Amazon Prime Fall Deal Event - How To Prepare - Episode 258

INTERVIEW WITH LOGAN NIELSEN AND DAMIANO CIARROCCHI

DESCRIPTION

Kiri, Damiano, and Logan are talking about the Amazon Prime Fall Deal Event which is expected to happen in the first half of October. They are talking about Prime Day preparation on the PPC and organic side of things as well.

Make sure you tune in to find out more!

Damiano Ciarrocchi is PPC Manager at Bobsled, and he started just over a year ago as a PPC specialist. Damiano came to Bobsled from working directly at Amazon in the Advertising success team based in Europe. Damiano lives in Italy.

Logan Nielsen is a Client Project Manager at Bobsled and resides in Springdale, Arkansas. Logan got his foot in the door with Amazon by running his own FBA reselling business before transitioning to the brand side of things. Logan worked in-house at a brand helping them maximize their Amazon efforts before transitioning to the consulting world in early 2020.

“The most important thing is to speak to the brand and establish what the goal is in a very general sense and take a deep dive into the whole catalog and create a strategy for the whole catalog and the whole funnel. ”

— Damiano Ciarrocchi

KEY TAKEAWAYS

With the Q4 season coming up and in early to mid-October with Prime Day, how are you guiding your clients to spend on advertising when there are theoretically going to have a much longer sales season?
Damiano: This is a very unique period with mega sale dates. From a PPC standpoint, Damiano is instructing brands to monitor metrics very closely in between these events. As customers start to learn about these sales dates they could become very savvy and we could see more browsing and window shopping for the period. He recommends a very robust budget strategy and structure. A very structured strategy for each month, and in between these sales days we would track metrics and see what the market is saying. If we start seeing the conversions going down and impress and clicks going up, we can leverage with awareness and consideration tactics to be in the mind of the customer come the Turkey 5, etc.
It's difficult giving examples since it would be at category level and what keywords are you using, start shifting budget from longer tail keywords to more short tail keywords and start implementing more prospecting campaigns and try to harvest more keywords for these days and leverage also the sponsored display functionalities and lifestyle audiences and get the awareness and consideration up.
Logan: October historically isn't a sales month, it is a great opportunity to build momentum in this period before turkey 5. Use it as an opportunity to create some excitement a little bit earlier than normal.
Damiano: Fantastic opportunity in Amazon’s history that we have 2 Prime Days that are so close together, we are able to leverage data from this summer, since those data points happened just 3 months ago. Usually, we leverage Turkey 5 from last season and now we have fresh data and see if we can optimize any campaigns, the store, which is a great opportunity this year.
Logan: You need to be a player as much as you can, he’s is very curious to see what happens from this event.
How will each of you be thinking about tracking fatigue among shoppers? We just had Prime Day and Q4 coming up, it will be an interesting time to score a deal, but the other side of the coin is that people have just done Prime Day, Cyber Monday is coming up, will people be ready to open their wallets? How will PPC track and respond to potential deal fatigue?
Damiano: Constantly monitoring the data and interpreting it will tell us what the consumer is feeling. It's hard knowing what will happen since this is the first time since Covid that we have an October event, however, it's the first time we have 2 Prime Days in a few months.
Damiano thinks that during the event we'll see a bigger concentration of sales and maybe a lull in between. The daily campaign management will tell us that as each hour passes, we'll see what's happening with metrics and campaigns and we can start to anticipate what happens with the account or sales.
Logan: Depends on the items you're discounting. The Prime Fall event can be used for overstocked inventory, or you can leverage both sales events for different purposes and don’t give the customer the same coupon on the same item and be creative on what discounts are you doing.
Looking back at the July Prime Day event, what were the most effective deal strategies?
Logan: Ultimately, the higher the better, percentage-wise. From a technical standpoint, Prime Exclusive discounts are great from a placement standpoint and are more exciting, but they had some bugs the last Prime Day so being ready to quickly pivot to a coupon is very important.
We've had a number of clients whose PEDs were ready before the event and as the event started, some of them didn't have PEDs running, so they had to run coupons immediately instead. It's important to have a backup plan. On the advertising side, Damiano wrote a blog post a few months ago about whether you should advertise at all on PD or not. He shared a thoughtful analysis of that. Logan agreed and commented how these high-traffic times are very important for your brand if you are strategic with it.
A bigger question that isn't up to us but to our clients, is what is the objective of the brand. It's not a one size fits all situation.
Damiano: The most important thing is to speak to the brand and establish what the goal is in a very general sense and take a deep dive into the whole catalog and create a strategy for the whole catalog and the whole funnel.
Be careful what you're measuring.
Damiano shares what worked well during the summer event, it's not a cookie cutter strategy for all, but the best strategy for most brands and which could be valid for this event as well is to have a clear plan for each ASIN way before than the time of the big sales so you can create strategies around these ASINs and getting good data weeks before the event(s).
What worked well, as well, we had PD over two days this summer and the Bobsled’s PPC team assumed that the customers would be more inclined to buy products on the first day and take the budget and devise a mix that would cater to these different spin levels. And it proved to be a very successful strategy.
Our management during the two days was the most important, checking several times per day if everything was running, the budget utilization throughout the day, etc.
In terms of leveraging marketing channels outside of Amazon, how to make your existing customers aware that there will be a big sale during Prime Day?
Logan: It's worthwhile even if the strategy is to keep a more D2C strategy and utilize more channels and understanding that these days are important for your brand as a whole not just for your brand on Amazon. I would leverage social media, email lists, influencers, etc.
Is there anything new that you're interested to see how it floats this PD?
Damiano shares that there's a big PPC update that the PPC geeks have been waiting for a while, which is sponsored brand video ads that link directly to the store. Only some brands have this option, but Damiano assumes that this could be available to all brands before Prime Day.
Kiri shares that everyone should get on the Amazon app as much as they can and see what's happening there and she finds it that as a consumer she's looking at more video ads and you can tell the story of the brand through that.
Logan shares that he agrees and he'd mention that one of his favorite strategies is sponsored brand video and it's something that is crucial to stand out during high-traffic events, and he's excited to see how video targeting will show results. With Amazon rolling out new programs, being an early adopter, trying to utilize them, and trying to learn as much as you can about them.
Kiri shares that it was just announced that with MYCE you can contact your followers and now you can leverage segments of customers as well. In theory, it sounds great, but the emails are not very engaging and the challenge she sees is that people are going to start unsubscribing from them. Kiri and Damiano share their views on the new possibilities with MYCE and whether is it worth using it.
Logan shares what he's excited about this Q4. You still have time to make a strategy and if you're a consumer lookout for new deals, brands could be offering many different options, but in general, he's excited to see what's Amazon up to.
Damiano can't wait to dig into July's Prime Day numbers and devise a good strategy for the fall Prime Day and very exciting things can come of it.