With a stronger inclination towards online shopping, the holiday season this year will be more critical and competitive for Amazon sellers than ever before. To stay ahead of the competition and to ensure that their products stand out in the market, sellers must employ a comprehensive Amazon advertising strategy to gain from the traffic surge. This year during Prime Day, several sellers encountered challenges because of a serious lag in their existing approach and couldn’t gain maximum ROI. To ensure that such problems do not arise during the BFCM period, sellers need to aggressively engage in better advertising tactics. 

A customized advertising strategy will help you enhance your brand experience, drive shopper engagement, and increase conversions in Q4. Not just this, it will help you leverage significant traffic and sales opportunities during this period. You must build a solid strategy to reach shoppers ahead of BFCM. A large number of customers search for products ahead of the actual sale day. Catch their attention early on.

In this edition of the newsletter, we are going to deep-dive into key actionables that you should keep in mind in order to surpass your competitors during the holiday season:

1. Define Your Advertising Goals: You need to precisely define your goal for the advertising campaign first and then work on achieving it. Knowing exactly what you are trying to accomplish, setting the right pace, and measuring that constantly is very critical for overall success. Your holiday strategy will be significantly influenced by your advertising goals. For instance, if your priority is driving sales, then you need to focus on keywords that are generating clicks and converting into sales. Similarly, if your goal is creating brand awareness, then you need to center your campaign around impressions. For this goal, the focus will be more towards putting related keywords, setting high CPC bids to help win more keywords and gain more impressions. These goals can also be different across the portfolio. For example, a set of products could be the sales drivers, another set could be new launches, one could be a set of products with high growth potential, etc. Each should have its own advertising goals. Always remember, no matter what the goal is, make sure your product listings are optimized for retail readiness with conversion-friendly images, user-driven content and a considerable number of reviews. This will help in driving maximum benefit from the ads push.
2. Optimizing the Campaign Structure: Amazon offers two types of campaign types to choose from – automatic campaigns and manual campaigns. Each strategy has its own benefits, but we recommend to formulate an ads strategy leveraging both Automatic and Manual targeting to reach more customers and increase sales. Identify the best performing keywords from the automatic campaign, and then add them to your manual campaign before the holiday season is underway. Manual targeting allows you to have the highest level of control, so if your targeting is done critically, these campaigns will get you high ROI. You can clearly identify and target keywords for high performance. On the other hand, Automatic targeting works well to cast a wide net and assists effectively in prospecting for new keywords that the customers are going to search for. It matches relevant search terms with your products.
   Specifically for the holiday season, you can employ product targeting ads to reach a wider audience. Identify high performing ASINs via your automatic campaign and target them manually. You can also utilize negative amazon targeting to prevent your ads from being displayed for superior ASINs that you don’t want to compete for. 
3. Utilizing Amazon Sponsored Brands Video: Amazon Sponsored Brands video will help you stand-out on mobile and desktop shopping results, allowing you to reach more customers. Relatively, videos impact the viewers’ brains much more than simple-plain text and are also easier to retain. Specifically for the holiday season, these Sponsored Brand videos can prove to be a powerful tool for you by helping increase your product discoverability. Utilize remarketing and Amazon DSP to reach a much bigger audience as customers are bound to shop across various channels on BFCM. It is recommended to keep the video content to-the-point, demonstrative and product-focused. To hold the customer’s attention, the optimal length of these videos should be between 15-30 seconds. Lastly, ensure that your on-screen text is readable and the video format is optimized for mobile devices as well. The video can have a holiday theme if the product is relevant like chocolates can be advertised with a holiday theme.
4. Remarketing Ads via Display Ads – These times are great for deploying audience based display ads. Go heavy on Sponsored Display ads as customers are checking out a variety of products, so you would want your product to be top of mind. Seasonal cheer should be reflected in your display ads to promote your sales and deals. Specific festive/holiday display ads can be employed for this season. There has been an increase in “self-gifting” in recent years, so tailor your display ads accordingly to address people buying gifts for themselves. For example, using messages like “treat yourself this holiday season”, will help target this stratum of the audience. 

From increasing visibility to maximizing conversion rates, Amazon sellers can win big during the Q4 period by formulating and executing an intensive Amazon Advertising strategy. The aforementioned tips can be used by sellers for accelerating their success on the marketplace and surpassing their competitors. 

Want to know how you can build an effective advertising strategy to crush competition this holiday season? Hit reply and let’s chat.