CMOs: 3 Tips to Increase your Market Share using Amazon

As a CMO, you're always trying to find the smartest way to increase market awareness of your brands. As a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC program, I have been researching Amazon and its power to really impact your market and have found two articles which really show its potential.

Skip McGrath, an accomplished seller, lists 20 steps for new sellers on Amazon. His tips start with the basics of setting up your account as a new seller all the way down to tips for using the keyword tool. You can check out Skip McGrath's website here.

 

Image via Wired.com

Armando Roggio, an editor at PracticalEcommerce, gives us 5 tips for increasing sales on Amazon by 50%. While this percentage might seem unattainable, what have you got to lose? Tips range from competing on price to automating your listings to save time. Check out the 5 tips here and browse around the other PracticalEcommerce articles, there's a lot to learn!


1. Register as a PRO and prosper! Setting a professional seller account is a no brainer. You're not representing a single person, you're likely representing a company. This is what all buyers will see so it should be your company name or something similar to it. What not as many people are familiar with is Amazon's Brand Registry program. Once you do this it gives only you (or your company) the power to edit details on a product's page. This will be come extremely important if there are many sellers selling on the same listing. 

2. Eyes on the competition. Spend some time getting lost on Amazon.com. Are your competitors on Amazon? See what they're selling and what they're pricing their products at. Are they bundling items? Are they listing items at MSRP or at a discount? Also, check to see if any of your products are currently being sold on Amazon, if they are, this will save time later on. But check to see who these sellers are, are they your distributors?

3. Pick your products! Not every product you carry is going to be a good fit for Amazon's Marketplace. It is often recommended that you don't waste your time selling anything that's less than $10 due to Amazon's fees. Also, it's important to remember Amazon's customers are mostly consumers. So if you're someone who primarily sells in B2B, you need to think if any of your potential customers will actually be looking for your product on Amazon. You also may want to stay away from complicated items that require a lot of customer hand holding. 

It’s time to take the leap and start selling on Amazon. So register a professional account, track the competition, and select your products to sell. These tips are just the tip of the iceberg. Amazon's Seller Central can be overwhelming and complicated at times but there’s so much potential from an increase in sales to an increase in exposure and an increase in new customers. Just go for it!

About the Author: Allison S. Fine has over 5 years of experience in business to business marketing. She specializes in digital marketing and Amazon Marketplace strategies. In 2014 she increased her company’s Amazon sales by 150% compared to the previous year. Allison has consulted with a number of companies on their Amazon strategies. She currently is the Marketing & Ecommerce Director at Neil Enterprises, Inc. and has a masters degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from Northwestern University. She is not affiliated or sponsored by Amazon or any Amazon marketplace companies mentioned. Allison is available for consulting and speaking engagements, please contact her via Twitter or LinkedIn for more information.

Learn To Target...Like CPG Does

As a graduate student in the Nortwestern Medill IMC program, I have been studying best target applications by social marketers. In the past decade, the lack of face-to-face interaction in the store had been a challenge for the consumer packaged goods (CPG) folks. But things started to change with the expansion of technology and tools. In the face of intensifying competition, digital channels will be critical in keeping your brands relevant to the consumer. To be specific, the CPG industry has been hit hard by the economy in recent years, and as a result, private labels are gaining more popularity. There is no better time than this for brands to start embracing social media as a form of trusted, earned media.

It is important to understand your competitors’ strategies (obviously leaning towards social and interactive now) in order to stay ahead of the pack. A research conducted by dunnhumby reveals that shoppers who already had a history of brand purchase are more effective in social media marketing. CPG firms would need to do more to take advantage of retail data by looking for shoppers with high frequency of purchase in their brands and locate them on social media platforms. Building authentic voices will help influence other consumers and eventually drive sales, creating a strong foundation for a profitable growth of the company.

The social marketing program will be heavily reliant on shopper marketing data. In addition to the frequency of purchase (most likely an indication of loyalty), CPG firms will need to target demographics profile while also  considering their customers’ social influence scores (e.g. Klout) in order to find the right advocates for the brand. My recommendations include:

1) Observe what people think about your product – finding what customers have been sharing online e.g. uploading product picture on Facebook wall, or writing reviews on the latest items they purchased on Amazon. This way, CPG marketers can monitor real-time user experiences and obtain feedbacks promptly. There is also a possibility of improving product design by finding what they might have missed out during product testing via observing discussions around the brand.

2) Improve in-store experience – letting some of the more socially-engaged customers do their job, for example, customers sharing experiences via their smartphones while also being able to research similar offerings online, or scanning the QR codes to deepen their purchase experience right in the aisle. 

3) Share what your customers care – posting the latest trends on social media. We can do extra research and analysis to find out what the consumers really want to stay ahead of the competition by, for example, observing the meals people prepared and shared on Pinterest to learn what they are looking for in the grocery stores in terms of convenience and creativity.

4) Activate the dialogue – creating a space where customers who have a history of purchases can tell their personal stories and share their expertise. We already know that word-of-mouth and personal recommendations are one of the biggest drivers to purchase in the CPG category.

Yet, the biggest mistake is to let the advocates run the program themselves. We need to provide guidelines and activities to keep these consumers engaged and motivated, hence the need to strike the right balance between over-monitoring and letting the social marketing program run itself.

Arisa Kulpiyavaja is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC program. She is a marketer with a long passion in the consumer packaged goods industry, specializing in branding and marketing analytics. You can reach Arisa on http://www.linkedin.com/in/arisakulpiyavaja or follow her @arisaimc.

5 Tips to Enhance Your Social Media Presence

After analyzing the presence of social media in more than 50 cooperate and non-profit organizations for my job at Northwestern Alumni Office, I feel a strong impulse to share my learning and give some advice. I know most people, no matter how much they are into the social media business, would not like to read almost each single post from 50 Facebook pages. My wild guess is…if you are not the person who writes every Facebook post or Twitter tweet of your company, you probably have never read all of these posts of your own business. OK. You can’t wait, can you? Here you go:

Post beautiful pictures about your products, animals who need to be adopted or your campus! Your posts are for humans, and humans are visual animals! (Don’t ask why Pinterest is getting popular anymore…) If you want your followers to know that your company has a new CSR initiative of helping children in the inner cities, please don’t post the first paragraph of your press release on your social media pages! Give your readers a picture of a smiling kid with an introduction of less than 140 characters (The Twitter rule applies to every social media platform). Trust me, the child’s smile would work much better than a bunch of rhetorical words.

Be personal. Again, Facebook is not somewhere to release your press release. It’s true that you represent an organization; it is also true that social media began with interpersonal communication. If you, as an organization, want to leverage social media magnetism, follow the rule and talk like a PERSON. If you are a fashion brand, “talk” like a young lady who tries to make herself beautiful everyday. If you are a college, “talk” about what college students care about: finals, commencement, or a new coffee shop where they would like to spend their afternoons.You’d better never talk like you are “offering” something great and your followers should pay for it with both money and gratitude. It’s you who should show gratitude for all the attention and followers you get. So, make your audience’s lives happier,prettier and easier with your posts.

Be consistent over your different social media platforms. I’ve seen organizations act like two totally different people on Facebook and Twitter: one is charming and intelligent, the other one is like a loser who has lost all  interest in life. Brands should always act like a woman in love, who tries to show the best side of her to her crush. So dress up for every occasion because you never know when your customers will be viewing your page. Don’t go out, or open your account on a new social media platform, if you are not ready to show your best side.

No more than 10 posts or tweets a day. Even if you are an attractive and sexy 20 something, do not walk around your secret crush’s window more than 10 times a day. It will lead to beauty fatigue and it only takes his one click on “unlike” or “unfollow”, and you are gone forever.  Less than 5 Facebook posts and 10 tweets is a good limit. After all, you don’t have so much information to share, do you? Too many posts or tweets are as annoying as spam emails.

Be a listener. There is a lot of advice telling you how to “talk” on social media platforms, but not how to “listen”.  If you go to some top brands’ Facebook or Twitter pages, you will find that they spent a lot of time answering questions or replying to posts from their followers. In a word, they listen. There was a famous case about how Chipotle avoided a PR disaster by quickly responding to a tweet about its failure to inform consumers about some of its ingredients. Don’t just re-tweet or “like” posts that mention you, please. When your followers bother to type your name in their posts, they don’t expect you to make them “famous” by retweeting their post; they did that to start a conversation with you, and you should feel grateful for their interest and efforts. If you are popular, like Starbucks, it may take you a long time to reply to every mention. So missing one or two may not matter too much for you. But it matters to that particular customer. 

     Some of my advice may not seem new to you; but this insight is generated from comprehensive research. As a Master’s student, who concentrates on Internet Marketing and Market Research, conclusion from data analysis is vital for me. I cannot accept people who just walk into the conference room and exclaim, “You know what? I am gonna trust my gut to initiate a new social media strategy and spend the 100,000 dollars!” Thanks to MedillIMC, who did a good job shape me from  a “free spirited” person to a data-driven, consumer centered marketing professional.

Katie Li is a current graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC marketing program, with 5 year work experience for Microsoft and Ogilvy in China. Katie decided to move to the U.S., when the death of her lifetime icon Michael Jackson revived her long-time dream of living in the U.S. Katie aims to find a job in the Internet Marketing and Global Marketing industries after graduation. She shares her learning, interest and passion towards her profession and life through @iamkatieli on Twitter and http://www.linkedin.com/in/katiewenli on LinkedIn. 

Can you Know your Social Media Influence on Sales?

 Yes! for Free! 

By Katie Li

A question has been asked and answered many times and on different occasions: Does social media help companies increase sales? No matter how many “yes” to this question social media gurus gave, C-suite executives and small business owners still have doubts, because they did not see the numbers of social-driven-sales with their own eyes. Social Analytics — the newly released functions of Google Analytics can answer our question with solid facts.

                

            Social media does work. Facebook or Pinterest, become the new company websites. Once your customers “like” your business on Facebook, you will have the opportunity to demonstrate yourself to them several times a day. There is no other way to get the same level of interest online. You know that customers would not search your company on Google and visit your company website several times a day.

Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." It is the time for social media to prove its value. Because the final goal of business is to make money and we need to see the numbers. Internet Marketing Guru Avinash Kaushik believes that social media should be about quantifying your efforts. Kaushik stresses that companies must determine what they did that ended in specific results, and the economic value that was created due to these efforts.

With one of its newly released functions of Google Analytics—Social Analytics—you can see the positive influence of social media on business sales with your own eyes. It allows you to see which social media platforms send you most visitors and most valuable visitors. You can identify high value networks and content, track on-site and off-site user interaction, and tie it all back to your bottom line revenue through goals and conversions. Here is how to use the three major functions:

• Sources: To identify networks and communities where people engage with your content. For example, in most web analytics reports I saw, Twitter generates very few visits to company websites. Visits through Pinterest, on the other hand, are growing rapidly.

• Social Visitors Flow: To compare traffic volumes and visitor traffic patterns through your site. This function can help you visualize your social visitor flow. For example, if you find your high bounce-rate homepage receives most of you social media visits, maybe you should change your strategy. When your fans click on a specific Facebook post, they expect to see the content they are interested in rather than your homepage.

• Conversions: To measure the value of social media by aligning social media with your on-site goals, conversions, and e-commerce transactions. This function can perfectly answer the question “Does social media help companies increase sales?”

Now, you have the power of analyzing your Social media influence on sales for free. Don’t forget to integrate the new social analytics and web analytics and SEO report together to find the optimized model of your marketing efforts. Social media is a tool, not a strategy. To engage customers and increase sales, you must integrate your campaigns using various channels and tell a comprehensive story.

Katie Li is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC marketing program and is specializing in web analytics and social media. Katie shares her learning and interest through @iamkatieli on Twitter and http://www.linkedin.com/in/katiewenli on LinkedIn. Katie is eager to talk to you.