Doing content marketing on Amazon

A fight between titans

How important is it to know this platform to start selling on Amazon? Very. Just a few days ago, Amazon managed to close a historic day on Wall Street by exceeding Microsoft's market value for the first time.

No wonder that observers and analysts have begun to look at the world's largest ecommerce in terms of profit as a powerful marketing and content platform. 

 Amazon wins the comparison with search engines

One of the features that have made this platform increasingly attractive to brands that want to sell on Amazon (and therefore also to consumers) is the fact that hundreds of millions of users use Amazon to start researching a product before buying it.

 Unlike other players like Google and Facebook, Amazon's advertising revenue can be distributed both at the beginning and at the end of a classic sales funnel. Users can then go from searching for information to buying in just a few clicks. 

According to a survey conducted by Raymond James, financial services group:

▶ the percentage of users wishing to make an online purchase that starts browsing directly on Amazon has grown by 14% in two years, going from a value of 38% in December 2014 to one of 52% in December 2016. This implies that more than half of the users who intend to shop online start their navigation on Amazon without even going to Google. 

▶ only 26% of the users interviewed start browsing on Google, a percentage that is halved compared to the same survey just 2 years earlier, when it was 55% (December 2014 - December 2016). 

One might expect this trend to continue as especially for the 18-29 age groups, Amazon is the favored starting point before making an online purchase. 62% of them start browsing directly on Amazon while only 21% use a search engine as a starting point.

But what are the tools made available by those who want to sell on Amazon? How to start building your own marketing strategy for Amazon? 

Curate your content on Amazon 

Brand Stores

Amazon developed the brand store pages wanting to recreate the feeling of being in a store.

You can show multimedia content related to the products on sale and organize your brand's reference page in an attractive way. You can also work on brand awareness and increase traffic thanks to social plugins that allow easy and immediate sharing.

This, for example, is the result of the Samsung brand store: a combination of in-depth data sheets, product grid, videos and a set entirely dedicated to social sharing. 

Brand-building

All the tools mentioned so far are useful for a better definition of your brand: well-kept images, multimedia files, in-depth content and useful information for your buyers.

However, it remains important to strategically build your own sponsored ads (ads). 

Selling related products on Amazon 

Users are usually inclined to browse for related or related, but how to appear in the related of an Amazon product? Furthermore, how to reinstate Amazon seller account!

It is essential to know and use Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), an increasingly flexible package of tools that allows you to show your ad to the right person, at the right time. You can target keywords, products similar to your own or that of a competitor, or even the interests of the users you want to involve. 

To make sure your campaigns are safe and ready to go:

• Take care of your copy as much as possible: portions of text written all in uppercase or all in lowercase are reported (except in brand names of course);
• Add creativity to the content you produce;
• Be strong and decisive and use clear and immediate CTAs;
• Don't overdo it: don't use unverifiable statements if you don't also add a source, perhaps on the landing page associated with the ad.

Amazon Echo by Alexa 

Beyond the more “traditional” tools made available by Amazon, the content of your brand can also be distributed through emerging and rapidly growing channels.

Impossible not to start with the voice-controlled Echo product line via Alexa technology:

It will be no coincidence that some of the world's marketing gurus, such as Neil Patel and Eric Siu, have decided to take advantage of Alexa to offer a sort of mini-podcast with marketing tips and tricks.

Another example can be “Ask Purina” the service that allows you to talk to Purina and find an answer to the most common doubts of those who have a 4-legged friend.

It is sufficient to consider that Alexa's "skills”, that is, apps managed by voice commands, are now 25,000 in the world , including those with premium content, launched in December 2017 to the delight of developers.

According to a Skyword article on the growth of voice searches reporting Technavio data, the voice recognition market will be $ 601 million for 2019 .

We still need to ask ourselves if it is really worth having a content marketing strategy dedicated to Amazon.