Selling and advertising products on Amazon should not be handled as two separate processes. It is helpful to think of your product, product content, logistics, and advertising as gears that fit together to keep your business going on Amazon. Each of these gears depends on the other and needs to be functional to work well for you.
The Basics
Amazon Advertising campaigns won’t do much for your products if you’re not retail-ready. In this helpful blog post, Shannon O’Connell outlined the seven things you need to do before selling on Amazon. Make sure that your product pages are fully optimized with full descriptions, bullet points, and images.
Be sure to build a Brand Store and A+ content for your account and products. If your content is fully optimized to show and describe your product clearly, then you are ready to start advertising. If your product page is lacking in content, your ads will serve but may not convert to a sale once the Amazon shopper gets to your page.
Once you have your items in stock and ready to sell, it’s time to build out the rest of your holistic Amazon Ads strategy. Read this blog post for outdated Amazon Ad strategies to avoid. Organize your business goals, and determine what you wish to achieve by selling on Amazon. This will inform your ad strategy to help maximize your ROI.
Turning the Gears with Amazon Advertising
For a truly holistic approach to Amazon Advertising, you need to build out ad campaigns that cover both your branded terms and key generic terms that are important to your product and product category. It is then important to use as many of the ad types that are appropriate to your goals.
- Sponsored Product Ads: Get started with Sponsored Product ads, which show up in a shopper’s search results. The ad will show the main image of your product as well as the title, which is one of the reasons why you need to have your content and images looking their best. This type of ad does not require design or formatting and can be competitive depending on the size of your market. These ads are great for both middle and bottom-of-funnel marketing goals.
- Sponsored Brand Ads: To further maximize showing your products on as much of the real estate in Amazon’s search results, take your learnings and keyword strategies from your Sponsored Product ads to build Sponsored Brand ads. Sponsored Brand ads appear at the top of the shopper’s search results, where you can use a video or custom lifestyle image to show your products in action and tell your brand story. When a shopper is on mobile or desktop, Sponsored Brand ads take up the most space on the screen. This can serve your top and middle-of-funnel marketing goals.
- Sponsored Display Ads: Next, seriously consider using Sponsored Display ads. These appear on product pages, including your own pages and competitor’s pages. This type of ad can use a custom image or video of your design and can target the audiences you wish to reach. Depending on the breadth of your in-house resources, you can build a video within the Amazon Advertising console if you don’t have video assets ready to use. If you are new to Amazon or have a new product, Amazon has determined that using Sponsored Products and Sponsored Display ads in tandem is more successful than using one type of ad alone.
- Sponsored Brand Video Ads: Another way to engage the customer during their search is by using Sponsored Brand Video ads. You can use this type of ad to demonstrate the features of your product. You don’t need to use sound in your videos, as they appear muted by default in search results. According to Amazon, “advertisers who used Sponsored Brands video ad format, saw an average $43 more purchase from new-to-brand customer compared to those who didn’t.” (Amazon internal data)
- Sponsored TV Ads: Acquiring new customers can also be done via the newly launched Sponsored TV ads. These videos appear on Amazon-operated streaming platforms, including Amazon Prime, Freevee, and Twitch. Here, you can choose which interest audiences you would like to reach.
Engage With and Retain Your Customers
Sponsored Brand Video and Sponsored TV ads are great for telling your brand story and acquiring new customers. You should also include a plan to retain repeat customers on Amazon, as repeat customers are cheaper to keep than it is to acquire new ones. After at least 90 days of sales history, you can determine the Lifetime Value (LTV) of your Amazon customers.
Amazon shoppers are very vocal about their entire shopping experience as well as the products, so it’s important to listen to what customers are saying in their reviews. If there are issues with your product or fulfillment process, you’re likely to hear about it in a negative customer review. The more negative customer reviews a product has, the less likely your product is to show up in search results. The social proof of reviews on Amazon is crucial, so here are five ways to earn more reviews on Amazon. When companies listen to what their customers are saying and make it clear that they care, this goes a long way in retaining customers and building their brand reputation.
If it applies to your product and brand, consider registering for an Eco-Friendly badge, as this will appeal to the social consciousness of your consumers as well as show transparency, potentially gaining trust from customers.
Sponsored Brand, Sponsored Brand Video, and Sponsored TV ads are great ways to engage with your customers. In addition to these advertising campaigns, consider using Amazon Posts. These are free to use and appear similar to social media posts. These show up in customer searches as well as on product detail pages.
Truly Holistic Marketing on Amazon
Amazon advertising is most effective when all of these aspects of selling on Amazon are taken into account. If one of these components, or gears, is rusty or dysfunctional, it can have an impact on the efficacy of your ads. Advertising on Amazon is not just about building PPC campaigns. It is about using all the real estate on the platform to your advantage to reach customers, keep them, and approach all of these aspects of your business as a whole.
