What to Know About Using Amazon Marketing Services to Boost Your Sales

Amazon offers a very useful marketplace for anyone in the publishing industry. That said, leveraging this platform to its full potential involves understanding how to take advantage of Amazon Marketing Services (AMS). Like advertising on Facebook, taking the time to learn about selling on Amazon and how it can help your business is important.

Like Google AdWords, AMS charges pay-per-click fees to help sellers reach potential customers. Using it effectively can have a major impact on your book sales.

The following tips will help you get started.

Requirements

Amazon requires users to have one of the following before they can access AMS:

• A Vendor Central login

• An Advantage Central login

• A Vendor Express login

• An invitation to represent a vendor

• A Kindle Direct Publishing account

If you don’t yet have the right login or account, set one up before registering for the program.

First Steps

Once you’ve registered with AMS you can begin advertising your products. To do so, sign in to your account and find the “Advertising” link in the navigation toolbar. Click it, then click on “Create your first ad.”

However, it’s worth familiarizing yourself with the types of ads Amazon allows you to create before getting started on one.

Sponsored Product

This ad type is ideal if your goal is simply to boost sales. It allows vendors to choose a product, select keywords to ensure it appears in appropriate searches, and set a daily budget (the minimum is one dollar). Your sponsored product ad will then appear in searches. Best of all, Amazon only charges users for clicks their ads receive.

Headline Search

Headline Search ads are very similar in concept to Sponsored Product ads. They key difference is increased visibility. A Sponsored Product ad will appear on the bottom or right-hand side of a search results page. A Headline Search ad, on the other hand, will appear at the top of the page.

That said, increased visibility comes at an increased cost. The minimum budget for this type of ad is $100.

Product Display

Sponsored Product and Headline Search ads target customers via your chosen keywords. With Product Display ads, users can target customers based on interests by having their ads appear on pages for related items. The minimum budget for these ads is also $100.

Increase Sales with Amazon Marketing Services

Knowing how AMS works is important. However, once you understand the basics, it’s also important to learn how to leverage this service to actually increase sales. The following points explain how to maximize your return on investment:

• Opt for Manual Targeting: You have two essential options when targeting customers with ad: automatic or manual. With the automatic option, Amazon analyses your book and targets customers based on said analysis. However, if you’re willing to research which keywords other authors like you have used effectively, you’ll get better results with manual. This option lets you choose your own keywords when targeting customers.

• Test: There’s no universal answer to the question “Which type of ad is right for my book?” It varies on a case-by-case basis. Thus, it’s best to try different types of ads with low budgets first. Monitor the results for each to determine which is most effective. It’s also important to experiment with different keyword combinations.

• Promote a Series: Do several of your titles belong to the same overall series? If so, you can leverage one to boost the sales of the others. Promote the first title in the series and revise your product description to ensure readers clearly know it is one of several books. Ads that yield sales for the book you’re promoting will also increase sales of other books in the series as a result.

• Consider the Season: Seasonally-appropriate titles will often deliver better results if you promote them accordingly. For instance, if you’re considering running a campaign in October, and you have a book that relates to Halloween either directly (it takes place during the season) or indirectly (it touches on scary/supernatural topics), promoting that one instead of another title will boost your ROI.

Keep these best practices in mind as you get started with AMS. This service is valuable, but the value it offers will increase substantially if you know how to use it most effectively. These tips will help.

Ilan Nass is an experienced performance marketer with 7 years experience helping B2B and B2C companies grow. Spent 5 years running Taktical Digital, a paid social performance marketing agency. Skills include SEO, SEM, Content Marketing, Paid Social Ads and more

Why You Need to Incentivize Book Reviews

Becoming a successful author requires a difficult combination of writing skill, general resilience, good fortune, and calculated marketing. That last requirement is often tricky, even for ambitious authors, because it isn’t easy to get that deeply involved in the commercialization of something that means so much to you personally.

But something has to give, and if you want your books to be widely read, you need to be willing to view them as products with value — and thus as items suitable for review. Now inundated with options about what to read (all the classics of the past digitized, and new works from across the world available online), today’s readers simply can’t keep up with fresh releases, and need ways to narrow them down.

That narrowing is achieved through the collation of opinions from authorities (such as the New York Times site pictured above) and peers (anonymous reviewers). Whichever way you look at it, reviews are key, and you need to be incentivizing them. Here’s why, and how you can do it:

You Need Feedback To Optimize Positioning

Trying to find objective quality in a book isn’t an advisable task, because one person’s work of genius is another person’s waste of time. Artistic products aren’t suitable for generic valuation and packaging like businesses that sell direct are. Consequently, if a new author becomes discouraged due to their first book being slated, it isn’t necessarily a result of their poor writing: it could simply be a matter of incorrect placement and presentation.

This is another reason why you need to get as many reviews as you can. Through looking beyond the simple ratings and digging deeper into why people like or dislike your work, you can derive some useful inferences about how you’ve been marketing it. This is something that the Kadaxis Amazon Research Service is perfect for.

Sometimes, it even turns out that an author’s view of the strengths of their work is wildly inaccurate: they might have intended to write a comedy but somehow ended up writing a character study, yet persisted in presenting it as a comedy because they never consciously acknowledged the pivot.

In such a case, a book that has been struggling to gain any traction and gathering poor (and confused) reviews might just need some superficial alterations. Change the cover, change the blurb, change the listed genre (or discard the concept of genre entirely), and all of a sudden you have a hit. If you don’t stay aware of what readers think about your work, you’ll likely miss such opportunities.

How To Incentivize Book Reviews

To serve as compelling social proof, and to help authors and publishers decide how to best position any given book for success, reviews are vitally important — but books don’t inevitably gather reviews. With less popular works, you need to encourage them. Here’s how to do it:

• Enter your books into contests. It doesn’t matter whether you think you have any hope of winning. Simply submitting your books as candidates for contests can get you some free feedback from industry professionals who may well have some valuable ideas for how you can improve your writing or your presentation.

• Suggest your books for roundups. Bloggers love to do listicles, and something akin to “8 Horror Books to Try This Halloween” is an easy sell. If you reach out to sites that do such content and ask them to consider including your books, you’ll get some reads.

• Reach out to readers through social media. Assuming you’ve made some sales — or at least been able to distribute some copies somehow — you’ll have some readers out there in the online world. Unless each one of them has already provided a review (unlikely), you should be able to pick up some more through simply asking.

• Offer a small reward. If you’re really not getting anywhere in general and you just want to know where you’re going wrong, think about offering a minor reward for reviewing your work. You could provide free copies, or coupons of some kind, or even signed merchandise.

Any one of these methods can prove successful, so try everything applicable and you should be able to start expanding your range of reviews.

 Let’s briefly recap what we’ve looked at:

• You need reviews to persuade people that your work is worth their time.

• By reading reviews, you can identify opportunities to pivot your presentation.

• You can get reviews by pitching your books, consulting readers, and offering rewards.

Get started right away, and use the information you collect to achieve greater success.

Victoria Greene is an ecommerce marketing expert and freelance writer who loves reading through book reviews to get different perspectives on stories. You can read more of her work at her blog Victoria Ecommerce.

BISG 2017 Annual Meeting - Rights, Metadata and Marketing Panel

I participated in a panel on "Rights, Metadata and Marketing" at the recent BISG 2017 Annual Meeting, held at the Harvard Club in New York City. Here are my responses to the questions I was asked:

What is currently working for Kadaxis?

Our approach combines machine learning techniques with a deep knowledge of Amazon search. We take a digital marketing approach to keyword creation by understanding how readers search for books. As a result, our publisher clients are experiencing success by using our keywords, and have seen how the right keywords can directly lead to an increase in search visibility.

Creating keywords by hand isn't hard, creating keywords using algorithms also isn't particularly difficult, but creating keywords with an understanding of how a specific search engine (Amazon in our case) uses them can be challenging. This difference in platform optimization is key in creating keywords that have an impact.

What trends do you see in rights, metadata, and marketing?

A strong trend in moving away from the traditional gut instinct approach to around metadata content curation and marketing, to decisions backed by hard data. The most effective data engineering we've seen by publishers, are from those who iterate over metadata changes quickly, then use tools to measure the impact. As a result, their internal expertise and specialisation increases, leading to significant improvements to online visibility and sales.

What's not working as well, or where would you like help? What are the persistent problems you think the industry needs to solve?

Keywords have seen a significant increase in visibility for publishers this year, which has meant a significant increase in queries and interest in our service. But as with any new solution or technique, it's human nature to look for a silver bullet to solve a problem (in this case to boost search visibility and sales). Part of our engagement process for new clients is to set expectations that creating impactful keywords requires time and focus. While we can scale retail SEO expertise to work with tens of thousands of books at once, not every book will be boosted equally. Metadata optimization works best when using tools such as audience driven keyword analysis, but it can take iterating over the process to find what works best. A single metadata change is almost never the single piece of the puzzle for a meaningful increase in sales.

Platform optimization is key here also - many companies in the space have come and gone, making the same mistakes of extracting keywords from the content of the book, ignoring the audience and not optimizing for a platform - for us we focus on Amazon search. Creating keywords from a body of text isn't technically challenging, but creating keywords that have a high probability of working on a specific platform is our goal, which can be at odds with a gut instinct approach to keyword optimization.

We've also worked hard on helping to educate publishers on the importance of measuring keyword success - many publishers take the "set, forget and hope" approach to metadata optimization. Without a methodology in place to measure and understand how changes impact a book's performance, it's impossible to know if the changes made a difference or not, and how the process can be improve upon.

How can BISG help in these areas? What should we be thinking about for 2018 and beyond?

Publishers strengths have always been in identifying the content and creating a product that resonates with an audience. This is the traditional art, the skill that hasn't changed and I don't think it will or needs to. What has changed is how people find books - search and recommendation engines, social media, deals, and so forth. Audiences are reached using these newer systems through data and are the perfect target to apply data analysis techniques.

The better data a publisher has about an audience - the better it can target them.

Think about how other types of data might be shared and accessed and eventually monetized - beyond book metadata. The more you understand an audience, the more likely you are to reach them. Consider all the rich data about reader interests and behaviour that exists online - think book bloggers, email list owners, retailers, and so forth. If this data was captured and available to publishers in a standard format - data owners could monetize their data while publishers and other service providers could access powerful insight into audiences in a standard (potentially real-time) method at a low cost.

Creating a standard around how this data might be shared would be powerful and create significant value for audience data owners and consumers.
Ideally if such data were decentralized and made available on a blockchain, it could facilitate the next generation of market intelligence and discovery services in publishing.

If you could ask the companies represented by the people assembled here today for help in one area, what might that be?

Share with us how you're experimenting with data to understand who a readership is so we can understand and learn with you. Publishers often aren't given enough credit for being innovative. During my time in the industry, I've learnt an incredible amount from many smart publishers and always welcome the opportunity to understand how publishers are redefining marketing.