7 Common Objections to Amazon Advertising (And How to Respond to Them)
Have you heard about the exciting world of Amazon Advertising? Ready to take your company forward into the many dynamic opportunities for intercepting your target customers within the platform of the world’s largest online retailer?
Perhaps you’re preparing a proposal for diving in head-first with a large budget and high expectations for success. If this describes your situation, let us warn you – BRACE FOR IMPACT! You’re about to face resistance. Your enthusiasm is going to be met with strong opposition.
You see nothing but blue ocean ahead, but others will see red flags and will do their best to steer the ship in another direction.
We’ve been there and we’d like to help by sharing some of our insights from facing resistance at companies in which we’ve been employed and within companies that have hired us to manage their Amazon advertising (one of our favorite specialties!).
Here are the 7 most common objections that have been raised when companies consider their first round of Amazon Ads and/or when they are discussing scaling up their investments in existing Amazon Ads.
You may not face all 7 of these arguments, but you will likely experience a combination of them. We hope this article helps you prepare your offense and defense as you build a case for growth through Amazon Advertising.
Objection #1: A General Dislike for Amazon
Often, within many companies, a dark cloud of negativity and resentment overwhelms the boardroom whenever Amazon comes up in conversation.
Amazon’s quick rise to power came at the expense of many companies and individuals. When they dominated a market, they often decimated the entire sector. And this left deep scars that will not be soon forgotten. Friends lost their jobs and their fortunes. Entire chains vanished from existence. People have suffered because of the success of this online giant.
Someone in your executive boardroom considers Amazon a ruthless enemy and a constant threat. They will do everything in their power to dampen your enthusiasm and sabotage any plans for a deeper investment in Amazon Advertising.
Would you like a clever quip or a killer one-liner to put them in their place so they don’t hold your company back from progress?
We don’t have one. And we don’t recommend this approach. On the contrary, our advice is to be genuinely empathetic and understanding about the pain they feel. Don’t dismiss it. Acknowledge it. Respect it.
Start your proposal by addressing the orange elephant in the room and respectfully ask for permission to lay out a thorough case for taking your business forward via this ad channel.
Objection #2: Amazon Already Gets Too Much Market Share
If you can move past the general feelings of hostility towards Amazon within your organization, one of the first specific objections you will hear is that Amazon gets too much market share. “Channel conflict” is almost certain to come up during your proposal - most likely from the VP of Sales.
“Why would we invest our energy, let alone our money, supporting a retailer that is already dominating? Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart, and Target want us to focus on increasing foot traffic in their stores and, if we are going to support any retailer, it should be one of them. That’s our best hope of balancing power in this retail landscape!”
Again, there’s a good point here and it’s one that shouldn’t be quickly dismissed. Your organization should invest in deepening its partnerships with key retailers and it would be wise to schedule another board meeting dedicated to finding creative ways to do just that!
Support those initiatives with as much gusto and enthusiasm as you want the board members to support your proposal for growth through Amazon Advertising.
Don’t dismiss it, but try to table it for a future meeting. That’s another matter entirely. No other retailer has the opportunities to engage customers via advertising like Amazon. So, we recommend not making it an “either/or” but a “both/and.”
Objection #3: Amazon Already Gets Too Much of Our Money
The next objection that may get raised - this time from the CFO - is that Amazon already gets too much of your company’s money. Between the aggressive discounts that Amazon “negotiated” with your organization, various additional fees, and the required co-op that is part of the relationship, someone is likely to say…
“Enough is enough – we can’t give them any more of our money!”
Again, a valid point. It would be wise to anticipate this. Many executive board members will be thinking it, and someone is probably going to mention it, expecting that the case will be closed.
Our recommendation? Be gracious and understanding, but ask for the opportunity to lay out a detailed case before it is dismissed.
The reality is that Amazon Ads can be like a cash machine. The more you put in, the more it gives back. It makes you money more than it costs you money.
Those who haven’t experienced the radical results of an effective Amazon Ad strategy are usually skeptical of its potential, but every one of the partners that we manage ads for has increased their investments over time (some more quickly than others) because of its unprecedented results!
Objection #4: We Can’t Trust Amazon with Our Data
The fourth objection not only challenges a case for investing in Amazon Advertising, but it also keeps some companies from having a retail partnership with Amazon at all.
We’ve heard this concern from businesses in a variety of sectors. The underlying fear is that Amazon closely monitors successful product sales, gathers data about consumer search terms and search volume, and then later steals your business out from under you by rolling out its own Amazon-branded versions of your product.
Is this argument pure paranoia? It may feel that way to some, but this scenario has happened and is happening. Amazon started in the book sector (one of my personal areas of specialty), and after years of gathering and interpreting customer behavior and search term volume related to the book industry, they entered the book publishing sector with vigor.
Amazon now has more than a dozen publishing imprints and they have successfully acquired bestselling authors like Dean Koontz and Patricia Cornwell.
This objection impacts Amazon Advertising when people consider how Amazon will gather and leverage all of the additional keywords, search volume, and sales history that will come from your company’s investment in Amazon Advertising.
Just like the other objections, this one has merit. When you roll out a robust campaign strategy within Amazon Advertising, you will intercept more customer searches, your products will be discovered and purchased more frequently, and there will be more sales history for Amazon to trace back to terms that could inform their own product development initiatives.
What is the best answer to this objection? You could explain that they are already gleaning this data anyway from your competitors. What they would learn from your ads may not speed up the timeline of Amazon’s potential threat of entering your sector.
Or you could inspire your executives by using the potential threat to motivate your company to keep creating best-in-class products with quality that Amazon won’t be able to compete with.
Objection #5: We Need to Focus on Direct-to-Consumer Sales on Our Own Site
The next objection will likely come from the VP of Direct-to-Consumer Sales.
“Instead of sending people to Amazon where we give them half of everything they sell [the actual % varies] and then they own the relationship with our customers, we should invest in ads that drive people to our website where we get to keep all of the revenue and the relationships.”
The person raising this objection may be joined by the VP of Marketing who proposes an alternative investment in advertising within Google Shopping, Google Search, and Google Display.
They might suggest more testing within the Catalog and Shop formats of ads within Facebook. Microsoft/Bing ads, native ads, and a variety of other online ad networks may come up in this conversation as ways to increase direct traffic, direct sales, and direct relationships with target consumers.
Are you starting to see a pattern with our rebuttals to these objections? Our recommendation, again, is to agree with their passion for direct sales. Yes, we should build our direct-to-consumer sales channel. That’s important. It’s vital actually. But, right now, there is a massive opportunity to reach thousands of our customers who prefer to purchase from Amazon.
Studies have shown that as many as 74% of U.S. consumers start their product searches on Amazon. Advertising on Google is important and recommended, but to invest there alone means you’re missing the opportunity to reach up to 74% of your customers who start their search on Amazon and prefer to complete their purchase there.
Another response to this objection could be to discuss the quality of your product and the creativity of your packaging. If your product is exceptional, many customers who purchase it on Amazon will look up your website to learn more. That’s your opportunity to capture a lead and own the relationship.
But your packaging needs to clearly display your brand and communicate something compelling about your brand’s story. Brainstorm as a team how you can get someone who buys your product on Amazon to visit your site afterward.
Field Notes is a best-in-class example! Buy a $10 pack of 3 notebooks just to walk through their unboxing experience and see how they use packaging to tell a clever and compelling story that drives you to their site and makes you want to subscribe to their email list (no, they’re not a sponsor).
One creative method is to have a lifetime warranty offer printed on the packaging itself or on a card inserted into the package.
Invite them to register their product on your site to enroll in the warranty. And have a clear disclaimer printed alongside this offer (and repeated on the landing page with an opt-in box) which discloses that by entering their email address, they’re also agreeing to receive updates about your products and promotions (don’t forget that part!).
For this to work effectively, your landing page needs to have a good user experience and it needs to have personality. It’s not just a warranty registration page! It’s the gateway to a direct relationship with a new customer who may become an advocate that refers others to your products and your site.
Objection #6: We Prefer Other Ad Channels
The 6th objection will likely come from a Senior Director of Marketing who spent the last 3 years building a team of experts in Facebook and Google advertising. Every year they raise the bar by breaking company records for online engagement.
It took years to recruit, train, and onboard everyone to the point of excellence they are currently operating at, and simply put, your proposal threatens the future of this team!
Nothing raises the temperature in a boardroom like a vigilant leader who feels that they and their entire team are in danger. That’s natural and understandable, especially if you’re proposing that an expert outside agency should be entrusted with managing this new territory for you.
Somehow, you will need to diffuse this tension by respectfully and carefully demonstrating some stats. There are industry averages for various metrics all over the internet. Find the most recent and relevant benchmarks for your business sector and then compare them to your company’s actual stats and Amazon’s average stats.
Google “average benchmarks for [business sector]”…
CPM (Cost per thousand Impressions)
CVR (Conversion Rate)
CTR (Click Through Rate)
ACOS (Average Cost of Sale)
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
Hopefully, you can give props to the marketing team for outperforming the average benchmarks for your sector, but it is unlikely that even their best campaigns will outperform the averages within Amazon’s ad platform.
For many of these metrics, Amazon’s averages will be 10x better than any other ad channel. This is why we have chosen as an agency to make Amazon Advertising one of our top specialties. It works and we believe in it because we’ve measured the results and have proven that it far outperforms other ad channels.
Amazon Ads can bring immediate, radical, and sustainable growth with the right strategy, ad setup, tools, and an obsession over optimization.
Another major differentiator between Amazon and Facebook is what we call interruption vs. interception marketing. Facebook is an interruption ad channel where you cross paths with a user who is browsing their news feed for entertainment. Your best hope is to grab their eye, stop their thumb from flipping past your ad, and distract them long enough to start a relationship that can lead to a sale.
Amazon, however, intercepts customers who are in a buying mindset while they are looking for products that you offer. It’s difficult to overstate the advantage of intercepting customers at the point of sale.
Facebook has a purpose, and we recommend it and manage Facebook ads for many of our partners, but if you have a product to sell on Amazon, it is an important place to intercept customers who are ready to buy.
Objection #7: We Already Show Up in Search Results for Our Brand, Products, and Relevant Terms on Amazon
We saved the best objection for last. This is the most common one, and it would be wise to prepare a thorough response. This objection is ALWAYS raised and it often comes from the CEO.
“We don’t need to advertise on Amazon because we already appear in relevant search results. When people shop for our category of products, we already show up. When people search for our brand or any of our popular families of products, we already show up. Why would we waste our money on ads that pay for clicks we would get anyway?”
Remember who you’re talking to now – probably the CEO – so tread lightly. This is another legitimate concern, and the answers are complex enough to warrant an entire article dedicated to it. Please check it out after you’re finished with this one. Here are a few points gleaned from that article.
It’s vital to be in the top 3 search results for all relevant searches!
Jungle Scout’s survey revealed that 73% of Amazon shoppers click on the top listing in search results, 14% on the second, and 5% on the third. If you’re not showing up in the top 3 spots, or what some call “above the fold,” the product in your company’s listing has about the same chance of being discovered as one of your products that is on the bottom shelf in the last aisle of a darkened corner of a small store.
But even if you are ranking high in search results, competitors can bid on your brand name and your product titles so that they bump you down the fold. That leads us to the next point.
Amazon Ads not only let you promote your brand, but they also enable you protect it!
You can leverage Amazon Ads to ensure that your products stay above the fold for all relevant searches. It is an established best practice to bid on your brand name and your product titles.
Thankfully, Amazon’s ad platform operates similarly to Google’s PPC model where relevance and authority are rewarded with more impressions and lower bids for clicks. Sometimes you can win the bid for your own brand name for half or even a tenth of what the competition has to pay to appear in search results for your brand (often, as little as ten cents).
Why wouldn’t you pay 10% of what the competition has to pay, just to keep them from stealing your customers? It appears wasteful to many people, but it is actually a best practice and when managed properly, only 15-25% of your ad dollars will need to be invested there.
Add to this that you can and should structure your ad strategy to include the promotion of Amazon Stores via Sponsored Brand ads so that when someone searches for your brand and clicks on an ad, they enter a virtual store where you can tell more of your brand’s story while they discover and purchase multiple products instead of just the one they were looking for.
[Note: If you’re not familiar with Amazon Stores or the Sponsored Brand ad format, don’t get lost in the details. We are writing other articles to explain those things and if you need help creating an Amazon Store, we can help with that too.]
There are many other ways to intercept customers where your products definitely aren’t currently showing up in the top 3 spots.
We have another article dedicated to all of the options for intercepting your target customers on Amazon, but the main takeaway is that radical, exponential growth comes from finding all of those ad placements you’re not currently appearing in.
There are dozens of strategies for intercepting your customers within Amazon. The challenge is knowing which ones to use and how to set them up with all the right settings so that you get the best ROI.
This is where an experienced, certified Amazon Advertising Partner (like us at Amplify Marketing Services) can come alongside you and your internal teams to manage your campaigns under your direction.
There’s a significant advantage to using an agency. We’re not for everyone, but we can help you avoid wasted investments and we can steer you toward profitable ad strategies that you wouldn’t have on your radar.
Amazon is a complicated, powerful, intimidating, and ever-changing ad channel. The cost of hiring an experienced agency is easily absorbed by the exponential lift in incremental revenue that comes from their expertise.
Conclusion
If this article can help reinforce your case, feel free to forward it to those who are raising objections. And let us know if you have any questions or if you’d like to discuss a partnership with Amplify.
Good luck. We’re pulling for you!
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