If you aren't ranking on the first page, most customers aren't going to see your listing at all. Only ~25% of customers even check to see what's on page two depending on the category.
That's tricky, right? 🤹🏻If you don't have sales, you won't rank. And if you don't rank, you probably won't make many sales.
Fortunately, there are other ways to make your listing VISIBLE, enabling customers to find and buy your product—which boosts your ranking!
1) Drive Customers to Your Product Page with Social Media.
Know your goals.
Facebook has multiple types of ad campaigns. If you decide to run an engagement campaign, then your goals should center around the number of likes, comments, and shares on your ad. If you run a traffic campaign, then your goal is to target your audience to make sales.
Keeping your goals in mind affects the content you post, who you target, and where you show your ads.
Ideally, it's good to have over 1000 followers on Instagram and/or Facebook before you launch your product. This is where an "Engagement" campaign comes in.
Be authentic and place yourself in a position to gain organic, word-of-mouth growth. Create credibility for your brand. Give your fans somewhere to congregate and rave about you and the lifestyle or hobbies your product enables. 🗣
Spend time on your audience and give them value. Invest in them and provide quality content. The media you choose to share is important!
What you post doesn't have to be directly related to your product. The Wendy's Twitter account posts snarky and funny content, often leaving "buy our burgers" as an afterthought. But it gets followers to think about their food through osmosis. Plus, when they do promote their food, the audience is there. Favor what is shareable. This casts a wide net to get the notice of as many people as possible. Only a small portion of them will buy. As your social media campaign progresses, alter your strategies to pull that portion of potential buyers in deeper.
Facebook is wonderful for marketing because it knows so much detail about its users and can help you narrow your audience.
If you sell mosquito solutions, target the southeastern United States and other places with bug problems. If you sell cat scratching posts, target only cat owners.
Even better is that—Facebook knows users' hobbies. Facebook knows when users have interests when users naturally like, comment, and share. If you sell home improvement tools, target handymen and DIY users.
Aim for the demographic that will engage.
Pro-tip! Include a call to action with every Instagram & Facebook post. Suggest that your audience tags a friend who [adjective/experience] or to comment their favorite of something (B horror movie/breed of cat, etc).
There's so many options, and this just scratches the surface.
One of the members we coach achieved $21,000 in 30 days because they chose the right niche, differentiated, and built a social following of over one thousand people before launch—to which they then promoted their product. What makes this even more amazing is that they did this with zero Amazon reviews and used zero PPC.
2) Utilize Influencers to Expose Your Product to More People.
You can use established influencers to get your offering in front of customers on Amazon Influencer Shops. They highlight their favorite products on social media, promoting your product to followers.
Find influencers whose audience would want to buy your product.
Offer influencers payment or free units with product seeding. Influencers with post pictures of them using the product. Be sure that you've differentiated your product in a visual way for the best returns!
3) Run PPC Ad Campaigns to Become Visible to Buyers on Amazon.
The single best way to get your product listing ranking is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Amazon directly places the listing in front of the customer when they search certain keywords. It will appear as "sponsored". You pay Amazon every time someone clicks on your sponsored listing whether they buy or not.
This will grant you a lot of early market data, feeding you insight to improve your listing.
You'll know how many impressions you have (appearing in front of the customer), clicks, and purchases. Using these stats, you get click-through-rate (CTR) & conversion-rate (CR). These help you measure the desirability of your listing.
Pro-tip! Optimize your listing before concerning yourself with visibility. Make your product desirable! It doesn't matter if you get eyes on your product if consumers don't want to buy it!
PPC will not be as effective if you don't have high perceived value with a quality feature image that shows differentiation. If you want to go deep on this, learn how visibility works in tandem with desirability and impact.
Amazon grants the sponsored slot to those who bid the most for them. Bid aggressively in the beginning to show on the front page. You want as many sales as possible as early as possible in order to get yourself ranking organically.
Start by evaluating keywords individually and create a manual exact match campaign so you are only paying for what results in a high CTR. Choose only keywords specific and relevant to your product. For instance, if you sell oversized dog beds, don't run an exact match on "cat beds". You could end up getting curious clicks that you pay for but don't turn into sales because it's not what the customer wants. These keywords should be in your listing title or bullet points (but sound natural).
Bid at least 30 cents more than the top range of the Amazon's suggested bid. Make sure you are sponsored on the first page. You will be able to lower your exact match and other keyword bids later after you gather data.
After you've set your exact match campaign, select other keywords and longer tail keywords that can be typed in in different orders. If you sell a cat scratching post that's made of rope, you want to make sure you get the eyes of people searching "rope scratching post" AND "scratching post rope". For three word campaigns, select "phrase match", and do "broad match" for four words or more.
Then there's automatic PPC campaigns too!
Amazon will choose keywords based off your listing and generate new keywords over time. The more likely those keywords are to convert, the more Amazon charges, and vice-versa.
Some products have profitable auto campaigns which can run long-term. You can also use this only to uncover new keywords and move them to your exact campaign.
Monitor for your PPC closely for 14 days.
You have to cast a wide net at first and boost visibility. After 14 days, narrow that net. You’re looking for keywords that resulted in sales and have an acceptable cost to maximize profits.
But we've merely scratched the surface of all of the ins and outs of PPC. Our members get so much more including product targeting PPC, hard numbers in optimizing your PPC campaign, and further detail on the methods already discussed.
Using these PPC strategies, one of our members re-listed their product and launched entirely within terms-of-service without a single incentivized review. It surpassed the prior review numbers and continues to grow. It's ranked on page 1, 2, and 3 for the top keywords, passed 150 reviews with a 4.7 star rating, gained 15-40 sales daily, and generated over $30,000 in revenue in a single month.
The best part about PPC is that it makes your listing stronger over time and continues to work for you even after the startup phase.
