Selling on Amazon FBA is one of the most effective ways to make passive income or to scale your brand, and 2024 has only made this even more the case. But if you don’t know how to market Amazon products effectively, there is only so far you can go
In the last 5 years, we have helped 100s of clients to boost their organic rankings, optimize their listings, and send their sales volume skyrocketing.
As you’d expect, we’ve learnt a lot of useful tricks in that time, and today we’re going to share them with you!
Introduction to Amazon Marketing
There are two main aspects to marketing your Amazon product. The first is traffic. You could have the best product in the world at an amazing price, with appealing copywriting and an unmatched proposition. But if nobody is seeing your listing in the first place, none of that counts for anything.
And with 4,000 items being sold per minute in 2019, this is a very real possibility.
The main ways to increase traffic to your Amazon product include:
- Organic Rankings
- Sponsored Products (Amazon PPC)
- Off-Platform Marketing (Blog Placements, Affiliate Marketing etc)
- Google Marketing (Building Backlinks to Listings)
The second main aspect to Amazon marketing is listing optimization and product positioning. You can do all of the above traffic increasing methods to a high standard, but if the product itself is unattractive, or more expensive then competitors, you aren’t going to get far.
You need to take notice of:
- Your title, bullet points, product category and product description
- Your pricing and USPs, and how they may be viewed by potential customers
- Your product images and A+ content
- Your product reviews
- Any issues or requests that may arise in Seller Central
The general idea is to put yourself in the mindset of the buyer and work on making all of those as effective and appealing as possible. If any of these seem like a red flag – for example if your top review is a low rating or displays negative review text, or your product images are low quality – this translates directly into people clicking away from your listing and looking for another, which dampens the benefit of whatever methods you’re using to drive traffic to your listing.
However, get both of these right, and you can expect masses of viewers to your listing, and to convert a high percentage of this traffic into buyers. This then continues to improve your organic rank and tells Amazon your product is appealing, encouraging them to show it to more and more searchers. This is the key to long term sales in the Amazon platform.
Now, let’s take a look at each of these points individually:
Organic Rankings in Amazon
Organic rankings is a term used to refer to the order in which products are displayed in the search results. If a product in the search results has the word “sponsored” next to it, this is a paid ad generated via Amazon Sponsored Products.
However, any other search result (so, the vast majority), are organic rankings. The way this works is Amazon arranges the search results in the order of which the products are most likely to convert to a sale.
They will keep track of how well every product converts into sales under every keyword. This allows them to offer every searcher the product they are most likely to buy, and it helps them to turn as many searches into sales as possible.
If you’re the first organically ranked product for a high traffic keyword, this instantly makes it easy to make long term profits from Amazon. Unfortunately, if you launch into a competitive niche, you may find you’re organically ranked on page 7.
Even worse, page 1 might be completely full of established sellers who have been there for a long time, have tens of thousands of customer reviews and easily convert searches into sales. If you’re sat several pages beyond these products with significantly less positive reviews, you aren’t going to make any sales.
PPC is an easy way to fix this quickly, but it also reduces your margin heavily and the sales won from it dry up as soon as you reduce your bids.
Put simply, improving your organic rank is the only way to guarantee long term success without constant reinvestment and loss of profits.
It is as simple as getting people to search the keyword in question and purchase your product. Each purchase will tell Amazon that the product is highly relevant to the search term and bring your product up higher.
Now, algorithm manipulation is against the ToS in Amazon, and while that’s a vague term that doesn’t mean much, this would definitely fall under it.
However, if you ensure the buyers aren’t immediate family or people Amazon can easily link to you, they will appear to be genuine Amazon sales and the risk remains low.
By doing a short sharp boost of sales, you can bring your product up to the top of the results and boost your sales hugely, since you will now be the first result seen by most searchers. Even if you don’t have enough buyers to do this, you can bring it from page 3 to page 1 for example, for a noticeable boost to sales.
Are you interested in trying this, but don’t have enough buyers? Not sure how to organise the sales or ensure they are organised for optimal results? We can manage organic ranking campaigns for you, and have already helped over 400 clients transform their business. Request a proposal now to see what we could do for you!
Sponsored Products/PPC
Amazon Sponsored Products allows you to place a bid on specific keywords in order to make your product show up above the organically ranked products.
As mentioned above, this isn’t a great long term strategy as it takes a cut from every single sale, and as soon as you switch it off you lose all visibility, having gained nothing essentially.
Organic rankings take more work and often cost more, but once achieved, they can bring you full priced sales forever.
This doesn’t mean PPC isn’t worthwhile, however. If you’re in a very competitive niche, ranking your products organically will more than likely take some time. Outbidding your competitors is a great way to pick up early sales with little effort, and the profits from these sales can be reinvested into organic ranks.
It’s also worth mentioning that Amazon prioritises products that pay for PPC and gives them a slight rank boost – so if your organic ranking strategies are proving slower or more difficult than expected, throwing a low bid on the same keywords can help improve the conversion rate of your product under that keyword and drive the ranks higher.
You can also find branded keywords such as those containing the brand name of your competitors – they won’t require large bids as they won’t be targeted as much as more generic keywords, but by entering a bid you can show up next to your competitors products and potentially win some sales from them for next to nothing.
To learn more about effective PPC strategies and using them to easily boost your sales, take a look at our PPC training page!
Off Platform Marketing
Organic rankings and PPC are the two main ways to boost your visibility and sales within the Amazon platform itself.
And with over half of all searches for online products starting on Amazon, you need to take advantage of them to get seen.
There are still very effective ways to push your product outside of the Amazon platform too, however.
These include:
Backlinks
Just like using backlinks to improve the Google rankings of your website, you can also point links to your Amazon listings to increase the likelihood they’ll show up for relevant Google searches.
This can be a powerful strategy since you’re basically opening up your listing to the remaining product searches that don’t begin on Amazon.
Our sister marketing agency is one of the leading backlink specialists in the UK and can help with this if you don’t have the time to do it properly yourself : Ghost Marketing.
Of course, this strategy can be very easily combined with the next one:
Blog Placements/Affiliate Marketing
With so much marketing text all over the place these days, customers have a hard time knowing who to trust across most sales channels.
Often, to help them with this issue, they will search things like “best camera phone for surfing” or “heavy duty hair ties”.
As a result, there are millions of blogs all across the web spouting top 10 lists and the best possible items in their niches.
Usually these sites are monetized via an Amazon Affiliates account. You can get huge success by reaching out to such blogs and asking them to include your product. Most of the time, it is just switching out one product for yours. They’ll still be generating the same amount of sales and still be getting the same cut from Amazon, so it’s win win.
Of course, getting links to your products in relevant blogs with high domain authority will also improve the backlink profile and therefore Google ranking of your Amazon product listings.
Considering how cheap a blog placement can be, this isn’t something you should overlook!
By combining the above strategies, you can maximise the amount of people who see your listing.
However, the listing itself needs to still be attractive, otherwise all the eyes in the world won’t increase your sales. This is where our second list of things to look at comes in.
Let’s jump right in:
Title, Bullet Points & Description
These are utterly crucial when it comes to catching the searchers’ eye and converting the viewer into a customer.
For example, you should include as many selling points and features of the product as possible in the title. If a viewer has a question about your product, and the title doesn’t answer it, they may just scroll on until one does.
On all 3 of these on page sections, there are two main things to prioritise. The first is to include as many relevant keywords as possible. After all, to successfully run one of the organic ranking strategies listed above, you must be showing up in the search results, even if at a very low rank. The more keywords you can include in your listing, the more places it can be seen. However, this must be done within reason, and stuffing your listing with so many keywords that it no longer makes sense to read will only harm you.
The second thing to prioritise is old school copywriting. When an Amazon user lands on your listing, they want to read more information to see whether the product is for them. This means your on page text is your main (and only) chance to convince them to go ahead and buy. Bad spelling or grammar, a lack of USPs, or simply bad copywriting is likely to make them turn away and never look back. Consider looking at already successful or popular products in your niche to learn more about how they sell their benefits.
But sell your product’s main features in an attractive and appealing way, and you’ve just made a sale.
We have gotten product visibility down to a fine art thanks to optimizing listings for hundreds of clients and boosting sales 100% of the time – and we will bring you a more in depth post on this topic alone in the near future.
In the meantime, if you need help with your listings, feel free to contact us for the highest quality keyword research and on page optimization!
Product Images & A+Content
Up to 65% of people are visual learners and prefer to see what you’re offering, rather than read about it.
That’s a pretty significant number, and it’s important not to disregard these people.
We would recommend using product images that are:
- High resolution and clear
- High quality/taken by experience photographers
- Filled with “benefit driven” text selling the benefits of the product, and the benefits of those benefits for the owner
- Full of useful features and details. Even those that are already present in the bullet points, as some people prefer to check the images first.
It’s also important to use Enhanced Brand Content. This option is only available to brand registered sellers, so you won’t be able to use it if you’re selling somebody else’s products.
But, if you are brand registered, it’s an absolute must, since it’s a lot more engaging and interesting than a standard text product description, and it helps to convert people who scroll down looking for more information.
We have a complete in depth guide on enhanced brand content, so please check that out to learn more!
Often, marketing for Amazon sellers seems incredibly complex and all the different things you need to learn can be overwhelming.
However, if you break it down into the individual points listed above, and focus on doing each one of those right, it suddenly becomes much more manageable.
Would you rather have the leading Amazon marketers in the industry handle it for you? Request a proposal now to discuss what we could do for you!
