Brand Registry

If your brand is trademarked, it’s important to apply for Amazon Brand Registry. Doing this allows you to have more control of your Amazon product listings and who sells on your listings.

Once your product is registered with Amazon brand registry, you have access to create a product listing using enhanced brand content.

Your product description can be more robust with images, use of more HTML formatting, and generally a more professional look than a standard product listing. You can also import videos to showcase the product and features.

Pay Per Click Advertising

In order for your product to get found in the millions and millions of products available on Amazon, you have to do a combination of Pay Per Click (PPC) and organic search optimization.

Amazon PPC allows you to be listed in the sponsored product sections of the Amazon website, which is usually at the top three slots at the top of the page, and interspersed through the organic listings. Make sure you are bidding high enough so your listing is showing up in the top three spots.

If you’ve ever done Google Pay Per Click advertising, you know that most people don’t search beyond the first page of results, and that’s the same with Amazon. If your organic or paid listings are not showing up on the first page you’re probably wasting money on ad spend.

When starting to run advertising on Amazon, you should use a combination of Manual and Auto campaigns. Manual campaigns allows you to run ads for keywords you know you want to show up for, and auto campaigns uses Amazon’s best judgement of keywords that are relevant to your product based on your product listing. You can use results from your auto campaign to add to your manual campaign terms. More about keywords is next…

Keyword Research

When you’re creating your product listing for the first time, it’s important to know the best keywords for your product and what you want to show up for in a search.

Using tools like Scope, or Viral Launch Keyword Research are great places to go to find relevant keywords. You can also use your best guess, or ask a friend what they would search for and see what the campaign results show.

Keywords are important because they will help you rank organically, meaning it will help you get found faster. It’s also important to use in your paid ads to help your product show up right away for the relevant keywords.

I won’t get into specifics in this post on reading your ad campaigns, but you should be looking for impressions on your keywords to understand how many times people are actually searching for a specific keyword.

Make sure your main keyword is in the title of your product description. This is the most important section of your entire product listing.

FBA vs. FBM

You may or may not be familiar with what these acronyms mean, so let me clarify. FBA is fulfilled by Amazon, and FBM is fulfilled by merchant.

It is always best to list your products FBA. By letting Amazon do the fulfillment of the product, the customer can take advantage of 2 day free prime shipping. Sales are typically higher when a product is listed as fulfilled by Amazon because the customer can get it faster (even if you can ship it fast, FBA is still perceived as the better option.) With this option, you send your products into an Amazon warehouse and they take care of all of the logistics, shipping, and customer service.

If you have excessively large products, or something with a short shelf life, then you might have to do fulfilled by merchant. In this case, you create your product listing the same way you would for any listing, but you are responsible for shipping the product when it sells.

External Traffic

Amazon likes external traffic that leads to a sale of your product on Amazon. They see it as highly relevant and will move your product up the organic ranks faster.

If you have an email list, don’t be afraid to direct traffic to your Amazon listing, even if you have a shopify or other ecommerce store. It will help in boosting your organic ranking, which will help in getting you found faster from people just searching within Amazon.

Also consider Facebook advertising as a great way to drive traffic directly to your product listing. Facebook has an incredible ad platform that allows you to target very specific types of people. Create a compelling offer or coupon for this audience to help get traffic to your listing and ultimately sales.

I hope this helped you get a glimpse of some of the things you need to know when navigating the Amazon platform. It’s an incredibly valuable platform to be on because of the sheer number of customers ready to buy and take advantage of PRIME shipping.

If you have questions or would like to know more, drop me a note at jason@purplefishmarketing.com or call 617-501-2706.

If you’re in the Boston area, I’d love to sit down for coffee and chat about how your products are doing online.