A full perspective on Amazon off-site promotion (from many years of promotion experience)

1. When doing promotions, the discount price is getting higher and higher, and the effect is getting more and more unstable, sometimes good and sometimes bad. I keep trying various service providers. I really want to find a channel that can generate stable orders, but I can't find one.

2. The prices quoted by various KOLs are getting higher and higher. I finally convinced my boss to spend a lot of money to place a few KOLs, but found that there were no orders.

If you have the above confusion, then you must not miss this article. Today I will not discuss this topic from the perspective of a service provider, but would like to talk to you from the perspective of a person who has experienced it.

01 Why is it becoming increasingly difficult to promote products outside of Amazon ?

From the perspective of the traffic receiving platform for promotion positions, it can be divided into several categories:

Third-party sales platform off-site promotion - not only includes Amazon off-site promotion, but also others such as AliExpress, EBAV, etc. As long as they are stationed on third-party sales platforms and need to generate traffic from outside the site, they are all included in this field.

Independent station off-site promotion - self-operated independent station, which is also a very hot area of ​​DTC brand independent station promotion.

Regional market promotion - this team is usually set up by more successful overseas brands. It mainly serves the regional market promotion of the distribution department's customers. Many times it involves local online sales platforms + offline store exhibitions and other promotions. I have always felt that Amazon's off-site promotion is actually a false proposition, because it does not conform to the basic logic of overseas marketing promotion. Therefore, this position is awkward to do and the sense of accomplishment is relatively low.

02 The reasons why Amazon’s off-site promotion is becoming increasingly difficult are mainly the following:

Customer data gap:

The lifeblood of retail is repeat purchases. In the early days, Amazon also provided sellers’ phone numbers. We could correct these phone numbers into a standard format and upload them to the Facebook advertising backend to push targeted ads to Amazon sellers who purchased our products. We could also analyze data to identify users with high frequency of repeat purchases and contact customers through WhatsApp. Now, not only are phone numbers blocked, but even adding card information to the product to guide users to contact us is strictly prohibited. This means that no matter how big our scale on Amazon is, we have to continuously attract new customers and cannot conduct repeat purchase marketing. From a B2C business model perspective, Amazon’s off-site promotion seems a bit of a false proposition. You can only continuously attract new customers and cannot form a closed loop of users. Your consumer portrait of users who purchase your products on the Amazon platform is very vague.

Channel traffic costs are getting more expensive:

Among these major traffic entrances, the largest amount used for Amazon's off-site promotion is channel traffic, including media, blogs, Youtube, deal sites, groups, social influencers, etc. In the early days, the promotion costs of these channels were relatively low. As more and more sellers entered the market in the later stages, the traffic of the channels themselves increased, resulting in channel promotion becoming not only more and more expensive, but also high-quality channels becoming more picky about products. There is no other reason, because supply cannot meet demand, and the final choice is firmly in the hands of the channels.

Too much pursuit of ROL and neglect of long-term promotion strategy investment:

Now I feel that over-emphasizing RO and not investing in brand assets will make it increasingly difficult to go global in the next round of reshuffles. Sometimes I feel very entangled. Without investing in brand assets, it is difficult to maximize the promotion effect. I can only do some very simple discount promotions, and then make coupons together. I don’t know when I can see the return of Lan, and I feel more and more uncertain.

Not all products are suitable for systematic off-site promotion on Amazon:

Many people have a misunderstanding that it is difficult to promote within the site, and they want to get orders from outside the site right away. In fact, this is not very realistic. Competition outside the site is often more intense than within the site. The traffic within Amazon is all from a precise group of Amazon sellers. If the traffic within the site cannot be converted, and you want to convert the general traffic within the site, then this can only be achieved by providing very competitive discounted prices to promotional channels.

Here we would like to put forward a point of view. For most daily necessities and products with a short user purchase decision path, most of them cannot be promoted systematically outside the Amazon site. Generally, they can only carry out relatively simple and crude promotions. A very simple judgment is that if you contact celebrities for evaluations, basically no one will pay attention to you, which means that your product itself has no characteristics and is not suitable for brand evaluation and promotion . Therefore, for this group of sellers, our suggestion is to first make ordinary products as perfect as possible, do a good job of on-site optimization, maximize the conversion of accurate on-site traffic, and then assist with off-site promotions . This is a more practical and reliable approach.

Amazon off-site promotion is a module of brand promotion:

For sellers whose products are relatively high in barriers to entry and whose products are relatively strong, even if they sell well on the site, we recommend that they consciously make strategic and long-term investments in brand promotion . We cannot simply treat the Amazon platform as a cash flow platform without investing any brand influence assets, as this will easily lead to false fat.

We cannot simply promote for the sake of promotion, but rather regard Amazon off-site promotion as one of the links in brand promotion. Therefore, we must realize that some promotion actions are for short-term orders, some are for enhancing brand influence, and some are for maximizing the promotion effect. If we simply pursue ROI, then what we can do is relatively simple, generally focusing on promotional traffic in channel traffic. We call this "single-dimensional Amazon off-site promotion."

Create "three online axes" for your own brand:

If we want to promote a product, and classify all the "bullets" we can directly use into major categories, we will find that they are mainly divided into: channel traffic system, social matrix system, and old customer system. We internally call them the "three axes of brand online promotion." These are directly used by platform sellers, and they accumulate with compound interest over time and investment. The author believes that all overseas companies committed to branding, no matter which sales platform they use as the focus of their operations, should consciously build these three systems. Only when these three systems are truly built can they survive better in the subsequent overseas competition environment where the cost of acquiring traffic is getting higher and higher.