From Amazon off-site marketing to the triple realms of marketing, how to do it?

Topic: The Three Levels of Marketing and How to Do Off-site Marketing on Amazon

Host: Gong Chen Coen

Location: WeChat group of "Knowing Everything" Wendao Study Group

Mode: Voice/text live broadcast

「Activity content record」

Hello, seniors and peers, I'm sorry there are no masters today. Just pretend you are tired of the top 10 and come and see the bronze joy. I am Coen, a marketing pawn. I originally wanted to share some useful small tools and plug-ins so that I could be influenced by the masters in the group for a few more days. I didn't expect that seniors had already shared this topic, and most of the things I prepared were mentioned. The remaining little things can't be talked about for a few minutes. But how can a man only have a few minutes! Right! So when Xiaozhi asked me, I bit the bullet and reported the little things I was thinking about at the time as the topic.

That is "The Three Realms of Marketing and How to Do Off-site Marketing on Amazon". This topic is very big and difficult. Fortunately, although I am not specialized, I have done domestic marketing planning, cross-border e-commerce operation and promotion, and overseas APP product operation in the past few years. It is really a mess, but with my fragmented experience and the psychology, society, and marketing books I read during this period, I can barely come up with some twisted ideas. In addition, the Amazon company that I started with my friends from a peasant house has grown to nearly 20 people in more than half a year. I can take some time to summarize and think. Without further ado, let's officially start.

If e-commerce is a marketer's nightmare, then Amazon is a marketer's black hole, swallowing up all hope without leaving any light. Amazon has three black holes:

The first is the theoretical black hole . Traditional marketing theories are extremely difficult to implement on Amazon. STP is somewhat useful, but marketers cannot get involved. Two of the 4Ps (place) (promotion) are at the mercy of Amazon. CRM is even more annoying. Amazon doesn't want your dirty hands to touch their customers at all. They wish you were just a supplier.

The second is the data black hole . A large amount of Amazon's data is blocked and not open. All the data tools on the market are expensive and inaccurate. The functions combined are less than one-tenth of those of Business Advisor. Google Trend is far inferior to Baidu Index. The efficiency of data-guided marketing is very low.

The third is the cost black hole . Under the flywheel of Amazon, most sellers have been lowering their prices again and again. 50% to 60% of their sales go to Amazon. After deducting the shipping costs of the products, where does the money come from for marketing? Internet companies or traditional enterprises can only take out more than 30% of their sales, and even use financing to do marketing. How much can Amazon take out? It is better to spend more on PPC with this money!

In such an environment, Amazon can only focus on operations, and marketing promotion is just miscellaneous work such as brushing orders and sending codes. As for off-site promotion and full-network marketing, you should not believe in Amazon companies with less than 10 people, and for more than 10 people, just be like that. After all, they can find mailboxes and send emails, and act as human crawlers and spammers.

Anyone who is interested in marketing and really intends to invest in this career for a long time, it is not recommended to work at Amazon as the first job, regardless of operation and promotion. However, other marketers who switch to Amazon and have strong implementation capabilities may have the miraculous effect of dimensionality reduction attack, or Amazon bosses and executives of large companies who want to make further breakthroughs can also find some ideas from marketing.

Now that I have discussed the difficulties, I will talk about my superficial understanding of marketing from three levels.

First level: sales

E-commerce is nothing more than the trivial matter of sales = traffic × conversion × customer unit price. I dare not teach you about the site, and offline is not my forte. Here I will briefly talk about the idea of ​​off-site marketing. From the above formula, it can be seen that the rule of traffic is king is still the first method of the Internet. Online marketing mainly uses white, black and gray hat methods to attract traffic from the entire network and make transactions on Amazon. There are hundreds of ways to play. If you are interested, you can study this book. I can do 60-70% of the book myself. Online marketing is considered a beginner's guide. There are differences in many places overseas, but the ideas and methodology are the same.

From the keywords in this book, we can also see that the way to play with traffic is to ask for traffic from different channels. SEO SEM asks for traffic from search engines, blogs and soft articles ask for traffic from websites, EDM asks for traffic from email systems, and SNS asks for traffic from social media. What marketers need to do is to find the right channel and use the right method to get traffic that meets ROI.

Traffic channels can be divided based on two attributes. One is channel maturity. New channels often have a bonus period, while old channels are highly competitive and require better methods and techniques, or have even declined and are not worth spending much effort on.

Another point to look at is whether it is passive traffic or active traffic. Active traffic, such as advertising, has an immediate effect, but the cost is higher. Passive traffic, such as soft-text SEO, requires accumulation over time.

I made a rough diagram, which is not rigorous, just to show the framework.

Different channels have different ways of playing and ideas, which are difficult to elaborate here. Let’s take the common ways of playing Amazon’s off-site marketing and use this idea to make a simple analysis.

In fact, Amazon has been doing the most on deal forums, YouTube and blog celebrity reviews. The companies that do well add FB and Google ads to attract traffic to their independent sites.

YouTube celebrity reviews are considered passive traffic, and long-tail traffic can account for 30% or even 50%. Therefore, many companies do this and calculate that the orders they receive in one or two days are not enough to pay the celebrities commissions. They don’t want to do it because they don’t understand the composition of traffic and the value difference between content display and one-time traffic. Other companies set up YouTube celebrity departments, recruited a bunch of fresh graduates, searched their email addresses, sent development letters, and used ROI for evaluation, but they could not continue in less than a year. YouTube videos themselves have content attributes and long-tail attributes. If you use the idea of ​​running PPC ads, there will be some benefits when the channel is not mature, but it will not last long.

For Amazon sellers who want to become YouTube celebrities, it is recommended that they at least spend a small amount of effort to take over the brand's traffic on YouTube, or to participate in draws when new products are released. It would be great if a big V would take a notice of them occasionally.

The second is the Deal Forum, which is mainly an SD. This channel was still very good about 15 years ago. Many electronic product sellers could clear hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods in a month with SD alone. However, the issue of merchants shilling posts is still a gray area after all, and it all depends on the mood of the forum operator. Moreover, the forum has long been a mature and declining channel. In less than two years, the income of SD has become much worse. It has become difficult to post, the poster price has become higher, and the appetite of the spectators for discounts has become bigger and bigger. How can you ask for a like if it is not a loss-making price?

At first glance, there are already thousands of words and the traffic part has not been finished. In order to avoid it being too long, I will try to be as concise as possible for the rest.

The main problem with FB and Google ads is the cost and conversion rate. The cost is not lower than the CPC on the site and the conversion rate is far inferior to that on the site. It is really difficult. According to what I and several agents of Cheetah Feishu know, in the industry, not to mention Amazon, even independent sites are not running smoothly with FB ads. However, if both the product and optimization techniques are in place, it can still be effective. I know that many clothing sellers have made money. It is recommended that you give it a try if you have the ability. Becoming an affiliate on an independent site can also increase some ROI.

In general, the Internet as a whole has entered a stable period, and the days of lying down and reaping the benefits of new channels will hardly come again in the next 10 years. Most sellers' products do not have much premium, and it is difficult to maintain ROI by buying traffic. There are so many marketing tycoons, and there is a reason why they are still dealing with celebrities on SNS after several years.

My personal opinion is that, on the one hand, it is the old way of playing. If the demand is large, optimize as much as possible, such as crawling mailboxes, IP agents sending thousands of emails a day, and more mailboxes and more products. It is difficult for a celebrity to win the prize if he receives 1,000 emails a day, but what if 200 of them are yours? In short, let him be strong, and I will do my job. If the demand is small, don't do it yourself. Find professionals for SEO and soft articles. There are many people in India and Bangladesh who are happy to make $1,000 a month. How can you compare your time cost with them? Deal, celebrities can do it themselves or outsource it according to their needs. In short, save energy and make a small goal on the site first.

On the other hand, new ways of playing and new channels, if you have the ability, you should try more, hire someone with strong stress resistance to try various methods, pay more attention to the APP rankings, the labor cost is not high, and you can also become a deal celebrity. If you find a decent channel, find out a replicable routine (process, details, software assistance, recruitment) as soon as possible, and complete the rapid accumulation before this channel rots. You have to be like a teddy bear, and work hard when you catch the entrance!

Second level: Communication

The biggest difference between online marketing and offline marketing is the communication path. Offline, even if you come up with a creative product, service or marketing idea, it is difficult to get customers to mention your product twice after dinner. Have you ever seen someone tell others or call their relatives and friends about how good the things they bought are? Online, a simple Weibo lucky draw can make a lot of people willing to share your product or even link. An interesting idea or a moving story can make your product spread all over the Internet without spending a penny.

In terms of communication, I recommend two books. One is about creativity, "Going Viral", which covers the STEPPS principles: social currency, triggers, emotions, public, practical value, and stories. Taking one or two of them will give your creativity a reason to be shared. The other is about media, "Confessions of a Media Promoter: Uncovering the Truth Behind Marketing Myths", which uses every possible means to provide value to the media and let your creativity be spread by the media for free. No matter how fast a data cable charges, it won't make the news, but it's good news that a data cable can pull an airplane. A Bluetooth speaker that makes people love it is an advertisement, and a Bluetooth speaker that keeps apes around is news.

However, although communication sounds so profitable, in fact, the so-called popular news reports you can see now are mostly backed by professional teams and tens of millions of public relations fees. Many media celebrities rack their brains but still can't come up with a few 100,000+, so it is unrealistic for a third-party platform seller to expect to be prosperous. If you pay attention to the cases in the planning industry, such as socialbeta, you will find that even if the giants use real resources to make the cases, most of the influence is still very limited. The videos made with hundreds of thousands of dollars have only tens of thousands of views. How can the boss of Amazon bear this? If the industry leaders really want to build a long-term brand, they can build their own brand communication department, or cooperate with advertising companies to do a few cases to promote the brand or strategic products.

For small and medium-sized sellers, don’t think about making a big splash on the Internet. Instead, you should use the principles of communication in an interesting way during your daily marketing process to add as much communication value as possible to your products and marketing activities. For example, if you want customers to share your products online, what should you do? Put a card to tell customers that they can get a discount if they share? European and American consumers who don’t even use the code in front of them care about this? So what is the practice that conforms to the principles of communication? You can do it like Coca-Cola, which makes Coke bottles with names, or Maoduoli, which prints jokes on its packaging. You can also do it like Afu, which offers a buy one get 19 free sale, to appeal to users’ desire to show off.

In short, consciously apply communication theory to your products and marketing, even if it is just a slightly better idea when posting on Facebook, the cumulative effect will be twice the result with half the effort. Communication is not just about 1,000 traffic triggering a million exposures. If 10% of the 1,000 traffic is shared, it is also good to get tens of thousands of exposures.

The third level: brand

Brand is the most difficult part. You can’t just read Positioning and read Kotler and Ogilvy and come out and talk nonsense. I have basically no idea about this part, so I dare not talk nonsense. I will just talk about the idea of ​​building Amazon’s brand.

According to many traditional marketers, pure e-commerce does not have brands. The fact that Taobao brands were very popular a few years ago and now most of them are dead is an example. Not to mention Amazon, if a brand that will die without the existing channels is not considered a brand, then only Anker, which started purely on Amazon, can be considered a half-brand. But why should we care so much? Fake brands are fake brands. The theory is a thousand words, but I just want to ask, is it useful?

Of course it is useful. For sellers who are a little older, the sales of brand keywords can account for 10% to 30% in the Amazon advertising report. These keywords are often the best looking in the report. There is a concept on Taobao that sales depend on new customers, and profits depend on old customers. Many products with high repurchase rates can be marketed at a loss and make money by relying on old customers to repurchase. Even for electronic products, 20% of the sales of old customers is 200,000 US dollars of free traffic for a million-dollar seller per month. Even if the brand official website does nothing, it can still have a session of about 5% of sales.

In general, brands are free traffic for Amazon sellers, free orders, and a boost to conversion rates. Some can even create a little brand premium on platforms like Amazon . And such benefits are free. Even if you just come up with a crappy name, after selling tens of thousands of orders, you will have such brand power to a certain extent. If you have the right method, you can make a brand that sells 10,000 orders more powerful than a brand that sells millions of orders.

My personal understanding of the Amazon brand building formula is as follows. It’s just my personal opinion, and I hope it will inspire others to think about it.

Brand = brand name + logo + slogan + packaging + values . Let’s briefly talk about each part:

At least the brand name should be readable by foreigners. If you don’t know how to pronounce it, how can you remember it and spread it? It’s best to add some associative memory points to the name. In short, a brand that can be remembered at a glance is a good brand.

Logo, visual memory is human nature. What many domestic marketing experts talk about over and over again is actually the same thing as "Visual Hammer". If you don’t have time to read the book, just remember it. The logo should be beautiful and simple, and it is best to have a little entrepreneurship. Just like the brand name, the key is to be able to enter the consumer’s memory.

A slogan is a sentence that lets people know what you do. Even if you can't think of drinking Wanglaoji if you're afraid of getting a sore throat, you don't have the capital to say that you are America's Leading USB Charging Brand, but please don't say nonsense like great quality, great quality = nonsense. Customers can really filter out this nonsense subconsciously, say something different!

As for packaging, if you are still using crumpled cheap kraft paper, forget about building a brand. Clothes make the man. If you want to sell at Evian’s price, you must first make Evian’s packaging. Compared with other sellers, your packaging must be as dazzling as a firefly in the dark night to leave an impression on buyers among a pile of packages.

Values, It's the economy, stupid, values ​​are the biggest market in the world. Men love to cheat decent women into bed and persuade prostitutes to be good. Women love to talk about money with poor people and talk about feelings with rich people. Consumers complain about the quality of cheap goods and the price of high-end goods. Human nature is cheap, we should not only make him feel rational but also emotional. There are two G-spots for white leftists in Europe and America, one is environmental protection and the other is charity. If you buy a product from us, we will plant a sapling with your name on it in the desert, and for every pair of shoes sold, we will donate a pair to children without shoes. Let him feel that every purchase is a good deed, making the world a better place, and then remember your kindness.

In summary, traffic, communication, and brand are actually closely related. Communication requires traffic amplification, and traffic itself is one of the products of communication. Brand is the accumulation of creative communication and traffic exposure.

After reading the whole article, it is really a thankless job to market outside the website, and it is not as cost-effective as marketing inside the website. But putting all your eggs in one basket of Amazon will inevitably be controlled by others. JD.com dares to directly take over the sellers' backend and set discounts, and Tmall is even more prosperous and dying. Although Amazon may not be so shameless, sellers are the leeks of the platform, and destroying you has nothing to do with you. If you can market on the entire network, Amazon will make deals, the independent website will take over the traffic, SNS, EDM will activate CRM, and exposure will accumulate brand potential. One deal from outside the website is better than several deals on the website!

Finally, the topic is too big and too far-fetched. I have said a lot of nonsense but have not made it clear. I hope it can inspire you and make it worthwhile for me to stay alone in the office and write on Valentine's Day (actually I was waiting for the logistics to pick up the goods). I wrote it in a hurry. If there are any shortcomings, please correct me and give me advice.