7 Tips for Scaling Your Brand on Amazon
In recent years, Amazon has become one of the biggest product search engines in the world. Consumers worldwide use it for brand discovery, even if they end up making a purchase via a different channel. That’s why managing your brand presence on Amazon is crucial.
At Payoneer’s recent Beyond 24-hour global virtual summit for digital business, we addressed the important question of scaling up your Amazon brand. eCommerce businesses are always on the lookout for tips for establishing a better brand presence on Amazon, so we gathered four experts with over 50 years combined experience in managing successful Amazon brands.
Payoneer’s very own Ben Stein, Strategic Partnerships Manager for North America, shared a panel with Daniel Tejada, Co-Founder of StraightUp Growth; Mike Begg, Co-Founder of AMZ Advisers; Andrew Morgans, Founder of Marknology; and James Thomson, Partner at Buy Box Experts, and had them share their expertise in setting and achieving brand goals on Amazon.
Let’s dive in…
1. Understand the System
Our panelists agree that Amazon is completely different from any other channel. Your existing marketing strategies don’t transfer to Amazon. For example, consumers don’t care about big established brand names. Instead, they’re interested in small, local businesses with a compelling backstory so it’s crucial to work on your brand narrative.
In addition, you need to dominate the buy box to get onto the first page of search results, so you might need to create a unique SKU by offering a travel size or a specific bundle.
2. Own Your Brand
On Amazon, intellectual property and digital assets are key. Amazon doesn’t consider you a brand unless you’ve got a registered name and logo. You also need to control all your content, branded terms, and IP assets so that no one misuses them to corrupt your brand image.
3. Craft Your Amazon Presence
Many brands rush to throw money at Amazon ads, but you have to build a strong Amazon listing before you can begin with ads.
This means making sure you have:
- A clear, accurate, and easy-to-understand product description
- Sharp images
- Video reviews and video descriptions
- Great looking products and a great storefront
- Plenty of useful reviews
- High quality content that’s SEO-optimized with the right keywords
Unless your Amazon brand presence is optimized to convert from the product page, you’ll be wasting too much on ads.
4. Build Your Off-Amazon Infrastructure
While you’re building your Amazon presence, you also need to consider your wider infrastructure. Set up channels to drive traffic to your Amazon brand page, including organic traffic through keyword optimization, funnels from your website, and social media.
Your social media following works together with your Amazon content to help you scale your brand image faster. When your audience is large and enthusiastic, you won’t have to work so hard to get attention for new product launches, and there are more people to try and review your products. More reviews raise your profile on Amazon, which lowers the costs of paid ads.
5. Test Test Test!
Our panelists referred to Amazon as “an amazing petri dish” for testing out products and marketing strategies. Gather data from Amazon to see what customers want from your product categories, which colors, sizes, or styles are missing and in demand, and what they expect in terms of content and customer service.
Try out products to see what consumers do and don’t like and use data analytics tools to synthesize data quickly and decide which actions will drive you towards your goals. By aggressively testing products and strategies, you can scale up your brand within a year.
6. Go All In
According to all our panelists, there’s no such thing as “dipping a toe” into Amazon. If you want to succeed, you have to go all in from the very beginning.
7. Use Reliable Resources
There’s a lot of misinformation out there claiming to tell you the secrets to Amazon branding and growth. Watch for anything that’s out of date, because Amazon is not a static platform and it doesn’t try to let people know when it makes changes. As well as listening to real experts, you also need a network of peers who are all helping each other to keep up to date with Amazon tactics.
Take a Different Approach
Amazon is a unique platform for sales and branding, and it demands unique tactics. Listen to the experts to learn how to build a good brand presence both on and off the platform that will drive sales and revenue.
To learn more tips and tricks to scaling your brand on Amazon, watch the full session below!