As many of you know, advertising on Facebook during the holidays can be difficult. There are so many promotions and so many advertisers competing for attention.

Black Friday weekend can be one of your most profitable times of the year as an ecommerce business if you know how to approach it in your Facebook advertising.

So how can you break through the noise?

Today, I am going to teach you about the Pent-Up Demand method that has been effective at generating millions of dollars in sales during Black Friday weekend back in my agency days.

Step 1: Turn Off Your Retargeting

This method capitalizes on people’s anticipation of upcoming sales on Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and it is really simple to execute.

All you need to do? Turn off your retargeting audiences a 1–2 weeks before your promotion launches and put 100% of your budget toward your top-of-funnel prospecting.

Why, you ask? Well, the answer is simple.

Doing this will build up a pretty sizable audience of users that went to your website but didn’t buy anything. These people were interested enough in your products to click, but something may have held them back from purchasing. It’s okay though because we will give them a great chance to complete their purchase in the next step.

Step 2:  Preparing Your Promotional Ads

In the weeks leading up to Black Friday, you are going to want to take this time to prepare your promotional materials for the upcoming ad blitz.

Whether you are offering a BOGO deal, or a discounted price on a popular product, it is important that you create ads that mention this promotion in both the image/video AND in the ad copy. You can always develop new creative for this if you like, but I recommend just repurposing your best performing creative and adding a banner or callout that makes it clear what your promotion is. This way you know it will be effective.

For the ad copy, I also recommend repurposing your best copy for this. I like to use yaytext.com to create eye catching headlines and callouts for the copy. You want to create a sense of urgency to get people to purchase, so make sure you make it clear that is sale is only live for Black Friday

Step 3: Turning Your Retargeting Back On

The last part of this method is where the magic happens. Once Black Friday rolls around, it is time to turn your retargeting audiences back on and REALLY push your budget into these audiences.

Now, normally I wouldn’t recommend pushing your frequencies in your retargeting audiences. But Black Friday/Cyber Monday has so much earning potential for ecommerce businesses, you can squeeze a lot of sales out of your retargeting audiences during that weekend.

So spend as much as you can during these 3 days! If you have the inventory and the budget, find your best performing ad sets and really push into them during this weekend. If your promotion is enticing enough, you will have a HUGE audience of people to push these ads to and really get a lot of bang for your buck.

If you can implement this strategy well, you should see bigger ROAS increases with lower CPMs, since retargeting audiences generally have lower CPMs.