Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping events of the year, but it’s also the noisiest. Influencer marketing cuts through the clutter by putting your brand in front of people who already trust the creator. That affinity drives clicks, conversions, and real revenue, right when it matters most.
Here’s a practical guide to building a Black Friday campaign that performs:
- Know your Audience: Where do your customers and target audience spend time online? Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or elsewhere? What motivates them to engage, follow, and ultimately buy?
- Create your Black Friday Offer: Once you know what drives your audience, craft a deal they can’t ignore. Use limited-time discounts or exclusive deals to create urgency and maximize conversions.
- Build your Strategy: Not every platform serves the same purpose. Choose the ones most relevant to your audience and focus on delivering the right content where it performs best.
- Pick the Right Influencers: Find creators who align with your brand and genuinely connect with your audience. Provide them with clear guidelines and key messaging, while giving them the creative freedom to produce authentic content that resonates.
- Monitor key metrics like engagement rate, CTR, conversion rate, and ROAS in real time to quickly double down on what’s working. Use these insights to refine and strengthen your future strategy.
Make your 2025 Black Friday campaign your most profitable yet. Let Upfluence match you with the right influencers, automate outreach, launch campaigns in minutes, and track every sale in real time.
Understanding your Target Audience
Before you build your black friday marketing strategy, you need to build a crystal-clear picture of your customers.
Which platforms are they scrolling during peak shopping season? What sparks their interest, stops their scroll, or drives them to add to cart? Use data, not guesswork, to guide your campaign strategy.
Your audience insights, platform usage, demographics, motivations, and historical buying patterns should shape everything from messaging to creator selection.
Tap into your own holiday history to answer those questions:
- Which products sold best last Black Friday?
- What content performed the best?
- What age groups or segments were the most active, and what were they searching for?
Designing your Black Friday Incentive
Now that you know what your audience wants, and where they’re looking. It’s time to craft an impactful incentive that will drive results. Here are a few strategic ways to anchor your campaign:
- Discounts: Use limited-time discounts. For example, kick off your campaign with a 20% discount code that expires at a clearly defined time. Make sure to communicate the deadline upfront and send a reminder a few hours before it ends to drive last-minute conversions.
- Early access: Early access campaigns are another effective strategy. Launch deals 48–72 hours before your public Black Friday sale to give influencers’ followers exclusive access to discounts. This approach not only rewards loyal audiences but also provides insights into demand, helping you adjust inventory if needed.
- Exclusive Bundle Deals: Additionally, exclusive bundle deals promoted through influencers can drive higher average order values. Create bundles that aren’t available through your regular channels and let influencers present them as curated, special offers and limited. This approach reinforces the influencer’s authority while driving sales.
Finally, make sure to create personalized discount codes. Shared by influencers, these codes not only make their followers feel valued but also allow you to track campaign performance with precision.
Planning your Black Friday Influencer Campaign Strategies
Once you’ve created your offer and know which shopper segment to target, it’s time to craft an influencer campaign that will drive immediate action. Influencer content needs to stand out immediately, especially on mobile devices, where most Black Friday shopping takes place. Let’s break down how to select the best platforms and content formats to maximize your impact.
Which Platforms to Use for Your Campaign
Maximize your reach by tailoring content for different platforms. Each platform should offer something unique while maintaining consistent messaging about your Black Friday deals.
The platform you choose should align with the nature of your product, but also your audience. Impulse purchases thrive on TikTok and Instagram Stories, while bigger or more considered purchases perform better on YouTube through its long-form content.
- Instagram continues to dominate as a go-to platform for Black Friday influencer marketing. Its shopping features, combined with tools like Stories and countdown stickers, create a seamless journey from product discovery to purchase – especially for fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands.
- TikTok is ideal for connecting with younger audiences and creating buzzworthy moments. Its algorithm can catapult deals to massive audiences within hours, thanks to its emphasis on raw, authentic content that feels less polished but more relatable.
- YouTube is especially effective for higher-priced products. Use it ahead of Black Friday to build awareness through detailed reviews and demonstrations from creators, then amplify your promotions during the sale to give buyers the confidence to commit to bigger purchases.
- Pinterest shines for home decor, fashion, and DIY brands. Users on this platform are often in discovery mode, actively searching for products. Partnering with creators here is especially powerful, as their curated boards and content inspire purchasing ideas. It’s also a great channel to use ahead of promotions to build visibility and generate interest before your campaign goes live.
Most Successful Content Types During Black Friday
1. Unboxing and Product reviews
Unboxing videos tap into a sense of curiosity and anticipation, letting viewers experience the product. These videos are often filmed with high-quality lighting and a clean background, allowing the influencer to walk through their first impressions, highlight packaging details, and give an honest reaction. The strongest unboxings combine genuine excitement with honest commentary about the product use, quality, or standout features, building trust with the audience.
When viewers see a trusted creator interact with a product, it reduces the uncertainty of buying it themselves — especially for premium items, tactile products, or potential gifts. Adding a review within the unboxing strengthens this effect, giving hesitant buyers the confidence to make a purchase.
2. Try-On Hauls and Lists
This format is especially powerful for fashion, where consumers want to see how items move, fit, and style together in real life. Influencers bring this to life by showing outfits in motion and pairing pieces to create complete looks their audience can be inspired by. Many batch these videos, showcasing multiple looks or product variations in a single seamless post. Their insights on fit, comfort, and personal favorites foster genuine product affinity — it feels less like a sales pitch and more like sharing what truly works for them.
Curated gift lists offer a slightly different angle but deliver similar results. These are formatted as “Top 5 under $50” or “My holiday must-haves” and help simplify decision-making for busy shoppers. Influencers position themselves as trusted gift advisors, highlighting items that are both meaningful and on sale.
3. Behind-the-Scenes
The raw, unfiltered nature of behind-the-scenes content makes it feel less like an aggressive sale and more like an exclusive sneak peek at what’s coming. Exactly what Black Friday shoppers respond to.
Whether it’s about upcoming deals or a new collection, this type of content builds energy around your brand. It also offers something many polished campaigns don’t: transparency. When shoppers see creators engaging with your brand in real-time, it creates a sense of authenticity that high-production ads often miss.
For brand inspiration and campaign breakdowns using these formats, don’t miss our article: Black Friday Campaigns Ideas: 5 Influencer Campaigns That Drove Massive Sales. Once you’ve identified the right mix of content, the next step is selecting the right Influencer that will best represent your brand and amplify your campaign.
Finding and Working with Influencers
The success of your Black Friday marketing strategy hinges on collaborating with creators who genuinely resonate with your target audience. Every decision, from selecting influencers to determining platform strategies, plays a critical role in driving sales during this peak shopping period.
When selecting influencers for your Black Friday campaigns, audience alignment should be your top priority. Go beyond basic demographics and dig into the psychographics of their followers. For instance, an influencer promoting luxury skincare to budget-conscious college students is unlikely to deliver the conversions you need, no matter how high their engagement rates may be.
Pay close attention to engagement quality and content authenticity. Smaller influencers with highly engaged audiences often outperform those with large but passive followings. Influencers who maintain transparent communication and regularly share honest product reviews tend to cultivate trust, increasing the likelihood that their followers will act on their recommendations during Black Friday.
Upfluence eliminates the guesswork with our influencer discovery, helping your Black Friday campaigns move from idea to execution in hours, not weeks. With access to over 12 million verified creators and AI-powered search tools, you can filter by location, engagement rates, audience demographics, content style, and brand affinity to find high-performing influencers that are a perfect fit. Brands can also connect their CMS to invite loyal customers who are creators, directly boosting collaboration rates by 7x.
Tracking Performance and Improving ROI
When Black Friday hits, there’s no room for guesswork. To truly scale your results, you need real-time insights into what’s working and what’s not. That’s where performance tracking becomes your strategic edge.
Here’s what to focus on:
- Reach & Impressions: Start with visibility. Reach shows how many unique users saw your content; impressions count total views. Both help gauge awareness, but they’re just the starting point.
- Engagement Rate: Go deeper with engagement. Divide total interactions (likes, comments, shares) by reach, then multiply by 100. For Black Friday, expect higher-than-average rates—3–6% on Instagram, 5–9% on TikTok.
- Conversion Rate & Sales: Track what matters: purchases. Use UTM links and unique promo codes to connect clicks to conversions. Focus on metrics like average order value (AOV) and revenue per click (Conversion Rate) to understand your true ROI.
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Calculate total revenue generated from your campaigns divided by costs (influencer fees, product seeding, etc.). This tells you how much revenue you earn for every dollar invested.
Upfluence gives you the tools you need to monitor and evaluate the success of your Black Friday influencer campaigns. With the ability to generate unique promo codes in bulk, you gain access to real-time sales attribution, making it clear which creators are driving purchases. All of this data is available in a comprehensive sales dashboard that can be easily downloaded and shared with your team.
Your Black Friday Campaign, Powered by Upfluence
Upfluence helps you execute high-converting Black Friday campaigns by supporting every step, from strategy and planning through execution and results.
- Creator Matching: Find influencers that aligns with your target audience using AI-powered discovery and CMS matching. Short on time? Use Upfluence’s creator marketplace to find creators and launch your campaign in minutes
- Outreach : Scale and automate your influencer marketing outreach with precision and personality with our built-in email templates, automated email flows and AI mailing assistant, all designed to save you time and boost your outreach.
- Sales and Content Tracking: Set up trackable discount codes and affiliate links to monitor UGC sales.Track engagement, CTR, conversions, AOV, and ROAS in real time to optimize and prove ROI.
- Drive UGC: Upfluence helps you identify, track, and leverage UGC from influencers and real customers across social platforms. Spot emerging trends, highlight winning content, and repurpose high-performing posts into branded campaigns that feel organic and drive conversions.
Whether you’re scaling fast or refining as you go, Upfluence keeps your Black Friday campaign focused, efficient, and revenue-driven.
