Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Tuesday everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder Managing Director here at BWG Connect a giant networking knowledge sharing group kicked us off seven years ago as a means for brands to interact together. And collectively we determine, Hey, what are the biggest things we want to learn about where our biggest pain points? How do we solve them. And then also, through the network of brands, just saying, Hey, who are the leading people in this space, helping the most people in the network out, and then we invite them on to, you know, kind of help educate everybody across the board, I spend the majority of my time talking to brands 20 to 30 a week, we'd love to chat with anybody on the line here today, look for a follow up email from me. And that is all around Hey, what are those biggest things that we're trying to solve for? So more than happy to network and knowledge share, we're going to do close to 100 in-person events this year. So if you're in a major city, just let us know. Or if you're going to shop, talk, fall or ice, tell us wise, whatever these might be, we're usually doing a few dinners around that we'd love to meet people in person. housekeeping items, as we get started here, drop any questions you have along the way into the q&a or into the chat. We'll get those answered in real time. You can also always email me any questions that includes during the call afterwards, a week from now, Aaron@bwgconnect.com. And we can probably connect you with a brand in the network that can help you solve whatever you have. And I think the last thing is, we're starting a few minutes after the hour, just so everybody knows, we'll wrap up with at least a few minutes left in the hour. Give everybody a chance to get on to the next meeting without being late. And now let's jump into a major topic that people have been asking about preparing for Prime Day. This is everybody's thinking about it. And we're in to kind of do a deep dive into the day. And what does it look like to drive conversions and prepping for it as a whole? I'm Tayler, you want to jump in? And try it yourself. And Blue Wheel. You guys have been long time. Supporters, friends of the network, really appreciate everything you do. Brands still highly recommend you so super happy to have you back on a webinar today. But if you want to, if you want to jump in with the intro on yourself and Blue Wheel that'd be awesome. Sounds good? Yeah,

Tayler Jaksim 2:40

absolutely. Hello, everyone. My name is Tayler Jaksim, I am the Vice President of advertising at Blue Wheel. So I oversee all all advertising channels, whether it's DTC, retail media, Amazon Marketplace, Walmart, you name it. And if you're unfamiliar with Blue Wheel, we are we help brands from from literally click to ship, so we help you on the front end in terms of advertising, SEO, organic social influencers, all the way to the back end operation side, whether it's fulfillment, inventory management, and planning, you know, content, all of that good stuff. And so I'm really excited to talk about this. Because when you when you oversee so many services for brands, there's a lot that goes on, right? There's a lot of planning from inventory to, you know, using your ads to the content you want to have created. And so we're gonna go over all of that today. And you know, we were excited to talk about this. And I've been really excited about this, because we know Prime Day is right around the corner. I feel like we say that every month. But truly we're, you know, in theory, as long as Amazon continues on the schedule they have for the last few months, you know, we're about two months out. And so we're gonna go through this today.

Aaron Conant 3:53

Awesome. Sounds awesome. Just a reminder, for those who had a few more joining you have questions along the way, dropping in the chat and the q&a, we'll get them answered.

Tayler Jaksim 4:01

Awesome. So like I said, we help every brand from click to ship. We are an omni channel agency. And so we've helped our brands do over a billion dollars in revenue in terms of for themselves. And so we can support. We support everyone, a lot of the major channels. And so what we're going to go over today is just looking at 2023 for Amazon, some of the tentpole moments along with the history of Prime Day, we're gonna go over the Battle of the deal days, we're officially at that point. Now. You know, if you would have asked me a few years ago, would we have been a battle of the DL days I'd be like, What are you talking about, but now we're at that point in eCommerce or we have this we're going to talk about how you can support Prime Day through our through Amazon along with your DTC efforts, some very key inventory deadline for Prime Day which is coming up in about 30 days, along with some key takeaways from this presentation. So we're gonna get right into it. So taking a look back Get 2023. You know, we found this stat from Amazon, which is, you know, I don't think any of us are surprised to see this. But the first day of Prime Day 2023 was the single largest sales day ever on Amazon helping make 2023, the biggest Prime Day event ever. This is not surprising, we know that every single year Prime Day gets this momentum and it just keeps growing and growing and growing. And we can see that if we're looking at Vyas, Batista, 2015 2015, you know, Prime Day was there, but we didn't really know about it. And then as it's grown, it's just continued to grow. And it's become this monstrous event that we have seen. And even though we're not seeing the significant increases, like we did, from 2018 to 2019, or 2019 to 2020. It's still a significant spending day, and we still expect it to grow. You know. And I think one of the interesting things too, when we look at this, as this chart shows us, what is what are people planning on purchasing during Prime Day, the thing that stands out to me is, is right here, you can see that it's all electronics, and it reminds me of well, I'm going to date myself a little bit, but you go back to the 90, late 90s or early 2000s, Black Friday, people were camping out in front of BestBuy or target and they're waiting to get like the prime deals for TVs, right? Like it was always known for like Black Friday was synonymous with TVs. And so that's now translated almost into Prime Day. Because Amazon owns Alexa, they have their own tech stack or the Alexa, you have the fire stick, you have the Echo Dot you have the ring alarm systems. And so it's not that surprising to see that electric electronics is still like one of the top categories that people are shopping for. I know personally, last year, my husband, I had just moved into our house and on Prime Day I picked up, you know, the ring security systems, right. So it's really kind of interesting to see this. And then you also see clothing, shoes and apparel. Again, not surprising as well as this is, you know, we're entering in that almost back to school season. So people are gonna be taking advantage of this. And so, you know, will Prime Day be, again, will we ever see that where it becomes, you know, I would say that, that that jump from 2018 to 2019 and 2019 2020. Probably not, but it is just going to continue to grow. Cool. So let's talk about the spring sale from 2024. Amazon tested this, which is my assumption, we they some of you might know about this, some of you might not. There was a five day sales period for it was also available for non Amazon Prime shoppers. And there was, you know, it was not every brand new about this. It was not offered to every brand they had kind of started to you know, I think we all had heard whisperings of their becoming a spring prime sale and and didn't act, they didn't market it as a prime sale. But we haven't really seen too many stats either from Amazon or just in this space of what everyone was seeing. And so we wanted to kind of report what we saw. So in terms of ad sales, we saw the most ad sales on Sunday, it was a five day event versus Amazon Prime's typical two day event. So in our you know, our thinking is that consumers had more time to make a decision. Again, I can only speak for myself as a consumer. But I definitely waited until one of the last days to purchase, because I was trying to see what else is going to be coming on sale, what are the other deals are going to be coming in. But if you know this is something to think about. Because if there is a repeat of this next year, which we will see, it's just important to know that because this was a five day sale, it's going to take a little bit more time for you to see I would say kind of the zenith of sales, because people are probably waiting because it is that longer event to purchase. The other thing we saw that was of note is CPC spiked on the second day, which was Thursday the 21st. We believe this is just because one the awareness kind of start to get out because of the event and to brands who were not advertising on the first day because they weren't aware, or maybe they saw a spike in sales at first day. We believe that a lot more people had started to run campaigns and launch to try to capture that traffic. But one of the things that was interesting is that after that second day of of the sale, we saw CPCs go back to not pre sale numbers, but they were lower. So it seems like people tried testing it with campaigns on the second day and then they might not have seen the same shopping propensity that we see for Prime Day and even fall ball. What was it this year prime big deals Day event. And so they probably just shut off campaign or just went back to their regular schedule advertising.

Aaron Conant 9:55

So a few questions. One comes in here. Do you have any stats about how much of the share of electronics sold is Amazon brands? I

Tayler Jaksim 10:04

do not. But I can reach out to our reps, I think that would be a really interesting stat to see if they would even release that. Because that goes into kind of, you know, they always have sales for Prime, right, like all of their products always have a Prime Day deal. So it'd be interesting to see how much of how much of the electronic sales do come from them. And the

Aaron Conant 10:24

other one is just around overall budget. If it's spiking on day two, how should people plan for budget? And maybe we're gonna get to that. But that comes in. Yep,

Tayler Jaksim 10:34

yep. So we'll get to kind of the subprime day, if again, we go past if we're going against past prime days, we know it's only going to be two days. And so we will go into that in a bit. But the sprays sale that happened this year was a little bit unique in that it was a five day sales event, which normally hasn't happened outside of you know, like, they'll have like the the beauty event and stuff like that. But the five days is interesting, because we don't even get five days on the fall the fall primate button, if you will. So this was just kind of some of the things again, that we saw for spring sale, which was interesting. But yeah, we'll definitely get into budget in a few slides. Awesome. Cool. All right. So keeping it going, we're gonna go into the battle of the deal days. So like I said, you know, we always knew it was Amazon Prime, right? And then or Prime Day, and then you go into Walmart plus week, right? Walmart and Amazon have this chess game, if you will have who's going to who's going to announce it first. And so Amazon will typically announce when their days are, and then Walmart will announce there's typically it's within the same timeframe, or there might be a little bit of overlap. And then target circle week, they've been kind of doing this, but this year, they actually already had it, and it was the seventh through the 13th of April, they might do another one in July, we don't know. But they also could be just testing, like having their own event that's not gonna be synonymous with prime or Walmart. So then they don't have that same competition, because that's what you know, it's really the Battle of the deal days, right? Walmart and Amazon typically are very close together in terms of theirs. So as a consumer, do you go to Walmart, or do you partake in prime. And based on just what we can see in the data is Prime Day still is just by far and away one of the largest shopping days of the year. And then one thing just to know on here is that there is a little bit of a newcomer in Tiktok shops. This is another marketplace that brands are opting into and getting more familiar with and consumers are trusting to, you know, to do shopping on Tiktok shops. They did last month, a little bit of a beauty hall event on Tiktok shops. And there were some brands that participated that had their own exclusive beauty products and brands. And you know, and consumers could shop out for 20% off or something. So it's getting interesting kind of this new ecosystem of the Battle of the deals and how do we get, you know, how do we get all of these consumers? Or how do we get a consumer to purchase our products? And if you think about it, this is already kind of been happening between DTC and marketplace. And so if you've heard me talk on a few different webinars, I've been really preaching Ditas DTC and marketplace, they're not enemies, right? They're really complements to each other. And it's a matter of how do you grow your brand's ecosystem in terms of digital presence and sales. And there are you know, there are cases to be made about margins are different between retailers are DTC and marketplace. But it's kind of looking at this whole, you know, you have Black Friday, you have Prime Day now is kind of becoming into the calendars. And so it's this interesting little thing that's happening in eCommerce, but more or less to Oh, go ahead here. No,

Aaron Conant 13:51

no, I'm just thinking about it. On the brand standpoint, it's just funny that from an Amazon Prime Day prep call, if we go back just a few years, it used to be almost solely focused on what's going on with Amazon. But now at this point in time, what I'm pulling out here is, hey, by the way, if I now you have, like three you have multiple other on your draft consumer site as well, like everything else is you're gonna go you're gonna try to take place, you know, and the plans you're gonna put in place holistically across all these different channels. Yeah, everything's gonna be like, spurred in by prime, or Amazon Prime Day, but everybody else is gonna fall it's just interesting. How everything year over year gets more and more complicated.

Tayler Jaksim 14:36

It does does Yeah, and if you're in you know, as a brand, if you're trying to holistically plan out, what are we partaking in? And then you also talk about like, what inventory or what what products are we going to be featuring, is it? Are we featuring the same products across all of these deal days, including, you know, and even on DTC? Are we doing different product departments? What is our inventory levels it becomes it's, it's like this 3d puzzle Almost so you have to put together and try to figure out where am I? Where am I putting my bets, at least for this and we know as brands like Prime Day is still by far and away the biggest event where people are going to be shopping. We know this right? It's very similar to Black Friday you have, you know, in the digital ecosystem, you have two tentpole moments in the air, you have Black Friday, and you have Prime Day prime days, obviously bigger than, you know, on Amazon than it is for DTC. But Black Friday, still is very solid showing on marketplace, but that is like the Super Bowl of DTC. So then you start adding in tic tac shops, target deal days, Walmart plus week, you have the Ulta Beauty events, you have the Sephora Beauty events that happen a few times a year. So yeah, it's becoming this this insane little complex. planning exercise is awesome. So

Aaron Conant 15:50

a couple of things come in. Are you able to share the deck after the call?

Tayler Jaksim 15:57

Yeah, I should be able to Yeah,

Aaron Conant 15:58

awesome. And the other one that comes in? Is there any consumer data on crossover shopping? Or over the years? Have there been leakage from one platform to another?

Tayler Jaksim 16:09

Oh, that's a good question. In terms of leakage is this I'm curious if it's more about like the overlap between what Yeah,

Aaron Conant 16:16

I think that's what it is from one platform to another where, you know, obviously, it started off with prime but now do we see because all these others that people are actually jumping to other sites as well?

Tayler Jaksim 16:28

Yeah, yeah, I still think you know, even with I personally, again, talking as a consumer, I've never parked or taken or took, and Walmart plus week, I haven't done anything with target circle week, I, you know, I'm still always in my head, I'm thinking about Amazon, Amazon Prime Day, tick tock shop, I think we might actually see the adoption be quicker, just because of how fast Tiktok shops has taken off. And it even it seems like the adoption, I don't have any data to back this up. But again, as a consumer, I'm more likely to purchase your Tiktok shop. And I already have multiple times than I am to kind of consider going to Walmart and doing this. So it's definitely interesting. And I think the more and more that we have concrete battles, again, of these meal days, we're going to be able to see what that looks like. Because if you think about it over DTC and marketplace, it was always trying to figure out where is that overlap between our consumer? Are they shopping exclusively on one channel or the other. And, you know, there is there's technology that you can use, that's going to cost hundreds of 1000s of dollars, that's going to be able to point you in that right direction. But I think the industry as a whole has made that assumption that it is a very, it's very similar, there is overlap there, there might be a few brands where it is very specific, and you have a very specific DTC shopper versus a marketplace shopper. But for the most part, you know, there is overlap. So I'm guessing that there is as of now, there isn't really any data in the history that shows that. But I think that Prime Day is still the big one. And then in my opinion, I think tick tock shop is going to be kind of become potentially there's lots of going on with tick tock right now. So who knows what might happen in the next nine months. But I think that if everything was to stay as it is, I think Tiktok shop could become almost that second challenge or potentially, in a few years to Amazon's prime.

Aaron Conant 18:27

Awesome. Love it.

Tayler Jaksim 18:30

It looks like Aaron, we have another question too. Are you gonna say that?

Aaron Conant 18:34

Yeah. I was actually top of mind for me as well. Do you think the spring beauty haul will affect historic Prime Day sales? And so Lisa's things are sending that in. It's interesting, because, you know, there's ball Prime Day, right? There's the spring event, there's Prime Day there's all these other like, do you see a watery, you know, down of a Prime Day as a whole? Love to hear your take on? Yeah, what do you see happening there?

Tayler Jaksim 19:04

In Okay, so So I think you still even as a consumer, you still think of Prime Day being in July, like there's still that that connotation of Friday happening in July. And then again, same thing with Black Friday, right, you know, Black Friday is where you're gonna go to make your DTC purchase. It's like there's still that that idea. But as we're seeing more sales events getting put into the the ecosystem of marketplaces and retail, I think shoppers are also now kind of thinking about where their marks are gonna be. So if you're a Sephora shopper, you know that Sephora does typically two VIB sales a year. And so you know, like if you you might start building your cart, pretty close to those events because you don't want to forget about it. And then it's the same thing kind of like with Prime Day like you know that closer you get to Prime Day being in July, for example, you're gonna start building your Carta. But I don't know if we'll necessarily see a watering down. I think instead, what we're going to see is the consumer getting trained or smart enough to realize that you can get thing you can get things that you would normally wait for Prime Day or a larger moment like Black Friday, you can get them on sale more frequently. And I think this is important, because over the last, you know, few years with inflation and different like macroeconomic trends, we've seen eCommerce kind of start to slow down a little bit and not grow at that same rate that we did. And so now that it seems like people are waiting for these moments to purchase where there's a discount, so if we have three prime days on Amazon, we don't know if spring prime is going to happen. And they don't refer to fall and spring prime, right. They have different names. But if we start having three primes on Amazon, along with your traditional Black Friday, and maybe on DTC to more tentpole moments, and then your Sephora and your altos or Nordstrom has their Anniversary Sale In August, I think you're gonna see that maybe overall a watering down for a brand in their sales, maybe not necessarily specifically on Amazon, but we do see buy go back. One second, we do see on this slide that the this the increase every year in terms of sales on Friday has started to slow relatively, I mean, we're talking about almost a million dollar jump in sales or a billion dollar jump in sales. So, you know, what's it what's a slight billion right, but I do think eventually that we will see overall for brands that that watering down, if that makes sense.

Aaron Conant 21:47

Oh, 100%. And I also like Stephanie's comment here, you know, that's why it's crucial as a brand to pick and choose, you know, carefully which sales we want to participate

Tayler Jaksim 21:57

in. Absolutely. And it's interesting, because now we have brands who on DTC they've been trying, you know, I think for a while on eCommerce on DTC, we had this idea of, you know, there had to be a promo every single month, and over the last two or three years more brands on DTC have started shifting to having, you know, their black friday moment, maybe to friends and family sales, and then maybe one other moment, so let's say for tentpole moments of the year, and now it's almost like the opposite is happening on marketplaces and retailers where they're like, oh, let's have even like, we want to have now three prime days, we now want to have two VIB sales and this, that and the other. And so as a brand, it's important to know like, what are you putting on sale during these moments? Is there going to be overlap? Or are you going to make it exclusive, so only a certain category of products on Friday is going to be available on sale. That way, if someone is looking for something else, they can pick it up during your friends and family sale on DTC, or they go to Sephora, right? So it's becoming very interesting on that front. All right, cool. Now let's get into the meat and potatoes or the the salad, if you will of this presentation. And we're going to talk about the formula for winning on Prime Day. And so we have basically, there's this formula that we have designed internally at Blue Whale to kind of help our brands get this success. And we've seen this because one we are a sell ourselves on Amazon. But to we've seen this with our brands over the last few years. And this is what it is in terms of one you're creating demand, you need to create demand. Plus you need to focus on brand awareness. Plus you have to have a budget that is going to equal a successful Prime Day. And for extra credit, you keep it going. Just like when someone purchases either on your site or at a retailer for your brand. That conversation shouldn't stop right now. They're in your now they're a brand loyalists, how are you going to get them to come back for your LTV right on Amazon. Just because we have Prime Day doesn't mean that you should stop right then and there. Right? You might not be having the same budgets. But you can be retargeting people through DSP or sponsored display, or other ad units. And so it's important to kind of keep this going. And so going into creating demand, this is going to be kind of the important thing. And so, you know, on marketplace, it's all search based for the most part, right? You want to make sure that you're showing up where people are searching. And so we have two different theories, if you will, when it comes to create demand. So first, on AMS, you can use sponsored display. So making sure you're showing up for either on competitor pages, or let's say you want to show off, even maybe potentially on your own or based on some interests or behavior similar to your brands. And then you also have the new brand and new to brand is really where you're focusing on your non brand, right? You're going to get in front of people who might not necessarily on keywords, you don't necessarily have your campaign. So let's say you sell shampoo and you own and let's say it's an anti dandruff shampoo, all of your keywords words might be antidandruff, for longtail keywords or something like that, while you're leading up to prime to you, and you want to create that demand and create that brand awareness, maybe you start going out of the box, instead of it being antidandruff shampoo, you might be able to search for like tree tea, like tree tea tree tea oil, right? Or you might start showing up for maybe certain I don't know, hey, shampoo for dry scalp or shampoo for something right, like different different things. Or maybe it could be hair products for dandruff, there's a multitude and really a plethora of things that you can go after. And then you just kind of start showing up. And typically, maybe it's a week before, even though some of these people might not necessarily be purchasing right now, when they are waiting for Prime to purchase. And they're like, Oh, I really need that new dandruff shampoo, or let's say, in three weeks, or shampoo runs out and they're like, Oh, I got that really cool ad from that brand, they might come back and find you. So you really want to focus on that creating that demand front. And you can do that through AMS, whether it's through new to brand or non brand, you know, through sponsored display sponsored products sponsored brand sponsored brand videos, or you can do this through DSP. And I should say and or you do this your DSP, again, you can focus on new to brand, which is you know, you can do different behavioral targeting and interest targeting. You can even tap into AMC, which we'll talk about in a little bit. AMC has some really cool audiences that you can be using. And so there's some there's some cool things that we've been testing for some brands. And then you can also be focusing on retargeting. So maybe it's someone who looked at your asin, you know, three months ago, and they're not really a lost cause because you have Prime Day coming up, start kind of getting in front of them again, and they didn't purchase. So you just want to stay top of mind for them, get them some really cool creative and you can't say on Amazon, you know, like Prime Day is coming or anything like that. They don't let us have fun. But you can start just again, getting in front of them, whether they're on IMDb, whether they're just scrolling through Amazon, whatever. So there's some good ways that you can do just to kind of like create that demand. Like, if we're making a cake, you want to you know, you're not separating all your dry ingredients from your wet ingredients. But you want to make the batter first before you get to do the frosting. Before you you know, put all the other fun fillings into it and all that stuff. I'm clearly not a baker if you can't tell. Awesome. So let's talk about if you were a brand who made pizza cutters, you know, it's a seemingly it's a kitchen gadget that I feel like everyone has, whether it's a bridal Registry, or, you know, you move into a new home or you just simply love making pizza, you probably have a pizza cutter. And so if we're looking at this, ah, that's a good one, Katie. That's a really good one. I also noticed on here that there's apparently bike pizza cutters, which I think is pretty cool too. But let's say you're you're only focusing on pizza cutters truly is like your your your keyword focus on on Amazon. So now if we're a pizza brand, or pizza cutter brand, we're going to want to start getting in front of more people, right? So people who might be searching for like full pizza cutters, or maybe they're looking for, you know, a pizza oven or pizza stone or whatever flat or whatever that is, you want to start getting in front of people, right? To be able to know like, Oh, hey, I saw pizza cutters. And maybe you saw a cool pizza cutter. Maybe you're someone that sells a bike pizza cutter, which I think is really smart. Or they have the hatchets or if you are like Katie and maybe you want to sell pizza scissors, you want to start getting in front of these people who might not necessarily know who you are. So then that way you can when it comes time for Prime Day, you're gonna have that whole new pool right there. And if you're running DSP, guess what all of those people you just showed up for leading up to the event, you can now retarget them on DSP or even sponsored display. Really quick, so

Aaron Conant 28:58

another? What about running meta tic tac campaigns driving to Amazon? It's

Tayler Jaksim 29:03

like Lisa is reading my brain of what's going to come in the deck. We're definitely going to get there I promise. Okay. Yeah. Okay, cool. So kind of going back into we talked about creating the demand, and how do you create that demand, you have to launch your campaigns early, if you are waiting until Prime Day to launch your ads and your campaigns you are? Well, you're too late. Every there's going to be brands every year who are gonna be launching campaigns on Prime Day or maybe during Prime Day. But if you want to get in front of people, and again, you want to create that demand, you want to show up for keywords you might not necessarily necessarily be showing up for now. You need to launch those campaigns early. We know as advertisers that campaigns need data and they need those learnings to be able to work efficiently. Don't wait until Prime Day get that learning started about a week or you can even do two weeks ahead of time. You don't have to put a lot of budget behind these campaigns. You just want to get them going so you're going to be able to capitalize on Prime Day because you know, when it comes time for Prime Day, what's going to happen, we're going to all be upping our budgets to be able to make sure we're counting for the increased, you know, shopping behavior on those two days. So moral of the story here is make sure you're launching your campaigns early Do not wait until Prime Day to launch, I promise you, there are going to be people who are gonna be launching on Prime Day, which is why we do see higher CPC sometimes. But don't wait just whether it's sponsored display SPVs, STS ESPYS. Just start them early. So then going back into focusing on new brands. So again, if we go into talking about the screen, the demanding in the brand awareness, you need to focus on new brand, you're not going you're going to probably see your performance go down leading up to Prime Day One because people are waiting to purchase because it's Prime Day and two, you need to get in front of new people you can't, it's we no longer can assume that if we build it, people will come that was kind of like, feel like a few years ago or early on in Prime Day was that was that. But it was very simple. Because there wasn't as many competitors wasn't as many shoppers, there wasn't as many sellers. But now it's no longer if you build it, people will come and they will shop, it's you have to build it, you have to advertise and you have to get in front of them. And then maybe they need to come. And so how do you do that you focus on new to brand, and you don't have those strict tacos or a cos or Rojas goals that you normally have, because you want to get in front of someone. And this is such a crucial shop stuff that we see brands missing out on, they over invest in branded, especially leading up to Prime Day and you've depleted your, you've already depleted that audience, you so it's important to make sure you're kind of just making sure there's always new brand in your systems. And that's how you can use you know, you can retarget them with DSP. You can make sure that you're retargeting them on sponsored display, and the other tactics that Amazon gives us. So on the non brand side, if we go back to the our little pizza cutter example, you can start showing up on competitor asin targeting. You can be buying competitor keywords, you can start doing like I said, Cool pizza cutters, if you want to show up for that you can do handheld pizza cutter, kitchen gadgets, small kitchen gadgets, pizza accessories, there's all these things that you can do to start showing up for. And you might even want to start showing up for you know, on on search, you might even want to start showing up for I don't know, maybe it's like Father's Day gifts, right? That's relevant. Or it could be gifts for dad or husband gifts, right? Like there's all these different segments that you can go into. And so it's important and so I say there's a question in the chat is this for DSP only know you're going to be you can focus on new to brand for both DSP and search. And so if we look at these keywords, this is what you're going to want to be. This is an example of expanding your new to brand reach on AMS through keyword targeting or through sponsored display and sponsored brand. On the DSP side, there's a bunch of different things that you can do. And so for example, you can have two different segments that we found is one, you can focus on high value customers just regular high value customers that might shop to you. Or you can figure out and target people who are new to brand customers. And so one of the cool things is that in DSP you can actually select when someone shopped, and so you can see here, we can actually target and create these audiences in DSP for last Prime Day. So not only is it just anyone that shopped on Prime Day, it's people who shot them brought Prime Day and we're new to brand customers. So it's kind of this cool thing that you can do. And so that's why we say you should be leveraging both AMS and DSP when it comes to creating this awareness. Because they they're it kind of is like they go part and parcel with each other. And so this kind of leads us to this next point of, if you want to win on Prime Day, you want to be running DSP, DSP has kind of always been that, that elusive option of yeah, we'll try it one day, or it might be a little bit challenging to run because Amazon doesn't give you seat necessarily unless you're spending a lot and so you have to find a partner who can run it for you. But a lot of times partners don't have insane minimums like Amazon does to run so you can run a campaign for maybe 5k. Or you can run a campaign for whatever those minimums are. And you can start DSP whenever so again, if we're talking about getting early, and just making sure we're there early, you can start running DSP, maybe two weeks early and then capitalizing on it during Prime Day and then slightly after. So one of the things that we found is that when you are running a full mix of advertising, so DSP sponsored display, display sponsored brand sponsored brand videos, sponsored products, we've seen an increase in conversion rate of 2,600% versus just doing a sponsored ad strategy, so only doing sponsored products or just a mix of just AMS we have been studying this for the last year. year and a half, two years via AMC. And it's incredible. And every time we pull these reports, it shows the same thing is that the more ad types you're running that is inclusive of DSP, the full mix that you're running, the stronger and the better your conversion rate will be. So if we're talking about winning on Prime Day, you need to have DSP in there and you have to have AMS you need to be running a full mix of channels. And so kind of just closing out DSP. So we want to focus on new to brands. This is where you can go into interest and behavior targeting. You can target people who recently bought a pizza stove, maybe or pizza oven. You can also use AMC audiences like AMC to create audiences, or one of the things that's cool on AMC is you can actually target people who have active bridal registries. So we talk about bridal showers. Typically, the happy couple will go into the local registry. And where do you find your kitchen equipment, typically on registries, whether it's a housewarming registry or bridal registry, typically, there's a pizza cutter on there if you were that pizza cutting brand. So focus on new brands, different ways that you can do it through either again, interesting behavior targeting or through AMC. And then don't forget about retargeting as well. So you can bring awareness to your deals, or you can retarget people who abandon their cart through DSP, that you can't necessarily do that on the different options through AMS. So instead of only focusing on brand, maybe for those two days, you can also have a DSP campaign running, you know, people interested in let's say, pizza cutters, or you can have a campaign running or and or you have a campaign running, targeting people who abandon your listing, they, they might have a product in their cart, and they just don't purchase it, you can give them an ad kind of bringing them back and reminding them to Hey, like, you know, you can't say Don't forget about us, but you can use the responsive eCommerce ads on DSP. And people go oh, yeah, I almost forgot to check out with that. So DSP, basically, what we're saying it's a non negotiable. If you want to win, a lot of brands are doing a lot more brands are opting into it. And then if you want a little bit of a competitive advantage, look into the AMC audiences, AMC can be incredibly helpful and wonderful to

Aaron Conant 37:17

do we want to tackle this budget question and I want to kind of expand it to off Amazon as well. Oh,

Tayler Jaksim 37:25

I know, we're all on the same page here. So the biggest thing for budget I would say is, first, you need to go into this, remembering that Prime Day is only going to get bigger, right. And so you want to make sure you have enough budget. So if you only spend 5k. Last year, you should assume that you're going to want to spend like on Friday, for example, those two days, you're going to want to say okay, what is a 50% more spend that I can be spending on these two days, and pulling from other parts of your year potentially, because you're going to want to be competitive CPCs continually get a good hire. So you always have to have that in the back of your mind. The other thing that is important to know that a lot of brands don't necessarily think about is we're gonna see budgets depleting earlier in the day, just because it's prime May, they are these big days. Don't forget about the West Coast, though we have California on the West Coast, we have taxes on the West Coast, and Central Time Zones. Typically, these are some of the top states that people are purchasing from. So what happens a lot of times is people will go in and they'll set their budgets and it's kind of like on the Senate and forget it. But they might have depleted their budget by 2pm. Eastern, there's a whole other half of the day ready to go and you're not going to have enough budget. And so you need to make sure that let's say again, you spent $5,000 on Prime Day last year, assume you're probably going to spend at least 7500 to $10,000 this year, depending on your product and your budget, we always try to have a higher so like when we're planning budgets, we always have a higher threshold in July, just because we know that July and November are going to be typically our larger months. And so we also have pocket budgets to say okay, let's say we're going to spend $100,000 on DSP, or on Prime Day, if we see that we're at a x tacos or a five row as for example, we're okay with spending an incremental $50,000 We're going to pull it from this month like you need to have plans going into it because what you don't want to do is it be 2pm on the first day of Prime Day, you're already on a budget and you're like I don't I can't turn back like campaigns on so you just need to be super prepared. And then in terms of if you want to have off Amazon support so meta or Tik Tok or Google or whatever you're gonna want to think about that. And I will say I'd like to start really quickly on this as you know, meta is going to be meta is going to be a tool that you can definitely use to promote your sales on Amazon. But I wouldn't necessarily plan to spend a ton on it, just because you're gonna have to get someone to go from the Facebook app, or the Instagram app to the Amazon app. And they might already have their, they might already have their built their cart built or the the other thing is the CPCs are going to be cheaper. So you don't necessarily have to worry about the CPC as being I would say like as influenced or as high as maybe a Black Friday time, because your CPC is going to be bloated on Amazon. So you can use the other channels to be able to have a little bit of a lower CPC, not nearly investing as much. Because at the end of the day, if you want to be able to show up on Amazon, you need to have more budget on Amazon, bringing someone from meta to Amazon is going to help but you need to make sure that you have more than enough budget for your AMS, your DSP campaigns before you you focus on the other channels. Awesome.

Aaron Conant 40:57

I mean, do you see these couple other in here from Ashley's? Well,

Tayler Jaksim 41:00

well, let me look real quick. So in terms of partners, so that is correct. So agencies who agencies or there's even tech, like I believe PAC, you, you can, you can use PAC view or Perpetua to run DSP campaigns, but it's going to be someone like an agency or someone that has a seat, that they can run DSP for you. Amazon has been the their minimum to have Amazon manager DSP campaigns has been growing going up and up and up every single year. So unless you're planning on investing, like a quarter of a million dollars in a month, you probably won't see your seat for DSP. So either find a partner that can do it, or you can look at either, like I said, a tech that can do it for you. And then I see Ashley also wrote in here, because they're already spending so much on meta and Google. And actually, is that in regard to promoting Prime Day via those channels? Or is that just or is that completely separate than Amazon? And you can answer back in this too. Okay, Aaron, I feel like your conversations always go by super fast. We only have 10 minutes left. How does this happen every single time. Okay,

Aaron Conant 42:14

do we have like 15 questions coming in. We keep that already in a little bit. So

Tayler Jaksim 42:18

I know it's all good, though. It's all good. So we're gonna get into how you can support this through your DTC strategies. So, we've always thought of, you know, DTC and marketplace kind of like going head to head but in reality, you can use your DTC to drive to Amazon and you can use Amazon to drive your DTC. So we're really gonna be focusing on using your DTC to drive to Amazon. And again, don't compete, like let them complement you want someone during Prime Day they're going to be building their cart on Amazon. Regardless, if you run an offer on your DTC or not like, again, Prime Day is like the the, I'll say the second or the third largest shopping day of the year, if you include Singles Day, which is more of an international holiday for shopping. So a lot of our brands will say hey, should What should we do on our site to be able to compete, and instead of competing, we're like, you're probably going to be running a fourth of July sale. So your DTC T or your DTC customers will be purchasing, then there isn't really a reason for you to be having another one to compete with prime because people are just going to go to Amazon and purchase anyways, because they can again, get it in two days, typically, or even less, depending on how close they are to fulfillment center. So instead of saying, we're gonna do this Prime Day sale on our D to C, and all this stuff, just have your own moment on DTC, whether it's Memorial Day or Fourth of July, and then let Amazon take your Prime Day because they're going to be competing anyways. And they'll come back to your DTC when you do probably another sale, whether it's Labor Day, or friends and family event, or Black Friday, it's it's less about, you know, how do we again competing for that customer and complementing each other, which is such an important conversation. And again, I'm having these right now with with several of my brands too. So using meta, one of the ways that you can use meta to kind of get the message out, if you will, leading up to Prime Day is running lead generation campaigns. This is a this is a campaign that you can run that will literally collect emails, you can have people sign up. We have seen some of our brands do this and they'll do this even for retail sometimes, or if they're running on QVC. But the nice thing about these is that the someone who gets this ad doesn't even need to put in their information necessarily. Facebook automatically collects it which is either a good thing or a bad thing. You can run this on tick tock too, but I would say if you have limited budget that you want to support via DTC like via meta, I would look at only running this on meta. A few different audiences that you can do this for is you know, you can even target your email list and say, Hey, we're creating like a you know, we want to create a very segmented list of people who are interested in buying on Prime Day, would you be interested to see our Amazon Prime Day Sale what's coming up sign up for this, you can target people like your interest targeting who have shown interest in products similar to yours, or I would say they're interested in maybe who your target consumer might be too. So if someone is interested in refinery 29, you can target similar to refinery 29 publications, you can do look alike. So whether that's your email subscribers or your past purchasers, or you can even target your social engagements for this for your Instagram and meta pages. So anyone who either follows you on Instagram or is a fan of your meta page. So it's definitely something that you can use, I will say that depending on depending on either the industry or creative or even the type of audiences you target, we have seen that sometimes the this campaign can do very well in collecting qualified emails, that you will be able to continue to target or sometimes it doesn't really lead to anything. So it really just depends, we still recommend running this to brands, even if it's not for Prime Day, it's still one of these campaigns that, you know, if you are trying to get grow your email list, it's a good option. But definitely one of ways that you can do this by a meta. So then kind of going into that is lifecycle, so your email and SMS. So we've had several brands, and really a lot of our brands will send out a Prime Day email, and they're landing people on Amazon. So you can have either a separate audience that you're sending this to maybe people who've signed up via the lead form on meta, or you've sent two different Amazon promos in the past, and they've had a high engagement rate with it. But you can you can send this and really this is a you don't have to worry about putting, I would say additional cost behind it like a meta ad or a Google ad, you're sending this to your list. And I will say this is definitely something that's important too, because for any brand that use NYC E, which is the manager customer engagement option that Amazon used to have, that's sunsetted now, so you can't really even use that. And so this is I would say like lifecycle is one of the things that you can definitely use from your DTC channel to complement again, complement your Prime Day success. And you can send an email saying, hey, sign up, you know, be be the first to know about our Amazon Prime video, you can send it during Prime Day. And then after Prime Day, you can still use that with either non purchasers, or for future Prime events. Or if you have another deal on your DTC that might be similar to what you did on Amazon or just another deal that you're running, you can you can target them and then paid social. So some brands will love to do paid social. So you can do this either on meta on tick tock, we've seen this done a few different ways, you can target either your social engager. So pretty much any audience that you really target, that you are going to target in that that that lead generation campaign via meta, you can do this for social engagers, you can do this for people who signed up in your lead generation campaign, you could target specific lists from your life cycle campaigns, Oregon is relevant interests. And you can do this on tick tock, or you can do this through meta, we've seen this for several brands. But granted, cosmetics did a wonderful job of this last year, they had all this different creative for this, and they were even promoting it through organic, which is so important. But it's just making sure again, that you're you're landing people on Amazon, you're using your cloud from your Instagram and your Facebook account to promote this. And you are putting a little bit of money behind it. But not every brand does it. So it is a way to also kind of capitalize on lower CPCs. And get in front of people that you might not necessarily be able to target on Amazon just because it's so expensive. And then lastly is organic social. So you can use organic social to be able to do this, whether it's you're doing alive, or whether you're doing this through Instagram stories, or you're putting posts out, your followers are going to be able to see this. And again, you don't necessarily have to put additional dollars behind it because it's going on your feed or it's coming from your page. But it's a way to alert again just like life. So I got the Hey, there's there's a prime deal going on, you can go over to Amazon, you can check this out. Maybe you can even put in there like if there's a set that you need to move. If you have a lot of excess inventory. It's a great channel that you can use. And so I want to talk about tick tock last year and 2023. And so when we had pulled stats this was a little bit ago, and I'm sure these numbers are even crazier now. But Prime Day just a hashtag Prime Day last year had 1.2 billion views. When we saw that Amazon Prime they had 510 million views. Amazon Hall had 2.6 billion views, and then Tik Tok mainly by it had 62 point 6 billion views. So definitely make sure if you have a tick tock channel that you're using, not even from an ad standpoint, but just from an organic perspective. You need to be capitalizing on it and you can use this also for creators. We've seen some brands harder with creators and they, you know, the Creo start hinting at like, hey, like my favorite pair of shoes are actually going to be on sale during Prime Day. Keep your eye out but start adding it to your cart, you know in purchase on Prime Day. Amazon even did this last year with I think both the fall Prime Day and Prime Day in general, they worked with some of the top creators on Amazon or on tick tock. And they were able to say like, Hey, like this is a little package I got from Amazon, it's like a little PR package of some of the brands are gonna be on sale during Prime Day. And like that gets everyone excited, right? Because you're like, Oh, my favorite influencer or my favorite creator is their ice ice machine like their countertop ice machine is gonna be on sale, maybe I'm gonna get that are walking pads. So don't discount tick tock and I know I had said that tick tock shops might be able to come close in terms of competing with Amazon Prime Day, it's a long way off. And again, right now think of it as a complement to each other, versus having to worry about it kind of competing against each other. Okay, and then one last thing, Aaron, and then we can open up for more questions. If you have not already done this, you have until June 20. Before your FBA inventory has arrived at to filament center. So your FBA inventory has to arrive at the fulfillment center by June 20. So if you do not have that date written down, make sure you do because this is going to be an incredibly foreign thing. And you don't want to miss out on that one. So I'm ready for key takeaways. But Erin, if you want to go any questions, because we're running low on time, I'm all for that. Well, I

Aaron Conant 51:33

think we bust through a bunch of these questions. The last one here would be how much is should spend be for a generous amount of leads. And then we can go into key takeaways and wrap up with two minutes to go. Sounds good.

Tayler Jaksim 51:45

That sounds good. So in terms of how much spend for a generous amount of leads generous, it depends. If you want quality over quantity or quantity over quality, you can run a lead gen campaign for $1,000. And depending on who you're targeting, if you're targeting, let's say a super broad audience that has you know, millions of like 10s of millions of people in it, you can probably get a decent amount of leads, let's say, you know, I'm just, this is just rough back of the math, back back of the napkin math, you might do like 200 to 500 leads depending again, who's in the audience. But of that you don't know how quality it is like how qualified they will be. So you can try doing it for $1,000 Some of my brands will do 2500 2500 seems to be the magic number. But however, that that depending on who you're targeting, it could be either super qualified, or it could be kind of just like you're just collecting leads to collect leads. So I don't really have a strong answer on that. But it depends, I did just have a brand, we just ran a huge lead gen campaign for a very large moment for them off DTSC. And we spent a significant amount of money and we got a lot of leads. And now we're tracking through the cycle like through the rest of our year, how those leads are going to be in terms of quality, because we saw such a huge, a huge amount coming in. And then we also saw a very successful event, which was nice. So I can't say that's why the event was successful. But we did see a lot of leads come in. So were there any other questions?

Aaron Conant 53:22

That is it, we should in the chat and in the q&a, we've tackled them all.

Tayler Jaksim 53:26

Wonderful. Okay, cool. So getting into key takeaway. So really, first, just make sure before Prime Day, you're creating that demand you're running campaigns early, you're launching seven to 10 days early, you're focusing on brand awareness you're focusing on new to brand, again, it is no longer if you build it, they will shop it's you need to build it you need to advertise and you need to bring them in in order for them to shop. During Prime Day don't forget to increase your budget and also don't set it and forget it check in like every half hour to see how you're pacing or if you need us be putting more towards a certain campaign or another. And also don't forget about the West Coast do not set up and only have enough budget to get you through 2pm Eastern and if you have too many campaigns and might be better off for to consolidate those campaigns. So you can last longer throughout the day. I know it can be very tempting having you know 50 To 200 campaigns, but if you're not going to be able to stay on during your your your core campaigns, you might need to look at a different strategy during Prime Day. Think outside of the box. So maybe you're using off Amazon tactics like lifecycle, email, influencer organic social, to drive to Amazon or you're going to be doing something with display that or with DSP that's a little bit different using different audiences that you can target through AMC, for example. And don't forget to use rec or Responsive eCommerce ads to retarget on DSP. Make sure you have a retargeting component just because someone visits your asin or clicks through your your AMS ad doesn't mean that they're going to convert. It's highly competitive. So make sure you're staying top of mind with retargeting. And then post Prime Day we know CPCs are going to go back to normal always spend, however capitalize on people who didn't either purchase from you, or who's who are still shopping Prime Day, it kind of seems like it's like this big event. There's all this lead up to it. But at the end of the day, people will always be shopping on Amazon. So just because someone isn't necessarily going to purchase your product or a Prime Day, they're still they still might purchase. And then going back to kind like that bridal shower example of the bridal registries. There's registries happening and being created all the time. So you can use that audience via AMC, through DSP to target them, and then just continue to retarget using sponsored display and DSP and other tactics just continue to retarget this audience, just because someone just because primary is past doesn't mean that our retargeting should shut off that that's actually the opposite. You should just continue to target people. So that's, that's it. That's all I got, Aaron.

Aaron Conant 55:59

It's literally perfect timing. Just one minutes ago. Tayler, thank you so much for your time today. You guys are awesome. I encourage anybody. You have follow up questions on this, you need help in this space. That's everything from traditional, paid search social to Amazon to anything. The team over at Blue Wheel is helping a ton of brands and the network out there all around fantastic. People encourage you to have a follow up conversation with them. Look for a follow up email for me. I'd love to chat with people on the line as well. Just pick your brain. We don't sell anything here. But we'd love to know what are the biggest pain points you're having so we can craft the next event. And with that, we're going to wrap up this webinar here. Everybody, take care. Stay safe. Look forward to having you at a future event. Thanks again. Tayler. You're awesome. Thanks. Bye. Bye, everybody.