How to Remain Competitive on Amazon
The Amazon.com marketplace is constantly evolving, and it has become a lot more complex over the past few years. In order to stay competitive, Amazon sellers must remain agile. The most successful brands continue to adopt new strategies, ensuring their sales are protected from these frequent changes.
Here are three tactics you can implement to solidify your competitive advantage selling on Amazon:
Take Steps to Ensure High Conversions
With 54 percent of all product searches taking place on Amazon, it's now the world’s largest e-commerce search engine. Brand owners must understand that there are certain listing elements you need to include in order to take full advantage. Optimizing your listing can go a long way towards boosting sales.
Your listing’s copy should be written for both Amazon’s algorithm and consumers. To ensure Amazon’s system rewards your listing, include the most important keywords in the title. Fill your bullet points, description and back-end keywords with other relevant terms, while including sales-inducing language that appeals to the shopper.
Additionally, you need to differentiate your product. Use your copy and product photos to highlight how it’s different than the competition. Split test your price to see where it’s most profitable, and drive as many positive reviews as possible to elicit buyer trust. Enroll new products in Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program, and set up compliant email follow-up sequences to gather additional reviews.
Set Up Your Ad Campaigns for Success
At least 11 percent of product page views are now driven through sponsored ads, up from 4 percent in 2017, which means Amazon advertising is becoming a necessity. A lot of brands dislike sponsored ads because they can be tedious. But if you shift your mind-set and master them, ads can become a way to get your products in front of millions of people that you wouldn’t normally get access to.
Automatic campaigns let Amazon identify high-converting customer search terms for your brand. Your manual campaigns should be used to cast a wide net, negate keywords that are wasting money, and double-down on search terms that convert. Take high-performing broad keywords and move them into phrase match with a higher budget. When you’ve found a search term that customers purchase through often, target it as an exact match and watch the sales roll in.
Keep Optimizing Your Ads
Just because you did your homework up front doesn’t mean your ads will be profitable from day one. The whole game with advertising on Amazon is casting a wide net, optimizing, casting a wide net, optimizing, etc. And with time, you'll see results.
Make sure you’re setting up automations or manually keeping an eye on your campaigns to adjust them as needed. If you’re not getting any impressions, make sure your product is indexed. If your ads aren’t profitable, lower the bid and add negative keywords. If your clickthrough rate is low, consider raising your bid to improve your sponsored ad rank position. Find out what's working for your product, and then capitalize upon it.
It may be getting tougher to compete in the Amazon landscape, but that doesn’t mean your job has to get harder. Keeping an eye on your competition and implementing these strategies will go a long way to maximize results. As long as you stay agile, your brand can continue to take advantage of the world’s largest e-commerce engine.
Lindsey Tod is the product marketing manager at Viral Launch, a provider of Amazon seller tools.
