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 experience to produce a frictionless experience for your customer. Include the batteries, include all the information that’s needed, include 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 home made. Get a proper graphic designer, who has worked for similar brands. And 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 on to 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 and 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.
