What is a tentpole event? As the holidays approach, we are entering the high watermark of tentpole events on Amazon. Black Friday/Cyber Monday are, across the board, the biggest tentpole events of the year for many businesses.
Winning Turkey 5 is on everyone’s mind—and once you get past Turkey 5, you want to keep that momentum going into next year.
The reality is, tentpole events happen year round. To get ahead, you need a year-long tentpole strategy. Identify the events that are relevant to your business, and build a tentpole strategy to get the most juice out of these events.
Execute that strategy during Turkey 5, and then carry it onward through the year.
Tentpole events happen year round
The big, universal shopping events of the year, like Black Friday or Prime Day, are hugely important and should be a priority. But they are not the only tentpole events that matter for your business.
Every product category has its own tentpole event—or multiple tentpole events—every year.
For instance:
- The Super Bowl is a tentpole moment for snack brands.
- Earth Day is big for eco-conscious brands.
- Back-to-school season accounts for many of the sales of brands that sell binders, textbooks, and stationery.
- Tennis companies can probably expect their sales to tick up during the US Open or Wimbledon.
You get the picture.
You probably have some sense of what your brand’s tentpole events are—but if you don’t, comb through your annual sales data, and look for the time periods where you see sales tick up organically.
Then, once you’ve identified your tentpole events, you have to prepare for them. The reality is, tentpole events are huge opportunities for your company.
These are the moments where, if you position yourself well, you can leapfrog competitors in the organic rankings on Amazon or Walmart. Not to mention, you can bring in tons of sales in the process.
To get there, you need a tentpole plan—one that works not just for Black Friday but also for other tentpoles down the line.
When do I start my tentpole campaign?
The first step in running a tentpole strategy is figuring out when to start your ad campaigns.
Typically, you should start advertising a couple of weeks or more ahead of the tentpole event. You want to get on your shopper’s radar ahead of time—so that when the time comes to make a purchase, your brand is top of mind.
But it’s a delicate balance.
- Start your campaigns too soon, and you’re wasting ad spend on shoppers who ultimately are not going to convert on the tentpole day.
- Start too late, and when the tentpole event comes, shoppers won’t have your brand in mind. You’ll lose out on sales that you easily could have gotten, and potentially give an opportunity to your competitors in the process.
So how do you ensure you’re starting your campaigns at the right time?
First: Keep in mind that, during tentpole events, shoppers probably see multiple of your ads before converting. The outcomes are therefore impossible to see in the Amazon Ad Console data. You need to use AMC instead.
In Amazon Marketing Cloud, you can run a Tentpole Phase Overlap query that breaks down your tentpole sales based on when shoppers first saw an ad of yours.
Take the data from that tentpole event last year, and crunch the numbers to see which day your tentpole purchase first engaged with your brand.
Did very few people who saw your ad three weeks ahead of the event ultimately make a purchase? Then you might want to wait to start your campaign.
What are the best ads to run for my tentpole campaign?
Using this AMC data, you can isolate the exact day to start your tentpole strategy, when your ad spend will make most sense.
From there, you can also get more granular. You can see which ads, or combinations of ads, were most influential in converting shoppers during the tentpole event.
Was a Sponsored Display ad followed by a Sponsored Products the best path to conversion on last year’s tentpole? Then you might want to double down on that combination of ads for the next tentpole event.
Which products do I prioritize during the tentpole event?
The other benefit of AMC is that it helps you identify the products that you want to put the most spend behind during a tentpole event.
To get there, you first have to think about the goal of your tentpole strategy. Is your KPI to convert New-To-Brand shoppers? Or do you just want to drive as many sales as possible, even if it’s mostly from returning customers?
Once you’ve answered the question, you can crunch the numbers to see which products will most successfully drive that strategy.
Let’s say you’re aiming for net-new shoppers on the tentpole day. As you probably know, Amazon Marketing Cloud lets you see complete New-To-Brand data.
With a simple query like NTB Gateway ASINs, which you can run and customize easily at scale in Intentwise Explore, you can see which of your ASINs drive the highest share of NTB shoppers.
It might not always be your top-selling products, for what it’s worth.
Those products are the ones you want to put out front and center during the tentpole.
Want to go further? One exciting feature with AMC for Sponsored Ads is the ability to boost bids for particular custom audiences for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands.
You can create a custom audience with AMC, and assign it to your SP or SB campaigns. For shoppers who belong to that custom audience, you’ll automatically bid higher for them.
This is really useful when it comes to a tentpole campaign. Let’s say your tentpole strategy is to bring in net-new customers.
Then maybe you want to bid higher on New-To-Brand shoppers than on other shoppers.
You can create a custom audience of NTB shoppers or shoppers who have never seen your ad, and choose a higher bid specifically for those shoppers.
If you want to directly target a certain audience, you can do that with Sponsored Display ads, too, as we discussed here.
You can extrapolate this out for whatever your ad strategy is. The point is, you now have way more control than ever before over your tentpole campaigns.
Tentpole events happen all year round, and they are the times when you can really stand out—if you just execute the right strategy.
