When selling physical products, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter, enable us to create amazingly engaging content to build up an army of fans for our brand. The challenge comes, when we start thinking about using paid traffic to amplify that content or more so, to drive them from the social platform direct to our Amazon listing – turning our social following into buyers.
One challenge with this approach is that Amazon doesn’t like direct traffic from social media platforms because they have their own advertising platform internally that they would like us to use more and spend money there. A further challenge is that when traffic arrives at the Amazon listing and then abandons (doesn’t buy), then this has a serious effect on the ranking of the listing.
If you have your products listed for sale in the marketplace of this online giant, you’ll know that just having your product listed doesn’t guarantee sales; the Kevin Costner “Field of Dreams” mentality, if you build it they will come, doesn’t fit here! We must optimise product listings , drive traffic and do a whole lot more than just list our products.
How can we utilise social media in the best possible way to drive up engagement for our brand and sales.
Ant Hodges, Marketing Consultant here at Optimizon, explains all in this short video:
In short, we can drive paid advertising from a platform such as Facebook to a third-party website that then refers through to our Amazon product listing.
Many people do this already with the use of third-party review websites and through articles and press releases. You can use Facebook advertising to send people to these websites, hoping that they will then go through to our Amazon listing and buy.
The biggest challenge we have with these third-party websites is that we cannot control the content ourselves. We would have to submit requests for information to be changed, for the coupon codes to be changed and for offers to be taken down that have expired.
So, what can you do?
Following the model that Ant explains, you could control third-party website pages outside of the social media platforms and outside of Amazon to promote your products and sell more. You can create ethical bribes in the form of offers and coupon codes to get people to part with maybe just their email address.
With this strategy in place, you will also build up a list of people that you can run email marketing campaigns to; to promote other products. And with the use of coupon codes for opt-ins, tracking specific sales from this marketing activity means that you can more accurately measure a return on investment (ROI).
It doesn’t stop there – if ninja tactics such as Facebook remarketing are added into this mix, you have an automated machine to engage with those in social media who are interested in your products. You captured their data to remarket to them and you drive up sales.
If you’d like to talk about the model and have this implemented into your business, contact the Optimizon on team on (01793) 602480 or click here to contact us
