It seems like every week Amazon is announcing its expansion into new countries. While it might seem like a no-brainer to follow Amazon’s lead into a new territory, expansion is complicated. At the very least, it takes time and a strategy.
Even after the VAT, logistics, trademark applications, and translations are done, getting your products in front of the right audience can be tough. In most cases, brands have built both an on-Amazon and off-Amazon brand presence in their home country. However, expanding into a new country can often mean brand awareness is back down to zero.
The main challenge then becomes how can brands overcome a lack of brand or product awareness, a lack of in-market reviews, and no sales history in this new territory? The overly-simplified answer:
- Step 1: Build beautiful and informative content that converts
- Step 2: Create and execute a sound PPC launch strategy (which is what we’ll cover today).
Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day
One of the best traits to have during the expansion process is patience. With a new market, there is no such thing as overnight success.
Campaigns need time to stabilise and listings need time to build some organic sales history and reviews. While there are strategies that can help accelerate sales velocity, ramping up advertising campaigns is a gradual process.
Let’s Get Visible
Launch all campaign types (Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brand, Sponsored Brand Video and Sponsored Display) to ensure maximum visibility of the products in all the different placements available from Amazon. Use different types of targetings available – especially focus on Auto targeting and Non-Brand keywords and Competitor targeting – as these will help with scaling up the campaigns in a new market.
Keywords are King
Use the learnings from the home market and new market research to create keyword/ASIN targeting lists, but keep in mind that some keywords that perform well in the home marketplace might not perform well in the new market.
For example, Brand keywords might be performing well in the main market as Brand awareness has built up over the years, but that probably won’t translate to a market that has never heard of you.
Instead, try scaling up on the Non-Brand/Competitor keywords to get more ad placements and be visible to the customer. That is a fast track to growing the brand presence and increasing the likelihood of branded searches. You can then target additional competitors and broader categories via SP and SD ads to grow reach.
Back It With Budgets
Ensure that your campaign budgets are appropriately allocated for your campaigns so that they are served all day, every day.
Double down on what’s working by increasing the budget for well-performing campaigns and decreasing or pausing the budget for low-performing campaigns or lower priority campaigns.
Test and Learn
Trust the data and let it guide you. Regular bid changes for best & worst performing Keywords, ASINs & Categories should be done multiple times a week to achieve better campaign performance.
Similarly, increase bids for best-performing keywords, and add new relevant keywords & search terms that have converted. Don’t forget to negate targets that are not working well and you’ve got yourself a solid PPC strategy.
Be Flexible
In the initial few months, PPC will be an investment. Sales are important, but the data is just as valuable. Run experiments and trial different targeting options in the campaigns to understand what works for your products in the new market. Once the listings start getting organic rankings and reviews, and you optimise campaigns, the ROAS will start improving, and you can really focus on scaling up the account.
If new market expansion is in your future, but not quite sure how to make it happen, contact us today to see how Expert Edge can help make your expansion dreams come true.
