Understanding Amazon Marketing Strategies in 2020

Understanding Amazon marketing strategies are vital to your sales. This is because many shoppers nowadays begin their product searches on Amazon. Thus, it’s not a surprise that Amazon dominates the e-commerce universe with more than 80% of the market share. 

From years ago, advertising on Amazon was an unexplored opportunity, but not anymore today. Many sellers are increasingly advertising on Amazon to sell more of their products. If you have a product to sell or you are selling it already on the Amazon marketplace, then you’re in the right place to know the basic understanding of Amazon marketing.

Amazon marketing is a strategy that your business will undertake to promote the buying and selling of your products on Amazon. We will elaborate on the three strategies that you can use in marketing your products on Amazon:

1. Amazon SEO
2. Amazon PPC Advertising
3. External Marketing Channels

Understanding Amazon Marketing Strategies for Better Sales

Amazon SEO

One of the most important Amazon marketing strategies is Amazon SEO. Amazon SEO is the process of optimizing your product listings so that they are both relevant and popular for search queries of your target customers on Amazon. This should be the first one of the Amazon Marketing Strategies you implement. If you have a product on Amazon, you would always want to be found by your customers just as how you want your site to show up on the search engine. Amazon SEO, if it is done right, will result in more traffic and sales. Who wouldn’t want that to happen? Thus, Amazon SEO is a fundamental strategy of Amazon marketing. 

How to Rank High in Amazon SEO

Amazon is primarily a buying platform, that’s why to rank high in Amazon is not that simple in comparison to web SEO. As more and more sellers join this largest global eCommerce marketplace, the chances of your products getting found by customers on Amazon is decreasing fast. Therefore, Amazon SEO is critical for every seller and their product listings. Just listing your products on Amazon is no longer enough.

Like Google, Amazon also has a search algorithm known as A9 which basically dictates how product listings are ranked for every search query by customers. So in order to rank high on Amazon search engine results, Amazon algorithm considered relevance and performance as two crucial ranking factors that will end up your product page converting and selling more. 

Step by Step Guide to Amazon SEO

1. Research Target Keywords
   Researching and selecting the target keywords for a product is the core of Amazon SEO marketing. Since the goal is to rank on Amazon organically, then it is important to start identifying target keywords on Amazon by searching like s customer. As a marketer, you would want to put the most relevant keywords for your product so it will become more visible in the search results.
2. Optimize Product Title
   Product title is the most important element that builds relevance for the target keywords. To optimize product listing titles, focus on:
   1. Incorporate as many keywords as possible in the product title
   2. Make sure the product title doesn’t cross the ideal limit of 114-154 characters else the words will
   3. hide and it wouldn’t read as naturally
   4. Try to use the main target keyword and important related keywords as early as possible in the product title
   5. Ensure that the product title reads naturally and provides sufficient information about the product itself. That being said, you should not try to include irrelevant keywords that may have high search volume but do not define the product.
3. Optimize Product Description
   A product description is the next most important area where you can incorporate your target keywords and improve relevance. Therefore, to optimize product description:
   1. Incorporate as many target keywords as possible.
   2. Ensure the target keywords used in product titles are also used in the product description, as this emphasizes relevance.
   3. Try to incorporate keywords earlier in the description to improve relevance.
   4. At the same make sure the product description is comprehensive and provides a compelling and accurate product description.
   5. Also, the product description should read naturally and users should be able to scan through it to see the highlights (use bullet points and use proper spacing to make it read easily).
4. Explain why your Product is Better than Others
   Next, you need to convince your target market on why they should buy your product by focusing on:
   1. Explaining clearly the value it offers to customers
   2. Key differentiators of your product that makes it better than the competition
   3. Trust elements, especially if your brand/product range is new, e.g. Guarantees? Better customer service? Easy returns?
   4. Incentives for customers to switch from your competitors, e.g. Free shipping? Discount? Lower price? More quantity?
5. Use High-Quality Images
   Product images are vital also in converting customers. Your images should be of high quality, preferably on a clear background (follow Amazon’s guidelines). If your images are low-quality, AI tools like Upscale Pro can help you enhance them to the required resolution. Then, provide more images that highlight all aspects of the product, use brand images/logos to add trust and descriptive images that explain the product features to add clarity.
6. Get More Sales
   Amazon’s A9 algorithm tends to favor products with more sales and rewards with higher rankings. If more number of customers have bought the product that clearly tells Amazon that the product is good and therefore Amazon decides to rank it higher. If you are just starting out with Amazon, then it will be helpful to do targeted Amazon PPC ads to increase your sales.
7. Get More Ratings and Reviews
   Positive Ratings and Reviews will definitely contribute to organic rankings. The more positive ratings and reviews mean the product is more popular and better than the other sellers and therefore should be ranked higher by Amazon’s A9 algorithm.

Amazon PPC Advertising

Another one of the key Amazon marketing strategies is Amazon PPC. Amazon advertising is an umbrella advertising solution of Amazon for sellers and vendors, where it functions as “Ad solutions to find, attract, engage customers throughout their journey.” These Amazon ads work similarly like how Google search works – when you type a keyword on Amazon search bar, you’ll notice that the top results are “sponsored” posts.

Amazon ads are charged on a pay per click (PPC) basis, which means that there is no cost for showing your product ads on Amazon but you’ll pay only when a customer clicks on your sponsored listing or banner. With Amazon PPC, you will end up selling more, earning more reviews and ratings, and all of these will contribute to increasing your organic search ranking. Therefore, when an Amazon SEO optimized listing as mentioned above is advertised with Amazon PPC, the product listing is likely to convert more customers into sales. 

Types of Amazon PPC Ads

There are three main types of ad formats you can use through the Amazon advertising platform to advertise your products and increase sales:

1. Sponsored Product Ads
   These are widely used ads and possibly the most effective ad format. It promotes individual products on Amazon by choosing which products to advertise, assigning keywords or product attributes to target, and entering the cost-per-click amount. When shoppers click on these ads, they will be directed to the product detail page on Amazon. When this happens, it will be effective that your product page is well-optimized with details and information so that all the more there are higher chances of conversion to sales.The simplest way to identify sponsored product ads is to perform a search on Amazon and look at the products listed for your search.  Typically, you will find products at the top, a few in the middle and a few at the end of the list marked as ‘sponsored’.
2. Sponsored Brand Ads (Formerly Headline Search Ads)
   These ads show on top of every search results page and offer a more visible format which includes a heading, logo, and three ASINs that link to a listing page. If you want to establish product awareness of your brand, then Sponsored Brand ads is the best choice to use because it offers you better visibility and exclusivity as compared to Sponsored Product Ads. These are also keyword-targeted ads which means you can target specific keywords matching your product and target audience to show your ads.One major qualifying factor for sponsored brand ads is the requirement that your brand should be Amazon Registered. If you are an Amazon vendor, you automatically qualify. However, if you are a seller, you will need to enroll your brand with Amazon before you can create a campaign for Sponsored Product Ads.
3. Sponsored Product Display Ads
   Product display ads allow the vendor to place relevant ads on product detail pages, search listings, reviews pages, and offer listing pages. It works differently than the two ads format above. These ads are not keyword targeted, but it targets your customers based on their interest as well as you can target your competitors’ products and categories, to maximize your reach and ability to sell more.
4. A+ Content (Formerly EBC)
   It is a feature to showcase your brand differently than your competitors – your products, its features, the images, unique selling proposition through enhanced text and images making your products stand out as compared to others. If you want your product listings to stand out from the competition as well as help your prospects make faster you can make good use of this ad format.

How to Amplify Sales on Amazon PPC Ads

After planning and setting up your Amazon Ads, what’s next? This step could be designed as easier compared to getting the performance at a profitable ACoS since this requires knowledge and expertise on Amazon advertising. In order to amplify sales, it is good to have an optimization strategy in place to ensure that your Amazon ads are performing to the best of their ability in maximizing sales and impressions. You may visit our blog on the best practices of Amazon PPC optimization.

External Marketing Channels

Advertising on Amazon is probably the best option available since your products are listed on the platform and these can be advertised to the customers who are looking to buy your products.

However, there are also limitations that slow down your marketing growth:

1. Fast-growing competition: Nowadays, many sellers are increasingly advertising their products on Amazon to sell more
2. Saturated Placements: Amazon Advertising has already become so competitive that on some of the search result pages you would not see a single organic listing in the first scroll. 
3. Increasing CPC and ACoS: This competition is naturally increasing the CPC bids, which in turn increases ACoS.
4. Costly for New Sellers and Products: A highly competitive marketplace means that new sellers or new products will find it very costly to advertise and sell.

Therefore, exploring other opportunities could be a better strategy for the sustainable growth of your Amazon business. Based on our experience and research, we recommend these paid channels to promote your Amazon product listings:

• Facebook: The largest user base out there and sophisticated targeting options make Facebook the most ideal paid channel to promote your Amazon product listings. Also, using our suggested Sales Funnel, you could get cheap traffic and nurture them into sales qualified prospects. 
• Google Search: Google is still the second-largest product search engine, second only to Amazon. Therefore, if you have identified the right set of keywords, you could find a target audience here, much closer to the conversion in the sales funnel.
•  Google Display Network: By targeting prospects based on their interests, demographics, and a wide range of custom targeting options, you could find some quality yet cheap traffic on Google Display Network. Using remarketing and sales funnel, GDN traffic can be used to advantage, to drive sales. 
• YouTube: Depending on your products and niche, YouTube can be a very effective and cheap paid traffic channel to build a targeted opt-in list as well as drive sales. Health & Fitness? Gadgets? Fashion and Lifestyle? Travel? You name it. 
• Instagram: Along with Facebook, Instagram can be another great paid traffic channel to build opt-in lists as well as selling products. If your niche is relevant to Instagram, you are already a winner.

Takeaways From Amazon Marketing Strategies

Learn to use all the Amazon marketing strategies together for the greatest effect. If you are selling products on Amazon, then advertising is a must. If you don’t advertise your products on Amazon, then you’ll simply lose sales to competitors. From Amazon SEO, Amazon PPC advertising, then marketing it to other external channels, our team is dedicated to delivering not just good results but success.