have set, they already know.

In your marketing, in your blog post, in your emails, however you’re doing your promotions, make it clear that they can continue with your services for whatever your regular rate is. Let them know that usually the value is more than what the regular rate is. But just be clear so they know what the regular price is so they can continue.

When it’s over, you want to thank them for their business, get a testimonial from them, which is another benefit for you by doing the Black Friday special is you’re now getting testimonials. Get a testimonial from them and let them know you would love to continue providing this service for them, and invite them to go to your page on your website where you share more about the service and what your rate is, where they can sign up to be an ongoing client, or provide that information in an email.

What you don’t want to do on Black Friday is give away anything for free. Do not give anything away for free and call it your Black Friday promotion. Okay. This is all about sales and providing things at a lower rate, not free.

The rate that you’re offering for Black Friday is a flat rate. You don’t want to base it on hours, although, if you are an administrative virtual assistant you could sell a block of hours for a certain flat rate. You could sell 5 hours for $99 and that’s an example. I don’t even know what that is hourly, but that’s just an example. Let me actually pull out my calculator. Let’s see, what is that? What is the $99 divided by 5? Okay. That’s $19.80 is what 99 divided by 5 hours is.

VA rates are anywhere between $15 an hour and $75 an hour depending on experience. If you’ve never done VA work, this is your very first time, your Black Friday offer, you’re testing the waters, then you want to go on the lower end and that’s okay. Let’s say you do $18 an hour. You do a block of 5 hours for $90 or you could make it $89. You’ll notice online, the prices are never like $90 or $50. $50 is going to be $49 or something like that.

I’m just giving you an idea of what to play with for your rates. If you’re existing and you already have rates, just make sure that your Black Friday offer is a special. Make sure that it’s something you would happily offer and don’t feel like you’re giving away your time and effort for nothing.

You don’t want Black Friday to come and go, and your inbox is going to fill up with all of those stores and different things with their Black Friday offer, and each time it comes you’re going to think about your Black Friday offer. If you’re ready to go, you’re going to be thinking, oh, I’m ready this year. I can’t wait. If you’re not, you’re going to think, man, I should do this. I should do this. No, maybe not. You know, you’re going to go back and forth with it in your mind, so go full force.

This is your chance to show off what you can do, giving clients a chance to test-drive your service in a bite-size chunk.

Thanks so much for tuning in. If you like what you heard, stay tuned. We’ll be back. Tell me what’s going on with you. Come on over the Facebook page: facebook.com/tiffanyparsonbiz, or if you prefer a little shorter message, come on over to Twitter: @tiffanydparson.

See you next time.