So You Want To Compete With Amazon...

A Smaller Retailer’s Guide to E-Commerce Survival – Learn How To Skirmish With Amazon & Win!

For the average smaller retailer, winning on the internet seems impossible.

You can’t compete with the biggest players in your space, and no matter what you do, Amazon is going to kick your butt. Luckily, after you read this, you won’t be an average retailer. This is a step by step strategy guide for e-commerce survival. Learn how to compete with Amazon without going out of business. Buckle up kids, this is going to be a crazy ride.

Let’s Set The Stage

Amazon is way better than you are at everything (except for the most important things – which we will get to in a couple of hundred words – so hang on).

1. Amazon has eleventy-billion products. That matters. The impact of all those products is that Amazon can live off of traffic. Expensive traffic, cheap traffic, it doesn’t really matter. If Amazon can get a shopper on to the site, the chances that what that customer wants or needs is on Amazon is very high. If you have fewer than eleventy-billion products, this is not true for you.
2. Amazon now gets more than half of all product-focused searches on the internet. Because of the incredible conglomeration of products on Amazon, consumers have started to search Amazon 1st. This means that regardless of how awesome your site/product is, more than half of consumers who are expressing high intent to purchase through search are headed to Amazon before you have an opportunity to market to them.
3. Amazon has services that you can’t compete with – Prime, Video, Music, Photos, Web Services, Amazon Payments, Subscriptions, Kindle, Fire Tablets, Dash Buttons and probably 50 other things I can’t think of.
4. Amazon is growing faster than almost anybody of scale in the e-commerce space. Internet Retailer says that Amazon is generating 50% of e-commerce growth. Amazon is crushing everyone in terms of growth. They are adding more revenue and more transactions than ever.
5. And, maybe worst of all, everybody thinks that everything is cheaper on Amazon – that is 100% not true. But the myth is true, so shoppers tend to NOT price shop when they start at Amazon whereas they often do when they start their product journey somewhere else.

That Is A Pretty Grim Backdrop – What Can We Do To Compete?

Before we get started, prepare yourself. This is going to be hard. A lot of this is effort-based, and some of it will cost money. This is a Don Quixote kind of mission. You are taking on the most sophisticated marketing enterprise of the Internet era, who has, in all seriousness, a reach that cannot be matched and pockets that are never empty.

STEP 1: KNOW YOUR LIMITATIONS

This is hard, but you have to understand your limitations as a seller of product. If you have a niche product, you need to master niche marketing. If your are a mass market seller, you need to master a different set of skills. Take a cold, hard look at your core product selection and decide if you are niche or mass market.

Have you decided?

Great. By the way, if you picked mass-market and you are under $30mm in sales, you picked wrong. Selling into the mass market is expensive because it is built on brand awareness and brand marketing. If you don’t have those already, don’t fret. Having a well-known brand is not necessary to compete effectively with Amazon, and in some respects it might get in the way. So, we are all agreed, even if we think that we are mass market, we need to think in narrow niches to gain an advantage against Amazon.

STEP 2: IDENTIFY YOUR IDEAL CUSTOMER

This sounds like fluffy marketing consultant advice, but to fight the power of Amazon, you aren’t waging war. You are a guerrilla fighter, attacking Amazon on undefended fronts, taking small bits of territory at a time. In order to win these skirmishes, you have to know the exact customer that you are fighting for. So let’s start there. Identify your ideal customer, I’ll wait.

OK – so you’ve identified your ideal customer – and you tell me that they are male, 18-34, middle to high income…STOP! That is too broad, too squishy. If you can’t tell me a story about the daily experience of your ideal customer, you haven’t figured it out well enough. Here is a simple customer avatar work sheet. This customer worksheet is the basis for your plan of attack. We need to be very specific in whom we are targeting, because pinpoint targeting is the way to keep this attack a skirmish – this way we don’t run into the massive defenses that Amazon has built in SEO, SEM & more.

Here is our completed customer worksheet:

Get Your Free Customer Avatar Worksheet Now!

If we look at our avatar, Sandy, she is 32, has a child under 2, lives in the Northeast, is married/partnered, is out of the workforce until her child (or children) are of school age. Further, she lives in a place where her household income is above average for the metro area, so she likely lives in a wealthier suburb or in a part of a city that is more residential. She is college-educated, is focused on healthy choices for her family, does yoga or Soul Cycle regularly, has traveled internationally in the past and wishes to do so again in the future. However, her focus right now is on her young family, so kids music classes might take up her Soul Cycle time and Disney World might take priority over a trip to the wilds of Patagonia.

In short, we know a lot about Sandy, so we can leverage what we know to create a sales experience that will drive her to buy from us, rather than somewhere else. We use the customer avatar to create a web of influences that make our product the right product for her. We use this knowledge to win the skirmish. And while Amazon also knows all of this about Sandy, she isn’t important enough to fight for, individually. So our process will be to create a sphere of influence around Sandy to win her as a customer. And before you think that winning one customer at a time is no way to scale a business, remember that there are tens of thousands of Sandys in your market. As we start to find success, we will continue to widen the avatar until we hit a point of diminishing returns. Then we start all over again with a different avatar, slowly growing our collection of avatars. We will widen our avatar-based audiences so that we have a collection of small audiences that, in aggregate, provide us with ample opportunity, but no individual audience is so big that we are truly competing directly with the biggest players in the market.

So fill out your customer avatar worksheet. Take it slow. Make some choices. You should  feel like you are limiting your market. If you aren’t making your targeting precise, your work is too big. And the word big means Amazon is already there. We are going to attack small a hundred times. Think about it this way – Amazon generates more than $30 billion dollars in sales in a quarter. In order to make a difference in their business, they need to figure out how to increase that number by 10%. So Amazon needs to grow its business by at least $12,000,000,000 every year. The number of Sandys you need for that is unimaginable. That’s why Sandy is your target – she, and the tens of thousands of people that look like her – don’t add up to much when your target is $12B, but that group carries a lot of dollars if your goal is $2mm, right?

Huge scale means that you have to limit yourself to growth initiatives that can drive enormous numbers. Smaller scale means your bar isn’t quite so high. You can do things that seemingly don’t scale (but they really do…) and win 20 $100,000 battles against Amazon, because Amazon can’t really be troubled about $100K – they have bigger fish to fry.

STEP 3: START LAYERING KEYWORDS

OK, we know that Jeff Bezos does NOT do this. But  this is a crucial step to understanding and capturing your target market. The idea behind this keyword approach isn’t novel, and it seemingly doesn’t scale. But as we walk through this, you will start to see repeatable patterns in high interest keywords. We call this concept keyword layering. We create keyword strings using a series of modifiers that allow us to build more specific content that resonate with the particular buyer. What follows is a 6-phased approach to finding keywords that capture the essentials of what we know about Sandy, and what we know about our casual pants collection. We will be using this as eventual targeting for search, but right now, the goal is to find the specific language that you need to tell a story about Sandy where your casual pants play an important role. This story will be the basis of which we create content that is meaningful and high impact for Sandy. These words will help you construct a value proposition that makes your brand and products the right choice for Sandy. For the purposes of this exercise, our product focus is on yoga/casual/active pants. Now let’s start with spitballing a little bit. The typical way to generate keywords is to jump to your favorite keyword tool (Moz, Keyword Planner, whatever…) and start with the obvious keyword and sort by volume, etc. But we aren’t thinking about keywords as search volume drivers at this point – we are thinking about these keywords as skirmish points in our war in our war on the biggest retailer on earth. So lets think in terms of keyword modeling, rather than keyword research.

Why Model Long-Tail Keywords?

The idea behind long-tail keyword targeting is three-fold:

Head terms, namely obvious keywords, like “yoga pants” or “casual pants” are difficult to rank for in terms of search engine optimization and expensive to buy in paid search. This is universally true as far as I can tell, and I have been working in search since 1997. “Long-Tail Keywords” are easier to rank for in terms of SEO, but are much cheaper in cost per click search marketing.

Long-tail keywords are typically higher intent. Search is what is known as “intent-based” marketing. Searchers are expressing their intent or interest in a topic or product by the search term they use. Someone who uses more words in their search query to express what they want is likely expressing a higher-intent to engage or purchase. As an example, “pants” is less specific that “brown pants”, so we can assume that our searcher who has added “brown” to the search means that they know that they want brown pants rather than any other color, so they are closer to the point of conversion. A searcher that queries “brown pants with flexible waist” has further described what they are interested in, suggesting that they are more likely to engage or purchase from the narrowed selection of color and product attribute that they would be from just the broad product name because the search results are more relevant to the request.

Long-tail keywords actually represent the majority of searches through search engines. While individual words, like “pants” may have huge search volume for that query, in aggregate, derivatives and modifiers of that core search actually have a higher volume. So, key phrases like “brown pants”, “brown pants with flexible waist”, “flex waist pants chocolate color”, “flex wait brown pants pleats”, “brown cotton pants with flex waist”, and “brown stretch waist pants flat front cotton” on aggregate might attract a bigger audience. (And they have higher intent!) Our good friends at moz.com put together an illustration of this concept (way back in 2009!) and while the percentages may have changed, the concept is still 100% spot on).

Long-tail search targeting is key in not only helping you create the story that you need to win, but it also has incredible impact on organic search ranking, CPC cost, and, perhaps best of all, intent to purchase. They keyword layering exercise that we are going to go through will be one that you go through dozens or hundreds of times as we continue our repeated skirmishes with Amazon. Get good at this, because it matters. (And check out out our post on the economics of long-tail keywords.)

So, let’s get started:

Phase 1: Synonyms

Focus Point: Yoga Pants

Synonyms or Similar Meaning: Athletic pants, exercise pants, running pants, exercise leggings, etc.

You get the idea, right? You think of words that are similar to your focus. Because you know that Amazon (or somebody else who is way bigger than you) has got your obvious keyword locked down. So, you need to find alternative ways to attack this. Don’t worry, all of the words you come up with in this phase may be 100% obvious, but we will help you stretch out these concepts into something useful.)

Phase 2: Modifiers

Focus Point: Yoga Pants

Modifiers: Size, Color, Materials, Material Properties

Examples:

Size: XS, S, M, L, XL, 2. 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, tall, petite, etc.

Color: Black, Tan, Red, Gray, Heather, Brown, Taupe, Green, Yellow, etc.

Materials: Cotton, Spandex, Lycra, Nylon

Material Properties: Moisture Wicking, Compression, Flexible, Stretch, Sueded

The idea is to list out as many the discrete attributes of your focal idea.

Phase 3: Desired Characteristics

Focus Point: Yoga Pants

Desired Characteristics: Great Fit, Comfortable, Feels Great, Range of Motion, High Performance

These are softer modifiers. The previous modifiers were focused largely on product attributes, and the desired characteristics are more of the way you think Sandy wants these pants to feel.

Phase 4: For Whom

Focus Point: Yoga Pants

For Whom: Women, Ladies, Moms, Young Moms, Busy Moms, Moms of Toddlers, Women in their 30s

We’ve taken some of what we know about Sandy and layered it in here.

Phase 5: Use Cases (How Do You Use This?)

Focus Points: Yoga Pants

Use Cases: Exercising, Shopping, Dropping Kids Off At School, Traveling, Vacation, Around the House, Relaxing

This is what we imagine how Sandy might be thinking about what she might be doing while wearing these pants.

Phase 6: Tying It All Together

Now we take all of the keyword phases ideas and bring them all together into a phrase that helps us tell a story.

[KEYWORD] + [MODIFIER] + [CHARACTERISTICS] + [WHO] + [USE CASE]

[YOGA PANTS] + [BLACK] + [SMALL] + [COMFORTABLE] + [STRETCH FABRIC] + [NEW MOMS] + [PRESCHOOL DROPOFF]

Sandy is looking for black yoga pants that are comfortable. She loves pants with stretch fabric, because as a young Mom who is active wit her kids at preschool, she is always on the move. And she needs clothes that allow her to look put together, because she goes from preschool drop-off to the rest of her day.

Now, do you remember why we started layering keywords? The biggest reason is that it gives you a framework to find the words to tell Sandy’s story. The key selling points and Sandy’s key interest points are found when we interleave the customer avatar and the long-tail keyword set. In that combination, we encapsulate what Sandy wants and needs, with rich language that helps us create content that will be compelling, engaging, and ultimately, a key part of Sandy’s decision to buy. But along the way, that rich content will allow us to gain search visibility throughout the long-tail of search so that we can get organic or paid traffic with a lower expenditure of effort or money. This is a massive win – we get the core message of our content and it creates marketing efficiency at the same time. We get to influence Sandy’s decision process at economic terms that fit our budget – not Amazon’s!

STEP 4: LEVERAGING YOUR STORY

Now that we have a story to work from, how do we leverage this story to compete effectively with Amazon? The overall goal it to create targeted awareness. We have a target audience. We have a relevant product, now we need to create awareness of this product in a context that makes sense for the target. We aren’t trying to raise awareness of our product for the entire market – just for Sandy (and the tens of thousands of people that share her characteristics).

This is where we start thinking about skirmishes with Amazon rather than an all out war. We aren’t trying to fight for all of Amazon’s customers, we are fighting for Sandy. So, how do we win Sandy?

• Targeted Content
• Targeted Sharing
• Targeted Advertising
• Follow Up

TARGETED CONTENT: This is effort based – and it is hard. But this where Amazon can’t win. You need to create content that uses the keywords and stories that we’ve put together. And then you need to surround your product with those stories. It should look something like this:

The Blog Posts: The blog posts should be high-quality content that leverage the keywords that we layered. Further, the blog posts should be informative and not be overly sales-y. The goal is to create content that is engaging to Sandy. Maybe the blog post is Looking Great While Rocking A Diaper Bag or 5 Looks That Go From Preschool Drop Off to Coffeeshop or Yoga Pants – Fashion Friend or Foe? I think you get the idea. These are helpful articles that speak to the needs of Sandy. The blog should include inline links to your products that are related to the article. The goal here is to create a sense of value for Sandy, not to sell Sandy right now. And all blog posts should have some kind of call to to action in them, like signing up for e-mail newsletter, or share with a friend, or something to help your visitor engage with you.

The Social Posts: The social can alternate between highlighting the blog posts and highlighting the products. The idea is to repeatedly promote this content in a non-spammy way. If you are promoting Looking Great While Rocking A Diaper Bag, perhaps your first social post can mention the blog post, your second could ask a question like “Want to Know How To Look Great Everyday, Even With Kids?”, the 3rd might be “Check check out our Yoga pants featured in Looking Great While Rocking A Diaper Bag”. The goal here is to regularly promote content that you have created without being repetitious. By changing your focus slightly, you can reshape and recommend your content in multiple ways. And again, you aren’t selling aggressively, you are creating targeted awareness.

TARGETED SHARING: This is a strategy that will be hard to execute at first, but with practice it will get easier. We want people who look like our target, or have influence in our target audience to share this content.

FRIENDS & FAMILY: First, it is easiest if you have access to people in your target market. Maybe it is you, or maybe it is people with whom you work or socialize. Ask them, nicely, to share your content. They can do this on any social network. It doesn’t have to be much, but if they are in your target audience, they certainly have their own audience of friends and acquaintances that will see it. Depending on who your friends are this can be hugely successful, or simply an exercise in futility. But it is important that you do this because it helps you generate the skill in asking people to share your content, and it can create a little (or a lot) of awareness for your products and brand.

YOUR CURRENT CUSTOMERS: Your customers already know, like and trust you. If you already have a mailing list, send this new content to them, hoping that they will like it. Ask them to share it. Better yet, incentivize them to share it. Run a contest asking them to publicly share your content with a hashtag that you choose by a certain date and they can win a gift card, or maybe every person that shares gets a 10% off coupon or something. On that date, do a search for your hashtag on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram and give the winner their prize.

TARGETED INFLUENCERS: This is an entire world of marketing, but here are the basics. Look for blogs, Instagram accounts, etc. that address your subject and have a following. Reach out to them with a link to your content, telling them that you think their audience might be interested in this content. If they agree that their audience would be interested, ask them to share it, or offer to write similar content exclusively for them that can be hosted on their properties, as long as that content has links back to your site and products. This way, you get exposure to their audience, they get an afternoon off from creating content, and everybody wins. I know I made this sound easy – it isn’t. This takes time and effort, but when it works, it will be huge for your business!

TARGETED ADVERTISING & PROMOTION: Because the organic reach on most social networks is very low, and organic search traffic is hard to get, we need to advertise. There are several ways to do this, and there is a never-ending panoply of choices out there, but here are a the most important. There are some technical requirements here, and we aren’t going to dive deep in that regard, but if you get lost, contact us. We are happy to help. First, you need to install the Facebook Pixel. That will give you all the ammunition you need to market on Facebook & Instagram. Additionally, installing Twitter’s pixel can be helpful. And minimally, you need Google Analytics installed, or have a relationship with another retargeting company like AdRoll. We think that paid search is terrific too, so go ahead and install those Bing Ads & AdWords pixels, too. Advertising can get incredibly complicated, and ridiculously expensive. This post won’t give you all the insight that you need – if you need help, just ask.

FACEBOOK POSTS: The first thing we are going to do is promote our Facebook posts around our content. The idea is to choose an audience that is similar to Sandy. Spend $10-20 to boost the post to the right audience. That will get you some clicks to your content.

FACEBOOK ADVERTISING: Advertising on Facebook is similar to boosting a post, but the targeting options are richer. Spend some time think your way through this and spend $5-$10 advertising to test your results. The goal is to get potential customers to click through to your content and/or product pages. There are many ways to advertise on Facebook, including custom audiences and targeted audience creation.

TWITTER PROMOTED TWEET: Similar to a promoted post on Facebook, Twitter allows you to promote specific Tweets. Test this out first before jumping in with both feet. There are loads of other ways to advertise on Twitter, including retargeting. Twitter can be a powerful advertising platform, but start with simple promoted posts to learn the potential of this platform for your business.

RETARGETING: You want to “retarget” the audience that has engaged with your content. Between your regular social sharing, your e-mail blast, your contest and your influencer engagement, you should be building a decent audience for your content (if you haven’t built at least a small audience, work through the social share stuff again). What we want to do is show those people an ad that highlights the content message (so that it will trigger some memory of your great article) but gives them an incentive to clickthrough to your product (free shipping or a discount). You can retarget the visitors of specific pages of your website with specific messages. This will, of course, narrow your audience, but will also contain your spend to those people that have engaged with your content.

FOLLOWUP: As we mentioned early in the process, your core value-building content that is targeted at Sandy should have some kind of call to action. What we want is to give potential customers (people who look like Sandy and have her concerns and motivations), is an opportunity to engage with you. The calls to action should likely be focused on creating engagement, namely sign up for e-mail, follow us on Facebook, or check us out on Instagram. What we are looking for is a permission-based touchpoint with our potential customers. Once we have that touchpoint, we need to reshape and retell our value proposition again and again. Similar to retargeting, the idea of the touchpoint is to articulate your message in a way that echoes your first encounter. So, you may send one of your other keyword rich articles.

As you continue to grow your permission-based audience, continue to create content that sells, of course, but also informs. While you don’t need to go whole hog like Huckberry does with its completely terrific lifestyle content. Check out this interview with Kelly Slater – it has magazine-quality content, associated products, and it talks about products – it doesn’t sell them. Or check out Bonobo’s content vehicle, Equateur. Posts like 5 Ways To Keep Suits Clean is perfect – it is non-sales, but terrifically relevant to the Bonobos shopper – and best of all, it is written by another company- rinse.com! (Re-read the Targeted Influencers section again – that is what rinse.com did with Bonobos. Rinse understood that Bonobos would have influence on the target market that Rinse wants – so Rinse created content for Bonobos. It is a win for Bonobos because it is high-quality content that is relevant to their audience, and rinse.com wins because you know who they are (and Bonobos likes them, too!). If you keep feeding your growing audience with this kind of content, you will create a presence in their mind.

OK, GENIUS, HOW DOES THIS HELP ME BEAT AMAZON?

Here is how things work, in many cases, today. You spend lots of money & effort creating awareness. That awareness starts to generate consumer demand for your products. Then somebody sells it. More and more today, the seller is Amazon, even though you created the demand.

The current process looks like this:

 

Your new process looks like this:

That’s how it works. You create the targeted message to your targeted consumer, and you win that sale before Amazon. This is the skirmish. You need to win Sandy. Amazon can afford to not win Sandy. Grab your opportunity. Take a shot at the champ. Win this battle. Then do it again, again and again. 1 Sandy, 100 Sandy’s, 1000 Sandy’s, 10,000 Sandy’s are all there for you to win. Then move on to Thomas, then Quentin, then Suzanne, then Martha…

There are millions of targets out there. Think hard, identify your target, create a wonderful story and start shipping.

That is how you beat Amazon.

This article originally appeared on Selling To The C - for more great content around B2B & B2C marketing & sales tips, please consider signing up for our Traffic Builder e-mail newsletter. We promise it will be worth your while.