Marketing is crucial to getting good returns from your FBA business, but it can be incredibly time-consuming. Sometimes, you can’t seem to get the right information; sometimes you have to manage processes manually that could surely be automated, if only you had a way to do it.
Fear not, help is on its way. Numerous website and software programs can help you make your marketing more efficient and more profitable, and cut down the amount of time you waste on repetitive tasks.
Ahrefs is a cloud-based search engine optimization (SEO) tool that can help you in numerous ways. You can use it to research keywords, or to analyze your competitors’ use of keywords, and to look at their backlinks. You can also, if you have your own website, run an audit of your keywords and even check for broken links, missing HTML tags, and content quality.
If you’re using social media and blogs a lot, you can find guest blogging opportunities, see how often your competitors are publishing new content, and find the most popular content in your niche. These are really impressive functions and could enable you to steal a march on your competitors.
Ahrefs is really comprehensive and easy to use. But it’s quite costly, with plans starting at $89 a month.
Semrush does a similar job, tacking keyword research, SEO, and competitor analysis. But it goes even further with its capabilities; you can see your competitors’ ad copy, and determine their best ranked keywords.
However, it’s more costly than Ahrefs, and while its functionality is really impressive, it’s probably not going to be worthwhile unless you are really marketing-orientated and have a pretty big Amazon business. It’s probably more useful for agencies. It does, however, offer a free trial, so if you have the time to use it intensively you can find out whether it works for you.
If you use a lot of social media you’ll probably find you waste a lot of time doing copy and paste jobs on the same content for different sites. Managing multiple social media accounts can be a pain, but SocialBee lets you do it all from one console. You can schedule content, so you can work on your posts for the next month as a single project if that’s a better way for you to manage your time than doing them one by one.
SocialBee goes further than that, though. It can also show you figures on how your posts performed, and identify your top-performing posts. And it has a calendar which you can use to help synchronize your social media campaigns with your PPC advertising.
SocialBee delivers big bangs for minimal bucks at $19 a month, and has a 14 day free trial.
If you really aren’t on top of social media and PPC, then it might be better outsourcing. Shoelace can manage paid social ads, Google campaigns, and email marketing for its clients, and help you create campaigns without having an in-house ad team. They describe their approach as “full-funnel”, going all the way through to measuring conversions, and they care about branding, not just keywords. Definitely worth a thought if you have a great product but the world still doesn’t know your name.
Finally, let’s look at two basics you really shouldn’t be without. First of all, if you do any email marketing, Mailchimp is your go-to software. You can create mailing lists and email campaigns, use a template or design your own, automate and schedule mailings, and even run split tests to see which of two offers works better.
If you like the sound of this, you’ll love it when you find out the most basic level costs zero. Zip, zilch, nada. It has its limits, of course, but when you outgrow them you’ll hopefully be making more than enough profit to ante up the $12 or so for the next level.
And finally, Google analytics. There have been changes to the way it works, but it’s still free, it’s still good, and it’s still useful. You can track your website traffic, see where it’s coming from, and assess how your ads are working or whether that TikTok video really did boost your sales. You can even see the demographics of your web traffic, by age, gender, location, and interests. That gives you a whole load of information to refine your marketing and even your product strategy.