However, this break between high-level spending events is a great time for a reset: brands have a half of a year of performance under their belt and are coming off increased traffic and sales. While a nice nap may seem ideal, now is a true opportunity to sit back, take a critical look at the year so far, and keep your foot on the gas. If August is a lull for your competition, strike now and grow your brand’s awareness, test new initiatives, and take advantage of the lower cost time frame.
Code3 Commerce Strategists are sharing five strategic moves that can help set yourself from the competition now and through the critical second half of the year.
Refresh Always on ASINs
Don’t underestimate the power of “always on” ASINs. A strategy of consistently switching ASIN focus without keeping a majority investment on top performers is likely to result in losing a great deal of sales. Code3 Client Strategists recommend following a consistent “always on” mix as a best practice.
The conclusion of Prime Day is a good window to refresh your “always on” mix. Review ASINs that have had a consistent investment for the first half of the year and look to increase allocations. The goal is to find the point of diminishing return for your top performers. Additionally, remove any products that are no longer top performers, could have inventory constraints, or are being discontinued. This exercise is also an ideal time to look for opportunities and learnings from products that have been added into the mix with smaller allocations, or new products that have launched in the first half of the year to determine if they can be part of the refreshed “always on” mix. Doing this early in August will allow you to push paid and organic rank on these ASINs to increase discoverability prior to the upcoming high traffic holiday season.
Test a New Tactic
With less competition, now is the time to test new tactics with a goal of increasing the visibility of your products. Code3 Strategists recommend using this time period to test Online Video (OLV) or Streaming TV (STV), for brands who haven’t yet. While the promotion-aware shopper might not be looking to convert until a later time frame, we’ve seen the holiday shopper begin their purchase journey much earlier each and every year. After Prime Day, the back-to-school season nears its completion, and the holiday shopping season begins.
If you have 15- or 30-second video assets to use, you’re ahead of the game and can launch OLV or STV immediately. Identify 2-3 products or categories to get in front of top-of-funnel shoppers, and establish a small test budget for each. Keep a close eye on metrics like video completion rate and increase in branded searches and A/B test your 15 and 30 second videos against each other to see which resonate most with the consumer. At completion of your 30-45 day test, look to include your top performing videos leading into and during large deal time frames to give yourself a leg up on your competition who is likely focusing on mostly lower funnel tactics.
Increase Awareness of Your Product Mix
In general, advertising is much less expensive in August through mid-September, and you’ll get a lot more bang for your buck on awareness tactics during this time frame. If you haven’t yet launched DSP, this is a great time to do so. DSP is Amazon’s programmatic platform that allows you to reach your consumer base outside of the Amazon landscape, pushing them to Amazon to convert.
DSP starts at the top of the funnel pushing awareness and can be utilized through the remainder of the funnel, down to retargeting/conversion. As a best practice, utilizing Search and DSP together significantly increases the chance of a purchase for a customer, as you’re able to target them both on and off Amazon. When activating and deploying DSP, we tend to see branded searches and add-to-carts increase significantly leading into large promotional periods.
When brands can launch DSP before the competitive promotional periods, you are able to capitalize on a lower cost per impression or cost per glance view, allowing your dollars to go farther. We see consumers adding to cart and using add-ons to track price history, which makes a conversion much easier when that product has been added to cart or saved for later.
Update Budget to Hit Forecast
Forecast goals and stretch goals are where a business shines. No matter how efficient your ad results are, sales goals supersede that efficiency. Oftentimes advertisers are very dependent on Prime Day to help drive a great deal of the business to get their forecast or goals for the year. Post-Prime Day, it’s time to take a step back and assess where you are. Use this opportunity to align with your team and see how close you are to your current forecast. If you’re off , work on an updated budget and promotional calendar to close the gap. Determine which months give you the best opportunity to close the gap, keeping in mind that August and September might be a bigger opportunity than anticipated.
Some other strategic moves you can make now include:
- Check inventory levels and Buy Box of top performing products, and increase your media mix on those products to make sure they are in budget as close to 100% of the time as possible.
- Look at sell through goals for Prime Big Deals Days and the Thanksgiving time frame and create budget recommendations to hit full sell through.
- Check on the products that you think will be top-performers during tentpole events, and see if inventory allows for pushing past the initial sell through goal.
- Don’t forget the last minute shopper: they could be your ticket to hitting your forecast.
Make sure you have a few larger deals (and the budget to support them) during the final holiday push, as consumers look to Amazon Prime shipping to get them out of a bind for late purchases.
Create a Promotional Calendar
The earlier you can set your promotional calendar for the remainder of the year, the better. Make sure you’re taking a critical look at what worked and didn’t work in 1H to properly set future promotions.Identify successful deals and dive deep to determine what drove those to be successful. For instance, if a deal was very successful, ask several questions:
- Was it one of your top-performing products without a discount?
- Was it heavily discounted and too good of a deal to pass up for consumers?
On the flip side, if a deal wasn’t successful, was it the inverse? Determine if it was due to being a low performer not typically supported by media.
In general, even with large discounts, it’s difficult for consumers to discover a product if it hasn’t been a relatively consistent part of your media mix, and you’ll likely have to overpay for visibility.. This is why capitalizing on lead-in to the holiday season and large deal time frames is paramount to success. Find top-performers with good margins for your promotional calendar, or identify products that you want to put on promotion with a healthy discount and give your agency enough time to increase awareness on these products prior to the deal period. Quality of deals typically is more important than quantity of deals, as your agency can be more acutely focused on increasing visibility prior to and during promotional periods for those products.
Yes, August and September are a great time to kick back, relax and enjoy the fruits of your Prime Day labor, but even more important is gearing up for the second half of the year. Take advantage of the low competition and supercharge your efforts so you can hit the ground running during the holiday season.