How to Increase Page Views & Sales
If you’re an Amazon Seller, you’re very likely already allocating some of your marketing budget to advertise and promote your products within Amazon’s own platform via sponsored ads or any other option. However, there are other ways to increase awareness, drive traffic and boost your Amazon sales outside of Amazon’s own ecosystem.
There’s no denying that Amazon is the most visited eCommerce portal in the U.S. We’ve just learned that Amazon’s success over the holidays echoes larger industry trends. Cyber Monday notched a total of $9.2 billion in sales, according to Adobe Analytics, a spike of nearly 17% over last year. That’s why it is critically important to drive traffic directly to your Amazon listings rather than expect visitors to find your products among hundreds of possible competitors.
Below are the five most effective ways to drive external traffic to your Amazon Listings.
1. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive external traffic to your Amazon product listings. In a nutshell, when you establish your own network of affiliates (bloggers, influencers, podcasters, online news, etc.) you will be expanding your reach to a variety of audiences that you wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise.
The process is quite simple. You provide a unique affiliate marketing link to each of your affiliates so they can promote your products in exchange for a small sales commission. The unique advantage of Affiliate Marketing is that being based primarily on referrals from trusted sources (again, bloggers, influencers, etc.) the percentage of sales is usually higher than from other traditional advertising channels.
In other words, potential buyers are being introduced to your product by someone who they already trust. And when those new buyers like your product, your revenues will keep growing via recurring sales down the road.
2. Instagram Ads
This one seems pretty obvious, yet, few people realize that they can use Instagram or other social media channels to drive traffic to Amazon or their party platforms outside of their own eCommerce website.
Whether you create Instagram feed ads or story ads, when you use this platform to drive traffic to your Amazon listings, you will very likely see an increase in sales compared to your own eCommerce store. True, those sales will also come at the expense of paying Amazon’s FBA fees, yet, in the long run, the potential reviews, growth in Amazon rankings and customer lifetime value will more than compensate for the reduced sales margin.
As an added option, if you have an Amazon FBA account as well as a Shopify shopping cart for your direct sales, you can create a catalog and tag your products on Instagram. This will allow you to drive traffic directly to your Shopify cart for the actual purchase while letting Amazon take care of the fulfillment phase for you.
So far, advertising on Instagram is generally less expensive than advertising on Amazon. Therefore, if you can shift some of your Amazon ad budget to Instagram you will lower your overall PPC costs while maintaining a similar conversion rate.
3. Facebook Ads
The Facebook Ads option and strategy is very similar to the Instagram option mentioned above. However, Facebook’s platform also offers some unique marketing opportunities that you won’t find anywhere else.
Facebook groups offer a unique opportunity to reach a very targeted audience with pre-set attributes that you can use to showcase your products. In effect, promoting your products to a Facebook group is like targeting an audience within an audience. For example, if your audience includes “Automobile Enthusiasts” rather than singling out individual Facebook users, you will be promoting your products to Facebook Groups that match your overall criteria.
Just as you would do with Instagram, if you’re also using Shopify for your own eCommerce channel, by linking your catalog to Facebook, you can drive traffic to your own website for all purchases, while you can delegate the fulfillment to Amazon.
4. Google Ads
Although it is true that when it comes to product searches, Amazon is becoming the leading platform for advertisers who sell on Amazon, the option of using Google Ads to reinforce your brand and traffic is always a very viable one.
The primary advantage of Google Ads over Amazon advertising is that you will always “own” your customer, something that Amazon explicitly prohibits as part of their policy. You can use Google Ads to drive traffic to your LP, create special promotions and then have your visitors complete their purchase directly on Amazon. You can then re-target customers in the future or even send promotions to them directly via email marketing or other channels. For example, you can grow your own email database by creating specific ads to entice visitors to sign up and leave their email address to receive a discount coupon to apply to their first purchase.
The result? You acquire leads while you also boost your Amazon sales. You can then cross reference your Amazon sales with your coupon code and track the results of your own Google Ads campaign.
5. Promotional Videos
I won’t spend much time highlighting how effective are promotional videos since it’s already well documented. Rather, I will just point out a few elements that will help you get the most out of your videos.
For example, for Amazon sellers that have completed their Amazon Brand Registry application, you can add your own custom videos as part of your Enhanced Brand Content (EBC). Not only will the videos really “enhance” your content, but they will also separate your products even more from those of your competitors. Think about it, the more information you can provide to prospective buyers about your product, the easier you will make their decision making process.
Once you have your video/s created, you can also use them on multiple marketing channels, thereby, increasing your overall brand awareness. You can add them to your own Shopify store, you can also use short versions for your own Facebook and Instagram promotions (news feeds and stories). And best of all, you can also use them to show your products on YouTube.
YouTube by itself is one of the strongest marketing channels for all things eCommerce related. Not only is it the #2 search engine behind Google, but it is also the most relevant medium when it comes to consumption of video content.
However, because of the above reasons, you also need to be diligent while uploading your videos to YouTube. The entire topic of YouTube marketing is beyond the scope of this article, but let’s just say that you should have your own YouTube Channel, clearly defined Playlists, proper titles, descriptions, keywords, for each video, as well as definite calls-to-action referring viewers to your own eCommerce store or Amazon to buy your products.
Conclusion
All of the above techniques are fairly easy to implement and will definitely boost your sales and ranking on Amazon while at the same time, increasing your brand equity. But it is also an ongoing process… if you’re looking for overnight success, you’ll surely be disappointed and that too is why most small and start-up businesses fail within the first year.
But as effective as the above options are, they also need to be implemented properly. I’ve seen it all and frankly, sometimes it is not pretty. So next week, I will write the second part of this article highlighting some mistakes that you MUST avoid if you want your marketing budget to really work for you.
As always, if you need any assistance with your eCommerce marketing, our MGR Team will be happy to chat with you one-on-one. Use this link to contact us and set up your free consultation.
Thank you for reading. Until next time, this is Manuel Gil del Real (MGR). Happy Marketing!
