In this episode of Selling on Giants: The eCommerce Marketplace Show, Will Haire, BellaVix’s cofounder, an expert with extensive experience in the direct-to-consumer retail industry and a proven track record of implementing successful marketing strategies on renowned platforms like Amazon, Walmart and Target, talks about the process of “Fine-Tuning Your Strategy for Last-Minute Amazon Black Friday and Cyber Monday”.
In this latest episode, we delve into the intricacies of Big Sales events. Our expert guest sheds light on the last Minute Black Friday and Cyber Monday preparations. The episode underscores how you can use this short period of time to prepare for the sales events of the year. Will also shares some practical strategies that can improve your sales during this period. Don’t miss out on “Fine-Tuning Your Strategy for Last-Minute Amazon Black Friday and Cyber Monday!”.
Here are the top 10 key takeaways from the conversation:
- Prepare your strategy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, focusing on fine-tuning your approach to maximize success.
- Optimize your product listings for search and incorporate holiday-themed elements to attract holiday shoppers.
- Utilize AI tools to create holiday-themed imagery, making your products more appealing to potential buyers.
- Ensure you have sufficient inventory in stock well in advance to meet the increased demand during the holiday season.
- Consider running promotions and discounts, as holiday shoppers are actively looking for deals.
- Have clear advertising goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to guide your advertising strategy.
- Be cautious with holiday-related keywords, as they can be subjective and less effective in driving conversions.
- Sponsored products still tend to be the most effective advertising format, with DSP and sponsored brand videos becoming more prominent.
- Consider using streaming TV ads for brand awareness during the holiday season.
- Use inventory management strategies to stay in stock, including having FBM listings as backups and enforcing MAP policies to prevent undercutting by distributors.
Additionally, keep pricing strategies in mind, offering discounts and promos to meet the expectations of deal-seeking holiday shoppers.
- Listing – Making sure that it’s optimized for search. Since it’s the holiday season and most people are shopping for gifts, ensure that you’ve added some holiday themes. The images play an important role, so you’d like to give that holiday vibe to your listings as well as your storefront.
- Deals – Speaking of storefronts, having a Deals page in there helps in attracting buyers, most definitely. It gets crazy during the season and there’s a lot of competition, so having a Deals page gives you an edge.
- Inventory – Needless to say, this is the time that you’d like to be on top of your inventory. If you don’t have products, it’s tough to do any strategizing. If you haven’t sent your inventory out, it should have been October 26. If you don’t have inventory in, I would consider those products obsolete. Inventory is everything. You want to make sure that you have enough inventory. You can’t sell products that aren’t in stock. If you have the ability to use a third-party logistics provider, have the FBM listing ready. That way, if you run out of stock, you can just turn it right back on.
- Advertising – Having beautiful and optimized listings is like a mall without customers. You need to get the word out, and the most effective way to do that is via ads. It’s really an effective way to get additional shoppers who are in the market in front of your products and hopefully buying them, taking them home, and leaving raving reviews on all your product listings. Make sure to leverage all ad types. Don’t push products that have poor reviews.
- North Star KPI – Identifying your North Star Metrics and managing the expectations towards your goals ensures efficiency.
- Campaigns – Keeping an eye on your campaigns and making sure you’re pushing the top of the search inside them, as well as taking advantage of the bid multiplier, will ensure success, especially if you’re coupling that strategy with a sponsored brand video. Around October to November, you’ll likely start getting a little more aggressive with maybe DSP campaigns. Your goal here is to rebuild your remarketing audience. Consider remarketing and retargeting using sponsored display. Using DSP brand-tailored promotions kind of has this baked in a little bit, but try to get your products back in front of shoppers Leveraging portfolios also makes it really easy to manage promotional campaigns.
- Keywords – Depending on your budget, pick the top 5-25 keywords that you want to own market share. Identifying those very relevant, competitive keywords that you want to own will help kind of gauge how much you need to invest. Do not invest in irrelevant keywords. Instead, put in the DSP and build an audience or target an audience, or even go a little higher in the funnel and get some contextual audiences built.
- Free Tools – Take advantage of the free tools they have on Amazon, such as Manage Your Customer Experience, and Amazon Posts are technically advertising tools that you can use that are low costs. This aids in putting your brand all over the place – it’s awareness, it’s getting eyeballs.
- Pricing Strategies – Amazon shoppers are always looking for discounts, so you need to get ahead of it via promo codes and sales price promotions.
- Profitability – This is going to come down to your efficiency. You’re going to want to make sure your Amazon prices match your prices across online platforms. And you’re going to want to make sure that your advertising budget, the efficiency standard, and we use TACoS, total advertising costs of sale, total spend by total sales, ad sales, and organic sales.
Tune in on November 14th, 2023, at 12:00 pm EDT to listen to the whole conversation. Tune on some of BellaVix’s social media:
Or listen to the previous episodes on the different platforms:
Links:
- LinkedIn – Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willhaire/
- Branded – LinkedIn: https://www.bellavix.com/
“Selling on Giants: The eCommerce Marketplace Show” is sponsored by BellaVix. To learn more, head over to https://sellingongiants.com/
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