Simply listing your products on Amazon isn’t the same as successfully selling them.
Far too many companies think having a presence on the site is enough to enjoy massive sales. In reality, you need an Amazon-specific marketing strategy, as well. While plenty of options and strategies exist for bringing traffic to your listings, it’s vital that you begin with focusing on the options available within Amazon Seller Central.
Whether you just started your Seller Central account or your company has had one for awhile now, take a moment to make sure you implement all of the following tips. Until you do, your marketing will always suffer, even if you spend a fortune on all kinds of other tactics.
1. Optimize your search terms with keywords
The first tip is extremely simple, but that’s also why you can’t afford to overlook it.
Obviously, you need to provide a description for each of your product’s listings. You can do so through the Seller Central backend.
Depending on what you’re selling and/or how many items you need to describe, it might be tempting to copy-and-paste the description you use on your site or otherwise cut corners with this step.
Nevertheless, search term optimization is one of the easiest ways to attract organic traffic from the world’s largest online retailer.
Amazon gives you 249 characters, including hyphens, commas, and spaces. This isn’t a lot of room, so you’ll want to prioritize the keywords that are the most relevant for each of your products. The good news is that you don’t need to repeat search terms.
For example, if you’re selling a “whey protein supplement” in the form of a powder, you don’t need to also include “protein powder.” You can just add “powder” because “protein” was already mentioned.
Mastering Amazon keyword research will go a long way toward turning your Seller Central into a reliable marketing asset, but you can also invest in keyword-research tools that will help shorten that learning curve considerably.
2. Invest in ads
Over time, you may begin experiencing completely organic traffic to your Amazon listings, but until then (and even after), it’s usually a good idea to invest in Seller Central advertisements.
Like so many other Seller-Central opportunities, ads are extremely easy to set up and launch. Take your time, though. Creating successful ads on Amazon can pay massive dividends by not just earning you immediate sales but pulling in those all-important reviews, as well.
It’s worth getting them right by researching your market, your competitors (their ads and organic listings), and testing a few options with a smaller budget, so you don’t waste your funds.
Once you find a winning formula, scale up.
3. Include enhanced brand content
Whether through organic traffic, paid ads, or a combination of the two, increasing traffic to your various listings is key.
That’s not necessarily going to make for a successful marketing strategy, though. Even if your conversions are generating profit, it’s possible you could still be falling short of much higher numbers if you don’t optimize each of your product pages.
Amazon’s interface makes comparison shopping easy. Even after a customer clicks on your listing, they may see the “Customers also shopped for” section and decide to keep perusing all of their options. They could also just hit the “back” button if they’re not impressed with your listing.
That’s why you must use Enhanced Brand Content if your company sells products from other brands. If other companies are on Amazon offering the same items, it’s paramount that you’re able to differentiate your listings from theirs.
Among other things, Enhanced Brand Content allows you to describe your products with a unique brand story, text placements, enhanced images, and more.
You’ll have to get approved by the Amazon Brand Registry process first, but once approved, you can start adding this content to every relevant listing.
4. Periodically Run Promotions
Similar to ads, you can also run promotions from Seller Central to give your marketing strategy a quick shot in the arm.
Amazon coupons are a great example.
Not only do they lower the price of your product to whatever you decide, the coupon actually shows up on the results page, too. That way, shoppers know they have limited time to take advantage of this price reduction.
Some of you may also be able to leverage the Amazon Subscribe & Save Program.
This is for products that customers may need more of on a regular basis (e.g. cleaning supplies, makeup, etc.). It’s not necessarily a marketing tool, but it will help you win more conversions from that hard-earned traffic.
5. Continuously Track Prices
The importance of pricing as a marketing tool on Amazon cannot be overstated.
Again, the comparison shopper is king on this site, so if your price seems unreasonable, they probably won’t have to look far for a similar product that may be more in line with their budgets.
That’s why you should always keep an eye on what your competitors are charging.
Seller Central makes it easy to change your prices, but you have to be vigilant in order to know when to do so and what to charge. If your inventory is sizable, price-tracking tools will make this much easier to do.
Maximizing the Potential of Amazon Seller Central
There is no shortage of ways you can market your company’s products to drive traffic back to their Amazon pages.
Everything from Facebook ads to leveraging influencers can help your business see a banner year selling on Amazon.
However, before you move on to other strategies, be sure you first optimize your Amazon Seller Central account. Until you do, other tactics may help, but you’ll still leave sales on the table.
Fortunately, the tips we just covered are enough to enhance each of your listings, so they’re able to reach maximum effectiveness.
