How to Build Your Online Brand on Amazon

Amazon is a competitive marketplace, and understanding your competition within it should be one of the first steps in building your brand. Indeed, it's Amazon's commitment to helping sellers understand their place in this vast marketplace that led to the recent announcement of "Brand Stats".

Combining historical data with up-to-date metrics about seller performance on Amazon renders large volumes of information that can help you gain insights into your customers' preferences and needs. This insight will shape how you design products, develop marketing messages tailored for different audiences, or observe what competitors are doing - all because you know what they're selling better than they do!

Here are some steps that we can take:

1. Understand What Your Brand is All About

Before you can start building a brand, you have to know what you’ll be creating. Jot down on a piece of paper the categories of products you sell, the demographics you’re trying to reach, and what you want to achieve (i.e. Google-like simplicity, Reddit-like activity, etc.)

2. Build in Small Blocks

Going back briefly to our Google reference, the search engine didn’t just suddenly become the behemoth that it is overnight. It took time to grow, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin had to add many small blocks along the way to tweak things into their ultimate vision.

You’ll want to take the same approach to building your brand. Focus first on creating something of quality, then be patient while it’ll grows (this can/will take years). Put your brand/logo on everything so that, in time, consumers will soon begin to associate it with your products.

3. Don’t Go to Bat with the Big Boys

It can be tempting to have visions of grandeur, of competing with the likes of the world’s biggest brands and products. But even if that happens (and we certainly won’t discourage you from trying to reach those heights), it’s going to take some serious time.

Instead, a better, smarter, and more efficient strategy is to look at the really popular ideas out there and make them your own.

Remember when Tickle-Me-Elmo was popular? There’d be almost no point in trying to create your own Elmo-like character, but a better option would have been to create your walking, jiggling, giggling doll under your own (brand) name. That way, there’s no competition against precisely what you’re doing, and it can give you a leg up in moving forward.

4. Get Other People to Spread Your Word

When you first started selling on Amazon, you bought from other suppliers, suppliers with their own brands. But now that you’ve started to create your own brand, it’s time to put the shoe on the other foot. Start soliciting small shops to see if they can carry your brand, say yes to anyone and everyone who wants to buy in bulk from you, and set up supplier-only specials to encourage business. And think a bit outside the box, too, in trying to establish relationships with brick-and-mortar shops instead of just solely looking online.

5. Start Tweaking Your Prices

Want to know one of the coolest things in dealing with your own brand? You get to cut out the middleman, which means more money left in your pocket. And while there are a ton of ways you can spend it, here’s a nifty one: undercutting your competition.

This technique works if your competitors are buying from existing brands and have to pay a wholesale fee. That way, you can happily skip over that step and pocket the money for yourself, then use it as a buffer to lower your prices to lure more customers to you.

If you're a brand-registered FBA seller, your brand may be a nice side hustle for you. Or it might have become a full-time job.

But you might want to go further. Can you make it into a multi-million dollar brand?

It's a stretch. You'll need to expand your team. You'll need to think of yourself as a CEO and marketing manager rather than as a small business owner. You'll need to make a big commitment. And you might need to smarten up in a few areas, too.

For instance, check your copywriting. Have you been stressing the features of the product instead of the benefits to the customer? Just changing this very basic factor can boost sales and keep them moving in the long term.

It's something that often happens with products that have a technical background, like dietary supplements, dehumidifiers, or home improvements. Suppose you are trying to sell a customer a total refit of all the windows in their home. Which do you think is going to work best; telling them about the special inert gas between three different layers of glass, one of which has particular properties to cut out ultraviolet something-or-other, or just saying "Keeps you warmer in winter and cooler in summer" and letting them ask how it works?

So far, this is basic marketing. But you need to go a step further and make sure you're stressing the benefits in your keywords as well. That's where the real winners differentiate themselves from the competition.

Look at your competitors' products and see what are the common difficulties using them. A coffee machine that you can't get spare filters for? A shadow frame that needs special hooks to attach it to the wall, but comes without them? Difficult assembly?

Make your product easy to use. Learn from all these difficult experiences to produce a frictionless experience for your customer. Include the batteries, include all the information that's needed, including the cables, hose, plugs and sockets, little fixings, and spares.

And then tell your customers that this is what you do. It's a really good way to do things.

Take a good look at your packaging. Set it against competitor products. Run an impromptu focus group, asking people to give you their immediate impressions, the words that a particular package makes them think of. They might say "Cheap," "Luxurious," "Professional," "Dated," or "Family brand"; now you need to think about whether those are the right words for your brand.

Is your design coherent and striking? Some packaging and logos even for quite large businesses look distinctively homemade. Get a proper graphic designer, who has worked for similar brands. Make sure your brief includes a really important specific; your Unique Selling Proposition, your key brand value, needs to feature on the packaging. That might be

• lasts four times longer!

• Preferred by 90% of cats! or

• No sugar or sweeteners!

But it needs to be on the pack, which means it will make it onto your main product photo and will grab people's attention.

Do these three things and you've made your products as good as they can be, and you've marketed them properly. Now you need to expand the brand, so look at the 'also bought' and 'frequently bought together' boxes for your product and your competitors' products. These are great opportunities for you to expand because the same customers are buying them at the same time as buying your products. You just have to develop your own branded version.

The answer may be obvious. Customers buying paintbrushes tend to buy paint at the same time. But they might also buy masking tape tarpaulins and protective gear, which are a bit less obvious.

Finally, keep adding new marketing outlets and channels. Do Amazon Live, do Amazon videos, do Facebook, do Instagram, do Twitter. Run your own website. Use an affiliate scheme, or a customer referral scheme, use influencers, and get in the press. Monitor what works, and do more of it.

And then just keep doing these things all day every day. That's the way multi-million dollar brands are built.