[ad_1]
Selling on Amazon at the biggest business event of the year should be easy. When Black Friday rolls around, you would think taking advantage of the site’s branded promotions would be as easy as submitting products and seeing your sales increase.
While there are many retail brands that have the potential to take advantage of Amazon’s Lightning Deals advertising service, the strict qualifications can exclude many other very reliable sellers. For brands and sellers who don’t qualify, they’re on their own in a highly competitive market.
How can brands qualify for Amazon’s Black Friday Lightning deals?
Amazon consistently sees Black Friday sales growth from 60% year on year, with many of those sales coming from their Lightning Deals ad campaigns. These Flash Deals are time-limited promotions that appear on Amazon’s deals page – a safe destination for Black Friday shoppers.
The list of qualifications to participate in Amazon’s Black Friday Lightning Deals includes:
- A high product rating – poorly rated products are unlikely to qualify;
- Have more than 80% of product variations included (if applicable);
- Not to be included in restricted categories (including, but not limited to, electronic cigarettes, alcohol, adult products, medical devices, and infant drugs and formulas);
- Be eligible for Prime;
- A new element.
The problem is that this list is not exhaustive, as we have found in the past when trying to submit our own customers’ products for these promotions. There seem to be plenty of criteria hidden behind the scenes on this list that you can only stumble upon after trial and error.
What if you can’t qualify?
Failure to qualify for Amazon’s Lightning Deals on Black Friday can be a huge blow to brands hoping to take advantage of advertising services that drive sales. However, Amazon does not own any copyright or property in Black Friday, either as an event or as wording for use in product descriptions and designs, even on their own site.
Having to face Black Friday without Amazon’s help can be intimidating, and sure enough, it puts brands on the back burner when it comes to competing with products that have been approved for services. However, sellers can combat this with their own sponsored products or advertising strategies, bidding on Black Friday keywords and optimizing key points throughout the event.
Last year, ClickThrough shared an overview of how to prepare your Amazon strategy for Christmas, and many of these principles also apply to Black Friday. In order to plan for success only within Amazon, you will need to:
- Be sure of your best-selling products and be prepared with an inventory;
- Identify the seasonality of your products and the performance of your ads;
- Update your storefront to showcase your offers;
- Adjust your product listings for organic visibility and user experience.
But when your competition turns to these tactics to increase sales as well, looking to join forces with other channels is the newest and easiest way to differentiate yourself.
Why combine Amazon with paid social networks or PPC?
The advertising products built into Amazon’s platform are powerful and allow sellers to create campaigns based directly on their past performance and product data stored on their platforms. Salespeople may well view the option of advertising elsewhere as less important, effective, or simply more difficult to assess when it comes to reviewing performance. In fact, using your Amazon listings or storefront as a landing page is incredibly beneficial.
1. Get a commission for bringing external traffic to the United States
You can assume that Amazon would prefer you to keep your paid advertising campaigns on their own platform, but in reality they are fond of all the methods that will bring in external traffic and, if you are in the US, even pay a fee. commission. for your trouble.
The reality is that once users are on Amazon, the platform can run sponsored posts, suggest similar items, and send emails with offers after purchase. When you provide this traffic to Amazon, that initial loss of advertising budget can be quickly offset by the additional expense of your traffic on the platform. And there’s no reason you can’t enjoy the same benefit: Make sure your product clearly shows similar or frequently purchased products with products from your own store to maximize your conversion value.
2. Use audiences to approach more granular targeting
While Amazon limits you to keyword targeting (unless you’re using the DSP network), using a channel like paid social media will allow you to target audiences that match your own target market. With social worker with its own set of Black Friday advertising benefits, being able to take advantage of it to increase your Amazon conversions only strengthens your approach.
3. Offer users a site they know well
After you’ve fine-tuned your targeting to make sure you’re directing the right people to your products and storefront, presenting them with a well-written page they already know will improve the chances of conversion. When shopping for Black Friday, finding a product available on Amazon (a site where most shoppers will already have an account and – in most cases – will be logged in with their payment information completed) makes the whole process easier. process and inherently gives them confidence that they’re in a safe place.
While you might think it’s a fair approach to cut out the middleman and drive users straight to your own website (if you have one), consider being a top customer for your brand. Being presented with a site that they have used several times before that has clear standards for sellers, compared to a new business page (for them), takes the initial guesswork or research needed for users to feel safe buying.
4. Unify your marketing strategy
Finally, but perhaps most important, joining forces with your other advertising channels gives you a unified approach to full stack advertising. At the busiest time of year, being able to reach out to users at all stages of the funnel is the only sure-fire way to encourage them and guide them to the final purchase. While we, as marketers, have all of our specialties (and our own channels through which we swear), being able to recognize where we stand in our users’ stories is essential.
Whether you qualify for Amazon’s Lightning offers, can increase your ad spend to cover the basics of Amazon itself, or look elsewhere to drive traffic to your brand, it’s critical that you start optimizing your announcements now. To learn more about creating the perfect Amazon product page, you can download our free eBook to get you started.
By Lewis Jewsbury – Amazon specialist, Click Marketing
Lewis Jewsbury is the Amazon Specialist for ClickThrough Marketing. He has been building brands through ecommerce strategy and marketing for the past seven years and, since joining ClickThrough, has worked in various industries, focusing solely on Amazon performance.
[ad_2]
