Marketing
14 November 2022
Amazon advertising strategies for 2023
Brand awareness, margins and keywords are key to making the most of a marketing budget, writes SalesDuo CEO Arjun Narayan.

Brand awareness, margins and keywords are key to making the most of a marketing budget, writes SalesDuo CEO Arjun Narayan.
A great approach to starting a business and earning money is by selling goods online, and Amazon is the best place to sell if you're going to do it anywhere. Fortunately, the Amazon market is vast and expanding rapidly as more and more people switch to online buying for virtually every kind of product.
It takes more than just doing what everyone else is doing and addressing the essentials to get exceptional results with Amazon. Following these tactics will place your brand in the best possible position for success. You’ll also improve brand recognition, generate more advertising revenue, and cut your Amazon advertising expenses. This will help you make the most out of your marketing budget.
Amazon is the world's leading retailer and has quietly risen to the top of the list of websites used for advertising. Why is this such a fantastic chance for sellers? The advertising for Sponsored Brands on Amazon is primarily responsible.
Sponsored Brands advertisements appear on the search results page of an Amazon product search in the first column of the header. As a result, sponsored advertisements have a huge impact.
Regardless of whether or not customers had looked for the intended goods, this prominent placement of this ad type has demonstrated a sales conversion rate of 18% for products put on the search results page. Combined with keyword phrases and exact-match keywords that showcase your product, these ads are excellent for boosting top-of-the-funnel brand awareness and product reach.
Understanding your Amazon products' margins may seem silly, but it is crucial in structuring your Amazon advertising efforts.
You can examine the unique selling data points for each SKU. Assessing whether your profit margins are sufficient to invest more money in advertising for that specific product using the data, which ranges from cost to promotion to manufacturing and selling costs.
Before you consider investing more in paid advertising, determine which items have the highest profit margin. The last thing you want to do is spend money on advertisements for an unprofitable product. By eliminating underperforming goods and allocating resources to more profitable ones, you can change your product lineup with the aid of this analysis.
The self-serve display advertising option Amazon offers is Amazon Sponsored Display Ads (formerly known as Amazon Product Display Ads). With the help of the Amazon Brand Registry, marketers may use this advertising technique to target and retarget customers both on and outside of Amazon with automatically created, product-focused ads.
Sponsored Display Ads, Sponsored Product Ads, and Sponsored Brand Ads have different target audiences, but Sponsored Display Ads are the most specific. Sponsored Display Ads target customers according to their buying preferences rather than using keywords. Amazon Sponsored Display Ads make use of simple, retail-focused controls that are adapted to the specifications of your brand and product.
While customers are perusing individual detail pages, Amazon's homepage and other third-party apps and websites, an Amazon display ad can help draw them in. According to Amazon, vendors who utilized Sponsored Display Ads had an average of two times as many impressions and one-half as many clicks on their listings.
Although you might have done keyword research when you first put up your product detail page, purchasing habits can now be different. Researching keywords is something you should do regularly, and you should make sure the terms are used throughout the product detail page. The title, description, and bullet points are crucial aspects of this.
This is more than just cramming your article with keywords. You still need to write to convert readers into customers. The algorithm may rank your product, but it is not purchased by it. Consumers are the ones who read and decide whether to buy. They need to be persuaded by your copy that your product is the best option.
Just like you, Amazon wants more sales and satisfied consumers. Although it can seem like it at times, it's not you versus Amazon. It's you vs. the alternatives on Amazon that a customer might pick over yours. Keep your strategy's emphasis on conversion and awareness. If you use the appropriate approach, Amazon should give you better rankings.
Arjun Narayan is the founder and CEO of SalesDuo, a full-service Amazon agency.
Amazon cut another 18,000 jobs in late 2022.
Amazon is set to undergo a second round of layoffs in the coming weeks, bringing the total number of employees let go over the last six months to 27,000.
The latest round of cuts will reduce the number of roles at the company by 9,000.
The layoffs will zero in on several of the fast-growing, high-margin divisions that grew to become forces in their industry verticals after Amazon built them out to provide services for its ecommerce platform. Affected areas will include advertising, the cloud computing division AWS, the streaming platform Twitch and people ops division People Experience and Technology (PXT). Amazon did not break down the number of layoffs in each division.
In advertising, the cuts come in a division that has become a success story for the company. Amazon revealed a $31 billion advertising business in early 2022, meaning the division was larger than the advertising arms of media giants like YouTube on its own. In the fourth quarter of 2022, Amazon posted 19% growth in advertising as the business reached $11.6 billion in revenue.
While the ecommerce division, known internally as Stores, was not exposed in this round, it marks the second time that PXT will face cuts.
In a company memo, CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the additional layoffs follow the conclusion of Amazon’s annual planning process. The goal of this process, Jassy said, was “to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences.”
“For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount,” Jassy wrote. “This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”
Jassy added that the additional round of cuts is expected to be completed by mid-to-late April. While companies often seek to avoid multiple rounds of layoffs in a short period of time, Jassy said the multipart process was a result of the planning calendar.
“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago,” Jassy wrote. “The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible.”
Alongside the job cuts, Amazon has also scaled back on many expansion projects. Most recently, the company said it will close eight of its cashierless, in-person Amazon Go convenience stores.
While tech layoffs were a top story of late 2022, the cuts are continuing into 2023 as ecommerce faces continued headwinds on discretionary spending from inflation, and investors continue to turn cautious in an atmosphere of interest rate hikes and falling post-pandemic stock prices.
Among major companies in ecommerce, Facebook parent Meta said last week that it will lay off an additional 10,000 workers beyond the previously announced reduction of 11,000 workers in 2022, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg dubbed 2023 the “year of efficiency.” Meanwhile, SMS and email marketing automation platform Klaviyo laid off 140 people across all divisions last week, TechCrunch reported.
The cuts come after tech companies saw their fortunes soar during the pandemic, leading to a hiring frenzy.
Yet tech is proving to be an anomaly in the current economy. The labor market as a whole hasn’t cooled off coming out of the pandemic. U.S. companies, including retailers, continue to add jobs at a sizable clip, and unemployment remains at historic lows.