What Is An Amazon Agent? & When Should I Hire (Or Avoid) Amazon Marketing Agencies?
If you’re wondering about an Amazon Agent or Amazon Marketing agency, you are in the right place!
I’m guessing you already know that Amazon has 2.4 billion shoppers and 1.6 billion in sales every day!
And, you’ve probably already made the connection that if your business needs new customers, this might be the fastest way to get them.
But, what about hiring that dreaded Amazon agency? Could adding a dedicated Amazon Agent really be the key to your success?
In this post, we’ll explore 10 reasons why your business may want to hire an Amazon marketing agency, the 5 reasons why you may not want to hire one, and then we will talk about the Anti-Agency.
Table of Contents
What is an Amazon Agent?
An amazon agent is a person (a marketing manager) or an Amazon marketing services team that manages your Amazon account on your behalf. More than amazon agents, often they are called an Amazon Marketing Agency or an Amazon Advertising Agency.
10 Reasons You May Want To Hire An Amazon Agency
Let’s dive into some reasons you may consider adding an Amazon agency partner to your team.
Expertise and Experience
Amazon marketing agencies specialize in helping businesses maximize their sales on the platform. And, if they are established, they have years of Amazon-specific knowledge, expertise, and experience that can not only generate effective marketing strategies to increase your visibility, drive traffic to your product listings, and ultimately boost your sales – but also keep you out of trouble by avoiding silly mistakes.
Time and Cost Savings
Managing Amazon marketing is time-consuming and costly, especially if you’re not experienced in this area. By outsourcing this task to an Amazon marketing agency, you can save time and money, allowing you to focus on managing and scaling your business.
Improved Product Visibility
Experienced Amazon marketing agencies know how to optimize your Amazon presence to increase visibility e commerce business on the platform. They use advanced SEO techniques, Sales Optimization, and Brand Registry benefits to improve your search rankings, ensuring that your products are seen by as many potential customers as possible.
Increased Sales
The ultimate goal of any Amazon marketing campaign is to increase sales, and an Amazon marketing agency can help you achieve this. By creating compelling product listings, Amazon SEO and optimizing your Organic Attraction, as well as using multiple targeted advertising strategies, they can help you attract more customers and boost your sales.
Better Customer Targeting
Amazon marketing agencies have access to advanced analytics and targeting tools that allow them to identify and target your ideal customers. They can create tailored marketing campaigns that speak directly to your target audience, increasing the likelihood of a sale.
Advertising Expertise
Amazon marketing agencies are experts in Amazon’s advertising platform, which is growing increasingly sophisticated. This level of sophistication can be overwhelming for those unfamiliar with the disruptive advertising platform. An Amazon advertising agency has specialists dedicated to creating effective advertising campaigns that will reach your target audience and drive sales at the lowest cost.
Competitive Advantage
With so many businesses competing on Amazon, it can be challenging to stand out from the crowd. An Amazon marketing agency can help you gain a competitive advantage by creating unique, compelling product listings and using advanced marketing strategies to increase visibility and drive sales.
Customized Marketing Strategies
No two brands are the same, and an Amazon marketing agency understands this. They will work with you first on alignment, to fully understand your brand, and the desired goals. Then, they will take that knowledge and create a customized marketing strategy tailored to your needs and goals, for the best possible results.
Continual Optimization
Amazon’s A10 algorithm is constantly changing, and it can be challenging to keep up with the latest trends and techniques. Top Amazon marketing agencies will continually be in a process of optimizing your campaigns, your Organic Attraction and your Enhanced Marketing to ensure that you’re always using the most effective strategies and tactics.
Long-Term Partnership
When you hire an Amazon agency, you’re not just getting a one-time service. You’re building a long-term partnership with a team of experts invested in your success. A good agency will work for you – the best Amazon marketing agencies will work with you to achieve your goals and grow your business over time.
5 Reasons You May Want To Avoid An Amazon Agency
1. Your Economics
This is simple, you either don’t have the cash flow available to outsource your Amazon account management, or you don’t have sufficient cash reserves of investments to cover the burn rate while your sales catch up with overhead, then outsourcing may not be a viable option for you. Generally speaking, brands should start considering an agency partner when they are making at least $500,000 per year or more in revenue. Of course, this amount can vary depending on what services and support are needed from the agency and how quickly results need to be delivered. Ultimately, it’s important to determine whether using an Amazon agency fits within your budget and will provide a good return on investment before committing resources.
2. Your In-House Team
If you have a talented team of marketing professionals in-house, with enough time on their hands to dedicate to learning the nuances of Amazon’s complex algorithm and all the related details associated with running a successful Amazon business. Having a team knowledgeable about not only Amazon but also your business specifically, who can respond quickly and accurately to the barrage of Amazon issues and changes will ensure that any potential problems are addressed quickly before they become account-threatening issues. If you’re team can handle this, it may be more beneficial for your company to hire an experienced consultant rather than an agency. Consultants should be familiar with the management of day-to-day optimization tasks as well as managing customer service issues and other vendor support calls, so they can provide guidance and education as needed.
3. The Frat-Bro Agency
As comedic as it sounds, a growing complaint among business owners and CMOs is the sudden appearance of digital start-ups lured in by the abundance of YouTube training and the apparent ease of starting an “Amazon agency”. Brand executives complain about the lack of professionalism (many conversations contain the phrase “bro”, and the lack of depth of knowledge beyond the basics that can be gathered from YouTube videos. If you get the sense that you might be dealing with one of these Frat-Bro agencies, consider saying ‘no’ and then starting a new search for the right agency partner.
4. The Omnichannel Agency Turned Amazon Pro
Because Amazon Management has become a very popular ‘add-on’ for Digital marketing agencies, hiring an online marketing agency may not be the right fit. Digital agencies that wandered into Amazon rely on “smart digital marketing” strategies that simply do not work on Amazon. For example, they may ignore many of the non-PPC factors that influence Amazon paid ads. Because of this lack of understanding, the upstart Amazon advertising agency often finds themselves relying heavily on paid clicks to rank for keywords that could otherwise enjoy ranking via proper Organic Attraction with Amazon SEO.
But, here’s where it really hurts. The lack of Amazon experience means that Omnichannel agencies either unwittingly (or sometimes intentionally) keep feeding bad keywords into bloated monthly PPC budgets. This, of course, increases the contractual monthly payouts, because these Digital marketing agencies often rely on a base rate of $5,000 to $7,500 per month, and between 5% to 8% of the ad spend.
So, if you sense that your digital agency’s goal is to become a sprawling “omnichannel” marketing agency, you may want to look elsewhere.
Why?
Because…
5. Amazon Is Really Weird
So, A lot of Sellers forget that Amazon came from just being a humble bookseller. They sold new and used books – that was their origin story. And then they built upon that basic business, layer-by-layer to become the “Everything Store” they are today.
It was kind of a “Figure it out as you go” type of thing. So, they would encounter a problem and make adjustments. And add layers of technology and systems to prevent the problem.
So, their “fix-it-as-you-go” methodology added new layers of complication and “weirdness” to selling on Amazon.
This weirdness continues to upset many experienced and sophisticated brand owners and brand executives who are used to “how businesses should be run.”
This frustration often drives these professionals to abandon the platform altogether. If you know that you cannot live at peace with:
Incompetent Amazon support reps
Frustrating Amazon infrastructure
Capricious changes to Amazon rules
Unfair trade practices by Amazon
Or if you cannot willingly outsource those frustrations to an experienced agency
Then, not only should you not hire an Amazon agency, you should really avoid Amazon altogether. Because, even though Amazon is still a huge opportunity, these kinds of frustrations and changes are still going on today. And the changes happen regularly, and often unannounced!
In fact, changes happen so fast that many times Amazon’s own employees don’t even know what has happened.
All of these 5 reasons led us to create the…
The Anti-Agency
What is the Anti-Agency?
It is taking the big agency ideal and kicking it out the door. Bigger is not always better.
Any seasoned business professional knows that rapid growth can be a real threat to quality.
Sure, we have the same opportunity as every Digital Agency to proliferate by hiring a slew of graduates with marketing degrees (or a hoard of Fiverr freelancers with a few months of YouTube education). Instead, our team has years of experience in the trenches dealing with all of the Amazon craziness since 2015.
This means that we know how to optimize your presence so that Amazon’s A10 search engine will list you alongside the big brands (even without blowing through PPC budgets). Plus, we know what it takes to get shoppers clicking onto your listing without wasting time or money. And it means that you can avoid wasting a small fortune (and account suspensions) on silly mistakes.
In fact, our founder Sean Farrington took his years of Amazon experience and wrote the best selling book to help brands Sell On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BVPBMW5P
But more important, than all of that knowledge, we created a full-service Amazon agency that is truly focused on you. Treating you like family, not like a financial windfall. Fanatical about handling all those “Amazon headaches” for you (so you never have to know they even happened). All while keeping the bandwidth available to give you our personal best.
Below, Sean gives you his best advice for finding the right Agency, or even Anti-Agency.
Best Practices for Hiring an Amazon Agency (Or Anti-Agency): Insights from Sean Farrington
Now businesses of all sizes are looking to unlock the power of Amazon. One solution is hiring an Amazon agency. But with so many options, how do you know which agency is right for you? To find out, we asked Ant-Agency founder Sean Farrington, from the Amazon marketing agency Ecom Optimization.
We’re going to share some of Sean’s insights on best practices for hiring an Amazon agency.
Why Hire an Amazon Ant-Agency?
Amazon can be complex and time-consuming (and a place where silly mistakes can cost a small fortune).
An Anti-Agency will have years of experience operating on the platform for years, but yet still have the personal touch to help businesses navigate these challenges and maximize their return on investment (ROI).
In Sean’s words, “A lot of brands start selling on Amazon thinking it’s going to be easy, but listen, Amazon is weird. There are so many plot twists becaise the platform is constantly changing. An Anti-agency with years of experience dealing only with Amazon can help you stay ahead of the curve and ensure your Amazon presence is always optimized for maximum profitability.”
Best Practices for Hiring any Amazon Agency
Look for Experience On The Platform (Not Just “Digital” Experience)
Amazon’s algorithm is getting more sophisticated every day. What works on Google, Facebook, Insta, TikTok, or even Bing, simply does not work on Amazon. That’s why it’s important to work closely with an Amazon Agent that understands your niche and knows how to optimize your presence for actual sales.
And Niche experience matters says Sean. “If you’re selling OTC medical products, for example, you want to work with an agency that has experience with medical products and not just home goods – because, silly mistakes can shut down Amazon accounts.”
Check Their Track Record
Before hiring an agency, it’s important to check the track record. Look at their Amazon case studies and client testimonials to see if they have a history of delivering results. “You want to see that they’ve worked with businesses similar to yours and have been able to help them grow their Amazon sales and revenue,” says Sean.
Ask About Their Process
Every agency has a different process for optimizing listings, ads, and enhanced marketing on Amazon. Ask potential agencies about their process to see if it aligns with your goals and expectations. “Listen, alignment is critical,” say Sean. “Some agencies might have a more hands-on, ‘part of the team’ approach, while others might be more hands-off or rely heavily on Automation. Make sure you’re comfortable with the process before signing on.”
Understand Their Pricing Model
Amazon marketing agencies typically charge either a percentage of sales, a flat fee, or in some cases, both. Make sure you understand the agency’s pricing model and how it will impact your ROI. “If an agency charges a percentage of sales, or worse, a percentage of ad spend, you’ll want to make very certain that their commission is lower than the increase in sales they’ll be able to generate,” says Sean.
FAQ
Q: How much does it cost to hire an Amazon agency?
A: Pricing for Amazon marketing agencies varies based on the agency and the services provided. Some agencies charge a percentage of sales, some a percentage of ad spend, some a combination of that and a flat fee, while others charge a flat fee. Make sure you understand the agency’s pricing model before signing on.
Q: Can’t I just optimize my Amazon listings myself?
A: While it’s possible to optimize your Amazon listings and ads yourself, it can be very time-consuming and complex (especially if there is a learning curve). An Amazon agency can help you stay ahead of the curve and ensure your listings and ads are always optimized.
Q: How long does it take to see results from working with an Amazon agency?
A: The timeline for seeing results from working with an Amazon marketing agency varies based on the agency, the services provided, and how much “damage repair” is required to get products selling. Some businesses see results within a few weeks, while others may take several months.
Q: Does An Anti-Agency offer the same as marketing services as a normal Amazon Agency?
A: Yes, and even more. Because the Anti-Agency focuses only on Amazon, there is institutional knowledge alongside the most foundational services:
Listing optimizations: The team can optimize your product listings to help them rank higher in Amazon search results.
Customer service: They offer responsive customer service to help ensure that you get answers when you need them.
Account health: Maintaining a healthy Amazon account is crucial to long-term success on the platform. The Anti-Agency can help with this.
PPC campaigns: They can create, manage, and scale effective pay-per-click advertising campaigns to help drive more traffic and generate more sales.
Marketing strategy: The team can help you develop a comprehensive Amazon marketing strategy that takes into account your unique needs and goals.
Q: What can you expect when working with Ecom Optimization?
A: When you work with Ecom Optimization, the team truly becomes your marketing team committed to helping you succeed on Amazon. Their approach is highly collaborative, with regular meetings, a Slack channel for regular communication. Plus, with their years of Amazon experience, they will help keep you out of trouble more than any other Amazon agency.
Final Thoughts
Consider reaching out to Sean and your team at Ecom Optimization to learn more about their Anti-Agency approach to Amazon marketing.
