With Amazon continuing to dominate the e-commerce market, you’re essentially doing your product a disservice by not utilizing it. In 2020 alone, Amazon’s e-commerce grew by a whopping 38% in net sales. Additionally, according to Forbes, Amazon is predicted to seize 50% of the entire e-commerce retail market in 2021. Although deciding to list your product on Amazon may seem like a no-brainer, creating a successful Amazon listing is anything but. Here we break down some of the necessary steps to creating an Amazon product listing and how working with a marketing team can give your product its best chance at success.
1. Competitor Research
You may have a great product, but it’s still likely that there are competitors out there with similar designs. Over the past few years, Amazon listings have only continued to grow more competitive. In order to set your product apart from others, you must heavily research your competitors to see what is working for them and determine how to present your product to customers. You ultimately need to be able to answer the question: how is my product different or better than that of my competitors? This is the question your customers will be asking when making an informed decision about which product to purchase.
When you work with a full-service marketing team, there are experts on staff that have years of experience working specifically with Amazon listings. And a marketing team is able to work collaboratively with you to help you answer this crucial question. This process begins by sending your marketing team a sample of your product, allowing them to get to know the design and understand the product’s features and benefits. Then the team will conduct thorough research into the product competition. Comparing your product with competitors, a marketing team will then determine how to present your product to consumers so that its benefits stand out when examined alongside others in its category.
2. Keyword Research
In order for your product to get sales on Amazon, it needs to include specific keywords and phrases that will allow it to rank higher and be seen by more customers. This is similar to blog writing in that certain keywords will rank higher with SEO than others. The difficult part, however, is that the keywords on Amazon are constantly changing based on an algorithm that Amazon will not reveal to customers or sellers. This means that you could search for compatible keywords on Google for Amazon listings in your product category and—even if the article is only a few months old—the information could already be out of date.
When conducting competitor research, a marketing team will also examine the top products in your category. They will look for commonalities in their keyword usage in order to riddle out the current competitive search terms and phrases. This will allow your product to have a much better chance of ranking higher and duplicating the success of other top listings within your product category.
3. Enhanced Content
Once you’ve conducted your competitor and keyword research, you’ll need to write copy for your Amazon listing. The listing content will need to be expertly crafted to contain the right number of keywords, be informative about the product and its benefits, and be attention-grabbing enough that customers will want to purchase your product. Creating this perfect concoction of all three can be a process of trial and error and you may lose your product’s initial momentum simply trying to get your footing.
With a marketing team, however, you’re working with people who are experts at creating content for Amazon listings. Not only will the content be more polished, but with a full-service marketing company, you’ll have a team monitoring your listing, continuously doing research, and making adjustments in real-time in order to give your listing the best results.
4. Product Photography
Apart from reviews, one of the main elements that can make or break your Amazon listing is your product photography. Your product could be the best one out there in terms of quality, but if your photography is bad, your sales will be as well. As e-commerce has evolved, the time that you have to grab a customer’s attention has significantly decreased. One of the first things that a customer will do when clicking on a listing is to look at the product photography so, if it’s unprofessional, this could quickly dissuade them from purchasing your product.
To give your product the best chance to succeed, a marketing team will also be able to provide you with professional photography for your listing. This may additionally include graphic design elements which will give specs for your product within the photos themselves. This will allow you to give further information about your product that you weren’t able to include in your product description due to keyword ranking restrictions. And again, with a team constantly researching the latest trends in e-commerce product photography you’ll never have to worry about your listing being out-of-date.
5. Sales
Given their expert knowledge of Amazon competitor research, keyword research, e-commerce photography, and content creation, hiring a reputable full-service marketing company should improve your product sales. You’ll need to do your research to determine what company is the best fit for your business. Ultimately, however, you’ll want to work with a company that has a proven track record of success working with Amazon listings.
In the case of Flying Cork, for example, take a look at the above graph. We took over management of this account on June 1, 2020 (the red line on the graph) and you can see the immediate impact we had on gross sales relative to January through May of 2020. Additionally, the blue line shows revenue by month for 2021, which indicates the continued improvement they have seen this year. This client has had over 80% top-line revenue growth from 2020 to 2021.
Our Amazon Services team can predict what we are able to do for our clients during their competitor research. We look at what competitors are achieving from a sales volume perspective and that will give both our team and our client an idea of what to expect in terms of sales from an optimized product within their category.
6. Adapting
As stated previously, Amazon’s keyword rankings change sporadically and unpredictably. This can be fairly inconvenient for sellers. One day your listing is ranking high and getting a lot of sales, the next day your numbers have dropped drastically and you haven’t done anything differently! Suddenly you have to drop everything you’re doing and spend the day conducting keyword research to figure out what words are now ranking higher, then completely rewrite the content on your listing in order to reflect those changes and cross your fingers that it works. And, when it doesn’t, you’re back to the drawing board again.
Additionally, there are certain changes in the requirements for character counts, titles, bullet points, and indexing that can go under the radar. Although you may be allowed to type a certain number of words in your product description, only some of those words will index and that number can change without warning. And other more costly aspects of your listing such as the fulfillment fees can change as well, making a product go from profitable to not profitable overnight.
When you hire a marketing company, you’re working with a team that has a plethora of experience adapting to Amazon’s changing guidelines. At Flying Cork, we have software that will alert us if we stop indexing for a certain product. Since we will be alerted quickly, we can begin to conduct the necessary research to fix the problem right away and adjust the copy in your listing accordingly. This will hinder your product from losing too much SEO value and prevent you from missing more costly Amazon modifications as well.
Although Amazon is the world’s largest e-commerce retailer, there is a lot more that goes into a successful listing than simply the product design. Partnering with a reputable marketing team is one way to ensure that you get the most out of your Amazon listing.
