To help all retailers prepare for the holiday rush, we’ll be kicking our blog into high gear, sharing several holiday preparation tips over the span of the next two months. We want to make sure you’re covered from all angles, so two tips per post — one on digital marketing and one on marketplaces — and two blogs per week. We’ll begin with the tips that take the most time to implement and end with the less complex. Let the prepping commence!
If done correctly, promoting your products across various digital channels is a strategic way to increase the exposure of your brands and products. These channels can include paid advertising on marketplaces like Amazon, as well as social integrations. Let’s explore tips, options and ideas for further promoting your products.
Marketplaces Tip #8: Advertise on Amazon
Maintaining your seller status and optimizing your listings only gets you so far in your Amazon placement. Sometimes you just need that extra boost. To assist, Amazon launched an advertising program called Amazon Sponsored Products, which allows you to drive more traffic to your Amazon listings.
Give their similar names, you may be wondering how Amazon Sponsored Products differ from Amazon Product Ads. We’ve put together the chart below to help explain, but the primary difference is that Sponsored Products take shoppers to the specific Amazon listing, while Product Ads take them off Amazon and onto your website.
Digital Marketing Tip #8: Socialize your products
Remember when everyone said you couldn’t measure ROI on social media? Well, that’s changing. Just recently, social media has taken great leaps into the world of conversions, with #AmazonCart and Pinterest Rich Pins leading the charge.
Amazon Cart
The hashtag #AmazonCart was unveiled earlier this year, and according to Dowitcher Designs, it’s currently used in around 5,000 tweets per day.
How it works: Someone posts an Amazon product on Twitter, you reply to that tweet with #AmazonCart and Amazon puts the product directly in your cart.
Here it is in action:
Amazon is doing its part to promote #AmazonCart with Vine videos and pictures all tagged with #AmazonCart.
Pinterest Rich Pins
Pinterest is one of the most compelling social channels for retailers, as it’s largely focused on consumer products. According to research from AddShoppers, Pinterest generated the greatest amount of social commerce revenue in 2013, accounting for a quarter of all social revenue.
Take advantage of Rich Pins to provide Pinterest users with valuable information about your products. With Rich Pins, retailers can:
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Include title, price, availability, brand name and logo
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Send price notifications to users who pinned a product, alerting them of a price drop
Social sharing icons
Regardless of where these social channels are in the quest for monetization, the advice here is to be ready. Add social sharing buttons to products on your website (shares convert more than twice as often as Likes). Prepare your feed for potential social sales, so you’ll be ready to go when various buy buttons are fully launched and adopted by consumers.
We always love hearing about your progress as we approach one of the busiest times of year, so feel free to update us in the comments below.
Be on the lookout for the next post in our holiday series. We’ll discuss strategies for uncovering your suppressed products on Amazon and using Google Merchant Promos!
Blog post by Jordan Nowlin, social media and blog manager, ChannelAdvisor
