Advertising with Amazon can help you grow awareness for your brand and reach shoppers searching for your products. A good product strategy should include great product placement, solid branding, attractive packaging and lots of recommendations/reviews from customers who are fans of your product. This amazon marketing plan outlines a strategy that combines listing optimizations to achieve organic traffic in conjunction with paid marketing to drive more targeted traffic and reviews. This marketing plan is an overview of the steps involved for you to effectively market your products in the Amazon marketplace in the United States. When the time comes, many of these methods can be used in other Amazon marketplaces in other regions of the world.
The marketing tactics outlined in this document are designed to create a robust branding strategy while implementing a tactical product launch for your products. You can use the strategies here to develop a multi-pronged approach and utilize the many marketing tools available on the Amazon marketplace.
AMAZON MARKETING PLAN OVERVIEW
This Amazon marketing plan outlines a strategy that includes a combination of listing optimizations to achieve organic traffic in conjunction with paid marketing strategies to drive more targeted traffic. It will also discuss methods to receive product reviews and to increase the sales rank for your products. It also touches upon strategies to drive traffic to your listings from outside of Amazon, such as through Facebook, Instagram and YouTube as well as with paid advertising using Google Adwords and Bing.
This plan is broken up into three phases in order to maximize your effectiveness and long-term return on your marketing investment. These three phases include:
- Phase 1: Evaluating Your Amazon Business and Establishing A Baseline
- Phase 2: Setting the Groundwork for An Amazon Marketing Strategy
- Phase 3: Implementing an Amazon Advertising Strategy
PHASE 1: EVALUATING YOUR AMAZON BUSINESS AND ESTABLISHING A BASELINE
In Phase 1 you want to establish a baseline for your business, so you know where you’re starting from and where you want to go. In this phase we evaluate our customers, take a look at our competition and really analyze our products by looking at how to maximize their prices and the most effective ways to distribute them. Once you have a baseline, you can begin thinking about what type of marketing budget you will need to develop to maximize your sales and branding efforts.
Your Ideal Customers
This process starts by identifying your ideal customers. You should begin to think about what type of individuals are interested in your products. What are the demographics? Where will they live? What income brackets will they belong to? Once you know more about your ideal customers, you will know how to cater your message in order to resonate with them effectively.
Competitive Benchmarking
Competition on Amazon is very stiff. You will face a number of competitors who have already established a foothold for themselves in your niche on Amazon. Your objective should be to identify these competitors, so you can begin to devise a strategy to compete with them. Studying the competition such as what search terms they are optimizing for, their monthly sales volumes, what marketing tactics they use, who their suppliers are and any other useful information you can gather will help further refine your plan.
Product Definition
It is important to have a very good understanding of your products. Try to define what exactly your products do and what they won’t do. What will they look like? What will the packaging be like? Will they need UL approval or other special certifications?
Price Strategy
Establishing a pricing strategy is very important because it has such an impact on how you rank in product searches. While many believe that having the lowest price on Amazon is the most important factor, if you can establish yourself as a premium brand, you will be able to leverage greater pricing power and thus charge higher prices. Therefore, a robust branding strategy is key to be able to maintain one’s pricing strategy.
A basic question to ask is how you plan to price your products? That question seems simple enough, but it is vitally important that you find the “sweet spot” where you can maximize your sales. Try to figure out what price your target market will be willing to pay? Will you have any pricing power where you will be able to charge higher than your competition? For example, Starbucks can charge more for coffee than the local coffee shop because they have pricing power.
Product Distribution
What’s the best and most efficient way to store and distribute your products? How will you get your products from your supplier to your distribution center and then to your customer? What shipping methods will you use? Will you rent your own warehouse, or will you use a public warehouse such as a third-party logistics facility? Perhaps it may be better to have everything drop-shipped directly to your customers, so you don’t have to carry any inventory. These are all important questions to consider when developing your marketing strategy and budget.
One of the best ways to distribute your products is to use Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program. With FBA, Amazon takes care of all your order fulfillment for you. This means Amazon will house your products and will do all the picking, packing and shipping for your orders. What’s more, when you use the FBA program, your products become eligible for Amazon Prime’s free two-day shipping program. This is a great way to get increased visibility and sales.
If you are inclined to handle order fulfillment yourself, then Amazon’s Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) program may be a good choice. Seller Fulfilled Prime allows you to list your products as Prime-eligible but handle the fulfillment yourself. The Prime badge will be displayed on products that you enroll in the program, thereby giving your products greater visibility and discoverability. What’s more, because Amazon handles customer service for products that are enrolled in the program, your customer service volume may decrease as well.
Marketing Budget
It is super important to develop a marketing budget before you start advertising blindly. Think about what advertising channels are best suited for your products? What social marketing strategies can you use? Will you use pay-per-click advertising from Google Adwords or Bing? Will you attend any trade shows in your chosen niche?
One way to do this is to work backwards and ask yourself what return on investment (ROI) you hope to achieve from your marketing efforts? When you start with the end in mind you will have a better sense of how much of an investment you will likely need.
There are several strategies you can use to begin this process. For example, if you have a tight budget, you may want to focus on just a couple of products just to get started and then expand as you go along. This will help you build your brand while putting more dollars behind a smaller set of products. As you gain more insights into your approach, you can begin to revise your budget and your strategies.
PHASE 2: SETTING THE GROUNDWORK FOR AN AMAZON MARKETING STRATEGY
This Amazon marketing plan outlines several methods that you can use to market your products. These methods can be done in an incremental fashion over time or they can be done in conjunction with each other. If your marketing budget permits, it is advisable to implement several of these marketing tactics at the same time to generate a greater impact.
The first part of this plan consists of the tasks your will need to do in order to lay the groundwork for your marketing plan. This groundwork includes:
Groundwork Task #1: Keyword Research
An initial first step will be to conduct keyword research to understand which keywords drive the most traffic to the niche that you have chosen. There are a number of tools that can be used to conduct this type of research. For a more detailed explanation of keyword research tactics, please read out post entitled, “How to Find the Best Keywords for Your Amazon Listings.”
Groundwork Task #2: Listing Optimization
Any Amazon marketing strategy must start with listing optimization. Without a well-designed listing page, you run the risk of wasting all of your marketing budget because you will end up eroding your brand image while sending customers to a sub-par listing destination. It is important to have optimized listings on Amazon in order to maximize the potential to be found in search results and to get organic traffic on Amazon. Listing optimization include optimizing the following aspects of a listing:
- Product images
- Product title
- 5 bullet points
- Keywords that are chosen in the back end while setting up the product
- Answering customer questions that are posted in the listing to help boost product rankings
- A compelling, benefit rich description in paragraph form that is clear and easily readable
PHASE 3: IMPLEMENTING AN AMAZON ADVERTISING STRATEGY
Once you have laid the groundwork for your Amazon marketing strategy, it is time to start driving traffic to your listings, so you can generate sales and turn those sales into product reviews. The specific marketing strategies that are available on Amazon will be explained in detail below.
Strategy #1: Launch Your Products with A “Blast”
In this phase, you should implement what is known as a product launch “blast.” This method entails using a service to give away a number of products to customers at a deeply discounted price (commonly $0.99 or $1.99), using a one-time coupon code. This has the effect of significantly boosting your Amazon sales rank by getting a large number of sales in a short period of time. A blast of 150 to 200 product units will usually be sufficient to rank your product in most non-competitive categories. If you are in a super competitive niche such as dietary supplements, it may be necessary to double this figure to gain significant rank.
The goal here is to not only get initial sales to improve product rank but to also increase the chances of getting product reviews. Repeat this process for as many products as you wish to rank highly.
Begin with Your Existing Customers
A strong way to start is to contact your existing customer list with an attractive coupon to buy your products on Amazon. This is a great way to generate initial sales and to improve your product’s Best Sellers Rank (BSRs). Once you get these all-important initial sales, it is very important to capitalize on them by following up and asking for product reviews, so you can begin to build social proof.
Reviews, Reviews, Reviews – It’s all About the Reviews
A good way to generate product reviews is to use a service like Feedback Genius or other e-mail follow-up services. You can also opt to utilize the services of a virtual assistant to go through your orders and follow-up to ask for reviews. To increase reviews, you can also contact niche blogs, forums, and/or products reviewers, among others to write about your product and to generate buzz.
It is important to remember that it is against Amazon’s policies to give someone a discount in exchange for a review. You can only ask for an “honest” review once a sale has been completed.
Strategy #2: Pay-Per-Click Advertising
A great way to generate traffic to your listings is to conduct pay-per-click advertising on Amazon. Amazon offers two kinds of pay-per-click advertising solutions: Sponsored Product Ads and Headline Search Ads.
Sponsored Product Ads
Amazon Sponsored Product Ads (SPAs) offer a good way to drive traffic to your Amazon listings. Given that many Amazon merchants are using SPAs to drive traffic, it is important for you to develop an SPA strategy. One of the best SPA strategies is to create and optimize a Manual SPA campaigns by using data uncovered from Automatic targeted ads. If done correctly, this strategy can go a long way to increase products discoverability and to increase sales. The key is to use the data that you harvest in a smart way to continually optimize your new Manual targeted campaigns. This strategy is discussed in great detail in our post entitled, “How to Optimize Your Amazon Sponsored Product Ads.”
Headline Search Ads
Headline Search Ads (HSAs) are a good way to increase awareness for your products and brand. Unlike, SPAs, which are mostly text ads, the ad creative you build for an HSA include a headline, logo, and product image. When a shopper clicks on a Headline Search Ad, they are taken to a page featuring a collection of products from your brand.
Strategy #3: Enhanced Brand Content
The Enhanced Brand Content (EBC) feature enables brand owners to improve the product descriptions of their branded products. This feature allows you to describe your product features in an expanded way to include a unique brand story, enhanced images and text placements. Adding EBC to your product detail pages can result in higher conversion rates, increased traffic, and increased sales when used effectively.
Strategy #4: Early Reviewer Program
The Early Reviewer Program is a program that encourages buyers who have already purchased a product to share their authentic experience through reviews. The program’s goal is to help brand owners acquire early reviews, which helps shoppers make smarter buying decisions and can lead to an increase in page views, search click-throughs, and sales. This Program helps you get up to 5 reviews by offering customers who purchased your enrolled items a reward ($3 gift card) in exchange for providing feedback on your product.
Strategy #5: Lightning Deals
A Lightning Deal is a time-bound, promotional offer where an item is featured for a limited number of hours, usually 4 to 12 hours (as determined by Amazon), on the Amazon Deals page. Featuring an item as a Lightning Deal may help increase sales and reduce your inventory. You can use the Lightning Deals Dashboard to submit Lightning Deals for a fee. All proposed Lightning Deals require Amazon approval to run on the Amazon Deals page.
Strategy #6: Coupons
With coupons you’ll be able to create targeted and compelling promotions for customers on Amazon. You can use them to discount a flat dollar or percentage off an eligible single product or eligible families of products. Coupons show up throughout Amazon.com, including detail pages, search results, the Gold Box Deals page and even a separate landing page just for coupons. The savings are instantly applied so coupons can help drive customer acquisition and sales by giving customers an immediate reason to buy.
Strategy #7: Promotions
Promotions can help your products stand out from the competition and stimulate sales. Successful promotions motivate customers to buy your product by offering sufficient value to give the customer an incentive to act. Several different promotion options are available, including free shipping offers, percentage-off, buy one, get one free and giveaways.
Strategy #8: External Marketing Activities
After you have optimized your Amazon marketing campaigns, it’s time to finally turn to sending Amazon some outside traffic by turning on alternative external paid traffic sources such as Facebook ads and Google PPC. The Amazon algorithm likes external traffic as this brings Amazon more customers. You will be rewarded with increased product sales rank as a result.
CONCLUSION
Amazon offers several advertising options to help grow awareness for your brand and reach shoppers searching for your products. This Amazon marketing plan outlined several strategies you can use to effectively market your products on the Amazon marketplace. These methods can be done in an incremental fashion over time or they can be done in conjunction with each other. The methods we discussed included listing optimizations to achieve organic traffic along with paid marketing strategies to drive more targeted traffic. We broke this up into three phases in order to maximize your effectiveness and return on investment. These three phases included evaluating your business to establish a baseline, setting the groundwork for your marketing strategy and finally implementing your strategy. By following these three phases, you will be able to devise a well-informed and effective marketing plan to succeed on Amazon.
Business Consulting Services: If you’re a small business owner looking to start or improve an online business then let me show you how to benefit from my experience. I have helped several online resellers grow their businesses by developing an online strategy to sell on Amazon, eBay or any other marketplace. Call me at 310-574-2541 or email me at Pez@Pezlogic.com for a complimentary business review.
