In this guide you will learn the most efficient product launch strategy for Amazon FBA.
 
We’ll go over a checklist of things to cover in your launch, what promotions you have available in Amazon Seller Central and which are the best ones.
 
You’ll also learn how to use Facebook to boost your product launch and how other Social Media platforms can help.
product launch strategy

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Amazon FBA product launch checklist

Having an optimized private label product launch is going to make or break your sales numbers.

Following the correct steps outlined below and making sure that you ramp everything up every few days is going to guarantee that you will climb in Amazon’s rankings, increase your sales and have a healthy listing from the very beginning.

The product launch process will end up being costly, but you need to look at it as an investment. Creating a good foundation of sales from the beginning is very important, as it signals that your product is worthwhile to customers and to Amazon.

This will cause a snowballing effect which leads to more customers and sales. Everything you do now in the launch period is creating the foundation for your long term success.

First of all you need to make sure that your listing is complete and optimized and your products are in stock. Remember to keep your listing CLOSED until you actually start selling, otherwise you will incur penalties from Amazon algorithms for no sales.

The launch will be a combination of various approaches:

  • Paid advertising through Amazon PPC
  • External traffic from Facebook offers and promotions
  • Various Social Media campaigns

It’s important to keep things going at a steady pace for a few weeks. Start slow and every couple of days accelerate and increase the reach and ad budgets through all channels.

An important aspect is to keep things under constant watch, make sure your are properly indexed on all your keywords, and run daily reports to check how things are progressing.

The most important tactic used in the product launch relies on promotions within the Amazon platform itself: buy one get one free, various percentage discount coupons, Amazon giveaways.

Another good option to boost your launch is the Amazon Ad Platform known as Amazon PPC (Pay Per Click). There are various campaign types available that can be created based on your keywords. It’s important to start a campaign with a limited number of keywords and test from there to see what works and what doesn’t.

The other paid traffic option will be Facebook advertising. Based on the first Facebook interactions of people with your page, as well as test ads, you will be able to create look-alike audiences targeted specifically on people interested in your niche and product.

As with other forms of advertising, continuous testing and adapting is necessary for the best results.

Last but not least, make sure to distribute your promotions and discounts on all Social Media channels where you have a presence.

You can reach out to smaller influencers, the ones usually under 30.000 followers, to promote and test your product. You can do an unboxing on Youtube to showcase the packaging and the product and you can try to guest-post on blogs in your niche to get some attention.

You need to realize and accept that you will lose money for the first few weeks of your product launch.

That being said, make sure that you monitor everything closely in this time period. Your ranking on keywords, the performance of said keywords in your ad campaigns and overall how much you’re spending.

You’ll want to see which keywords and audiences are underperforming so you can either tweak them or remove them.

Amazon promotions for your private label product

There are multiple types of promotions to work with in Amazon’s Seller Central:

  • Buy One Get One Free: basically customers buy 2 of your products for the price of one. This can actually help with Amazon’s internal algorithm, since it will register more sales on your product and sends signals that your product is in high demand.
  • Various percentage discount coupons. Be careful here not to offer discounts more than 25% off, as reviews will be disqualified from being “verified”
  • Amazon Giveaways: offer free products as part of sweepstakes or promotions

Your main configuration panel will be in Seller Central – Advertising – Promotions – Manage Product Selection – Create New product selection. From here you can include your product ASIN for the promotion you want to create.

The most basic options are the Social Media Promo Code and Percentage Off discounts. These are simple percentage discounts you can offer on your product for a limited time.

Make sure that you set the promotions to be available only for one unit and one checkout or one redemption per customer. This will block hijackers from essentially buying off your entire stock at a discount.

It’s also a good idea to remove the “Detail Page Display Text” as various tools and scrappers on the web can pick this up and once again you might have hijackers flooding your page to empty your stock with fake accounts.

By far the most effective promotion is the Buy One Get One Free.

Each customer that buys two products will get one of them for free. Make sure that you set the offer for a group of items, since customers need to have at least two of them in their checkout, one redemption per customer and make the offer exclusive, so it doesn’t add up with other promotions you are running.

Don’t forget to remove the “Detail Page Display Text”.

Finally you have the Giveaway promotion. This basically gives out your products to random Amazon customers that have entered your Giveaway.

You have multiple options available here, like Sweepstakes, Random Instant Win, Lucky Number or First-come, First-served.

The most usual option for the giveaway is having people watch a Youtube video to be eligible to enter. After that, when the Giveaway period has ended you can announce the winners and perhaps send some promo codes to people that didn’t win.

You can keep track of your promotions within Seller Central in Reports – Fulfilment – Promotions.

Facebook page promotion in your Amazon FBA launch strategy

The first thing to keep in mind is that people see Facebook as a social environment. They don’t spend time on it because they have buying intent, unlike on Amazon, so it’s important to have a different approach when reaching out to potential customers.

Your goal should be to create engaging content through videos, ads and posts that can be shared and generate traffic, interest and buzz around your brand.

Outside traffic, especially from Facebook, ramps up your Amazon ranking very fast. It signals to the Amazon algorithms that you have a worthwhile product and they start sending more internal traffic to your listing.

Your listing will also be rated higher since you’re bringing in more people on the Amazon platform, where they are more likely to make additional purchases. The entire process has a cascading effect, and if done correctly it can boost you listing’s value substantially.

As with any form of paid advertising, always keep your eyes on performance reports to see how your ads are doing. Always calibrate your spend and your targets depending on the results you get. The longer a campaign runs, the more obvious it’s going to be what works and what doesn’t.

The topic of paid advertising is very broad, and we will cover it in more detail in a later chapter, but don’t expect to become an expert overnight and try not to get discouraged if the results are not amazing to begin with. Obviously, if you’re an experienced marketer your results will be better.

However, here are a few tips to get you started:

  • Try to focus on content that quickly captures people’s attention in the first couple of seconds
  • Use various mental triggers like scarcity, urgency, reciprocity (e.g. limited time sales)
  • Keep people engaged with your page and Brand by giving away free things: useful content, promotions with branded items, giveaways and contests etc.

To properly start your advertising on Facebook you will need a Facebook Business Manager account. This will offer you a platform to manage your entire Facebook strategy, including people in your business, ad campaigns, brand pages, Instagram accounts and many other options.

Once this is up and running you can start working on finding a good target audience for your product and start your first ad campaign.

From the Business Manager you can create a new Campaign – Ad Set. Here you have the option to segment your targeted audience in the “Detailed Targeting” field. You can filter this by your main keywords, first at a broad level, and then you can narrow this down to more closely match your product’s niche.

It’s in your best interest to narrow this down as close as possible to your audience, as it’ll be more likely to reach people interested in the topic and willing to buy your product. At the same time you won’t be wasting your ad budget on people who don’t have buying intent.

As a basis for a decent sized audience, try to target keywords within a total of about 200k – 2M people for the first campaign and trim down from there depending on your results.

Another option to create your first Facebook campaign is to use Audience Insights. Here you have some different options to segment your target audience (Sex, Age, Location) correlated with your keywords.

This will give you a better picture of your customer profile and you can use this to further narrow down your ads.

As your brand and community expand, you will also be able to create look-alike audiences: profiles of people similar to the ones that have already interacted with your Facebook page.

You’ll be able to target them with advertising as well, and naturally they’ll have a high chance to convert into buyers as they have similar interests to your current customers.

Google can also be a valuable tool in the audience search. By searching in Google for your keywords you can find various websites dedicated to your niche. Most of these should have Facebook pages that you can check out and use these in your ad campaigns as ways to narrow down your audiences.

The bigger the website or community, the higher the chance this will be available in your Campaign manager as a way to narrow the search.

You need to keep in mind that the purpose of your Facebook campaign is to send traffic to Amazon, increase the ranking of your listing, and boost your overall sales.

As a secondary objective, you are also gathering a brand following on social media and a community that you can leverage for future campaigns or product launches.

That being said, your first Facebook ad campaign will be focused on traffic being sent to your Amazon listing, using as a starting point the audience you’ve already identified.

Be careful to actually send traffic with buying intent to your listing, otherwise you will do more damage to yourself.

If people land on your page but don’t buy, they “bounce”, and go somewhere else. If this happens you are effectively signaling to Amazon that you don’t have a compelling enough offer for your customers and you will be dropped in ranking.

Start with a small budget of about 5$ per day in the first campaign, and adjust the amount and targets based on your results.

Most importantly, don’t be afraid to lose money in the beginning. Think of everything you’re doing now as an investment in your mid and long term organic growth.

Boost your launch campaign with social media platforms

There are multiple Social Media platforms that you can leverage for your brand and products.

Some are more efficient than others, depending on the niche you are in, but it’s generally a good idea to have an active presence in multiple channels, especially when launching a new product.

Be aware though that you won’t be able to target your audience precisely on all platforms, so you might send people to your listing that don’t necessarily have buying intent and might bounce.

The risk is that Amazon picks this up as a sign that your offer is not compelling enough and you could lose ranking.

If you want to create beautiful and engaging posts for your social media accounts, I highly recommend Stencil. It will allow you to quickly create beautiful social media graphics using a simple but powerful design tool.

To keep track of everything going on in your social media presence, look no further than Social Bee. Social Bee is a social media management tool that allows you to schedule posts, re-use content, keep track of your engagement and automate a lot of the activity related to your social media presence.

That being said, here are some platforms you can leverage in your product launch, along with some tips and tricks for each:

  • Twitter: a platform known mainly for news and short snippets of information that has decent options for paid advertising. You can follow the detailed Twitter product launch guide on the official website.
  • Pinterest: mostly focused on visual content, especially images and infographics. Learn how to create ad campaigns with Pinterest on their official guide.
  • Youtube: the biggest video platform on the web. The best way to take advantage of this is to create videos showcasing your product, posting an unboxing experience, or uploading helpful videos that teach and guide people about how to use your product.
  • Reddit: a forum / discussion board segmented by interests and topics called subreddits. If your niche is present on Reddit you can contribute to the discussions with relevant information and draw awareness around your brand. You can also use a few subreddits to promote your discounts, especially when launching your product: r/coupons, r/freebies, r/couponing, r/deals, r/studentdiscounts, r/discountedproducts.
  • Niche Forums: use Google to find relevant websites and forums. However, try not to spam your offers or promotions. Try to integrate within the community, provide value without asking anything back, and in time people will start to trust your authority and will become more open to your offers.

Actionable steps: Amazon FBA private label product launch strategy

  1. Create promotions and discounts within Amazon.
  2. Take advantage of the Buy One Get One Free (BOGO) promotion, as it provides the greatest sales velocity at the start
  3. Look for audiences on Facebook related to your niche and target them with ads.
  4. Get traffic with buying intent to your Amazon listing to boost your sales and your ranking with Amazon’s algorithms
  5. Join as many Social Media platforms that are relevant to your product.
  6. Try to get a following, integrate into the community and once you launch, reach out to them to convert them into buyers

Learn more in Chapter 6