In the third quarter of 2020, Amazon’s share of the American Ecommerce market dipped slightly, down half a percentage to 23.1%.
Despite that, they still hold nearly a quarter of the U.S. market—and even more abroad—and enjoyed a 39.3% increase in revenue in North America during the same time period. All things considered, Amazon marketing is a must.
We’re delving into three ways to grow your Amazon Ecommerce business in 2021 (and they’re not what you’d expect).
Check out our video on how to make your Ecommerce performance swell through targeted Amazon marketing:
1. Invest in A+ Content
What is A+ Content?
A+ Content is a feature that brand registered Sellers and Vendors are able to use to help describe their products with additional images, text, and even video. We’ve seen A+ Content help increase conversion rate on a detail page by up to 10%!
I highly recommend that you add A+ Content to your Amazon product listing pages. Additionally, you should take the time to look at all your competitors’ A+ content. There’s a lot out there (that’s the understatement of the decade) and you really want to make sure that yours is better than the competition.
Focusing on A+ content for your own shop is really going to help your marketplace conversion rates for the coming year.
How to find A+ content: Go to your Seller Central dashboard. Under the Advertising section, click A+ Content Manager.
2.Use TACoS to Scale Advertising for Amazon Marketing
Let’s talk TACoS—or advertising cost of total sales.
I’m a big fan of TACoS. It’s a metric that displays as a percentage, and it allows you to figure out what you should bid for a particular ad placement.
In other words, TACoS tells you how much you spend on advertising for every dollar of revenue that you make. To get TACoS, here’s what you do:
Take your total ad spend and divide it by your total sales. If your resulting number is $0.25, your ACoS is 25%. In other words, you’ve spent $25 for every $100 that you make.
Pro tip: Having this model in place is a game-changer because it allows you to confidently scale your ecommerce business and push the limits without being too risky. Just keep in mind, TACoS doesn’t include other crucial factors (like CoGS, or cost of goods sold, and Amazon fees) so you will need to factor those in for a holistically accurate metric.
So what’s a good TACoS?
In short, there really isn’t a ‘good’ TACoS, as it will vary by business, product, and category. When calculating your ideal TACoS, you want to look at your margins and be sure you’re adding in Amazon fees. Set your goal TACoS above your breakeven mark, so you know how aggressive you can be with advertising, promotions, etc.
In terms of Amazon pay-per-click advertising, TACoS is a huge deal. Once you have a percentage, you’ll be able to make educated decisions and approach your Amazon marketing more strategically moving forward.
After all, Amazon marketing should be a dynamic process that’s rooted in key metrics.
3. Look At Your Competitors’ Offerings and Beat Them
The Amazon marketplace is a bustling joint. With this in mind, it’s clear that anyone who’s running Amazon marketing for a brand will be able to see all their competitors’ different targeting abilities surrounding different keywords.
Plus, there are plenty of tools that allow you to see the different keywords competitors are ranking for when it comes to Amazon SEO.
All of this really matters, because without analyzing your competition, you can’t know who or what you’re trying to beat.
Despite the crucial nature of this, I’m actually talking about a little bit more than plain ol’ Amazon SEO. It’s not just keywords you should be paying attention to. It’s also Amazon reviews and ratings.
By consistently and thoroughly analyzing your competitors’ reviews, you’re going to be able to figure out precisely what you need to do to make your product better than theirs. It’s simple: look at your competitors’ shortcomings and play up your strengths in the same department.
Pro tip: Look at the reviews of your competitors and create a list of the key issues that customers are bringing up via reviews. Once you’ve done that, use the list to make sure your product detail page addresses all of those issues as a benefit for your product or service.
This is one of the best things you can do to improve your Amazon marketing—because if your product is better than the competition and your marketing hits all the right pain points and turns them into positives, the rest will follow.
It’s not only important that you look at reviews (the good and the bad) and determine how to bring those benefits to your profile. It’s also important that you take a hard look at their title, product description, A+ content, and the product listing as a whole. That way, you can make sure that your Amazon marketing is the very best. Having the best Ecommerce conversion rates in your niche will soon follow.
Bonus: Think of Amazon Marketing as an Integral Part of a Larger Ecosystem
You know me—how can I stick with just three things about Amazon marketing?
A lot of people think about Amazon as its own individual ecosystem. In some ways, that’s true, but Amazon is not mutually exclusive of the rest of digital marketing.
Oftentimes, marketing professionals don’t think about an Amazon product listing as having the potential for a fully-fledged marketing campaign. But it does have that potential.
Amazon advertising shouldn’t be your only point of focus on the platform. If you think about it in the right way, you can also:
There is a whole world of digital marketing out there, and you can use it to drive up sales on Amazon.
Despite the importance of Amazon as its own ecosystem, it is not inherently cut off from the rest of the web. Because of this, you must maintain a wider lens when looking at Amazon marketing in 2021.
Wrapping Up Amazon Marketing in 2021
By now, Amazon has officially been around for more than 2.5 decades.
Globally, the platform boasts nearly 200 million visitors.
At the same time, they’ve blown competitors like eBay and Walmart out of the water. Things are changing and innovating for the brand—from developments in electric vehicle delivery partners to a restructuring of the executive leadership.
And things are changing for the sellers on the ecommerce platform, namely in what it takes to grab the attention of an ever-growing market.
