What Is Amazon Marketing Services And How To Scale Your Business With It.
“Growing sales on amazon in the UK” has been one of the most frequently searched phrases on Google as of late and with good reason: Amazon sellers of all scales want to better understand the benefits of Amazon marketing services or the advantages of specialists marketing agencies, for example, when it comes to understand how Amazon Marketing Services can benefit them.
What are Amazon Marketing Services and how can a bespoke Amazon marketing strategy help you become more successful as an Amazon seller?
We discuss.
Growing sales on Amazon in the UK: Leveraging Amazon Marketing Services
Just about every seller on Amazon, at some point, wants to grow and scale their business. You’re no different. After all, growth only begets growth when it comes to selling on the world’s largest e-commerce platform, and the more you scale, the more you will grow, period.
Amazon marketing services help sellers come up with the right Amazon marketing strategy, in addition to putting down a best practices model that will help them grow specifically according to their product and target audience. One of the ways it does this is through specific ad targeting, which we will be discussing shortly. So, hold on to your cuppa!
What are Amazon Marketing Services exactly?
AMS or Amazon Marketing Services is Amazon’s own (surprise…!) PPC (pay-per-click) platform. If you’ve ever done any kind of PPC advertising yourself or have had a professional agency come up with your Amazon marketing strategy for PPC, then you know what Amazon’s platform can do for you – get your products front and centre of your ideal audience, all based on keyword usage, products and buyer interests.
Amazon marketing services encompasses Amazon ads platform.
- Amazon pages
- Headline search ads
- Product display ads
- Sponsored products ads
Before understanding the benefits of Amazon Marketing Services, you need to know some of the basics – i.e. how to gain entry into it:
- Have a Vendor or Seller Central login
- Request an invitation for representing a vendor
- Have a Vendor Express login
- Have an Advantage Central login
- A KDP (kindle direct publishing) account
Sound like too many logins? They’re not, once you understand how it all works.
Vendor Express, for example, is the most direct and easiest method of the above methods for getting into AMS. So, to gain access, you need to be “in” with Vendor Express, it’s that simple. That’s a good starting point, anyway. However, Headline search ads (something previously available solely to AMS sellers) are now available to 3rd party sellers too in Seller Central.
Do I even need Amazon Marketing Services to scale and grow?
The short and sweet answer is: yes.
Since Amazon launched its very first set of advertising solutions, they have only increased and improved the number of marketing and advertising solutions available to sellers over the years.
Competition on a platform like Amazon is absolutely fierce – sellers need to be doing everything possible to grow their business. Just because you’re making sales now does not mean it’s going to stay like that forever (even if there is steady demand for your product and you have a loyal fanbase).
Where most online advertising platforms offer the option to pay for impressions and clicks, Amazon offers a very fresh (and more effective) approach: you actually choose how much you want to pay every time a shopper clicks on one of your ads.
This is very important to understand as it essentially gives you granular control over your budget for ads. Furthermore, you’ll get higher conversion rates almost immediately because the purchasing intent of your target audience is strong from day one.
Amazon has also started to streamline its advertising reports – something that’s extremely useful to understand when it comes to what works and what doesn’t in terms of scaling your business. Combine this with a specialist Amazon marketing strategy and you’ve got your feet dug deep into the world’s largest e-commerce platform.
Crucially, we saw Amazon sellers and vendors who stopped using AMS lost upto 59% of t5heir organic sales – sales that are generated from ranking within amazon without ads – so we have a direct correlation between amazon advertising and ranking!
AMS advertising solutions to help you scale
Sponsored Products Ads
Sponsored Product Ads are the most effective kind of Ads sellers are using to grow their online businesses. In fact, do a quick search on Amazon and you will find that some products in the search results are “Sponsored”. These are products Amazon believes are the most relevant to a potential buyer, based on the keywords he/she entered or the subject material. Sponsored Products are an excellent way of promoting your products to the right audience.
So, when a shopper clicks on your Ad, they end up on your product detail page – and not your competitor’s for the same product or a similar one. You’ve just hit two birds with one stone: attract your ideal prospect and steer a potential customer away from your competitor’s listings. There’s a good chance your competitors are doing this as we speak, as Amazon lets you target specific products.
In order to use Sponsored Products Ads properly, you must first set up keywords and bids. Amazon will then work its magic, displaying your Ad on their SERPs (search engine results pages).
Display Ads
Product Display Ads are shown on the bottom right of your product listings – that’s right under the area labelled “Add to Cart”. This is a great location as it is the very last Ad a prospect will see before making the decision to buy. Display Ads feature only one product (unlike Sponsored Ads which feature multiple ones) – this works to your advantage as you’ll have better control over your Ad placement.
Most sellers use Display Ads to cross-promote their own products. For example, show one of your own Ads on each of the product pages, then use the Ad to steer shoppers to better (and likely more expensive) types of products.
Another way to use Display Ads is to target certain kinds of products sold by your competitors. This is your ‘last ditch’ attempt to tell the prospect: “Hey, before you buy this item, you might be interested in looking at mine too”. It works! Especially if you’re offering a better price for practically the same product.
Headline Search Ads
These can be used to promote up to three or more products, where you can drive traffic to either your Amazon brand store, a page that showcases your products or a customised landing page on the platform.
As the name explains, Headline Search Ads appear when buyers search for an item right at the top of the SERPs page. These kind of Ads are highly effective for brand building as their size and position ensure that they get noticed – it’s an effective Amazon marketing strategy for promoting your overall brand name rather than a single product or a few products.
Most buyers click on Headline Search Ads early on in their purchase journey, so it’s good practice to send them to your AMS brand page where they can then view the full line-up you’re offering.
Headline Search Ads can be used just as effectively to promote an entire range of products – since you have the option of displaying up to three, you can advertise your inexpensive and expensive range. Finally, targeting for these Ads is quite ideal as they appear only on the screens of prospects who are in need of the products you have. There’s a very good chance these prospects will convert into buyers.
Is there a way to know which ads are working and will help me scale my business?
There is – it’s a metric Amazon calls Average Cost of Sale or ACoS – basically, the cost of each sale. So, the lower this number is, the better.
If you’re selling something which costs, say, £10 and you are spending the same amount on your ads, then your ACoS is 100% – i.e. you’re spending as much as you are earning. But, on the other hand, if you’re spending just £1 on ads, then you’re ACoS is 10% – bagging you a profit margin of 90%.
One of the advantages of specialist marketing agencies is that they can use ACoS and other metrics that Amazon provides, to recommend which ads you should be using, which will have the greatest ROI and how you can use them all to your advantage (possibly) to scale and grow.
So, I absolutely need to use Amazon Marketing Services?
The fact of the matter is Amazon invests millions of pounds and countless hours of research to improve everyone’s buying experience – not only that, it wants to help sellers better understand best practices for growing sales on Amazon in the UK.
Some of the benefits of Amazon Marketing Services are just hard to ignore:
- Build better brand awareness and build a killer brand image as well as reputation
- Gain better visibility on Amazon’s SERPs and target precisely the kind of people who want to buy the products you offer
- Steer prospects away from your competitors and lure them onto your own product pages
- Cross-sell and upsell products – guide buyers to purchase better and more expensive products from your lineup.
Amazon marketing services are a powerful way to scale and grow your online brand – Chris and his team can advise you further and come up with a bespoke Amazon marketing strategy which will help you in the quest for growing sales on Amazon in the UK!
