Sales Hunting

Brandwatch Bulletin #11: Sales Hunting

Consumers are on the lookout for bargains.

12 October 2020

Happy Monday, we hope you had an excellent weekend. Today we’re looking at sales, specifically how people are more on the lookout for them than usual.

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Sales and clearance conversation is bigger than usual on social media

To investigate when sales begin and end, and any sale related trends, we used our Consumer Research platform to look at English-language mentions of sales (excluding things like “for sale”) from January 1, 2011 to September 30, 2020.

When we looked at sale conversations from June 1 to September 30 2020, we found that sale mentions were 19% higher compared to the 2017-19 average.

But why?

It’s not just companies promoting their sale promotions to encourage spending during the pandemic, it’s actually consumers discussing where to get the best price.

Over the last seven months, we found 336k mentions of discounts (both promotions and recommendations), and 331k mentions of price (both promotions and recommendations). The main takeaway was that people were sharing and promoting a good price that they had found.

In this respect, we also found 222k mentions of coupons. People were sharing and asking for coupon codes online to get the most out of a sale promotion online, and more bang for their buck. While another big conversation was free delivery — often encouraging someone to make a purchase — with 133k mentions on social media.

Meanwhile, in-demand items included fashion (360k mentions) and big brands (474k mentions).

Consumers are seeking sale content too

To investigate the media’s affect on sale conversation online we used our content analysis tool BuzzSumo, to explore sale and clearance related content over the last five years.

We learned that engagement (people reading and interacting with content online) with sale content was 14% higher from March to September, compared to the seven months prior.

It’s worth noting that publishers releasing sale-based content in the last seven months fell by 20%, in comparison to the seven months prior, but despite this, demand from readers continued to increase. A further indication that consumers are striving to find the best competitive price for an item, in these financially tough times.

It’s a year for sales

As we just learned above, and in our recent Christmas blog, consumers want safety, and avoiding stores is a big part of that. But for many people, a price which makes it feel like a steal is worth venturing out or clicking the purchase button for.

Plan ahead. Promoting any sales, or hyping any most-wished for items, a little earlier than normal could help your business stand out during a financially tough time, and a typically noisy promotional period.

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