Daniel Tejada, of Straight Up Growth, on effective advertising & marketing for the Amazon Marketplace

Amazon’s marketplace is where a huge share of e-commerce happens. It’s also an incredibly powerful customer acquisition channel. And yet many brands are skittish about letting Amazon do their selling for them. Concerns include Amazon’s control over customer relationships, the customer experience, pricing, reverse logistics, the degree to which an appearance on Amazon will cannibalize the brand’s e-commerce site, and even whether Amazon might “Kirkland-ize” the brand’s products by introducing its own product lines (as it’s done in the past).

Daniel Tejada is Co-Founder and Chief Learning Officer at Straight Up Growth, a San Diego, CA-based marketing agency specializing in advertising and marketing on Amazon’s marketplace. His company has successfully brought many brands into Amazon’s marketplace and it’s grown significantly in the past several years. He and I both had the privilege of speaking at the Roth conference recently, so I invited him to join me on a podcast.

I wanted to query Daniel about the lessons he’s learned about effective advertising and marketing on Amazon. We drill down into competitive conquest issues, branding strategies, and the use of appropriate KPIs in the marketplace. We discuss the “love/hate” relationship that many brands have with the marketplace, the SEO implications (both good and bad) of deploying an Amazon storefront, new tools that Amazon is putting into the hands of brands to alleviate some of their concerns, and his views on Amazon’s recent closure of its Smile customer donation program (BTW I am working on a Smile replacement — so hang onto your hats!).

Daniel is optimistic about the future of Amazon selling and his company’s role as an onramp for brands whose managers realize that they ignore Amazon’s marketplace at their own peril.