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The Best Marketing Services for Amazon Sellers

James Thomson

Sponsored Product Ads Tools

After Amazon made changes to its product review rules, many more sellers are becoming focused on advertising and sale strategies for Amazon Marketing Services to drive traffic to their products.

While the Sponsored Product ad offering by Amazon provides sellers with opportunities to increase traffic to their listings, competition for the limited ad space is quickly increasing.

Sellers need to become much more sophisticated in their bidding strategies and available budgets. Fortunately, new software is available to help sellers make sense of the return on investment of the endless number of keywords that could be used to promote individual products through Sponsored Products.

Key Issues to Consider

Customer search behavior changes over time, so it’s ideal to continue using such tools on a regular basis, constantly improving the effectiveness of advertising efforts. Words and terms that are not effective today may become more effective in a few months, as customers are exposed to new product choices.

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Landing Pages

Common situations you’d need a landing page for include:

  • You are building a shopping site using your own domain

  • You are creating a temporary flash site

In both situations, you probably don’t want to waste a bunch of time figuring out how to get your site operational and looking decent for customers. Fortunately, these providers offer you easy-to-use, inexpensive tools so you can focus on selling, rather than becoming a frustrated web designer.

Key Issues to Consider

Speed vs. bell-and-whistles functionality is the major tradeoff. While you may need a more permanent site, the tools of these providers are meant to get you up and running quickly. If you want much more advanced functionality, it will take time and likely the help of a web designer to get the perfect look and feel for your long-term site.

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Logo Design

If you are building your own website or your own brand, you will likely want to build a logo for these assets. And you most likely aren’t as artistic as you are entrepreneurial, so look at these solution providers. Some offer a single design, while others use a competitive approach to getting you many options from which to pick your preferred.

Key Issues to Consider

Some of these sites allow you to enforce an NDA with your designers, so as not to publicize pre-launch that your website or product is coming. Be sure to give your designers information on what the website or product is meant to do and the audience it is targeted toward.

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Social Media & SEO

If you have your own site or brand, it can be beneficial to bring in an expert – even for just a few months – to build exposure of your assets quickly, with the careful expertise of someone who does this sort of thing over and over. They can provide bandwidth creating new marketing content that is used to spread the word on your product, or they can manage the distribution of any existing content you already have.

Key Issues to Consider

While no directory could possibly include all of the skilled social media marketing people out there, here are a few to get you started. There are many skilled people in this space, so if you are looking at improving awareness in a local area, ask other companies who might have had direct experience with local providers.

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Task Outsourcing

Let’s face it, you don’t have enough time to get everything done! There is a whole world of talented freelancers out there that can handle all sorts of projects for you.

If you’re running short on time or expertise to complete specific types of tasks, these companies organize freelancers to make it easier for you to find people who will help. Freelancer services range and include: consulting, designing, writing, creating listings, improving marketing materials, building websites or software, handling repetitive data look-up tasks, etc. Chances are some other Amazon sellers have already defined Amazon-seller tasks for these freelancers. It’s worth exploring what talented help might be out there to support your business today.

Key Issues to Consider

Some tasks may involve sharing confidential or semi-confidential information, so be careful about what you choose to outsource. Check to see that your work is being done by the person you’re talking with on these sites. Sometimes work gets farmed out, and you don’t know who’s doing the work. Interview multiple people and give them small test projects to see if you have good communication and work well together on getting expected results back within the expected timeframe.

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James Thomson avatar

James Thomson is Partner of Buy Box Experts, a managed account services firm enabling brands to sell direct on Amazon. He is also president of PROSPER Show, the largest US-based continuing education conference for Amazon sellers. Previously, James was the head of Amazon Services (which recruits >99.5% of all new sellers to the Amazon marketplace each year), Amazon's first FBA account manager, a banker and a management consultant. He earned a Ph.D. in Marketing (B2B Pricing and Distribution) from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University.