Amazon Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping events of the retail calendar. Hosted annually each summer, the two-day sale provides Amazon Prime members with exclusive access to limited-time offers on products across nearly every category.
Heading into Prime Day 2021, the Amazon Prime Student team understood that while awareness of Prime Day was high among their target audience of Gen Z college students, there was an opportunity to drive awareness of the specific Prime Day deals most relevant to this 18-24-year-old consumer base.
The Prime Student team kicked off campaign development to achieve the following objectives with the Gen Z college student audience:
Campaign development began with understanding our target consumers’ current behaviors and using these insights to develop a solution specific to them. We knew the mass Prime Day promotions across Amazon.com, OOH billboards, and PR did not resonate with our Gen Z audience and needed to find alternate tactics to make Prime Day more desirable.
Research revealed that 88% of Gen Z consumers are willing to try a product recommended by a friend and that 74% spend 2-5 hours per day on social media. We leaned into these insights and developed a strategy to partner with Gen Z micro-influencers, tapping into the affinity Gen Z consumers have for these content creators to reach our target audience at scale.
As we headed into program development, we realized the confidentiality and limited window of Prime Day would require a unique program approach. Most of the items included in the two-day sale are not announced in advance leaving only 48 hours for content development, review, approval, and publication. We needed an approach capable of supporting the short turnaround and maximizing our creator partnerships. Our solution was a three-part plan that celebrated Prime Day before, during, and after the key shopping moment:
A total of 14 micro-influencers, each with 3,000-60,000 followers on their primary platform were engaged for the campaign. Each influencer’s followership was carefully vetted sure a significant Gen Z population and diversity across the collective influencer roster.
The Prime Day campaign yielded 471 individual posts, surpassing the number of contracted Influencer posts by 1121% and reaching nearly 2.3M individuals. Performance against the campaign’s three primary objectives is summarized below:
1. Drive Awareness of Culturally Relevant Prime Day Deals
Content was published across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube in video and static formats to appeal to users with varying platform and consumption preferences.
2. Personalize the Prime Day Occasion
The micro-influencers personalized Prime Day to their respective followings as evident in the engagement metrics. Top-performing influencer, @ariannabaq, for example, published 39 pieces of content providing her audience of fashion enthusiasts with a Prime Day shopping haul.
3. Encourage Shopping Behavior
While Amazon is not able to share sales data, the following showcases how the campaign successfully drove traffic to featured products and contributed to the sell-out of Flash deals:
