The Do’s & Don’ts of a Successful Amazon Advertising Strategy

Why Develop an Amazon Advertising Strategy?

When you have an effective, well-laid-out Amazon advertising strategy, you have a method of attracting people to your listings that works. You also have a way to know if your business is growing and thriving.

With the right Amazon product advertising strategy, you can achieve several benefits:

Most importantly, the proper Amazon advertising strategy helps you ensure that the work you are doing on the platform and in building your business is paying off. You don’t want to spend a lot of time and money working a business that never attracts enough sales to make it a profitable opportunity for you. Strategies like this ensure you can react fast enough to make changes as you need to.

Who Can Advertise on Amazon?

Learning how to advertise on Amazon is important, but it’s also important to know what Amazon’s rules are for the process. Like most of what you’ll learn about Amazon, there are eligibility requirements you have to take into consideration.

You are able to advertise on Amazon if:

If you’re unsure of when or how to advertise on Amazon as a seller, or you’re just breaking into the platform, let our team at Nuanced Media offer guidance.

Which Amazon Advertising Strategies Work for You?

Before you can pick and choose which goals to utilize, we have to think about a few basic things – including what your goals are for advertising on the platform. That seems easy enough – you want to sell! However, there is more to it than that.

For example, you may want to focus on your Total Advertising Cost of Sale (TACOS). This figure shows you how your ad spend is impacting your total sales. It also tells you how heavily your company is relying on your advertising for success. Our goal is usually 8 to 10%.

To determine this, divide the total sales by your ad spend, then multiply that by 100 to get your TACOS. This is a part of your flywheel and it impacts your overall business. Your ad spending directly generates ad sales for you. However, it also increases your sales rank and even boosts your visibility – that’s the flywheel effect in motion.

Some companies may want their goal of advertising to be increasing impressions. If this is the metric you wish to focus on, you can create strategies around increasing the number of impressions. This also means you’re going to work on raising your brand awareness at the same time.

While we’ll provide all of the help you need to get started with Amazon advertising strategies, Amazon has a pretty interesting website page that can provide you with a better understanding of how to choose strategies based on what your goals are. You can find options related to custom advertising, audio ads, display ads, and much more. Take a few minutes to check it out to give yourself more guidance.

What Should You Advertise on Amazon?

Once you get a better idea of how Amazon advertising works, you can dive into more specifics here. However, the priority for most companies is to realize there is a lot you can advertise to get the attention of your would-be buyers.

We recommend advertising all of your products that have listings. Now, it is important to ensure your Amazon product listing pages are already optimized. Optimized listing pages are most likely to turn visitors into buyers. If you have not done that yet, now is the time to do so.

We recommend optimizing the entire listing page (and we can help you with this if you like!). That includes:

• The product title
• Product features
• Product description
• Backend search terms
• All product photos

If that sounds like a lot of work that’s because it can be, but it is essential work that directly relates to the success and performance of your Amazon product listing pages.

It is much harder to advertise for a product that is not optimized. That’s because, once people land on that page, it may not convert properly into the product detail page. In short, you’re going to be paying for missed opportunities.

Where and How Should You Advertise on Amazon?

Amazon product advertising is more diverse than you may realize. That is, you have ample methods and tools to use to really give you an opportunity to capture your potential buyer’s attention. Let’s talk about how Amazon advertising works by looking at the various methods and tools you can use to achieve this.

Optimizing Your PPC Ads

To make any of these PPC advertising methods work for you, you need to create effective, optimized ads. While there is a lot that goes into that process, there are a few things you’ll want to be sure to do.

Your goal should be to find top-converting keywords, those that are most likely to turn people into your buyers. There’s some work to this process, but it needs to be done well to ensure you are paying for ads that relate directly to what your buyers are seeking. While you need those top-converting keywords, you also need to be competitive. That means not necessarily going for the most expensive keyword (because the competition is too high) but choosing a more affordable approach with other terms.

 At the same time, make sure you negate key terms that are not directly relevant to reduce any wasteful spending. You don’t want to use words that are not going to directly create a benefit for you.

It’s also important to get your budget right. Sometimes, sellers don’t provide enough budget for the PPC campaign. That means your campaign will end too soon, leaving you unable to reach a large portion of your potential buyers. Finding the right balance here can take some time, but the investment in that time tends to pay off.

When you turn to Nuanced Media for help with your Amazon PPC campaign, we’ll create tools, targets, and strategies most likely to help boost your visibility on the platform using ads.

Amazon Posts

The final way to advertise on Amazon is to use Amazon posts. This is Amazon’s social media tool. You can create social media-like posts and share them in front of millions of people who are using Amazon.

This type of advertising blends social media marketing along with other marketing strategies to help get your product and brand in front of a new audience. It allows your customers to engage with your brand more readily. It can also help you to build awareness for your products. Take a deeper dive into how you can use Amazon Posts as a seller. 

Amazon Posts give you access to a number of key features, including:

• Links to product detail pages
• Category tags to let shoppers explore posts in a related category
• Shoppable feeds where buyers can purchase right away

There are a few things to know about Posts. First, you have to register at Amazon Brand Registry. This allows the company to recognize your brand on the site. It is also only available to U.S. sellers at this time.

Another nice benefit of Posts? It’s free to use! While you may need to pay for quality images to use and spend the time building your posts, this is one of the most effective ways to advertise on Amazon without a lot of costs. It’s also very easy to use compared to other options.

Amazon DSP

Earlier on we mentioned Amazon DSP (with a warning about the cost). What’s important to understand is that this is a viable way to advertise on Amazon and needs to be considered. If the initial sticker price of using this service is a problem (and really it can be for many) we suggest partnering with us to reduce those costs. That’s far better than skipping out on this important resource.

So, what is it? Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP) is a type of software that lets advertisers search and buy advertising placement. You can use this tool to buy placement on various platforms outside of the Amazon.com website. That means you can have ads for your products – sold on Amazon – placed on news websites, popular sites where your customers visit, and plenty of other options. It also allows for you to take advantage of mobile app advertising.

There are plenty of ways to buy ads online. Why go this route? The answer is simple. When you are an Amazon Seller, you want to take advantage of the seemingly endless amount of data and information that Amazon has about its sellers. By working through Amazon DSP, you get that.

This is a type of programmatic method of selling, which means that Amazon’s algorithm will automatically select and bid on the best ad spaces available to you based on your target audience and the budget that you establish for your campaign. Because it is so automated, it is easy to change and grow your advertising when you want to. This makes it one of the better options for many of those buyers looking for a way to stand out.

You can use Amazon DSP for the type of targeting you want. You choose the factors most important to you in your potential buyers. Some of the ways you can use this type of ad targeting include:

• Behavioral targeting
• Lifestyle targeting
• Contextual targeting
• Remarketing
• Audience lookalike
• Advertiser audience

The only drawback to Amazon DSP is the initial cost outlay. We’ve already covered how you can reduce your Amazon DSP spend by working with our team.

Ready to Advertise Your Products on Amazon? Let Us Help You

With some 2.5 million sellers on Amazon, you’ll want to take advantage of as many of these advertising tools that you can. Most companies need to plan to use all of these methods to compete well. Of course, your success comes down to how well you use them to achieve your goals.

For that, we recommend checking out our Amazon marketing team at Nuanced Media. Let’s have a conversation about how to take your budget and turn it into Amazon advertising gold.