Many brands have a love-hate relationship with Amazon. Amazon, after all, owns the customer relationship, controls pricing, has complex rules, high fees, and a history of cloning successful products under its own Amazon brand.
At the same time, as my guest, Michael Begg, of AMZ Advisers points out, sellers must face reality. Amazon is where shoppers want to shop, and brands that aren’t there will leave a void that will be quickly filled with competitor listings. Smart brands must therefore go about finding ways to maximize profit and revenue by driving low-cost traffic to Amazon, taking full advantage of the mechanisms that Amazon makes available to incentivize this traffic, and employing mid-funnel marketing tactics and audience targeting through the Amazon Marketing Cloud.
Steps that smart brands should take when selling on Amazon include:
- Focusing on mid-funnel ad strategy for product detail pages, sponsored ads, and brand awareness.
- Distributing the majority of Amazon marketing budget to bottom-funnel sponsored products.
- Leveraging Amazon’s brand referral bonus for affiliate marketing, with a focus on incentivizing affiliates and maximizing customer lifetime value.
- Using promotional dollars to benefit consumers through couponing, discounts, and other Amazon FBA features.
- Avoiding competitive conquesting on branded search; instead focusing on creating consideration for the brand with potential customers.
- Focusing on profitability and maximizing returns in hyper-competitive categories like supplements, where customer acquisition costs are high and suggested bids are even higher.
- Using Subscribe and Save as a loyalty program to increase customer lifetime value, particularly for consumable products with repeat purchasing potential.
- Leveraging Amazon SEO and influencer marketing for increased traffic and sales.
- Organizing influencer campaigns well and structuring content briefs to help prevent influencers from making unapproved claims.
- Finding a manageable “sweet spot” for influencer partnerships, avoiding both high-end celebrities and long tail micro-influencers.
- Aggressively testing new Amazon advertiser/seller tools when they become available.
