An updated version from 2023 can be found here
Marketing strategies for Amazon sellers
“Content is king” is a common saying in the marketing world and that is also true for Amazon sellers wanting to promote their products. Content marketing is currently the hottest tool in the industry for modern and effective marketing, just like social media. If you want to sell online, you should also know your way around marketing online. Facebook and Instagram are especially great for Amazon sellers since they give you the option to improve your rankings and reach new customers with the built-in chat.
Preparation for social media marketing: Finding the right target audience
Before you can start with social media marketing, you need to find out who your audience and target groups are. Several criteria are used to narrow down the target audience, from age to gender and interests. You can only reach new customers if you know who your target audience is and how you can get through to them. Optimizing your target audience requires not only time and experience. It is also necessary to collect important data in order to be able to reach the right audience with the right campaigns.
Facebook for finding the right target audience: Facebook groups and Ads
If you want to sell a new product but don’t know exactly who to target and what your audience looks like, you can use Facebook groups to find them.
Simply post a video of your product in all relevant groups. All users who watched at least 80 percent of the video are part of the relevant target group. However, it is important that the video offers added value to the audience. Otherwise, it might be regarded as spam and end up being ignored.
The right keywords and settings in Facebook Ads are also a way to reach potential buyers. Add “amazon.de” and “engaged shoppers” to the requested interests and have your ad shown to users that frequently shop on Amazon or generally online. If they like your products, you won new customers.
SPACEGOATS extra tip: Optimizing your target audience with Pixelfy
Pixelfy is a tool that not only shortens Amazon links but also allows you to add various features. You can for example collect data about customers in order to further optimize your target audience. Only if you keep optimizing your marketing strategy will you reach the right people and get new customers.
Content Marketing for Amazon FBA sellers
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing, as the name suggests, is based on the right kind of content. Various formats are being produced and published, offering added value to the target audience and promoting the product at the same time. This way, you can reach the respective target audience for a product or brand and reach new customers. Content marketing offers an incredible variety of options because every kind of content can be used, whether it be informing, consulting or entertaining.
The right content marketing strategy for good results as an Amazon seller
Simply producing content haphazardly and – in the worst case – not achieving optimal results won’t do your brand or your products any good. That’s why you need a strategy for content marketing. It’s the only way to see sustainable results such as a steadily growing customer base or the right brand image. It is definitely worth it to invest time and money to create a strategy and good content marketing.
As an FBA seller, you can produce creative content that speaks directly to your target audience and therefore be ahead of the game on social media platforms as well as in a professional context.
Brand building and brand image with content marketing for Amazon sellers
Content marketing is also a component in brand building. It allows you to build your brand, position it where it belongs and make it accessible – which is crucial for its success. In order to create a brand image, you can use all kinds of content and formats, whether it be newsletters, videos, photos or customer magazines. It’s all about creativity and individuality! For Amazon sellers and their brands, newsletters, videos and photos are especially important to reach more people online.
The right equipment and gear for content marketing for Amazon sellers: professional and expensive?
When it comes to content marketing, starting is most important: Just go for it! If you’re brave enough and simply start putting your content out there, you can grow. It’s all about surviving the hard times in the beginning when there are few likes and small followings. Content marketing is about endurance: Stick with it and see the numbers grow.
On top of that, those times in the beginning are an excellent opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. After all, the audience witnessing little screw-ups is still small. The gear you’re starting with also doesn’t have to be top notch.
Here’s a wild guess: Every FBA seller has access to a smartphone. Those cameras are very high-quality and automatically take care of everything from focus to lighting or the image. The results can oftentimes easily be compared to professional cameras. This means even the inexperienced can produce high quality pictures and videos for their content.
SPACEGOATS extra tip: You can find plenty of tutorials and hacks on YouTube that will help you produce even better content with your smartphone.
Professional, mostly expensive, gear on the other hand often has a big disadvantage: Everything has to be set manually and this can be frustrating if you’re just starting out. It also might mean that your content won’t turn out as good as you hoped.
If you do decide to invest in proper gear and equipment, there are a few things to consider: Which gear is right and necessary and what is the budget? A camera that will shoot amazing photos doesn’t automatically shoot perfect video. If you do create videos, you should invest in a microphone for the audio and sound. And it might be worth it to get a tripod to stabilize everything.
You can get a good allrounder camera for photos and video from about 1,200€, including a lens. A gimbal is a way to support your camera in your hand that will steady your shooting and can be bought for about 200 to 400€. There is also always the option to rent a studio for highly professional content.
The right content for content marketing for FBA sellers: Presenting your product
When creating the right content for a strategy, it is important to work sustainably. After all, you want the production and investment to be worth it. It might not be helpful to use up time and money for content that might not fit the current season or not offer added value for the audience.
Some products are very easy to promote and the right content is almost obvious to some. For others, it might not be as easy to come up with and produce great content.
A content strategy for knives for example can be developed fairly easily, for example with clever product placement in cooking videos. The brand “Almazan Kitchen” used this strategy to reach an enormous audience – without excessively presenting the product or drawing special attention to it. Instead, they filmed cooking videos in a forest with a campfire. Whenever ingredients were cut, you could see the knife with its big logo. The videos were a hit and many viewers and potential customers grew interested in the knife.
This perfectly shows the two roles of content marketing: On the one hand, the audience gains added value, in this case through recipes and cooking videos. On the other hand, the product, in this case the knife, is being promoted. On top of that, the setting and the emotions conveyed in the video are being tied to the brand and therefore add to the brand image.
A similar yet totally different product, a potato peeler, might present more struggles when it comes to content marketing: Simple pictures are not very interesting to the audience, don’t offer any added value and don’t convey any emotions. As a seller and creator of the marketing strategy, it is important to see the bigger picture and to decide what the product’s abilities are, which emotions should be conveyed and how it can attract the audience’s interest.
An option for the peeler might be to videos showing life hacks or elaborate carvings of fruit and vegetables. Content like this might have a similar effect than the aforementioned cooking videos.
The right platform for content marketing for Amazon sellers: standing out from other content
Depending on the kind of product and the kind of content you produce, different platforms suit your B2C communication best. The artful vegetable carvings make for good Pinterest pictures since this platform hosts the DIY and photo fans. Shorter videos and funny content are great for TikTok, Facebook is for more conventional audiences, YouTube for longer videos and Instagram offers several features for up-to-date content.
As a seller, you know your product best and can tell which emotions should be conveyed to the customer or which experience should be offered. This is the basis for producing content. As a next step, you should try which content performs best on which platform. Oftentimes, it is almost impossible to tell what kind of content will absolutely work on which platform since the world of social media and its trends moves so fast.
SPACEGOATS extra tip: Recycle your content!
When producing content, you should not only aim for quality and added value but also efficiency. There’s a cool trick that allows you to create several small pieces of content for various platforms from one big thing: Recycle your content. Plan your bigger pieces in a way that allows you to post video excerpts on other platforms, transform them into text or create a picture.
This allows you to re-use your pieces and it is definitely not necessary to constantly come up with new and creative content. Smart planning and production will let you create content from one single piece for quite a while.
If you want to make brainstorming easier, you can also start producing a series of formats so you won’t have to come up with a completely new topic all the time.
User-generated content for content marketing: Amazon customers create content for sellers
Creating high quality content and the right social media strategy requires time and energy. While it’s definitely worth it and can also be made easier with hacks like the aforementioned content recycling, you still need to put in a lot of effort. Producing content that is informative, entertaining and offers added value can be strenuous. What if your customers could produce content for you and your product?
User-generated content consists of material that your customers create for you: Photos, videos, experiences, reviews and more are among the things users like to post on Instagram and other platforms. This allows you to repost and use this content on your channels. You will not only have easy access to content, this material is also highly authentic and will be a winner with your audience and customers.
Another option for user-generated content requires a little bit more planning and money but is highly effective as well: Working with influencers or customers. Let someone take over for example your Instagram channel for a certain amount of time. For this time, usually one day, they can use your product and share their experience in their own life on your social media. Photos, videos and stories can show how they use the product, how it makes them feel and what their experience is like. This is especially popular with cosmetic brands.
This option also offers additional benefits to the influencer or customers since they can use the created content on their own channels as well. On top of that, both parties involved reach a bigger audience by being presented to the following of the other account.
Content marketing doesn’t need to be immensely expensive or require a lot of effort – you simply have to know how to use it in a clever and effective way.
Strategies for social media platforms: Generate sales and ranking with Facebook Messenger and Instagram Stories
Different social media platforms offer an incredible variety of opportunities to promote products or brands – if you use them correctly. Not only content marketing is an option to gain new customers, you can also reach target audiences to recruit them as product testers and improve your product ranking.
Product testers and sales: The right strategy for Facebook Messenger marketing for sellers
The Facebook Messenger has proven to be an effective method to reach prospect customers. Facebook Ads can be connected to Messenger and are then displayed there.
Start out by creating the ad in the Facebook Ads Manager. Personal and interesting wordings and phrases work best for this form of marketing, for example: “We are looking for people to test our product!” (You can replace “people” with a more specific term and sub your actual product name at the end.) It’s especially important to add one feature in this add: The call to action, for example saying “contact us now”. By clicking on this button, the prospect can directly contact you, the seller, concerning a special offer and then can be recruited for example as a product tester.
Next, the seller will send a link to the customer in Messenger and explain how the testing works: The prospect will buy the product and get the money back from the seller via PayPal. Chat flows to manage the communication can be created with the Facebook Chatbot or tools such as Chatfuel.
This will generate a sale which will benefit your ranking as a seller on Amazon. On top of that, you can ask the customer for a review in the chat in order to create a good rating. However, it is absolutely crucial to keep this question neutral, like: “Thank you for testing our product. We would be happy to receive your feedback after the test.” In no case should the feedback or review be a condition for testing – especially not a good review. This violates Amazon regulations and can entail serious consequences for you as a seller.
Nevertheless, most customers are happy to write a good review if you offer them a good product and good customer service – they might simply need the little neutral reminder in the chat.
SPACEGOATS extra tip: Coupon codes instead of PayPal
You might come across customers who are sceptical of receiving their money back via PayPal. After all, they don’t have any guarantee for this. That’s why you can use a different strategy and hand out coupon codes. Amazon coupons are available at many retail places. All you have to do is send the code to the customer who will then use it for the purchase.
However, it is important to use a good processing and documentation process in order not to lose track.
Product testers and sales: The right strategy for Instagram for FBA sellers
While Facebook is great for starting social media marketing and for reaching a wider audience, Instagram allows you to target specific groups, to commit them to the brand and to create a better brand image. This is highly recommended for brand building but requires a certain foundation for the brand and marketing concept.
Instagram Stories are an amazing way to directly address the audience. This works similar to the approach in Messenger and generally gives you two options: You can either place a paid story or create an individual story on your account. The following sentence might be a good idea: “React with 🔥 if you want to test our new product for free!” This allows the viewers to interact directly through the reactions feature and start a chat. The seller can then start the chat flow. Just like with Messenger marketing, this generates a sale and in most cases even a good review and better ranking.