Amazon Marketing Strategy: How to Market Your Products on Amazon

If you’re looking to be successful in e-commerce, the best thing to do is observe what the industry giants are doing and apply it to your own business to whatever extent you can. And when it comes to e-commerce, Amazon is the most obvious model to admire and look up to.

That being said, we’ll first give you a brief overview of some of the core values behind the Amazon marketing strategy and then provide you with actionable ideas on how to develop your own marketing strategy for selling on Amazon.

Amazon Marketing Strategy

Amazon’s mission statement is “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.”

Amazon marketing strategy

For years now, Amazon has steadily been strengthening its dominance in the field of e-commerce. The graph below shows Amazon’s net sales revenue for the period from 2004 to 2017.

Amazon Statista

With that in mind, every day, more and more sellers and manufacturers take advantage of this Amazon’s enormous sales potential to offer their own products to a larger pool of potential buyers.

While they’re hoping to “steal” a small portion of Amazon’s success, have you ever wondered how did Amazon reach such heights? Like everyone else, they had to start small, right?

A Brief History of Amazon

Since it was founded in 1995, by Jeff Bezos, in Seattle, Amazon has gone a really long way to world’s largest internet retailer in terms of revenue.

In that time, Amazon has gone from this:

Amazon old

To this:

Amazon new

At first, Amazon used to sell only books, but from the very beginning, Bezos knew that he wanted it to be an “everything store”.

In fact, Amazon wasn’t the original name of the company. Bezos first named it Cadabra, then wanted to change the name to Relentless (there’s still a Relentless.com domain, owned by Bezos, that redirects to Amazon.com), but eventually opted for Amazon (hence the initial logo with the largest river in the world in it).

A couple of failed name choice attempts and a LOT of successful business decisions later, Jef Bezos is the richest man in the world for the year 2018, with his wealth being estimated at $112 billion.

How did he do it? Let’s hear it from the man behind Amazon himself.

Three main ideas behind Amazon

“We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO

Customer-centric approach

“If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word-of-mouth is so very, very powerful.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO

Hard-earned reputation

“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO

Charging less

“There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO

Always innovating

“What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO

Now, let us show you how you can be Jeff Bezos-successful in selling on Amazon.

3 Amazon Marketing Strategy Promotion Methods for Selling on the Platform

Before we go into the actual tips, let’s first briefly examine a typical Amazon listing:

Amazon product
Source: Amazon

Highlighted on the image above are the 4 key components of each product listing:

  • Title
  • Images
  • Price
  • Description (features and attributes)

In addition to those, equally (or even more) important are the customer-generated components – Q&A and reviews.

Amazon Q&A

1. Amazon SEO

One piece of internet wisdom says that “the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google”. The same goes for Amazon. There’s a huge difference between your product ranking on page 1 vs. page 2.

Screen Shot 2018 10 10 at 4.02.57 PM

That being said, trying to organically rank your listings should be your number one Amazon marketing strategy. The best thing about Amazon SEO is that most of the measures are free. Perform it right and you can improve your Amazon search organic ranking without spending any additional money on promotion.

According to a 2018 Adeptmind survey, more US internet users first search for products directly on Amazon (46.7%) than on Google (34.6%). This makes Amazon the US’s largest products search engine.

Optimize keywords

Prior to optimization, you need to conduct a thorough keyword research in relation to your product. After you’ve found and assigned all the relevant keywords. This means optimizing your product description, attributes, and title.

Proper distribution of relevant keywords leads to your product being more visible in the Amazon search results. Make sure to use the most important keywords in the title and in your product description.

Bear in mind that Amazon makes 57 percent of their sales from “keywords outside of the ‘popular’ terms”, the so-called long-tail keywords.

Come up with an information-rich, SEO title

Maybe it’s true that you shouldn’t judge a book by its title. But the online community (and search engines) will judge your content based on the title.

Copyblogger claims that 8 out of 10 people will read your headline but only 2 of them will read the rest of the content. To some extent, this applies to product pages as well.

Here are some of the things every Amazon product title should contain:

  • Brand name
  • Name of the product
  • Any product-specific features such as size, color or use

Screen Shot 2018 10 10 at 4.03.52 PM

As already mentioned, when writing the title for your Amazon product page, you need to make sure to include the most important keyword(s). A typical Amazon product title maybe does not appeal to the eye, but it appeals to search engines while providing enough information to potential buyers to know whether opening the product page will be worth their time.

Write for people and machines alike

Okay, writing Amazon product descriptions is not really the best of opportunities to showcase your literary talent. But it still doesn’t need to look like some keyword-stuffed, generic text, aimed at search engines only.

Remember that your product pages are read by people and, after all, they are the ones making the decision whether to buy your product or not. There’s no use in getting your product to rank well on Amazon search results if it doesn’t appeal enough to your potential customers to convince them to make a purchase decision.

When it comes to structure, most Amazon product pages should contain a title, bullet point, and product description.

Amazon product description

Keywords are there to appeal to search engines but how can you appeal to people? Make sure your text contains the following:

  • All the information necessary to make a decision to purchase
  • All the benefits, special features, and USPs of your product (and how your buyers benefit from those)
  • Clear structure and easy-to-grasp information


Extra tip –
Optimize your product content for mobile as well. As bullet points and product description will appear shorter on mobile, it’s important to list the key information first.

Extra tip #2 – Keep track of your customers’ questions and answers. If several users are struggling with the same thing or having similar concerns/inquiries, make sure to address those and add the missing information to your product description.

Add high-quality product images

It probably sounds like a cliche, but there’s a reason they say a picture is worth a thousand words. With Amazon product pages, images are worth at least as much as the title, and sometimes even more than the product description text. How come?

The title and images are the first two things a potential customer sees (along with the price, of course). Based on those, they make the decision on whether to click and see the entire page or scroll down to your competitor’s more appealing product title and image.

Screen Shot 2018 10 10 at 4.02.25 PM

That’s why it’s crucial to pair up your SEO text with attractive and appealing product images. They can play a vital role in your Amazon marketing strategy. People buying online like images because they’re the closest thing to seeing a real-life product.

Saying that a product is what it is is fine (someone will believe you, someone won’t) but showing it leaves a much stronger and more credible impression. That’s why you need to make sure to include professional images that show every physical aspect of your product, including both positive and negative features.

Extra tip – Amazon will allow you to upload 5-9 images for each product listing (depending on your product type and category).

Extra tip #2 – If possible, use high-resolution images (2,000 pixels x 2,000 pixels) for extra granularity.

Nurture positive reviews

Reviews are a double-edged sword of Amazon marketing. They can just as easily boots your product as they can doom it.

Amazon reviews

Let’s face it – negative reviews do happen. Even for the best of products and brands out there. In the case of a negative review, the best thing you could do is respond and address their concerns with care and dignity. In some cases, careful review management can lead to a negative rating turning into a positive one.

Worst case scenario – other customers will see that you can take negative criticism, that you respect everyone’s opinion, and that you’re willing to do everything you can to improve your customer experience.

2. Amazon advertising

If you don’t find SEO working for you (or you’re too busy/lazy to deal with it), paid-advertising could be a more effective short-term solution for you. In that case, you should definitely consider using sponsored ads in your Amazon marketing strategy.

Amazon ads

Amazon’s sponsored ads enable you to reach potential customers as they research and browse products similar to the ones you’re offering. These ads appear on top of Amazon search results, as well as on relevant product pages, thus getting your product in front of a large number of potential buyers.

It’s easy to set up Amazon ads in just 3 steps:

1. Choose the product you want to advertise
2. Determine your budget
3. Set your target audience (choose the keywords, products, and categories that you want to target)

“In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO

3. Amazon marketing strategy for external promotion

If the on-Amazon promotion doesn’t work for you (or you would like to try out an alternative, more original approach), you can promote your Amazon products using 3rd-party services and other means of external promotion. Here are some suggestions:

  • PPC (pay-per-click) advertising – Facebook ads, Google Adwords, etc.
  • E-mail marketing (newsletters)
  • Content marketing – for example, you can provide influential bloggers, vloggers, or Instagram influencers with your product for free so they could test it for their followers and include a link to your Amazon page.
  • Coupons (share Amazon coupon codes for your products)
  • Share on social media
  • Use an online quiz – quizzes are a fun and engaging way to generate leads and sales.

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Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes

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