5 Things Brands Should Do To Prep For Amazon Prime Day

In case you haven’t heard, Amazon Prime Day starts July 15th.  With deals lasting up to 36hrs, Prime Day has become almost as popular as Black Friday. Unfortunately, many brick-n-mortar stores believe that this event will deter shoppers from making purchases in-store. However, this isn’t exactly true.

Studies show that 23% of the time people will abandon their online shopping cart. In addition to cart abandonment, 34% of people choose to shop in-store to avoid waiting for delivery and 55% of people want to touch or try-on the item before buying. Amazon Prime Day can actually be quite lucrative for brick-n-mortar business if they prepare ahead of time.

How to Prep Your Local Stores For Amazon Prime Day

88% of consumers who search for a local business on their phone will visit within 24hrs. When 8 out of 10 consumers use their phones to shop, brands need to be prepared for an overflow of Amazon shoppers looking for same-day purchases. Prepping your brand to be found locally is one of the best things a brick-n-mortar store can do to compete with Amazon Prime Day.

Step #1 – Brand Audit

Start with an in-depth brand online reputation and visibility audit. You can conduct one yourself, or the Chatmeter team can conduct it for you for free! A brand audit is key in revealing how visible your brand is online in only a matter of seconds. See how your brand is performing in the search rankings, business listings, and reviews. Beforehand, you can begin working on the following steps you have to know where your brand currently stands – this starts with an audit.

Step #2 – Listing Management

Now that you know what your listings look like, you can go through and clean them. This means getting rid of duplicates, claiming or creating missing listings, and adding any missing information. The most common forms of missing information are often business name, address, phone number, website, category, hours, and description (a.k.a NAPWCHD).

By cleaning your local business listings people will have a much easier time finding your business. Accurate listings not only help you rank higher in searches but it builds trust with the customer when the information you have listed is correct.

Step #3 – Review Management

Are you replying to all of your reviews? Amazon shoppers rely on reviews and ratings to know they’re getting the best deal and this is no exception when searching for a local business. Responding to reviews can impact your search rankings by 15%. Not to mention responding to reviews actually leads to earning more positive reviews.

Have too many negative reviews? That’s ok; when businesses respond to negative reviews, 33% of the time the reviewer will update their review to a positive one and 34% of the time they’ll delete the original negative review. Managing your reviews is an important step if you want to compete with Amazon.

Step #4 – Local Pages

Get your local pages up-to-date. Local pages are a great way to not only increase your SERP appearance, but they help connect consumers with local information straight from the source – your website.

Local pages are the perfect place to connect consumers with the location nearest them, share in-store promotions, and list the items you have in-stock. Local pages are a must-have for any multi-location business looking to convert online shoppers to in-store shoppers because those shoppers will be using product keywords to find your locations.

Step #5 –  Social Media

Ramp up your social media presence. Social media is a great way to get your deals and discounts in front of consumers, in fact, 72% of consumers follow brands on social media for discounts. Consumers are already looking online for great discounts on Prime Day, by utilizing location accounts on social media, brands can drive online visitors in-store.

For multi-location brands looking to compete with Amazon Prime Day by capitalizing the moment-of-need shopper, following these steps at scale may seem like a huge project. Fortunately, tools like Chatmeter’s all-in-one Local Brand Management platform makes it easy for enterprise brands and agencies to take control over the online presence of their brick-n-mortar stores.  From listing management to reviews, social media, local pages, and more, Chatmeter is the solution for multi-location brands looking to drive more in-store foot traffic.