Calling all mid-market Amazon brands! If you’ve established your presence on the marketplace but know there’s untapped potential in your category, read on…

E-commerce dominates today’s retail landscape, and at its head sits Amazon – a selling powerhouse offering unparalleled opportunities for brand growth. 

Here, we’ll dive into proven strategies, offer insider tips and share our own best practices to help mid-market brands like yours achieve exponential growth on the world’s largest online marketplace. 

Whether you’re looking to increase your market share, expand into new product lines or optimise your existing presence, this guide will equip you with the tools and knowledge you need to thrive in the competitive Amazon ecosystem. 

But where do we begin to unlock the immense growth potential that awaits your brand on Amazon?

Let’s start with strategy…

Know your Market

We promised you insights, so we’ll kick off with an Amazon biggie – want to know the real secret to growing on Amazon? 

It’s in understanding that marketplace success is essentially a game of strategy that sees you pitched against your competitors in a battle for market dominance.

It’s Risk, but for retail.

And designing a winning strategy always begins with knowledge.

As an expert Amazon Agency, the very first thing we do for all new client accounts is to dive deep into the competitive landscape within their brand category – and this is what you should do too*.

First, we drill into our real-time data to look at the key competitors, analysing their listings in detail to determine their market share and how it’s spread across their product offering.

We look at their strategies across all Amazon elements, from their content to their Amazon Ads; their fulfilment strategy to their customer reviews, and pinpoint what works well, and why – what the reasons are for their success.

And we identify the gaps – finding the key areas they could be doing better, and understanding how we can do things differently to gain competitive advantage.

Armed with this knowledge, we compile a breakdown of the target listings we need to take market share from, and we move to the next level – setting a strategy.

* Rather pass this in-depth work to the experts? Click here to speak to our specialist Amazon team

Set your Strategy

Now you’re clear about who you’re battling against, and which of their listings you’re planning to take on, you need a strong strategy that you can stick to.

We’ll go into our own strategy creation process in more detail below (see section; “The Venture Forge Growth Framework), but essentially, designing your strategy needs to be driven by:

  • Your ultimate objective/s for growth – range or market expansion, greater profitability?
  • Your current Amazon position and its strengths and weaknesses.
  • The opportunities and threats facing your growth.

Developed over our many years of helping brands to drive profits and growth on Amazon, our Growth Framework (read on…) is a brilliantly comprehensive approach that is easily adaptable to suit marketplace businesses in all categories.

Interested to learn more about how the Venture Forge Growth Framework can help drive success for your brand? Speak to the team today

Don’t overlook the Data

We’ve emphasised elsewhere just how critical it is to monitor accurate, real-time data when driving growth and profitability for your Amazon business.

For those who missed our recent expert webinar, we see data as absolutely crucial to your Amazon success because it enables you to stay agile and react fast to market changes – and nowhere is that more important than on Amazon, even given the frenetic pace of the entire e-comm world.

Yet, in our live poll conducted in our webinar, a whopping 67% of attendees confirmed that they were unable to pull an Amazon P&L in real-time – an astonishing figure given we’re talking about a channel that’s all about driving profit, not sales.

WATCH OUR ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

And we’re not talking about looking over historical figures on a monthly basis – to drive growth, you need to be looking at it daily and taking agile action off the back of your findings.

Learn more – including the top 10 KPIs we think all brands should improve – here

What data should you be looking at?

For a complete breakdown, head here…

… but more briefly, for a brand looking to scale and play the big competition at their own game, the key data points to consider are:

  • Product Rankings
  • Keyword Rankings
  • Market Share
  • ACOS & TACOS
  • And, most importantly – Profitability

And why do we say profitability is the most important data point?

It’s true that your growth strategy might sacrifice profitability for market share in the shorter term, but there’s no success to be had in low profit margins.

Amazon is a competitive world, and it’s easy to be lured by the siren song of rising sales figures.

But in the absence of good data, it’s as easy to find that your profit margins have been sucked dry by any number of things – from ill-informed pricing strategies to fulfilment charges and fees, ad costs and even fraud.

Here at Venture Forge, our experts have partnered with brilliant analysis platform Merchant Spring to give us the granular insights into our clients’ performance that helps us drive them to ever-greater heights.

As Merchant Spring’s Paul Sonneveld says, “it’s only in gaining a deep understanding of where you’re making money and where you’re losing margins that effective trading decisions are made.”

Read more about powering your profits with data here

Introducing the Venture Forge Growth Framework

Want a sneak peek at the secret recipe to our clients’ consistent marketplace success?

Meet the Venture Forge Growth Framework.

Honed over our many years on the Amazon frontlines (find out more), our guiding growth strategy is based on tried, tested and tweaked methods that are proven to deliver the goods for brands of all shapes and sizes.

On the left, our retail basics are the fundamental building blocks that a brand must get right to stand any chance of success on Amazon – exceptional listings, retail readiness and strong launch and velocity planning.

The middle circle covers our core growth tactics, brought into the fray once the foundations are steadied.

Here, we look at 5 key elements, each designed to move a brand to the next stage of growth:

  1. Increased traffic – focusing on establishing a solid baseline of organic traffic and improved organic rankings.
  2. Amazon Ads – PPC is a key tool in a brand’s arsenal, putting products in front of consumers at all stages of the funnel and boosting sales velocity. 
  3. Trade focus – the smart use of pricing and promotions, plus a keen handle on competitor response, to gain market share traction and build dominance.
  4. Stock Management – and not just because out of stocks can ruin months of hard work at a stroke! Forecasting, analysis and delivery supports and drives growing sales.
  5. Conversion optimisation – resting on a brand’s laurels is never an option. Our framework is supported with constant optimisation; continually measuring and adjusting listings for peak conversions performance and profit growth.

Then?

Then it gets really exciting.

Backed always with cost efficiency optimisation, we turn our clients outwards to look at further expansion; whether that’s new product innovations that capture more market share, making moves into international Amazon arenas – or both.

Love to learn more about how we could help your brand ace Amazon? Why our clients report 100% satisfaction? Or how we take the “meh” out of your marketplace, and replace it with magic?

We’d love to chat. Get in touch today