3 New Amazon Strategies You Need to Leverage in 2020

Amazon has become such a staple in the life of many people and with the current Covid-19 pandemic, this channel has become increasingly important for brands to sell products that they once sold in stores. Due to this, the Amazon landscape has become more competitive than ever and brands need to leverage newer strategies to stand out from the competition and maximize sales. 

Well here’s the good thing…

Amazon has and is releasing more forms of advertising and performance optimization that will allow brands to stand out from a competitor if they are quick to adopt new strategies. In this post we will review 3 new Amazon strategies that can be used for brands that are new or existing on the Amazon marketplace, specifically on Seller Central. Read on to learn more about new advertising and review generation strategies that can help improve your Amazon sales.

Amazon Video Ads

Are you a brand on Amazon that wants to get exposure at the detail page level or on the home page? Well you’re in luck! Amazon is rolling out video advertising that allows you to display videos on the homepage of Amazon or on detail pages. This is a huge differentiator for brands that have the capabilities to produce video assets and allows for those brands to get a TON of exposure that would have not previously been tapped into. 

197 million people go on Amazon each month, which means there is an average of 6.56 million people going to Amazon daily. Of course you will not be able to capture the interest of all users on Amazon daily, but this does present a huge opportunity to gain a significant amount of brand exposure by placing your video on the Amazon home page. The catch? This can be pretty costly, BUT if you have the ad budget to play, the home page ads can be very impactful.

Don’t have a TON of budget? Don’t worry, video ads are still a viable option for you because you can show the video ads for your product within your sponsored ad campaigns. This will help differentiate your brand and has shown to increase the number of users viewing ASIN detail pages very significantly.

How Do They Work?

Amazon video ads will autoplay as soon as 50% of the video is visible on the screen and will stop playing once the user scrolls to where the video is out of view. Audio is always muted so it’s very important to make sure that the core message of the video can be delivered in the first 5 seconds without audio. Therefore, an Amazon shopper will see the first few seconds of the ad and know if the ad is something they want to learn more about by clicking on the ad. 

Amazon video ads do require the video itself as well as a background image for the placement. There are different background image requirements for different devices which can be seen below:

In terms of the video requirements, the requirements are fairly standard so you should be able to easily repurpose other assets or create new assets for video ads. Here are the requirements for video ads:

So What Should You Do?

We strongly recommend you give this advertising format a try as it can really differentiate your brand, which is even more important now on Amazon than prior to 2020. The resources and investment for this type of ad can be higher, but with risk and effort comes reward. Give video ads a shot!

Amazon Posts

Amazon posts are a newer feature to Amazon and will commonly show in app on mobile devices. They appear as social like looking posts that exist further down detail pages, brand feeds, category feeds and related feeds. If you have not seen these posts, here’s an example of the posts showing up on a Rayban sunglasses listing:

What are the Benefits to Amazon Posts?

Amazon posts allow you to show your products on listings of similar products or brands with lifestyle photography so the shopper can really envision themselves using the product. They act as a way for you to replicate what you are doing on traditional social media platforms on Amazon. The main benefit here is you are able to show the posts on a commerce based platform so it makes it incredibly simple for an Amazon customer to see the post and therefore buy the product. Therefore, the benefits include:

• Increasing brand awareness (especially for lesser known brands that can get placements on listings of well known brands)
• Show your product on competitor pages
• Play defense on your detail pages by showing your posts
• Gain free exposure (Yes, they really are free! That may change so leverage them now!)

There are no limits to how frequently you can post so feel free to post frequently as it will only increase your reach and brand awareness. The nice thing is that you can leverage assets from other social platforms and repurpose them for Amazon so these are an easy asset to work into the production process of your other social media assets.

Vine for Seller Central

Need more reviews? This is something all new brands on Amazon need to focus on early so that they can generate more validation and social proof from reviews about how great (or not) their products are. If you are confident in the product and receive great feedback from customers, then the Vine Program can be something that is very beneficial to getting more reviews of their products.

Historically Vine has been a program available within Vendor Central accounts but Amazon has now rolled out Vine to Seller Central accounts allowing sellers to leverage this review generation platform to kickstart the review generation process.

How Does it Work?

Amazon Vine uses the most trusted reviewers on Amazon to review products within the program. This can be a great way to get reviews on new or pre-release items, allowing an Amazon customer that visit your listings to see how other people have reviewed the product. As with any ecommerce platform, the more reviews, the better (if they are good!).

Amazon Vine provides these reviewers with products for free to get their unbiased feedback on the product. Vine Voices (the reviewers) are selected by Amazon based on their history of providing unbiased and objective reviews of products on Amazon. Amazon will not modify or edit any of the review content so it’s a great way to get accurate, honest reviews of a product.

When Should I Enroll in Vine?

We typically see that any products with less than 30 reviews typically do not rank or sell as well. Therefore, if you have less than 30 products, then Vine is a great platform to get more reviews.

Also, if you have not so great reviews prior but have recently resolved issues with a product, then it may be worthwhile to enroll in Vine to get more reviews of the product after product issues have been sorted.

Of course if you are selling a subpar product on Amazon, then this would not be a good strategy for you. In this case, getting more reviews should be the least of your worries and you should focus on improving your product so that it can stand the test of time on Amazon because it provides value to the consumers buying the product. That should be a no brainer, but we all know how Amazon can be littered with low quality products in certain categories where sellers are just trying to make a quick buck, rather than building a brand that people will come to love. 

Wrapping Up

With the ever changing world of Amazon and increased competitions, it’s more important than ever to evolve your Amazon marketing strategy to see success in 2020 and beyond. These strategies, while not the simplest, are newer strategies that can yield great results and should be an arrow in the quiver of any Amazon seller. Give these a shot early on and you will stand out from the rest on Amazon, allowing you to realize great growth in a time that is more competitive than ever before on Amazon.