The Skai 5: Five Pro Walmart Advertising Strategies During Prime Day

Although the official dates for Amazon’s biggest annual retail promotion aren’t out yet, the traditional summer Prime Day will most likely happen in October. There’s no doubt that this year’s event will be huge due to the surge of online shopping from COVID-9 combined with the fact that it will kickoff the Q4 holiday shopping season.

But retail is larger than Amazon and the big event has a cascading positive impact on other retailers. Walmart, for example, is one of the beneficiaries of the Prime Day activity. 

For those looking to reinvent their marketing strategy for the next normal, we take a look at The Halo Effect of Prime Day, highlighting some Walmart advertising strategies for marketers looking to cash in on Prime Day outside of just Amazon.

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Five Pro Walmart Advertising Strategies During Prime Day

Prime Day Walmart Advertising Strategy Tip #1 – Be ready for the halo effect…it’s real

[Last year] “We saw over a 100% lift in Walmart sales during Prime Day,” says Stamps. “Those were not promoted items, those were just due to the increased organic traffic. Even everyday consumable brands see a lift during that time.”

Prime Day heightens consumer awareness around product deals, but savvy online shoppers won’t just be clicking to buy on Amazon. They will still do their due diligence and search around for even better deals on sites like Walmart. This would be harder if they had to go to physical stores, but Walmart.com is just a click away from Amazon.com, making comparison shopping very easy.

Jamie Kahn says that Walmart advertisers need to have attention-grabbing promotions to win sales away from Amazon. It’s more than just the sales that could happen for Prime Day; it’s about winning customers for the rest of the year. “Some brands are willing to sacrifice strong ROI during that time frame, but they want to get that awareness, penetrate the market, and gain share-of-voice to convert them later,” says Kahn.

Prime Day Walmart Advertising Strategy Tip #2 – Be ready for the Prime Day season

We know that Prime “Day” generally extends way beyond the official two-day event. The weeks leading up to— and the weeks that follow—generally see a huge spike in consumer spending turning Prime Day into Prime Month. Some are now even calling this upcoming Q4 2020, “Prime Season.”

An analysis of Amazon Advertising run through Skai last year shows that marketers ramp up spend before and after the event.

source: Get Primed for Prime Day (Skai, 2019)

“We’ve seen brands changing their pricing on the weeks leading up to Prime Day. This is across categories and we see that in advertising as well,” says Kahn.

Prime Day Walmart Advertising Strategy Tip #3 – Build up retargeting in the weeks

Retargeting has proven to be an effective digital advertising strategy across channels. The good thing about retargeting is that you can reach people who have already shown interest in your product/brand. However, the downside is that you need people in those audience pools to retarget. 

Weinheimer offers this tip: “Think through your opportunity  Build up your audiences with upper-funnel audiences. Retarget people who have visited product detail pages.”  Marketers may want to spend a little extra on their Walmart advertising right now in order to help add to those retargeting lists to convert during Prime Day.

Prime Day Walmart Advertising Strategy Tip #4 – Be careful about inventory

One thing that can easily happen during the Prime Day volume is that inventory could go out of stock.  “Physical space has historically been a huge constraint for Walmart [vs Amazon] during the peak holiday season,” says Stamps. “They’re now bringing in things a lot earlier to secure that supply.”

In a recent blog post, the correlation between shipping times/out of stock items and advertising conversion rates was proven to be an important consideration for marketers. Practitioners need to keep an eye on inventory and divert any ad dollars away from out of stock items or they might end up wasting their budget on ad clicks that won’t turn into sales.  

Prime Day Walmart Advertising Strategy Tip #5 – Play the BOPUS game in your favor

Amazon may have free and fast shipping, but 90% of Americans live within just ten miles of a Walmart store. This means one of Walmart’s key differentiators against Amazon is BOPUS: buy online pick up in-store. Marketers should consider that when they think about which deals to promote and how to leverage the Amazon halo effect during Prime Day.

“Walmart has two different ecosystems when you go into their app—one where you get shipped directly to you and one where you pick up in the store,” says Stamps.” And you can advertise based on where you’re going to get the sale. For brands with items less than $5, it’s great ROI when you pick up in the store.”

Get Primed for Prime Day: Events all week

Join Skai and a dynamic panel of guest speakers live on LinkedIn for our week-long series as ecommerce experts share tips and tricks to help you successfully plan for the challenges and uncertainty Prime Day 2020 is expected to present.

Check out our Get Primed for Prime Day event page to get a schedule of our LinkedIn Lives and a list of speakers.

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