Amazon introduced the Black Friday concept to the UK in 2010, promoting a range of discounts and deals to consumers with unparalleled user experience. This huge shopping event is now at the core of brands’ digital marketing strategies, delivering unprecedented year-on-year growth for many categories, including health & beauty and fashion & accessories.
But is your Amazon marketing strategy ready for Black Friday?
Being Prepared
If you have an FBA account working through Amazon or ship directly, understanding your stock levels versus demand is imperative.
The events of the last few years have delivered a sharp shock to many retailers, and reinforced the necessity of keeping a close watch on stock levels and delivery solutions. Hikes in shipping costs and challenges in logistics have also forced brands into action – whether that be restructuring their business model, reconsidering the channels through which they sell, or reforecasting for the new ecommerce landscape.
Read on to discover the five key strategic factors you need to consider to make the most of Black Friday and Q4 in 2022.
1. Break Out by Category or SKU
To really take advantage of Q4 on Amazon through paid advertising, the campaign structure needs to be broken out by category/SKU. This allows you to quickly adapt your strategy and budget by having a layered approach to meet today’s complicated and frustrating climate.
This isn’t about what’s right for your business, this is about what works, demand and how you plan over this peak period. By breaking your campaign strategy out in this way, you’ll be able to scale sales and profitability, and also have the capacity to measure this activity in your account.
2. Brand Protection Campaigns
At the same time, your well-segmented advertising portfolios need to be backed by solid brand protection campaigns. During this time of year, competition is rife, which means there are more businesses fighting for the same customers and the same ad placements. If you aren’t aggressively defending your branded search terms and product pages, prepare to see your market share dwindle.
If you want to go the extra mile, you can also extend these campaigns across all three Amazon Ad types (Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brand, and Sponsored Display) to ensure you’re achieving maximum visibility across all the available placements.
3. Solid Organic Strategy
Having a solid organic strategy is also vital to your Amazon accounts overall performance. The halo effect of a strong organic presence cannot be underestimated. To achieve this, you need relevant ‘clean’ creative, and up-to-date, digestible content throughout your brand store.
The best approach to introduce this to your Amazon brand store is to use the fundamentals of an A+ content template to grow your reach across the platform. Once this has been completed, it’s time to up your game by targeting bespoke A+ content for your best performing products. To get started, check out our Amazon 9-point Retail Readiness Checklist here.
Measuring this activity on a Month-on-Month and Year-on-Year basis as your overall presence begins to grow will highlight what is working and which areas need further revision. Too many SMEs try to measure this element of marketing like PPC, however this is your owned media. The purpose of which is to increase your brand profile, ultimately boosting the value of your business.
4. Lightning Deals
Black Friday is also a great time to explore Lightning Deals and promotions. After all, who doesn’t love a good deal? These are time-bound, promotional offers that feature on Amazon’s deal page.
But be careful, the deadline for submitting Lightning Deals is fast approaching. Time is ticking so if your business has the stock, and you understand your consumer, then Amazon is the place to focus your resources on. Black Friday and Cyber Monday combines the highest levels of intent for purchasing products with the click of a button, so make sure you don’t miss out.
5. Pricing on Amazon vs Your Website
If there are areas of your ecommerce performance that are struggling, Black Friday is the perfect opportunity to reduce pricing and shift products that have been sitting in your warehouse. We have web development specialists that can help you create a different price point from your website onto Amazon with plug-in API tech for the leading CMS’s.
Make This Year Your Best Black Friday on Amazon
The Amazon marketplace is an exciting and challenging ecommerce arena, with brands fighting for attention from savvy shoppers. Customers will flood the site on Black Friday in search of bargains, and so it is imperative that your Amazon brand store and Amazon advertising strategy is ready to capture their attention.
For advice on how to achieve your most successful Black Friday yet, get in touch with our industry-leading Amazon marketing team. Our keyword gap insights have helped us to forge growth for our clients on a macro and micro level, and we’re ready to help your business do the same.