As a new year approaches, annual business planning is essential for smooth operating through every quarter. The marketing calendar for your Amazon business is a key part of ensuring that your products reach the right customers at the right time.
Key Takeaways
- It takes time to implement marketing strategies
- Content and inventory should be prepared well before starting a marketing campaign
- A percentage of your sales goal should be invested into ads and promotions to reach those goals
Solidify Your New Marketing Calendar Now
Getting marketing campaigns running and ensuring they are successful takes more than just a few clicks of a button. Beyond the work that goes into successful marketing there are steps that take significant amounts of time.
Scheduling promotions can take up to 30 days for some categories, so submitting them as soon as possible should be a high priority. Ads also need about two weeks to ramp up to a state of solid performance. During this time, you can add desired keywords, add negative keywords, adjust bids, increase budgets, and adjust the creative content to all perform optimally.
Keep Amazon events in min so your business can capitalize on through the year and prepare accordingly. Amazon provides a basic marketing calendar of their different shopping events to all who want to see.
Organizational Preparation
Coordination between teams so that ASINs are ready for when marketing should begin is key to avoiding costly delays and poor performance of your marketing efforts. Share your calendar with other departments so they know how to schedule their time so assist the campaigns.
Content teams need to know deadlines to have the detail pages of the products perfected. Bringing shoppers to the product pages means little if the content there doesn’t convert them into customers. If there are errors that break Amazon guidelines, it could suppress the listing and halt a marketing campaign in its tracks.
Work with your operations teams to ensure that you can fulfill the expected increase in sales due to the marketing initiatives. If your marketing is so successful that you run out of inventory too quickly, there could be missed revenue.
Include Ad Spend in Calendar
Putting your ad spend directly onto your calendar is a handy way of keeping constant track of how much you want to spend an any given marketing campaign.
We recommend certain levels of ad spend on different types of marketing. These amounts come as a percentage of your sales goal for the campaign. Lost-Buy-Box cost decreases should be separate from this ad spend.
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- 2-3% on ads
- Glance views can now be monitored
- New products and those with low search rank benefit most from ads
- 2-3% on ads
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- 3-5% on promotions
- We recommend coupons due to lower margin requirements
- We recommend Best Deals during VM supported periods
- NYNY, Prime Day, Black Friday, etc.
- 3-5% on promotions
A marketing calendar is an indispensable tool to include in annual business plans, which include a lot of parts that can shift and adjust as the year progresses, depending on what the year brings. It can act as a useful frame around which many different teams can operate, ensuring proper coordination and goal setting.
If you want to learn tips on how to create an annual marketing calendar, or to discover how Navazon can help you get your calendar in order, contact one of our experts today.