Brand Growth Strategies: Expert Advice from Senior Director of Brand Services, Erik Minter

As the dust settles after Prime Day 2025, brands face a new set of challenges and opportunities in the race toward Q4. In this edition Ask Our Experts, Senior Director of Brand Services at Spreetail and Buy Box Experts, Erik Minter, unpacks how shifting timelines, earlier shopper discovery, and deal fatigue are reshaping the post-event playbook. From launching awareness campaigns weeks ahead of peak traffic to capitalizing on remarketing opportunities and repurposing top-performing creative, these insights will help you transform a short-lived sales surge into a sustainable brand growth blueprint.

What are some important trends that your team has witnessed during recent Amazon Prime Days, and how can brands use these trends to be proactive going into peak season?

After Prime Day 2025, one of the most important trends we saw was a shift in pre-event discovery behavior. Shoppers were browsing and adding to carts days before deals launched, indicating that awareness and consideration are happening earlier than ever. Additionally, there was notable fatigue by day four, with lower engagement and higher bounce rates.

Trends included an increase in New-to-Brand orders for categories that leaned into high-velocity ASINs in addition to deal fatigue after Day 2, where ROAS dropped sharply across Sponsored Products.

For Q4, brands should launch awareness and upper-funnel campaigns at least 2–3 weeks before key events and structure their offers to capitalize on the “early bird” mindset. Budget pacing and creative freshness will also help them to maintain momentum throughout longer sales windows.

To prepare, brands should map campaign messaging to different stages of the funnel, repurpose top-performing assets, and use dayparting or budget pacing tools to avoid early burnout. Data from Prime Day should inform everything from targeting to promotional sequencing as they head into peak holiday timelines.

When Prime Day campaign data comes back, what are the most important metrics to pay attention to when figuring out how the event influenced your incrementally for the year? 

Focus on New-to-Brand (NTB) Purchases, Total Brand Impressions, and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) during the Prime Day window compared to baseline weeks. These metrics indicate whether your investment brought in incremental customers or simply accelerated existing demand.

We also recommend segmenting results by deal vs. non-deal ASINs to understand halo impact and identify lift in organic rank after the event. If you’re not seeing long-term organic gains post-event, your pricing, conversion rate, or review strategy may need re-evaluation.

Beyond just sales volume, the most insightful metrics for evaluating Prime Day’s incremental value include New-to-Brand units, repeat purchase rate, and lift in branded search traffic. These indicators show whether the event helped expand your audience, build brand affinity, and drive future conversions.

Don’t just look at Prime Day in itself, track how those new customers perform in the following quarters. Are they sticking around? Are they re-engaging with your brand across channels? That’s where the real value of Prime Day shows up, when short-term spikes lead to long-term customer relationships.

What shifts in ad performance metrics did you observe immediately following summer Prime Day 2025, and how should brands adjust campaign strategies as a result?

After Prime Day 2025, we saw that Sponsored Brand and DSP campaigns retained higher engagement, while Sponsored Products performance dipped due to heightened competition and ad fatigue. Ads that tied directly to strong creative (especially lifestyle imagery or bundles) outperformed plain promo-based ones.

There was a significant reminder that campaign structure matters less if your retail readiness or creative doesn’t inspire action. Brands should use this time to refresh ad creative, test new copy angles, and optimize ASINs featured in high-exposure placements.

Post-Prime Day, ad performance entered a recalibration phase. Conversion rates dropped, but remarketing grew substantially, presenting a major opportunity. The data showed that many shoppers browsed during the event without buying, meaning the mid-funnel expanded.

Brands should now pivot from aggressive bidding to smarter targeting. Layer in post-event remarketing, refine audience segmentation, and extend the shopper lifecycle with nurture campaigns, especially as Q4 approaches. Think beyond the sale; focus on sustained engagement.

What is the benefit of finding a way to repurpose top-performing creative content or messaging angles after an event like Prime Day? 

Top-performing creative concepts, especially authentic user-generated content (UGC), short-form videos, and conversion-driven copy, proved highly effective during Prime Day. Repurposing this content in post-Prime Day PDPs, retargeting, emails, and later Q4 ads extends its ROI. It creates continuity, leverages proven trust signals, and accelerates campaign set-up for holiday events, reducing the need to reinvent what works for your audience

The creative that outperformed during Prime Day is a real-world test of what converts under high-traffic, competitive conditions. Repurposing those winning assets across other channels, like paid social, DSP, or even organic, lets you scale proven tactics. It's not just reuse; it's iteration. Analyze what worked (tone, visuals, offer framing) and apply those insights to Q4 creative testing.

Did your teams see any unexpected performances or drawbacks due to the extension of Prime Day into 4 days? What can brands do to holistically prepare all facets of their account for the length of the next event and capitalize on it?

The 4-day format offered more than just extra time, it unlocked strategic windows for segmentation and re-engagement. Shoppers behaved in waves: early-bird deal hunters, mid-event browsers, and last-minute impulse buyers. Brands that partnered with agile agencies were able to adapt on the fly by shifting budgets, rotating creative, and launching retargeting campaigns just in time to convert.

Looking ahead, brands should view multi-day events as multi-moment opportunities, and agencies are key to orchestrating those moments, from dayparting to audience-specific messaging strategies that keep performance high throughout.

Rather than viewing Day 3’s dip as a drawback, we saw it as an inflection point, an opportunity to refocus spend and re-engage audiences who didn’t convert early on. Brands that had the support of a hands-on ad agency were able to pivot quickly: activating new audiences, testing mid-event promotions, and reallocating spend to the highest-performing channels.

Prime Day 2025 underscored the importance of early awareness, sustained momentum, and strategic adaptability in driving long-term growth. The event’s extended four-day format rewarded those who launched campaigns weeks ahead and treated each day as a distinct opportunity, adjusting budgets, refreshing creative, and remarketing to expanding mid-funnel audiences. Heading into Q4, the blueprint is clear: prepare early, pace budgets, iterate on what works, and think beyond the sale to build enduring brand equity.