Overcoming 'Big brand' challenges (and where small brands can win on Amazon)
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Big brands on Amazon have big challenges. Challenges that need different approaches. When you have 5 products in 1 marketplace, things are pretty straightforward. When you have 500 products in 10 marketplaces, things get complicated. In today’s newsletter, let’s have a look at
For both PPC, and SEO. Let's start with PPC. (you’ll have to forgive the PPC guy for that) If you’re somewhat advanced, you know you should generally try to segment your ads. You want to have as much control over your targets as possible. Control over your budget, campaign bidding, placement, and (since a few weeks) AMC audience multipliers. These are all only available on campaign level (apart from the SD ads exception). But of course, this is not without limits. We do NOT want a single campaign for every single keyword. Not only would you be quick to reach the limit of how many campaigns you can create (10k for SP ads). But reporting and management becomes a huge pain. Especially if you have hundreds of products. So, for big brands, the answer is simple: Only use advanced segmentation on your top profit delivering products. Product prioritization is key. For secondary products, you’ll have to either work with catch-alls campaigns. (google it, there’s a ton about this topic). Or let software create and manage ads. The main 2 tools on this front are m19 (1st month free via link) and Quartile (code ddzim55 for a 55% discount on the first 2 months). This is even more true for your secondary marketplaces. Let’s face it - you won’t take the necessary time to manage ads properly in those. So keep it very simple (catch-alls) or let automation do its thing. And what does this mean for smaller brands? Let’s say you have a large competitor with lots of products in your niche. Check whether the product competing with you is in their focus. This can become evident on their Amazon store pages. They either display the product on their Store's 'home' or Best Sellers page, or they don’t. When that is not the case, you have a much better chance of attacking that product- Either with the direct approach: product targeting ads. Or by reverse ASINing it and targeting the keywords it’s ranking for. And then closing in on those keywords with your SEO and PPC efforts. As this has turned out a bit longer already, I’m going to keep it short for the next part. This is the even harder part to scale. But there is new hope. I recently got to flearn about a brand new tool. It can actually research keywords and create content all on its own. AND it re-researches keywords every month or so to adapt to changing search behaviour and volume. For every product. It’s called Autopilot (yeah, not the most creative lol) Of course, maybe those AI listings might not be as perfect as what a human could do. But for all your secondary products and marketplaces, for which you’ll never find the time anyway… This could be the absolute perfect tool. To round things up, what does this mean for smaller brands? Big brands can’t focus on every product and marketplace. Time (and reporting space) is not on their side to constantly update all products. To constantly optimize their SEO. To manage all campaigns with advanced segmentation. That’s where smaller brands can jump in. That’s where you go after sub niches where the top brands aren’t focused on. And with sub niches I mean a very specific set of keywords. Remember, every keyword is its own niche! The big guys don’t have the capacity or time to focus on each one. The small guys do (more or less). What about the guys moving from small to big? They can turn to the Amazon Ads Scaling System. And learn how to best manage an overwhelming amount of products and ads with smart ready systems and software. Or, I suppose, try to sell their business to one of the Aggregators - yes, they still exist. That's it for this one. Keep on grinding (at least a little bit more, but then enjoy the festivities!) David |