Ross Walker is a Senior PPC Manager at Bobsled Marketing.
With Prime Day less than a month away, in fact, it was just announced that Prime Day will take place on July 12 and 13 this year! It’s important for brands to start thinking about the best advertising strategies that will bring customers in now. By the time the big day arrives, sellers should already have groups of targeted loyal customers who are ready to make a purchase.
At Bobsled, an Acadia company, we are always weighing the benefits of different ad solutions, both on and off Amazon. Recently, I have come to find that Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform offers the most instrumental tools and resources to help brands find out how, where, and when to implement Prime Day ads.
Simply put, DSP is one of the best ways to center and build customer loyalty. Since it uses a combination of Amazon and third-party ad solutions, it is easy to customize ad creatives and tweak campaigns in a way that is congruent with emerging customer behavior data.
Prime Day will take place on July 12 and 13 this year.
So far, there are 4 Things We Know About Amazon Prime Day 2022. While brands are newly limited in some ways, they are given more creative marketing freedoms than ever before. This is mostly due to the influx of multimedia ad opportunities through Amazon, such as Twitch streaming and AMC. This has lifted the cloth over brands’ eyes, giving clearer insight into the nuts and bolts of Amazon’s data-tracking capabilities.
Knowing this, it’s clear that DSP offers the most powerful and versatile resources to help brands capture their most important audiences for Prime Day. Last week, we talked about the importance of this upcoming event as a test run for some of the larger Amazon Prime events in later quarters. Below, I’ve highlighted 3 ways that brands can use Amazon’s DSP ad solutions to boost sales before, during, and after Prime Day in 2022.
But before we get into the tactics, here are some things you should know about DSP as it relates to Prime Day.
Customers come and go, but this cycle is not linear. It is more than possible to rope customers back in, even if they haven’t purchased from your brand in a while. Use this time before Prime Day to leverage what data you can about potential, current, and past customers of your brand. How can you target them specifically so they’re back on board before the Prime Day deals drop?
It can take time to build up audiences and awareness, especially when trying to build them up in all the phases of the funnel. So it’s important to start this journey well ahead of Prime Day to maximize results.
A newly-released platform is Amazon Marketing Cloud or AMC. This is a complete measurement and data tracking solution, giving brands bigger insights into the customer’s path to purchase. This will help sellers large and small make more informed decisions about the best ways to use Amazon DSP to capture the right audience in the right way. This platform is particularly helpful around events like Prime Day because advertisers can better see the full journey that their shoppers are making from awareness to eventual sales.
Many of our retail clients are looking for unique ways to increase both awareness and consideration in their audiences ahead of Prime Day. Among my book of clients, Brands in the beauty and pet food niches, in particular, want to use higher-quality videos and other media assets to really draw new viewers in.
To meet these requests, we are running DSP ads in the form of streaming and online video campaigns as they are currently the best ways to secure the first touch for new customers. Then, the brands can measure each customer’s impact across their lifetime. By studying the behavior of other shoppers, brands can readjust and recalibrate their ad campaigns to retarget those viewers with promotion-focused ads. Try
In the lead-up period, we are seeing increased searches for specific brands and traffic comes directly to those brands as a result. Interestingly, this shows that upper-funnel videos are key components of both first and last-touch efforts.
I want to give brands a better idea of the ways they can use DSP in a similar fashion to boost engagement and growth overall. Below are 3 ways to use Amazon DSP advertising for Prime Day:
As I mentioned above, and mentioned in a recent blog post, the new Amazon partnership with Twitch is finally starting to produce an exciting and unique value opportunity for advertisers. This popular streaming platform can now be tapped into in order to provide first-touch advertising in a revolutionary way. Similarly, Amazon Marketing Cloud gives brands access to customer insights across the entire purchase path, offering new ways to understand and leverage their ad inventory.
Never before have brands been able to access critical information about customer behavior across every step of the funnel, even when making off-platform purchases. One of the most important revelations coming from AMC is that a multimedia ad campaign is best for building customer awareness around Amazon Prime Day.
Combining different ad types into a multi-faceted campaign is a powerful way to bring in new and returning views right before Prime Day. According to an Amazon Prime Day 2021 report, brands that added multimedia ad channels by incorporating at least one type of media performed much better than brands that only went with sponsored ads. Combining sponsored ads with Twitch streaming videos, audio services, or TV platforms like the Amazon Fire Stick can help give your brand the boost it needs in the next several weeks leading up to Prime Day.
This access to insight - and these new opportunities to leverage unique ad types - provides a deep understanding that brands did not have in previous Prime Days. This is going to make Prime Day 2022 a potential game-changer for on and off-platform brands.
Want to learn more about how Twitch and AMC can boost your growth? Go on a deep dive into the Amazon Marketing Cloud and Twitch Advertising with Amazon Marketing Cloud: How it Works and How to Use It!
Over time, brands deal with an expanding list of shoppers who haven’t returned to buy from their inventory in a while. Those who haven’t purchased anything yet can be brought back with different upper and mid-funnel tactics to get them excited about Prime Day. Every brand has its loyal customers, even if they haven’t purchased in a while.
How can brands get loyal customers to come back? This is often much easier said than done. With new types of ad types and advertising media channels available, brands have more opportunities to leverage retargeting audiences in new and unique ways.
This is also the perfect time to capture new leads as well. Help audiences get familiar with your brand now, so they will feel confident in buying from you when Prime Day arrives. According to a new report by Kantar, 71% of shoppers learn about new brands in the weeks leading up to Prime Day, when brands are pushing targeted ads and Prime Day campaigns. Additionally, 75% of Amazon shoppers are said to be more likely to buy a product on Prime Day that they discovered in the weeks leading up to it than a product they have never seen before.
While all brands operate in the spirit of competition, it can sometimes be advantageous to partner with other top performers across niches in a combined effort to bring in more sales. Amazon’s internal data reports that brands who banded in a “better together” campaign outperformed individual brands without partners.
But it’s not just the partnership alone that helped brands key into better performance overall - it’s a combination of ad strategies as well. Amazon also found that using multiple different ad solutions, such as a combination of DSP and streaming ads (through Twitch or TV), lead to a 50% increase in sales.
After the initial rush of Prime Day, you still have a large window of opportunity to win back loyal customers and secure a wave of growth moving forward. Amazon DSP retargeting often falls in the middle of the funnel, during the lead nurturing stage. During this time, you want to focus on the customers that you’ve attracted using your sponsored ads and sponsored products. Retargeting allows you to incorporate multimedia strategies to give your customers a reason to stick around. Incorporating complementary products is a great way to highlight halo products and add another upselling tactic to the campaign as a last-ditch measure that doesn’t overwhelm the customer. Amazon DSP offers insight tracking to help you understand where in the funnel your complementary product offerings should be.
Not to mention, DSP retargeting offers many benefits over sponsored displays, including:
You have endless possibilities for creatives, ad placement locations, data tracking, and more. DSP is a powerful tool, so it’s important to keep using it well after Prime Day has ended. Learn more about the benefits and best practices of Amazon DSP retargeting by viewing our blog that explains rebranding creatives in further detail.
When do brands need to start implementing multimedia campaigns and DSP ads to spread awareness about Prime Day?
Right now!
I recommend about 6 weeks out to give brands enough time to season their campaigns, optimize their ads, and provide first-touch to customers a few times to make an impression before the real targeted Prime Day ads start to hit. While ads should mostly be targeting loyal and returning customers, this is an ideal time to touch new customers for the first time as well.
It is getting easier to do this as Amazon is starting to incorporate off-site video inventory to Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Display ad products. It’s likely that these capabilities will become native to the platform soon. This means that even brands without access to DSP can still benefit from some of the unique features that make DSP a good choice for growing customer engagement. It will also make the platform more expensive, especially for brands looking to create DSP campaigns for the first time. This is something that Bobsled experts will continue to monitor as access to platform features continues to change.
See how this year’s potential stacks up with last year’s outcome: check out Amazon Prime Day 2021: The Results.
Stay apprised of any and all updates about Amazon DSP methods and other strategies to make Prime Day 2022 successful. If you are a brand looking for the best omnichannel solutions to promote growth and profit, you can schedule a consultation with our Amazon experts at Bobsled today!