In today’s digital age, Amazon has become the go-to destination for online shopping. With its massive customer base and extensive reach, it’s no wonder that launching and promoting a brand on Amazon has become a top priority for businesses. However, achieving success on this platform is not as simple as just listing your products and waiting for sales to roll in. To truly stand out, you need to have a solid strategy in place that not only sets your brand apart but also captures the attention of your target audience.
In this blog post, we will be delving deep into the fourth part of our Amazon Seller Hacks Series, where we feature experts on advertising and product launching. Together with Amy, our guest experts discuss the best product launching strategies, along with common mistakes to avoid and creative ways to drive sales and growth. We add more Amazon seller tips that will help get your brand the boost it needs to grow. So, read on!
This week’s Seller Hacks Series features Brent Zahradnik, CEO & Founder of AMZ Pathfinder, and Vanessa Hung, CEO of Online Seller Solutions. We also have the power duo Shawn Hart and Seth Stevens, the brains behind Post Purchase PRO, as they walk us through the process of building, managing, and monetizing a customer list through product inserts (aka the key to driving sales for your brand!)
First things first, let’s talk about expanding your product catalog.
Why should you care about expanding your product catalog anyway? Expanding your product catalog is also crucial for long-term success on Amazon. Successful sellers have a variety of related products at different price points that address the needs of their buyer personas and related personas. Understanding keywords and gaps in the market is important, but expanding your product catalog and the skew count is even more crucial. That said, we’ve gathered the best product launching strategies that you can follow to grow your brand.
5 Best-Performing Product Launching Strategies in Amazon
Optimize your product listing
Your product listing is the first point of contact between your product and potential customers. Therefore, it’s essential to optimize your listing for better visibility and conversion rates. This includes using high-quality product images, writing compelling product descriptions, and selecting relevant and targeted keywords. Additionally, make sure to provide detailed information about your product’s features and benefits, as well as any warranties or guarantees.
Encourage customer reviews
Customer reviews are a crucial factor in the success of your product on Amazon. Positive reviews can help improve your product’s visibility and conversion rates, while negative reviews can have the opposite effect. Encourage customers to leave reviews by following up with them after their purchase and providing excellent customer service. You can also use Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program to get your first few reviews.
Monitor and adjust your strategy
Launching a product on Amazon is not a one-time event. It requires ongoing monitoring and adjustment of your strategy based on your performance metrics. This includes monitoring your sales, conversion rates, advertising spend, and customer feedback. Use this information to adjust your strategy and optimize your product listing for better results.
Utilize Amazon advertising options
To drive relevant traffic to your product listings, Amazon advertising is a powerful tool. However, it’s important to focus on tightly relevant keywords and avoid setting up dozens of campaigns with hundreds of keywords. Instead, try to teach Amazon what terms your products are relevant for, and use promos and coupon codes to stimulate the buying decision. Using data from Amazon PPC reports can also help you improve your product listings by tweaking your title or bullet points.
Leverage external traffic
In addition to using Amazon advertising, it’s also important to leverage external traffic sources such as paid advertising on Google Ads, social media platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook, and community building. Email marketing is another highly effective tool that should not be overlooked.
Launching and promoting brands on Amazon requires a strategic approach that involves specific thresholds for success, utilizing Amazon advertising and external traffic sources, and expanding your product catalog. With these strategies in place, you can successfully launch and grow your brand on Amazon.
Our Ultimate Pre-Launching Advise — Don’t Rush!
One of the biggest mistakes sellers make is rushing into the process without doing enough research. This includes getting samples too quickly without testing them, not understanding the trend of the market, and not thinking about the brand as a whole experience. Skipping these steps will almost always guarantee that your product launch will fail. It’s important to do a lot of research on whether a product is just a trend and find ways to make it more sustainable.
Another mistake that sellers make is not having a trademark and not having access to the brand registry. This can limit your options on the platform, such as not being able to have A+ content on the listing or advertise for sponsored brands. Going through the process and doing your due diligence is extremely important.
Another decision that you need to make early on is whether to have a GS1 UPC code or not. Having a GS1 UPC code has some pros and cons like not having a UPC may prevent you from expanding to other markets (like selling on Walmart or Target). Therefore, it’s important to think about success in the long term and make a decision that works for your business.
Taking a leap of faith is good, but in Amazon, it can lead to costly mistakes. Taking the time to think about the long-term success of your product and brand can lead to a more successful launch.
More Tips for a Successful Product Launch on Amazon
Launching a product on Amazon can be an exciting and lucrative venture, but it also requires careful planning and execution to be successful. With millions of products available on Amazon, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd and attract customers. However, by following these tips for a successful product launch on Amazon, you can increase your chances of success and achieve your sales goals.
1. Conduct thorough market research
Before launching your product on Amazon, it’s essential to conduct thorough market research to understand your target audience, competition, and demand for your product. By doing so, you can identify opportunities and potential obstacles and adjust your launch strategy accordingly.
2. Optimize, optimize, optimize!
As we’ve mentioned, your product listing is the first point of contact between your product and potential customers. Therefore, it’s essential to optimize your listing for better visibility and conversion rates. This includes using high-quality product images, writing compelling product descriptions, and selecting relevant and targeted keywords.
3. Leverage Amazon’s advertising options
Amazon offers various advertising options that can help increase your product’s visibility and sales. This includes sponsored product ads, sponsored brand ads, and display ads. By leveraging these options, you can reach a broader audience and drive more traffic to your product listing.
4. Offer promotions and discounts
Offering promotions and discounts can be an effective way to generate buzz around your product and encourage customers to make a purchase. There are other creative ways to promote your brand like offering limited-time deals, coupons, and bundle discounts. Just be sure to calculate your margins carefully to ensure that you’re not selling your product at a loss.
5. Encourage customer reviews
Customer reviews are a crucial factor in the success of your product on Amazon. Positive reviews can help improve your product’s visibility and conversion rates, while negative reviews can have the opposite effect. Encourage customers to leave reviews by following up with them after their purchase and providing excellent customer service.
6. Monitor and adjust your strategy
Launching a product on Amazon is not a one-time event. It requires ongoing monitoring and adjustment of your strategy based on your performance metrics. This includes monitoring your sales, conversion rates, advertising spend, and customer feedback. Use this information to adjust your strategy and optimize your product listing for better results.
Launching a product on Amazon can be a challenging but rewarding experience. By following these tips, you can increase your chances of success and achieve your sales goals. Remember to conduct thorough market research, optimize your product listing, leverage Amazon’s advertising options, offer promotions and discounts, encourage customer reviews, and monitor and adjust your strategy as needed.
Every problem is a gift — without problems, we would not grow…
The above quote is from the motivational speaker, Tony Robbins. In our journey to Amazon’s success, it is normal to hit road bumps and challenges. Succeeding as a seller on Amazon requires a combination of careful planning, attention to detail, and a willingness to adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of e-Commerce. We hope that with our Amazon Seller Hacks Series, you learn things that help you build a thriving online business and reach new heights of success on the world’s largest e-commerce platform.
We’ve explored some valuable insights from experts in the e-Commerce industry on how to succeed as a seller on Amazon. From understanding the common mistakes to avoid when launching a product to exploring creative ways to drive sales and growth for your brand on Amazon, there are many factors to consider when building a successful online business. Go and grow! Stay tuned for our next Seller Hacks Series episodes. When you find yourself in the weeds, don’t hesitate to contact us or enroll in our Amazon Listing Optimization Course. Together, we can conquer Amazon!
Transcript
Brent Zahradnik: Hey there. This is Brent with AMZ Pathfinder. And thank you, Amy in the amazing at home team for giving me the opportunity to put this little presentation together. But I’m going to take 10 minutes of your time to talk about key strategies for launching and promoting products on Amazon. We’re going to break this out into four sections. So let me get right to add. First thing, why expand your catalog in the first place? successful launches? What do they look like? What are the attributes? Third, Amazon advertising? And the fourth thing, external traffic? So let’s get right down to it. First of all, why bother to expand your catalog anyway? Okay, so I would say one thing we see with our most successful clients is they have a catalogue of related products at a variety of price points and a variety of offers, if you will, that address a different set of needs for a customer persona or related customer personas. So what they’re trying to do is sell to a certain group of people or persona, you know, understanding keywords and seeing gaps in the market where demand is not being addressed is really important. But intelligently expanding your product catalog is even more important than that. So think like Procter and Gamble, or Apple would, you know, what do they do they have a bunch of products at different price points for different people that are within their persona, right. So Apple used to call it the complete solution. Basically, I used to work there. But basically, if you had a computer, and then air pods, and an iPhone and iPad that was like everything, right, and those things are all addressed to this type of consumer avatar that’s like the Apple customer. So basically, this SKU growth paired with a solid process for giving each one of those new skews enough room to breathe, and product chance to thrive is basically what we’re talking about here. That’s what a launch means to me. And that’s why expanding the catalog and the SKU count is super important. So successful launches, what I usually see with our clients who are doing successful launches is they have thresholds for success. So they have a very clear pass fail on what success means for them. They have a timeline, they have a budget. And this way, they’re not making in the moment split decisions about things. You know, they pass or they fail, they have these metrics established beforehand. Now, it may be true, you have to adjust it sometimes. But generally speaking, you want to set some of these things up ahead of time. What are some of the traits of a successful launch, in addition to that pass fail criteria. The three I came up with here would be coordination, budget, and traffic. So think of coordination this way. It’s this idea of like a force multiplier, which I think comes from the military. Basically, it’s multiple launch efforts, all going at the same time have a bigger impact than any one of those efforts by themselves done in a serial fashion. So you’re coordinating it and doing it simultaneously, versus things going one by one by one by one. Now, we all know about the Amazon honeymoon period, right? Generally speaking, probably depending on the subcategory, it’s like 30 to 45 to 60 days, right, there’s a period there where Amazon is giving us a chance with a new product, you want to maximize your efforts in that time window, to make sure that you’re gonna have the biggest possible impact. So think of coordinating, and I put a stopwatch here, just to give the idea of like time, right? We want all these things to happen at the same time. An example I might give is Amazon ads plus email, plus an offer to your Facebook group plus a social marketing push on tick tock like those four or five things all combined, is going to demonstrate to Amazon that you’re serious. And here’s a bunch of relevant traffic coming from all directions. Look at all these sales, look at this velocity, this is going to have a great impact. So the next thing is budget. This one’s kind of simple, but you need enough money to be able to pay for advertising to pay for external traffic to pay for promos to use coupon codes, to really try to make it stick if you will. The one of the biggest mistakes I think I see is clients of ours at launch, and they don’t put enough muscle behind the launch initially, that is going to lead to in some cases disappointment. So we want to avoid that if at all possible. So you need enough budget to stick. And it can be a bit intimidating sometimes with budget for ads in particular because you’re spending and you’re not seeing a good ad costs. But what you are doing is teaching Amazon, what your product is going to sell for against what keywords and basically giving it some sales history and velocity. We’ll get to that in a second. And then the last thing traffic basically more eyeballs more betta is the idea. We want to get as much relevant traffic to the page as possible. And that is a factor of yet again, budget coordination, and just how many good people we can get on the page that are actually qualified and looking to purchase. Like real purchases. You know, we can’t do giveaways anymore. are no one’s doing review buying a self sell black hat, don’t touch that. This is all about relevant traffic. So next thing here, Amazon advertising, this is the area that we know most about Pathfinder. So let me dive in. I don’t want to get too in the woods, for the specifics of advertising. But let me keep it at a high level that’s still useful. So consistent traffic for tightly relevant keywords, we do not recommend setting up dozens of campaigns for hundreds of keywords, and just throwing a big pot of spaghetti at the wall, you really want to try to in 2023, be as targeted and do as much research as possible and say, this keyword are these other root terms associated with it, because you can think of like a relevant term as a root. And then there’s a stem, that’s many other terms branching off of that, we think that this is a relevant bet. So we’re going to put a lot of our money against this consistently. So let’s just say realistically, 10 to 15 keywords at a high budget per day, exact match, and go from there, right, we’re trying to teach Amazon what our product is relevant for and trying to get people that are searching for that to our page, and entice them to make a purchase. Maybe we don’t have enough reviews yet, maybe we have a coupon code to help people make the purchasing decision, because it’s, you know, still doesn’t have enough social proof in the form of reviews. But that’s the idea. The next thing is to appear on or near similar offers, there’s a bunch of ways to do this, you can target ASINs, you can use sponsored display, you can do product targeting, there’s all kinds of ways to appear, either on the product detail page, or near competitor listings that have the same offer as you and so you want to go head to head with them, especially those that maybe you think have a worse offer than you like the products on it’s good, it’s a much higher price, or reviews or crap, whatever it might be. Get in front of those because you are testing the response of shoppers that are the same kind of people you want to appear to. So make sure to show up on those. The third thing here use data to improve the listing. So Amazon PPC data is, I would say like a rich source of knowledge. And it’s only getting better. With more and more reports that Amazon puts out, you’re gonna have a lot of things in your search term report, your targeting report, and now even get stats on things like videos like how long someone’s watched the video, what kind of responses to that, all that information can be used in cycled back into the product listing itself. So if you notice, hey, we’re getting a lot of sales for this keyword, maybe we should make sure to include it more in the bullet points or even in the title. I mean, it’s a big change to change the title. But if you have enough data to support, that might be the move to do it. So make sure to have like a virtuous circle, they’re going with the data. And last thing, maybe the most important thing is focused on sales velocity, not a cost, doesn’t matter what your cost is, as long as you’re not losing 1000s of dollars a day. It’s okay, you need to set aside allocate a portion of your budget and understand that this is for advertising on the Amazon platform directly. And the idea here is to drive sales, velocity, consistency, and spend, you know it’s not to get a good a cost profitability is a goal for us later down the line. And it may take some months for this to work, right. We talked about the honeymoon period. But even longer than that is the period when products don’t have as many reviews as they could and their conversion rate through advertising may be depressed. So understand that a keyword that does not convert really well right now in the first couple of weeks, may convert very well six weeks, eight weeks, six months in. And so your stats might look very different. Don’t go and write off any keywords unless you’re totally sure that they’re just irrelevant junk, basically. Okay, the last thing I’ll touch on here, external traffic, let me make it quick. There’s really four things paid, which includes Google ads, but you know, that’s first one I think of but could also be of course, Facebook, Pinterest. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to pay for traffic on the internet. Even Snapchat has a thing, Twitter, even social and this is like organic social. So tick tock, Instagram, Facebook community and by community. I mean, do you have a Facebook group for your products for your brand? Do you have a discord community, any of these things you can use and leverage? And then the last one email and this is no joke. I’m not kidding about email. The reality is 1000s of DTC brands, and well known household names still rely on email to drive huge numbers of traffic and sales for their products online. Don’t ignore email just because it’s not shiny and new, like Tiktok. The reality is it still kicks ass. So go ahead and use it. We use a lot for our own business. So I know it works on the agency side as well. Okay, and the last thing I’ll mention about paid Google ads is the thing that’s working the best for us right now. When it comes to launches. We use a tool called amped has great attribution. And so I do recommend that everyone give that a try. That’s like our secondary paid channel besides just Amazon internal.
Vanessa Hung: Hello, founder. Hey guys, my name is Vanessa Hung founder and CEO of online solute solutions, and also our community ambassador for carbon six. And today I’m very excited to be talking to you about what are the common mistakes that sellers need to avoid when launching a product or a brand on Amazon. So the first thing that I want to divided into different types of mistakes, the ones that are internal to the process on Amazon, when it when you already have everything set up. And then the external was, which is everything that happens outside of the blog. So we’re going to start with the letter, the first thing that I see sellers doing that when launching a product is that they’re rushing into the process. So they try to do the research, as soon as they can, they try to find the product, as soon as as fast as they can, getting samples super quick, not really testing or finding all of the solutions they need. So when they don’t validate, first of all of all the concept of the brand, they don’t validate the matrix. So they only see what one single tool is telling them that this niche is, or that this keyword has for volume. And they don’t understand that trend in the market is very likely that they will fail launching this product. Also, the other thing is thinking about the brand as a whole experience. So for example, some sellers will say like, Oh, I wanna I want to create a product that is around fishing, because I’m super vague, inefficient. But I don’t think what, for example, when they put the name or when they create a product, what are all of the other different product lines that they could create after. So for example, they named the brand like fishing pole, right. And that brand is very, very small, like the scope of the products that you could have on their fishing pole are very limited, right? So they don’t sit down and think the whole ideation process of like, okay, this is the product I want, this is the brand, this is the experience. And I need to understand very well, the tracks. One other thing that happens is, if you are looking into a software that tells you that specific niche has an amazing volume or amazing, you know, demand, then you need to really understand if this is a trend, or if this is something that will stay for a long period of time. Because if it’s something that is just a trend of the two last months or something like that, maybe at the time that you launch and have your product available on Amazon, that probably died off, right. And the results are not the same. So be very careful of that. Then not doing enough market research. It’s obviously one of the biggest ones, especially with friends with competition, understanding what are the keywords that people use to buy that product on Amazon? Right? Or if you don’t have or if you have any need people understand what’s the angle? How are you going to do it? How are you going to launch it is not the same launching on Amazon, where people are looking in the search bar with a very high buying intent than something on Google or on Tik Tok, or on Instagram, it’s very different. So you really need to understand that then one thing is not filing for a trademark. And I think this is huge, because when when people think about launching on Amazon, they say like, Okay, I’m gonna launch my product first. And if it’s successful, I’m gonna find for my trademark, which is the the opposite way that you should be doing it because not having a trademark on Amazon not having access to brand registry, we’re really limit your options on the platform. What what are the things that you could do on the listing, for example, you can now have a plus content, you can now have a video in your in your main images, you cannot advertise to sponsor brands, you cannot advertise for video, you don’t have the
programs like Amazon posts, or you don’t have brand registry to get access to
programs that will subsidize your your traffic for example. Attribution, right? So if you launch apparel, and you don’t have that trademark, and after, I don’t know, four months of selling, you’re like No, the spread doesn’t work. Is it a product? Is it the idea or is it that you don’t have the right tools to succeed on the platform? Right so huge mistake not filing for a trademark not getting the
brand registry access as soon as you can. So that’s a huge
And then going to the internal mistakes that you do when you rush into process. And when you’re launching, the first thing is obviously creating the listings with little information just to get a barcode, right just to get an FN SKU that you can send to your manufacturer, that’s a mistake. Because if you create the listing, then you you will potentially lose the honeymoon period, if you wait too long to to really launch on half that units available. The other thing, and this is probably prior to that step of creating a scene is having GS one UPC codes. That’s the decision that you need to make as a brand or as a seller very early on, will I get GS one UPC? Or will you go into the route of not having and request an exemption exemption on Amazon, both are possible. And both are very different, the results are very different, because not having a UPC will prevent you from expanding to other marketplaces. So if you plan to go to Walmart, or target or any other marketplace, they will ask you for your PCs. And when that’s not tied to your Amazon account, then you could face some issues in the future. So also or, or even worse, that’s a huge mistake, trying to buy recycle or you know, recycle UPC out of a third party website, you need to buy the UPC codes in GS one, the official GS one website. So understanding this will go like take it two different routes. Obviously, if you have UPC, like original GS, when you proceed, that’s amazing you will you you’re set up for success. If you request an exemption, and then you want to expand into for marketplace or channels in the future, you could have encountered some issues at the end of the day, you need to have a plan for that, right. Another thing when creating the listing on Amazon is not writing or spelling the brand name as you have it in your trademark in the USPTO. Filing registration. Right. So some people for example, my brand is ABC upper cases. But then when I created the listing on Amazon, I put everything lowercase for Amazon, or actually for the USPTO. That’s a completely different brand. So you need to stick to the brand name that you have in your trademark. And be very careful that when you finally when you file for the trademark, you do your research, hire a good lawyer to do the research to tell you if you have good chances of getting that because if you get rejected for a trademark, then you could lose brand registry access. And when the listings are already created with a specific brand name, then you could encounter problems getting that change to a different trademark because you got suspended with a freshman.
Then when when you create the listings, and as I told you, some people rush into a process of credit listing yourself with a plate placeholder title placeholder information, just to get the barcode for for NBA. If you’re gonna do that, make sure that you set the launch date for the future. Okay, so you don’t miss that honeymoon period. And you you close those listings? Well, you don’t have inventory on Amazon. So super, super important. I think this is the core of all the mistakes. Every other mistake that people do when launching on Amazon is basically because they rush the process. So take your time, this is not a competition. I think the most important part when launching on Amazon is thinking about the customer experience, the brand experience that you want to give and focusing really, really well in solving an issue for customers rather than following trends and keywords, you know, volume search and you know going for the demand. Because right now, Amazon prioritizes a lot that experience. They’re giving brands amazing programs so they can succeed on Amazon, even when you know they have pros or not such high volume or things like that. So I hope this helps guys and make sure if you have any questions feel free to reach out or leave their questions in the comments. Thank you!
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