Commerce content ideas for Singles Day

It’s the biggest ecommerce event in the world and we aren’t talking about Black Friday when we say that. 

In fact, Singles Day, which began life as a celebration of being single, has now grown into a shopping event placed as being anywhere between two to four times the size of Black Friday (Time, November 2018; The Guardian, November 2017). Alibaba, one of the primary Singles Day participants, logged $1 billion of sales during the first two minutes of the event last year and consumers now spend $30 billion on the conglomerate’s platforms alone (AdWeek, November 2018). 

This year Singles Day is set to be bigger than ever, with 200,000 brands set to take part and Alibaba targeting an extra 100 million consumers versus last year’s numbers (South China Morning Post, October 2019). That makes it a fantastic opportunity for publishers in Asia-Pacific and further afield to create commerce content. So here are some ideas for how to get involved in Singles Day 2019. 

Top Deals Content 

It sounds simple, but sometimes the simplest ideas can be the most effective. Deals content always performs well, but it can be particularly powerful during Singles Day. There are promotions on almost every category you can think of during Singles Day, so a piece of commerce content rounding up a spread of different deals on offer can be a great way to get involved in the holiday. It provides a service to readers by helping them find the best value for their money. For publishers that haven’t covered Singles Day before, it can also be a low effort initiative to understand if this is an event your readers will care about. Around major events it pays to create content early, so ideally publish content in advance of Singles Day to pick up search traffic, as people scout deals ahead of the sales starting. 

Vertical content 

If you know the categories your readers love, you can also hone in on particular verticals and make those the focus of your commerce content for Singles Day. This can help improve chances of conversion, by making the content more specific to your audience. This piece from The Verge focuses on technology deals, outlining offers on items including smartphones and earphones. 

Photo Galleries 

When readers are weighing up whether to make a purchase or not having a visual reference point can help make all the difference. This post from Refinery 29 includes a beautiful photo gallery, which includes pictures of items from various categories including fashion. It helps illustrate the writer’s recommendations and better engage the reader in the Singles Day deals that are on offer.  It also shows how publishers outside of Asia-Pacific can take advantage of international merchants rolling out sales of their own in sync with Singles Day. 

Apply best practices from other ecommerce events 

Types of commerce content that work well for one ecommerce event can typically be good performers in other holidays too. You can see examples of top performing articles from holidays including Valentine’s Day, Black Friday and Mother’s Day in this blog post which covers the winners and nominees from this year’s Commerce Awards for Publishers. 

As Singles Day expands internationally, and more publishers catch on to the commerce content opportunity, we can expect the types of articles written around it to grow in number. Publishers that want to learn more about Singles Day can contact their account manager or head to the offers area of the Publisher Hub to find merchants to feature in commerce content.