Do you have a product on Amazon? Or are you thinking about it? Welcome to The Marketing Accelerator Podcast…featuring three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker, and today I'm speaking with Mike Begg, CEO at AMZ Advisors. That's an organization committed to taking brands from $1M in sales to $10M+ via e-commerce on Amazon. Mike, we all know Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla. Where do we even start?

Mike Begg: Well, you said it. I mean, Amazon is the biggest player in the e-commerce space. When you think about shopping online, consumers are going to Amazon to find products, and about 70% of all online searches for products start on the Amazon platform. So, when you think about it from that perspective, if your products are not on Amazon or not showing up on the platform, you're just losing out on visibility. You're losing out on the potential for consumers to find your product, and you're actually hurting your brand in the long term.

Drew: Okay, with that in mind then, how do we leverage Amazon to create brand awareness?

Mike: The first thing you're going to want to consider is how to maximize your visibility, and part of that's going to be building a funnel within Amazon; and then we can talk later about how that fits into your broader e-commerce funnel. First on Amazon, you want to focus on sponsored products to really capture people searching for specific keywords on Amazon. This is going to help them convert middle of the funnel. You're going to look at product-targeting campaigns, showing up on competitor products or products that are similar to your product, so that a consumer will consider your product over the competitor. And then finally, you want to look top of funnel for brand awareness with sponsored display and the programmatic advertising platform, DSP for Amazon, where you can really focus on maximizing the number of impressions that your product is getting for consumer searching online.

Drew: So far, we've been talking about the Amazon funnel. How do I leverage Amazon with my other funnels?

Mike: That's a great question. And with Amazon, you're going to have more conversions than you're going to have on any other platform. So, how do you start leveraging these conversions to your advantage? First way is product insert cards or a product QR code on your product. Look, that will allow the consumer to scan something, go to a webpage where they have the ability to opt in, leave their email address. You can incentivize them with, you know, a free digital product, a warranty registration, something like that where you can capture the email. Now you're building an email list which allows you to market to it. It allows you to use it for retargeting audiences on other platforms. The other way is the DSP platform that I mentioned before. The programmatic side. You're allowed to create custom audiences and lookalike audiences similar to what you can do on Facebook. So, with all the consumers purchasing your product, think about creating a lookalike audience to consumers that have purchased your product and how you can drive that traffic to your e-commerce website or other platforms.

Drew: That is helpful, Mike. Now I feel at least that I'm prepared to take that first strategic step with that 800-pound gorilla we all know love and, well, sometimes hate. The Marketing Accelerator Podcast is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com where we accelerate marketing leaders to higher performance and increase job satisfaction. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.