Amazon Prime Day Preparations

hi guys this is Jelena from Amazonia PPC and today I'm going to talk to you about q4 preparations for this year the reason why we believe this q4 is going to be pretty huge is because our sons recently and now says you probably already know that q that prime date this year is going to be in October and also as we've seen from the previous trends with lockdown and coronavirus a lot of retail chains are closed in the mean time unfortunately but this also means open opportunity for opportunities for e-commerce so all these demand that existed on retail is going to shift their focus over to e-commerce so those are the two main reasons why you need to prepare for this q for more than you did for previous years simply because this year circumstances aren't standard to the least so basically we have we had had clients ask us how to prepare for q4 and some of the things that we have in common that we tell them are first of all make sure to cover the basics you're in stock that your stock can handle increased volumes of traffic because there's going to be increased volumes of traffic also make sure that you are comfortable with possibly sacrificing part of your profit margins to cover the higher storage fees it's better to be less profitable than to deal with stock outs for sure we have learned this over the coronavirus periods with accounts that had an influx in sales that they just couldn't handle it weren't sustainable to them simply because they for example how the justin stock inventory management policy which means you only stock up to 30 days because you know that's how much you're gonna sell according to some forecasting methods there are programs like cell or mobile that offer forecasting for inventory but you should take these forecast with a grain of salt simply because they can't know whether that's going to be a second wave you know software doesn't know that and it's become more and more announced in the news that there's going to be the second wave possible second lockdown and the economy is just going to shift so make sure that aside from being ensuring that you are fully in stock also following the trends you know there are platforms like glimpse calm or insights nozzle dot ai or for example sell mobile also provides these forecasts of sales future sales but glimpse and insights they give you information from Google Trends which is basically just served to you based on though their their own analysis so following glimpse in the kovat for example during the covert lockdown we were able to see all kinds of crazy things increasing in demand such as home homemade bread makers you know the bread makers and chicken coops people were looking to grow their own chicken and and eggs gardening tool sets you know all these sustainability tools even bulk ammunition which is super scary to see but basically that's that's what had increased in demand and we were able to see it through glimpse and we were also able to see it through some of the accounts that were quite surprised with the increase of falling that they had their problem number one was inventory management you don't want to deal with these problems because for sure you're gonna lose more money with stock outs then what you are gonna lose with high storage fees for q4 so make sure you are comfortable with sacrificing one part of your margins to ensure stability for your business second preparation is to have an optimized listing for sure twofold it's twofold optimistic humans so that the listing converts really well so that's the part that you do mostly through copyrighting whether that's in a written form or through imagery infographics videos videos really big this year so make sure you implement video in your product listing and also in your advertising strategy which I'll talk about later so good optimize listing combined with coupons and deals and promotions and all these other features is ensure to give you higher conversion rates so make sure your listings are tidied up and so basically for your listings that are optimized if you have enough in stock you should be you should be able to deal with any kind of infox queue for successfully when it comes to advertising strategy some of the things we make sure we have laid out for our clients is the content marketing plan now you see Amazon has introduced Amazon posts I think early on this year they have been there for a couple of months but not huge attention was given to them on that until they were moved to the advertising console that they recently built in seller central so under the advertising console you should be able to have Amazon posts which are a free feature so ideally what we advise our clients is to make make a list of all the more important days like during the q4 like free commerce Labor Day Thanksgiving singles day Halloween Black Friday Cyber Monday of course Christmas New Year's Hanukkah Boxing Day all these important dates and make sure you create Amazon posts for these special with some kind of special discount you know Boxing Day 20% off for the inverter you want to get rid of or or for yours best sellers if your if part of your business model is repeat purchases from loyal customers then for sure you should make some kind of Amazon posts combined with the coupon for first and percentage off that will offer your customers an entrance into your product portfolio which is super important simply because you're using your best sellers for this purposes it's going to be something that will be the easiest window for for the new shoppers who weren't familiar with your brand before so using these discounts is going to be the only part of your profit margin that you sacrifice in order to win a new customer that's why Amazon posts are still so powerful and also there isn't a limit to which how many posts you are available to eligible to apply so you can even do twice a day if you have the inspiration to and it's a great great vehicle to build brand loyalty that's endgame what amazon wants they want to create a branded presence for brands within their online space that's the reason why they've introduced storefronts a plus content they've allowed us to upload videos they have various various advertising ad formats that increase brand awareness and brand presence on Amazon and that's the reason why they also are introducing Amazon posts my prediction that these Amazon posts will become a paid feature in the future similar to boosted posts on Facebook so make sure that you use them while you can and while they're free there's an overall good momentum for Amazon posts when it comes to winning new customers on Amazon if you belong in these accounts that have growth as their main advertising strategy and repeat purchases as part of their business model then for sure you will likely want to invest in new ad formats for example product targeting on sponsor displays very powerful and very cheap us so far so far so good from what from the numbers that we've been seeing cost per click on average with product targeting and sponsor display is still low so it's profitable to use these ad formats to your advantage to win more market share especially for the best sellers during q4 for best sellers during q4 be careful isn't targeting you will be able to receive premium placements not like in the suggested product section of where all the other competition you have 200 products so they just click through and then it's like a knob it's like on a carousel where they just shaped through the products that's what automated campaign still instead of that on the product detail page of your competitor that you manually chose to show up on you will receive placements that are a little bit irregular that are below the buy box and below the bullet points of your competitor which is super powerful and not in a regular format of sponsored product so that's super important and make sure you use that also when it comes to video I mentioned already that this year aside from all this craziness been going on with lockdowns sponsor brands video is one of the newest ad formats that generates really high click-through rates so if you have a new listing that you're launching which is not recommend it's never recommended to launch products during q4 because that's the time of the year where generally speaking your best sellers are the ones that are gonna do even better during this period but basically if you're launching a product now this sponsor brands video format is going to add format it's going to give them a very good initial push because you can target sponsor price ads through keywords so you can target some kind of narrow choice of keywords that you want to show up for and then boom you just throw video at them it's gonna likely increase click-through rates which is super important for ranking products and also this ad format is also going to be pretty cheap because it generates higher click-through rates and that's something that I think is relevant for this year we'll see how the transom move on to the next year but right now there's a roll good momentum on average we'll see like 20% maximum of competitors who actually are doing some kind of video so it's not like all of us are fighting over this one placement so it's still relatively cheap make sure you create it with some kind of amateur video with your smartphone and just do it just like upload it because it's still working you know the intention of customers on average is not that sophisticated yet and not that saturated yet so there's a good momentum and the same video you can use in probably in different dimensions you need to read through the recommendations that Amazon is giving you for the requirements for the video in order to do it right but that same video should be able to be uploaded to your listing which will then again increase conversion rates so as you can see video as a format in terms of advertising can increase your listings click-through rate and on the product listing side when you upload it there it can increase conversion rates which is post both of these metrics are super important for rankings so ideally I would recommend using this type of format only for your best sellers and especially if you have repeat purchases as part of your business model so making sure that you this is probably not a good time for product launches I already mentioned but you know if you have if you're eligible for subscribe and save if you have repeat purchases like I said coupons deals promotions all these things are gonna work really well during q4 because obviously it's that's the thing how been always doing it with the novelty of Amazon post that's the kind of thing that we recommend for our clients mostly in terms of strategy for q4 for all these additional days it's super easy to set up holiday specific campaigns so for example if your brand sells giftable products you're going to create an app called campaign that started for example three weeks before Christmas and it's going only going to run for that month and then it's gonna be Christmas Pacific campaign where giftable products are giving that 20% off or something like that if you sell to the Jewish community before Hanukkah yo then it create a campaign that's three weeks earlier of course so make sure you think a little bit in terms of holiday specific campaigns and which ones could potentially apply to your account into your products of course it all comes down to knowing who you're selling to hopefully you do that when it comes to accounts that are oriented towards profitability well it's still going to be this time of the year where all of us are just like bound to spend more including advertisers including customers who are saving up for q4 so that they can spend in so if you for example are tight on budget then make sure you just strengthen your ranking for the most important keywords there's going to be new blocks of traffic which also always always means influx of competition so you don't want to lose ranks during this time of the year so for the ones for the keywords that you have the first page access to organically make sure you bid really hard on them during this whole period to save and strengthen your rankings that's the number one advice we give to the ones that are oriented towards profitability and ranking of course coming back to Amazon posts that are still free you can definitely use that you don't even have to have like a special offer to them just a piece of content that your customers will find useful will suffice there they'll follow you and then some later time you know there's this follow feature on Amazon post that you can really capitalize on meaning you know they will follow you and then later at some time of the year later they will end up converting them and purchasing from you instead of from someone else which is something you can always actually it's super precisely but you know it does build up with time so those are a couple of advice I had for q4 if you need any suggestions ideas or anything from me I'd be happy to share my insights and my opinions on so just put a comment in the comment box be happy to answer that thank you for watching and let me know what you think