The Amazon Effect: 3 Tips For Retail Brands

Amazon’s dominance in online retail has required brands to completely reevaluate their relationship to the marketplace giant. For many brands, Amazon remains the distribution channel that needs to be worked out in order to accelerate online sales growth and prevent market share loss to competitors.

Amazon has traditionally dominated bottom of funnel sales, simply because customers already have purchase intent when browsing Amazon. What is interesting for brands however, is that we’re starting to see Amazon make moves to increasingly permeate every stage of the customer buying journey.

Amazon has amped up efforts to improve it’s top of funnel acquisition, including their new Influencers Program, where social media influencers are invited to earn money by recommending Amazon products to their follower base. It’s clear Amazon is making strides to become more relevant in the awareness stage of the buyer journey, where Google and Facebook both excel at.

Amazon has also created a huge wealth of product information for online shoppers through their customer review ecosystem. If customers trust they can rely on the diversity and quality of Amazon reviews for product research, it means the company will also capture more middle of funnel sales. Over time, shoppers may be less compelled to use search engines such as Google for similar purposes, simply because they will have no need to.

If the customer’s buyer journey increasingly begins and ends on Amazon, what does this mean for brands selling on Amazon?

It’s clear that selling on Amazon remains a challenging task, and many retail brands now have dedicated Amazon teams tasked with navigating the online marketplace. Marketers and account managers also have to grapple with the Vendor Central platform, which offers limited functionality in terms of optimizing for organic rankings (‘Amazon SEO’), running profitable AMS campaigns, and protecting their brand equity on the marketplace.

3 Tips For Retail Brands

For brands looking to overhaul their Amazon operations, there are 3 key areas that will need to be tackled first to help your business build a strong foundation on Amazon:

1. Improve product searchability on Amazon (‘Amazon SEO’)

On Amazon, the majority of shoppers are unlikely to browse past Pages 1-2 in search results. Your goal is to continually work to improve the visibility of your products, and optimize your rankings to ensure your products are displayed higher than your competitors in in Amazon’s search results.

‘Amazon SEO’ refers to the process of creating & optimizing the content of your product listings to improve your product visibility on Amazon. By ensuring your keywords and content are both optimized, you will be able to increase your sales velocity, and in turn this will boost your product’s organic rankings in Amazon search results.

2. Run Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) campaigns

We’re already seeing marketers and agencies shift more ad dollars to AMS, with data showing that Amazon ads convert better simply because customers are already there to purchase. With CPCs on Amazon’s ad platform substantially lower than Google AdWords, marketers are also seeing a higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) compared to AdWords.

In particular, Sponsored Products ads, the most popular ad format available in AMS, have proved to be extremely lucrative for marketers armed with a robust keyword targeting strategy and a sound understanding of how Pay-per-Click (‘PPC’) advertising works on Amazon.

3. Protect your brand equity

It’s very likely that your branded products will also be sold by resellers in the Amazon marketplace. However, these resellers will not necessarily care about your brand image, or make the effort to ensure the listing content for your product is accurate and aligned with the branding efforts across your other online distribution channels.

It will be your responsibility to ensure the content for all your products sold on Amazon is accurate and aligned with your brand image. You will also want to take a proactive approach with managing customer reviews, and your goal is to ensure all customer questions are answered within the shortest time frame possible. In an ideal scenario you would always be the first one to respond to questions about your product.

Your Amazon marketing strategy for 2018

Depending on how much time and resources you want to commit to scaling your Amazon operations, at minimum I would recommend brands to focus on optimizing their content for Amazon SEO, and setting up keyword-driven Sponsored Products (‘PPC’) ad campaigns for their main products.

As you become more familiar with the ins and outs of search and paid marketing on Amazon, you will find that compelling content coupled with keyword-targeted PPC campaigns will be the foundation for all your other marketing efforts on Amazon.

Originally published on Martech Advisor here.