Promoting a Flash Sale on Instagram and Facebook

If you're a business person who has engaged in running flash sales, and you've been wondering how to promote them on Facebook and Instagram, this article is for you. As most marketing personnel are aware, limited time offers can be one of the best ways of generating increased sales and generating revenue for your online store. This is especially true around certain days on your marketing calendar, for instance during the holiday season, and at times of other special events.Since flash sales generally only last for about 24 hours, the campaigns which are used to bring attention to them are just as short-lived. That means you need to have a different approach in your campaign management than you would for campaigns of longer duration, and you need to maximize your efforts to get the most out of the shorter time frame. Here are some ways you can promote your flash sale effectively on Facebook and Instagram.

Create a Facebook event

When you create a Facebook event for your flash sale, it will allow you to disseminate all the important details about the upcoming sale, so that any interested readers will have all that information at their fingertips. You can also extend your organic reach by having customers indicate whether they are interested in attending or whether they are definitely attending.It's also possible that Facebook's algorithm will display your event to a great many more users who could be interested, based on similar social activities they have been involved with. This doesn't even require any effort on your part, but could still net you a much greater reach, simply because Facebook would also be supporting you.

Conduct a pre-launch ad campaign

In the modern business environment, it's very important that you make use of paid ads on Instagram and Facebook, so that you can increase your exposure and generate significant buzz about your upcoming sale. By building engagement and increasing your reach before you even launch your flash sale, Facebook will be aware of potential buyers because of their engagement and their activity in the time leading up to the launch.

This will allow you to create a primed audience which you can later retarget with your ads. This kind of initial priming activity will place your product before people who were already predisposed to be interested in your flash sale. With no additional cost to yourself, your cost per acquisition will be reduced, and your return on ad spend will at the same time be increased.This is just a smart and practical way of conducting your ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram. You should keep in mind that a flash sale ad campaign will be set up differently in Facebook than a normal campaign which is seeking quick conversions and people who want to make purchases. Instead of choosing Conversions as your objective, you would want to identify this as a Reach campaign, which will help you to discover more followers and more prospects as a result.With flash sales, you'll find that many customers may have been previously interested in your brand but were just waiting for the opportunity of a discount or a sale. This campaign will alert all those users to the fact that a promotion is coming their way, and that they should be prepared to jump on board when the opportunity is presented. When you set up your Reach ad campaign, be sure to target not only your existing audience, but all those who have similar product interests as well, and might be potential customers.

Use posts to count down to your flash sale

Somewhere between five and seven days prior to the launching of your flash sale, you should start sharing countdown posts daily with your users on Instagram and Facebook. A few weeks prior to this time, you should be planning out your posts, so that you have time to think about what you will include in these posts to increase organic engagement.Ideally, the posts should be scheduled formally so that you don't inadvertently miss a day and lose an opportunity to reach a certain number of users. Each of your posts should clearly call attention to the upcoming flash sale, including the date of its launching, as well as how many days there are remaining before that launching. It's also a good idea to maximize your usage of these daily pre-launch posts by including engagement hooks which draw users into your sale.

For instance, you might encourage users to tag their friends who might be interested in the sale, or you might encourage users to make a comment about what they're thinking of buying during the sale. This becomes important because it helps you to establish an audience of people who have demonstrated recent engagement with your brand.You can then use this list of people in a retargeting campaign on the date of the sale itself. Using Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories can generate even more exposure because you can include daily posts in your Stories. This will help you to flesh out more details of the sale itself to further heighten interest when the time actually comes for your flash sale.

Run a Conversions campaign

On the day of your flash sale, you should be prepared to run a Conversions campaign, because that tells Facebook you're actually looking for conversions. Avoid choosing objectives like landing page views, engagement, adds to carts, or other possible objectives, because that's exactly what will be delivered by Facebook. When setting up your Conversions campaign, you should use a lifetime budget so as to achieve maximum results. If you chose a daily budget which you specified to run for something like six hours, Facebook would only spend 25% of your budget, because of the reduced hours.Facebook's algorithm is simply not optimized to create the best daily budget for short time frames, and that's why the lifetime budget makes more sense in this case. Once you set up your Conversions campaign, you'll be able to generate several ad sets so that you can evaluate their success rates, and measure which form of audience targeting was most effective. After determining which ad set is most effective, you can set up retargeting campaigns to make use of that information to increase your number of conversions.