Increase Return with Full-Funnel Amazon Strategy
StarTech
StarTech makes it easy for IT professionals to identify, get, and use the connectivity parts businesses need to enable their technology solutions. Founded in 1985, StarTech.com has always been dedicated to solving technology problems faced by IT professionals. The company has evolved into a global organization offering accessories that support over 200 different technologies, from legacy to the latest.
The Challenge
With the change in work from home norms resulting from the pandemic, StarTech needed to completely shift their Amazon advertising approach. As a historically B2B company focused on the IT professional, StarTech wanted to expand their audience to also include SMB companies. However, any change like this can be risky without the right testing plan and measurement support in place. Success would be measured based on the campaign’s ability to drive growth in YoY revenue at a profitable Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). Rise needed to speak to more people in more places as well as StarTech’s current customers in an updated way.
The Strategy
Research & Build
Rise’s core approach was to systematically test broader audience targeting, ad formats, and product mix across the Amazon marketplace. The goal was to find and reach the most valuable target customer audience with the right messages, while validating our tests through advanced measurement.
Rise worked in constant partnership with StarTech and Amazon to combat headwinds, including supply chain disruptions and the moving target of changing customer buying behavior. Rise wielded every aspect of the Amazon ad arsenal to create a custom store and product experience that told the StarTech story—and made profit.
Amazon Advertising has two unique advertising capabilities, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) and Amazon’s Demand Side Platform (DSP). AMS, also referred to as Sponsored Ads, is the advertising that is offered throughout the Amazon platform. DSP on the other hand is where you can programmatically buy ads to reach new and existing audiences, on and off Amazon.
Through Rise’s data driven approach to performance results, we were able to identify how to effectively grow into each of the updated ad products and categories for StarTech. To understand the impact of different tactics, we chose to run an Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) query to analyze customer pathing.
Execute
Using those insights, the strategy execution was multi-faceted and robust, across AMS and DSP, as well as up and down the funnel. This included:
Full-Funnel Focus
- LOW FUNNEL: More ad types
- MID-FUNNEL: More tactics
- UPPER FUNNEL: More ad types and tactics to expand awareness
Ad Types
- Built out substantially more ad types including Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Brand Video, & Sponsored Display. This strategy expanded coverage across the entire funnel.
- Increased the volume and variety of ad types including Video and Custom Image AMS to learn which products and placements would resonate with the target customer audience.
Targeting
- Expanded awareness strategies to drive long term consideration and growth with audience betas like Twitch and new B2B audiences.
- Leveraged DSP prospecting and Sponsored Display, in relevant categories, to expand reach.
- We also added DSP remarketing in order to re-engage with target customers who had already interacted with StarTech and increase brand loyalty.
The Result
Plus!
Leveraging the Twitch audience targeting beta led to finding a new, unexpected market for StarTech products: “PC Game Viewers”, “Non Gaming Viewers” and “New Game Viewers”. These audiences have now been added to all of our targeting.