Some of that perceived growth could be from and overall market shrinkage on Apple devices
In context: Facebook predicted that there would be an “adocalypse” after Apple began enforcing its App Tracking Transparency earlier this year. I don’t know if that’s actually been the case since ad-supported apps still pound me with advertisements that seem no different than before. However, one analyst firm says Apple has greatly benefitted from the new ATT rules.
Apple’s on-device advertising platform, Search Ads, reserves spots at the top of App Store queries for developers to advertise their apps in relevant search results. For example, when searching for Telegram, a user may encounter a paid Twitter banner at the top of the results page (below).
The Financial Times notes that data from mobile marketing analysis firm Branch indicates Apple’s mobile advertising market share has tripled over the last year. Search Ads only held a measly 17 percent of the iPhone advertising market a year ago. As of last month, it commands a majority share of 58 percent, with most of that growth coming in the previous six months.
“It’s like Apple Search Ads has gone from playing in the minor leagues to winning the World Series in the span of half a year,” said Branch Product Marketing Head Alex Bauer.
Analyst group Evercore ISI predicts that Apple’s advertising platform is likely to clear $5 billion in fiscal year 2021. Researchers see growth over the next three years, reaching $20 billion annually.
“[Apple’s privacy push] significantly altered the landscape,” Evercore reported.
Apple began requiring developers to ask users for permission to gather and use their data for ad targeting earlier this year, after a nearly four month delay. As expected, many users have opted out of tracking on most apps. As a result, Facebook’s “Audience Network” and Google Ads were severely hobbled when users began denying permissions to track.
The Financial Times suggests that this mass exodus is what led to Apple’s ballooning advertising growth. However, this might be a bit overstated. For one, Apple’s Search Ads platform is an exclusive feature of the App Store and does not engage in first-party advertising within its apps.
Additionally, analyst Eric Seufert points out that the data Branch used in its analysis excludes gaming apps, a dominant subsector of the broader app market. He mentions that Branch only looked at “mobile app install ads spending and not mobile web ads spending,” which further skews the analysis. Also, the actual values used in the study are unknown.
“This data is presented as a percentage of total attributed installs,” Seufert said. “Given that these figures are percentages and not absolute values, the total market size of iOS installs is a relevant consideration which is omitted here, ie. if the total market shrank, Apple’s increased share might not be indicative of increased revenue or scale.”
Seufert said that without solid numbers, it is hard to put the study into context. In other words, Apple’s advertising growth came at least in part because of an overall market shrinkage caused by the new transparency rules.
Indeed, several mobile advertisers have adjusted their advertising budgets in favor of the Android platform. Analysts at Singular say that advertising between Android and iPhone markets was split nearly 50/50 toward the beginning of 2021. As of June, advertising dollars spent now favor Android 70.3 percent to 29.7 percent.
So, it is hard to determine how much of Search Ads tripling go market share was actual growth without knowing the absolute values used to calculate those percentages.
Competitive advantage refers to why clients choose you over your competitors, allowing your business to achieve huge margins while generating value. For something to be considered a competitive advantage, it should be difficult or impossible to copy or duplicate. Before establishing a competitive advantage, ensure that your products or services offer value and generate interest, find your target market and how you’ll cater to them, and know your competitors and what they’re doing.
A clear competitive advantage helps businesses increase certainty and channel their resources for maximum return on investment. It makes your revenue streams more constant and predictable to help achieve momentum. Additionally, gaining a competitive advantage reduces expenditures such as recruiting, marketing, and fundraising and allows you to measure your progress accurately.
To develop your source of competitive advantage, you need to know your key competencies and understand your competitors and their competencies. Find out who your paying customers are and what they value. Here are ways to gain a competitive advantage.
1. Differentiation focus
With differentiation focus, you aim to differentiate within one or a few target market segments whose needs indicate that there are chances for you to provide different products or services compared to your competitors who may be focusing on a large group of consumers. To adopt the differentiation focus strategy, ascertain that your target audience has different needs and wants that the existing competitor goods or services aren’t meeting, ensuring a valid reason for differentiation.
Through this strategy, you can establish a niche market segment for your business to achieve higher prices than undifferentiated products. Use a market intelligence platform to acquire granular insights into the competitors’ activities, such as new product launches, to track their every move and predict what they’ll do next. This will help you create a fool proof plan to execute your differentiation focus strategy to gain a competitive advantage.
2. Cost leadership
When you leverage the cost leadership strategy, you aim to be the lowest-cost producer in your niche market. With this strategy, you offer similar products with the same quality as your competitors but at lower prices. To succeed with this strategy, find ways to produce your goods at a lower cost, such as high productivity levels and capacity utilization, take advantage of your bargaining power to negotiate for low-cost production materials, and use technology in your production processes. Accessing the most powerful distribution channels will ensure that your products reach a wider audience.
3. Differentiation leadership
Differentiation leadership allows you to target a larger market to gain a competitive advantage across the entire industry. With this strategy, you have to choose one or more criteria that buyers use to position your business to meet those criteria uniquely. Since differentiation requires you to charge extra to cover the additional production costs meant to offer value-added features to your clients, you have to find ways to convince them to choose your products over the undifferentiated ones. It requires a huge marketing investment. To achieve differentiation leadership, ensure exceptional product quality and branding that focuses on customer recognition. Focus on wide market distribution and constant advertising.
4. Consider innovation
Although product innovation can give your business a competitive edge, process innovation can bring you a greater advantage. This is because it completely changes the way a company operates. Process innovations are beneficial because they reduce product costs, helping you attract more customers before your competitors find ways to discover and imitate your process.
5. Leverage strategic partnerships
Partnering with businesses within your industry or closely related sectors is a good way to gain a competitive advantage. Strategic partnerships involve joint ventures where companies bring their resources together to gain exposure at the expense of those not in the alliance.
6. Strategic management
Strategic management involves planning and implementing strategies to establish, maintain, and grow a company’s competitive advantage. To develop a strategic plan, you should understand stakeholders’ expectations, global trends, and the competitive landscape to help with strategic decision-making for a strong long-term competitive position. To achieve and maintain a competitive advantage, you should constantly track and review your strategic approach for an improved financial situation and fast response to continually changing market forces.
Endnote
Since markets are generally competitive, sustaining a competitive advantage can be challenging. This is because competitors imitate advantaged industry competitors or the disadvantaged competitors create their unique competitive advantage to outdo those already enjoying the competitive advantage.
To maintain and increase competitive advantage, consider constantly assessing your company, its value proposition, the customers, competitors, and the market. This will help you ensure that you always have a competitive edge over your competitors.
By Habib-Ur-Rehman
Habib-Ur-Rehman is well-known writer for tech, business, food and multiple topic writer with updated info for the audience, believe in the researched based content writing with outstanding writing style.
Naturally, as a business owner, you want to spread awareness of your brand to as many people as possible. Developing an online following — whether of viewers, readers, customers or clients — is a common tactic for doing so. But, later on, the tools you use to build this following can significantly weigh on the success of your brand.
Many entrepreneurs make the “either/or” mistake: They either build their own domain on the open web or establish a presence within a walled garden. The best method for reaching the largest possible audience, however, isn’t either/or. It’s leveraging both walled gardens and a personal domain, as well as online marketing and advertising channels, to gain insightful data, independent brand equity and a corner of the web that’s managed entirely by you.
Sow Seeds Within A Walled Garden
From Facebook and Instagram to Amazon and Etsy, odds are you’ve used a walled garden before. Simply put, walled gardens are external platforms on which you can anchor your web presence or e-commerce store — but the perks don’t stop there. You can also advertise, market and sell goods, receive payments, offer content and perform a range of other online activities. The “garden” is the platform itself, and the “wall” represents its closed community of members, merchants and other registered users — in contrast to the open web.
Walled gardens come with millions of pre-existing users, making it easy to reach people as soon as you establish a presence on them. The best-known include Amazon and Facebook, but there are thousands more, including LinkedIn, Etsy, Angi, WhatsApp and Shopify.
In addition to letting you tap into an existing audience, walled gardens allow for easy account setup. Their platforms are often user-friendly, requiring little to no technical knowledge on your part. Using this turnkey solution, you can set up a free profile and begin reaching customers almost instantaneously.
Although walled gardens come with many benefits, you’ll want to ensure your brand isn’t contained exclusively within one for maximum long-term growth. To diversify your audience and unlock valuable data, it’s important to establish a simultaneous presence with a consistent brand look and feel outside the garden walls.
Own Your Online Presence With Your Own Domain
According to the results of a 2020 study by OpenX, 84% of consumers search the open web for business information, and 81% for products to buy. Far from obsolete, the open web is still the place many customers turn to first with a pressing need or question.
So, before you launch a presence within a walled garden, be sure to secure your own domain and build a website that’s entirely your own. If you’re not sure where to start, begin by looking for a domain name that successfully represents your brand. Consider securing a descriptive domain extension like .io, .live or .studio, which are often more readily available than .com names and can be both more memorable and relevant to your business.
From there, it’s time to establish a website and, fortunately, you don’t have to be a technology whiz to build one. Simply go to your registrar of choice, purchase the domain, then connect with a website builder that can develop you a new site using WordPress, SquareSpace, Drupal or another content management system. (Website developers can typically also secure the domain you want.)
Consider Other Avenues For Marketing And Advertising
Once your new site is up and running, and you’ve linked it back to the walled gardens you have a presence on for greater reach, what next? There are countless other avenues at your disposal to maximize the number of people who engage with your brand.
Despite the quick rise of social media, emails remain relevant and effective. According to the results of a 2020 study by AWeber, 79% of small business leaders believe that email marketing is important to their business strategy — and for good reason. Emails still ensure a sizable return on investment at $42 for each $1 spent, as noted in the Data & Marketing Association’s 2019 report (paywall). If you can secure people’s email addresses, you can use email marketing to stay top of mind — and, hopefully, capture their views, clicks and dollars.
But email isn’t the only manoeuvre for driving people to your website. Building a strong SEO strategy can help boost traffic, too. Start by researching the top keywords used by your target demographic on the open web, and strategically pepper those words throughout your site, especially in headings and subheadings. Next, consider creating a regular schedule for publishing high-quality content that hits on those keywords. This will increase organic traffic and the odds that other websites will backlink to your site, which, in turn, improves your search rankings.
You can also use your own website to gather valuable data about site traffic and visitor demographics. With these new, relevant insights about your customer, reader or viewer base, you can calibrate your digital approach to resonate with and reach your target audience. With that, you’re ready to build brand recognition, broadcast to a wider crowd and position yourself for future success by diversifying your presence across the web.
Thanks to limitations posed by the Covid-19 outbreak, marketers weren’t able to have in-person meetings, host special events or execute real-time, live activations last year, which is one reason why consumers consistently found their inboxes flooded with brands reaching out to them digitally. While the worst of the pandemic may be behind us, email marketing is still booming in 2021 because businesses are still seeing solid returns on their investments in it.
Aside from leveraging the latest trends in personalization and interactivity, however, marketers need to also be aware of certain standards of quality and value that today’s consumers expect brands to uphold when sending email content their way.
To ensure the most essential aspects of a marketing email are accurate, of high quality and effective at inspiring recipients to open the communication, read it and take action, see the advice from 13 experts from Forbes Agency Council below, where they discuss specific aspects of any marketing email that must be double-checked before hitting send.
1. Check The Spelling And Accuracy Of The Recipient’s Name
The spelling and accuracy of the recipient’s name is often sorely overlooked. There should really be personalization within the template beyond this—including company name, position, industry role and more—and the database should be thoroughly checked to make sure the incorporation of these elements reads seamlessly for every recipient. – Elizabeth Jean Poston, Helios Interactive, A Freeman Company
2. Send A Test Email And Check It Across All Devices
The “send test email” feature is there for a reason. Use it and double-check it on all devices, especially mobile ones. Regardless of their nature (formatting, design, grammar, spelling, links, buttons, readability and so on), you can only troubleshoot issues if you see them as a user. This is, after all, a mobile-first, user-centric world we live and work in. – Frank Rojas, Qode Media Inc.
3. Always Check The Accuracy And Functionality Of All Links
Always check your links. Whether they involve a logo, a landing page, a button, content or anything else, ensuring your links are correct and working is key to success with email marketing. – Ilissa Miller, IMiller Public Relations
4. Proofread Specific Elements As A Standard Operating Procedure
It’s important to proofread for misspellings, broken links, grammatical errors, unintentionally offensive language, accurate subject lines and more. All of that could and should be documented as a standard operating procedure and referenced before hitting send. Creating and referencing your company’s SOPs before sending marketing emails will save you from facing crisis management issues later. – Brent Payne, Loud Interactive, LLC
5. Eliminate Insider Language, Acronyms And Industry Jargon
Is it written for your target? In other words, do you need to get rid of insider language, acronyms and industry jargon? Also make sure it’s written in a way that is pleasing to the eye. Is it easy to read? Easy to understand? A marketing email should be just an email. – Michael McFadden, eAccountable
6. Make Sure It Has A Call To Action That Supports Your Goal
Is there a call to action? What are you wanting the reader to do after reading this email? The CTA might be to reply to the email to set up a call, to click a link to download a whitepaper or to just read the entire email and not subscribe. But whatever that goal is, think through it before you click send and ensure the email is set up with that goal in mind. – Kelsey Raymond, Influence & Co.
7. Don’t Forget To Review And Optimize The Preview Text Field
One of the most overlooked (and important) fields is your preview text. This one line is the first thing that shows up below your subject line before the viewer opens the email. If it’s not filled out, most email viewers will take the first line of your email, which may not be what you want people to see. Use this field and watch your open rates skyrocket. – Darrell Keezer, Candybox Marketing
8. Ensure It Reaches The Right Inbox By Checking Your Segmentation
One of the most important things to check before sending an email is the distribution list. Too often, marketers send an email and think that everyone is interested and will engage. That is not the case. Databases have endless opportunities for segmentation to ensure your emails reach not just any inbox but the right inbox. Check your segmentation before sending any email to ensure optimal engagement. – Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions
9. Create A Seamless Reading Experience For Your Audience
No one has the time to decode a lengthy email. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes and emulate an email you wouldn’t mind reading through. Keep the language concise, embed links right into your email, add imagery if appropriate and provide a clear call to action. – Katie Schibler Conn, KSA Marketing
10. Ensure Content Is Reader-Focused And Delivers Applicable Value
Make sure the content is reader-focused and respectful of your recipients’ time by delivering applicable value. That can take many forms, from answering common questions to proposing a solution for an audience pain point to identifying trends or potential problems your audience may not be aware of. Make your recipients glad they invested the time to read your email and leave them wanting more. – Scott Greggory, MadAveGroup
11. Make Sure Your Subject Line Is Clear And Compelling
Your entire email hinges on whether the subject line is enticing enough to get someone to click and view the entirety of what you are sending out. You can have the most mind-blowing content in the world, but a dull or vague email subject line will directly impact your open rates and sink your campaign. – Stefan Pollack, The Pollack Group
12. Double-Check The Optimization Of Elements That Affect SEO
Beyond the obvious, such as correct spellings and attributions, the most important things to double-check are related to optimization. Ensure photos are doing double- or even triple-duty by creating accessible, SEO-packed captions and meta descriptions and linking the images to relevant products/services. Links should also open in new tabs, away from the email, to encourage reader exploration. – Evan Nison, NisonCo
13. Clarify The Unique Value Your Email Provides To The Reader
We live in a very noisy information age. Finding the right engagement opportunities has never been trickier, and digital channels have become even more crowded. So, before you hit send on a marketing email destined for an inbox that is inundated with more marketing emails than ever, ask yourself, “What unique value does the email really provide to the reader?” If the answer is unclear, think about pausing. – Omar Hussain, Defy Communications
If used correctly, Google AdWords can be an extremely profitable online advertising channel for your business. However, PPC advertising on the Google platform is quite technical; specialised knowledge and experience are required to generate consistent ROI.
You likely don’t have the time to learn nor run a Google advertising strategy. This is where a Google Ads agency comes into play.
Like any agency, a Google Ads agency will save you time and effort and potentially make you money. Outsourcing is crucial for any business; you can’t do everything yourself.
Finding the right agency for your organisation will require careful consideration. Below, we’ve listed six major red flags you must watch for when choosing a Google Ads agency.
They “rent” the account to you because the bid strategies are their IP.
There are agencies out there that insist on ownership over bid strategies. When looking for a Google Ads agency, this is a scenario you’d want to avoid. Bid strategies shouldn’t be considered proprietary; look for an agency that’s transparent with your organisation.
2. They don’t provide you with full access or ownership of the account, or worse, they say that they “own” it.
You must have full access and ownership to your Google AdWords account. Agencies have an ethical obligation to give clients complete control. Some don’t, using it as a way to lock clients into their contracts.
Having full access to a Google AdWords account is essential for several reasons. Firstly, you’re able to see if the reported figures the agency gives you is accurate. Secondly, you can remove their access if you decide to terminate the contract.
It’s also important to mention that Google AdWords accounts with longer tenure are preferred. Your account history influences your performance and, ultimately, the ROI you generate from paid search.
Because an existing account has more data than a new one, Google rewards better quality scores. All that data is also a guide for what hasn’t worked; you’ll be less likely to make the same mistakes.
It’s preferable to maintain control of a Google AdWords account because you don’t want to create new ones. You don’t have the time and effort to continually build a new account every time you change PPC agencies.
Be cautious when signing a contract with an agency; there could be terms and conditions regarding ownership. If you don’t have a Google AdWords account and the agency wants to make you one, ensure it’s done through their Google Ads manager account.
3. They won’t provide a detailed breakdown of how they optimised the account in a given time frame.
One of the most significant red flags to look out for regarding PPC agencies is if things are too stagnant. Successful, well-managed agencies will regularly implement changes and tweaks to optimise ad campaigns.
This could be several things, for example.
Bid changes
New or refreshed ad copy
Bid adjustments
If an agency tends to run things on autopilot, they’re likely not utilising the ad spend effectively. More specifically, keyword bidding is probably done automatically, which leads to overbidding, resulting in wasted budget and inactive ads.
4. They won’t provide a detailed breakdown of where your money was spent.
It’s concerning if an agency doesn’t provide a frequent report that tells you how your ad budget is being spent. Many businesses take a hands-off approach when it comes to their Google advertising strategy. They outsource the work to an agency and assume everything is good.
What these organisations don’t realise is that agencies often charge high management fees. It can be as high as 30-40% in some cases. This means less of the ad budget is being used for ads.
To avoid this, agencies should be able to present, at any moment, a budget breakdown to a client. It should become a frequent habit, one that’s expected every week, fortnight, or month. Transparency is the focus here.
5. They don’t focus on important metrics like, you know, conversions and return on investment.
You can only know if your Google Ads benefit your organisation by looking at the data. Metrics like conversions, clicks and return on investment give us insight into the effectiveness of campaigns on the Google Ads platform.
A Google ads agency should provide data-rich reports that detail whether or not ads are profitable. Unfortunately, some don’t; this is a major red flag. Consider bringing up the topic of metrics when you’re interviewing potential candidates.
A Google Analytics account that you can access should be linked to your Google AdWords account. Conversion tracking and event snippets are also a must.
6. They never asked for detailed information on your business, your USP and your industry.
An ad performing well and providing a positive Return on Ad Spend is dependent on more than just the amount that you bid. The context, relevance, and a solid quality score can determine how much you pay for that click. Even the performance of your post-click landing page affects your ad and the cost.
The agency that you hire must understand your business and its unique selling proposition. They must also have verifiable experience within your industry; Google ads is particular and contextual. What works for one field isn’t going to work for another.
When screening and interviewing potential candidates, question them on their industry knowledge. Ask if they have any tangible examples of success with prior clients similar to your organisation.
Conclusion
An effective Google ads strategy is one of the best ways to increase the revenue of your business. It is, unfortunately, something that requires time, effort, and expertise — things that you may not have right now.
A Google ads agency is a fantastic solution to these concerns.
In this article, we outlined six different red flags that you must consider when choosing an agency. Hopefully, the information detailed provides some value to you and your organisation.
Are you looking for an agency that can help you grow your business with Google AdWords? Please contact our PPC advertising team today to learn how Vine Digital can help you get more from your advertising spend.
Glossary
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model where advertisers pay a publisher every time their ad is clicked. A publisher could be a search engine, like Google, a website owner, or a network of websites. The publisher hosts the advertiser’s ad to an audience.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
A unique selling proposition (USP) is a marketing strategy that informs potential customers how a brand’s product or service is superior to competitors. USPs are used as a tactic to differentiate a brand from the rest of the marketplace.
Conversion
A conversion is a desired action taken by an individual who has seen an ad or marketing material. It’s a nonspecific umbrella term for any intended goal that a business is hoping to achieve. Conversions can be measured and tracked with analytics and reporting features.
This could be signing up for an email list via a landing page or purchasing a product or service. Other examples include clicking on an ad, visiting a webpage, or watching a video.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on investment (ROI) is a financial metric that evaluates the efficiency of an asset, such as an advertising budget. It determines whether something is profitable for a business.
Bid
A bid is the amount of money you’ve committed to an auction for a specific ad space opportunity. In the context of Google ads, every keyword/search term provides an opportunity for you to advertise your business.
Bid Strategy
A bid strategy is a uniquely tailored campaign offered via the Google AdWords platform. Each of these campaigns has a specific goal in mind, such as clicks, impressions, conversions, or views. Businesses will choose the bid strategy that best aligns with their current ad goals.
Negative Keyword
A negative keyword is a keyword that stops your ad from being activated by a specific word or phrase. Negative keywords prevent your ads from being shown to users searching for that particular phrase.
Conversion Tags
Conversion Tags are snippets of code that help with conversion tracking on a website.
As data privacy regulations evolve, marketing communications professionals have a responsibility to adapt their marketing strategies with new best practices as they arise. While there are certainly strategies that companies can adopt, new and unexpected changes can present challenges to even the most seasoned professionals. Historically, marketers have dealt with regulations lawmakers pass in different countries and have pivoted their strategies to comply with those legal changes. However, now marketers are faced with a new dilemma; what do we do when a technology manufacturer implements its own data privacy features outside of those that are already regulated? Well, that day is here, and most notably, it is impacting email marketing.
In June, Apple announced that it was launching new features to help its customers better control how their data is shared with companies. Apple’s new update to iOS centres on user privacy and data tracking. The Mail Privacy Protection feature will allow users to open emails without alerting the sender and avoid disclosing their IP addresses, which marketers usually need to track user data. When this was first announced, marketers scrambled to determine how this would impact our ability to track email open rates and click-through rates. Most email marketing platforms put a tracking “pixel” in emails users send. Previously, people who used Apple devices to read emails that were sent out by marketers were tracked via that pixel. With the new update, if the user turns that function off, there is concern that marketers will not be able to track whether that person opens or clicks through the email. Additionally, Hide My Emailis a newer feature that Apple has rolled out. This function creates a randomized email address instead of a real one so that the user’s identity remains private. Simply put, this could impact a marketer’s ability to track email deliverability rates and user metrics. While there are email privacy applications for Android phones, there are currently no built-in email masking tools for the Android platform. Thus, the only segment of users this would impact would be Apple iOS users.
So, what are marketers to do because of these developments? First, while we may want to throw our hands up and quit, we should not stop marketing via email (or stop any type of marketing, for that matter). This simply means we must do a better job of engaging with our current prospects and customers. As marketers, we should re-evaluate what our prospects and customers both want and need.
This starts with creating relevant content that is impactful and that converts. Traditional inbound marketing methodologies work by educating prospects (and customers) to help them make purchasing decisions. By incorporating inbound marketing tactics with meaningful content, those individuals who interact with a brand will likely continue to do so regardless of the communication channel. Now is an ideal time to consider the resources you have available on your teams, including thought leaders within the organization who are outside the marketing department, to develop content that resonates.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the new kid on the block or you’re an industry veteran, all small businesses make mistakes from time to time.
Mistakes may be a natural part of the business process. But that doesn’t mean small business owners need to personally commit every error in order to learn each lesson.
There are many ways that entrepreneurs can learn from the mistakes of others to avoid paying the price with their own companies. Here are a handful of common mistakes that many small businesses tend to make, as well as suggestions for ways to avoid them.
1. Attempting to Do Everything
A small business owner is a brave soul. They’ve charted their own course and taken control into their own hands. If you’re a small business owner, you’re well aware of the confidence that this can create.
However, just because you’ve succeeded in one area of business doesn’t mean that skill or talent will translate to other pursuits. In fact, one of the biggest shortcomings of many small business owners is falling prey to the idea that they can do everything.
The truth is, every business owner has countless things that they’re not good at. Often, they’re even severely underqualified. For instance, managing taxes or stepping in as a chef are very bad ideas if you’re not qualified to do so. Even small activities like managing customer service calls or processing payroll can be a bad idea if you’re not trained.
Instead, outsource these activities. Look into technology solutions, such as small business payroll software. If you can swing it, hire employees to address them. The gig economy is another economic way to fill in talent gaps in your workforce without breaking the bank.
2. Failing to Take Finances Seriously
Both overspending and underspending are common issues for small businesses. Often the root of the problem stems from the personality of the business owner.
Those who are bean counters tend to avoid expenses, even when they’re necessary for growth — and at times even survival. On the other end of the spectrum, reckless spenders often ignore the math and rack up expenses blindly while hiding behind things like quality or a better customer experience.
Swinging to either extreme can be detrimental to a business. Instead, take steps to gain a firm understanding of your finances. Use software like Quickbooks or Expensify to keep track of income and expenses. Hire an accountant to help you with your taxes. The more you understand your business’s finances, the more informed your financial decision-making will be.
2. Attempting to Do Everything
A small business owner is a brave soul. They’ve charted their own course and taken control into their own hands. If you’re a small business owner, you’re well aware of the confidence that this can create.
However, just because you’ve succeeded in one area of business doesn’t mean that skill or talent will translate to other pursuits. In fact, one of the biggest shortcomings of many small business owners is falling prey to the idea that they can do everything.
The truth is, every business owner has countless things that they’re not good at. Often, they’re even severely underqualified. For instance, managing taxes or stepping in as a chef are very bad ideas if you’re not qualified to do so. Even small activities like managing customer service calls or processing orders can be a bad idea if you’re not trained.
Instead, outsource these activities. If you can swing it, hire employees to address them. The gig economy is another economic way to fill in talent gaps in your workforce without breaking the bank.
3. Mistreating Your Internal Lifelines
As a small business owner, you’re likely well aware of all of the threats to your business. From financial concerns to supply chain disruptions, customer satisfaction, and more, there are countless areas that can keep you worrying at all times.
This often creates stress and anxiety that small businesses will pass along to others further down the chain of command. For instance, many small businesses work their employees to the bone. They aren’t treated well by management or shown that they’re valued.
Suppliers are another group that often get the short end of the stick. They’re often left waiting for payments until the last minute, even when they deliver shipments on time.
Make sure to treat your internal and auxiliary workforce with respect. Go out of your way to pay them on time and show them that they’re valued. You’ll find that your business will run like a well-oiled machine, and you’ll get greater loyalty and production.
4. Spreading Your Marketing Thin
Marketing used to be a big company’s game. Small businesses had to scrounge around for the local scraps that big-budget corporations left behind.
The advent of online marketing has completely rewritten this narrative. All the way back in 2019, digital ad spending was already poised to overtake traditional spending, with no end to the growth in site.
The only problem is that online marketing, while accessible for small businesses, is overwhelming. Email, social media, website, search engine, content, video, and countless other marketing strategies are available. The worst thing a small business can do is commit marketing dollars to a scattered and mismanaged marketing strategy (or even worse, no strategy at all.)
It doesn’t matter if you’re spending hundreds or millions of dollars. Always create a solid marketing plan that dictates how to spend each penny.
5. Not Managing Risk
Risk is another common issue for small businesses. With less margin for error than larger enterprises, many smaller companies either play it safe and miss opportunities or take uncalculated risks that end in disaster.
It’s important to develop a risk management philosophy for your business. As you do so, make sure you have a balanced approach to risk. For example, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Use resources that you can afford to lose if a new business idea goes south.
At the same time, don’t sit tight on what’s working at the moment and let opportunities pass you by. It’s easy to put yourself out of business if you fail to evolve along with your industry these days. Look for things like cutting-edge tech or changing customer expectations and then create strategies that incorporate them.
The best way to do this is to set SMART goals. These are goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. By setting SMART goals, you can create reasonable objectives to work toward. This will keep you moving forward and taking risks. At the same time, it will avoid the need to threaten the existence of your entire business in the process.
There are many challenges that every small business will face. Some of these will be overcome without an issue. Others may stand out as clear mistakes and important learning opportunities.
However, there are also many mistakes that companies can learn from without first-hand experience. From proper finances to a loyal workforce, happy suppliers, meaningful marketing, and much more, it’s always worth taking the time to do your homework and safeguard your business against common — yet avoidable — mistakes as you go along.
Sentiment analysis can be defined as analysing the positive or negative sentiment of the customer in text. The contextual analysis of identifying information helps businesses understand their customers’ social sentiment by monitoring online conversations.
1. Brand Monitoring
A brand is not defined by the product it manufactures. It depends on how you build a brand by online marketing, social campaigning, content marketing, and customer support services. Getting full 360 views of how your customers view your product, company, or brand is one of the most important uses of sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis enables you to quantify the perception of potential customers. Analysing social media and surveys, you can get key insights about how your business is doing right or wrong for your customers.
Companies tend to use sentiment analysis as a powerful weapon to measure the impact of their products and campaigns on their customers and stakeholders. Brand monitoring allows you to have a wealth of insights from the conversions about your brand in the market. Sentiment analysis enables you to automatically categorize the urgency of all brand mentions and further route them to the designated team.
Keeping the feedback of the customer in knowledge, you can develop more appealing branding techniques and marketing strategies that can help make quick transitions.
2. Customer Service
Customer service companies often use sentiment analysis to automatically classify their user incoming calls into “urgent” and “not urgent” classes. The classification is based on the sentiments of the emails or proactively identifying the calls of frustrated customers.
The customer expects their experience with the companies to be intuitive, personal, and immediate. Therefore, the service providers focus more on the urgent calls to resolve users’ issues and thereby maintain their brand value. Therefore, analyse customer support interactions to make sure that your employees are following the appropriate process. Moreover, increase the efficiency of your services so that customers aren’t left waiting for support for longer periods.
As the customer service sector has become more automated using machine learning, understanding customers’ sentiments has become more critical than ever before. For the same reason, companies are opting for NLP-based chatbots as their first line of customer support to better grasp context and intent of the conversations.
3. Finance and Stock Monitoring
It is said that “Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful.” But here, the question that arises: how do you know if others are fearful or greedy? Well, here, you can make use of the sentiment analysis technique. Making investments, especially in the business world, is quite tricky. The stocks and market are always on the edge of risks, but they can be condensed if you do correct research before investing.
For instance, if you are looking to invest in the automobile industry and are confused about choosing between company X and company Y, you can look at the sentiments received from the company for their latest products. It will help you to find the one that is performing better in the market.
4. Business Intelligence Buildup
Digital marketing plays a prominent role in business. Social media often displays the reactions and reviews of the product. When you are available with the sentiment data of your company and new products, it is a lot easier to estimate your customer retention rate.
Sentiment analysis enables you to determine how your product performs in the market and what else is needed to improve your sales. You can also analyse the responses received from your competitors. Based on the survey generated, you can satisfy your customer’s needs in a better way. You can make immediate decisions that will help you to adjust to the present market situation.
Business intelligence is all about staying dynamic. Therefore, sentiment analysis gives you the liberty to run your business effectively. For example, if you come up with a big idea, you can test and analyse it before bringing life to it.
5. Enhancing the Customer Experience
A satisfying customer experience means a higher chance of returning the customers. A successful business knows that it is important to take care of how they deliver compared to what they deliver.
Brand Monitoring offers us unfiltered and invaluable information on customer sentiment. However, you can also put this analysis on customer support interactions and surveys.
NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys help you gain feedback for your business with the simple question: Will you recommend this brand, product, or service to your friend or family? The output is a single score on the number scale. Businesses use these sentiment scores to analyse the customer as promoters, detractors, and passives.
Here the goal is to find the overall customer experience and elevate your customer to promoter level. Theoretically, include the phases as: will buy more, stay longer and refer to another customer.
The next step in the NPS survey is to ask survey participants to leave the score and seek open-ended responses, i.e., qualitative data. Qualitative surveys are far more challenging to analyse. Still, with the help of sentiment analysis, these texts can be classified into multiple categories, which offer further insights into customers’ opinions.
As mentioned earlier, the experience of the customers can either be positive, negative, or neutral. Depending on the customers’ reviews, you can categorize the data according to its sentiments. This classification will help you properly implement the product changes, customer support, services, etc.
Also, remember that getting a positive response to your product is not always enough. The customer support services of your company should always be impeccable irrespective of how phenomenal your services are.
6. Market Research and Analysis
Business intelligence uses sentiment analysis to understand the subjective reasons why customers are or are not responding to something, whether the product, user experience, or customer support.
Sentiment analysis will enable you to have all kinds of market research and competitive analysis. It can make a huge difference whether you are exploring a new market or seeking an edge on the competition.
You can review your product online and compare them to your competition. You can also analyse the negative points of your competitors and use them to your advantage.
Sentiment analysis is used in sociology, psychology, and political science to analyse trends, opinions, ideological bias, gauge reaction, etc. A lot of these sentiment analysis applications are already up and running.
The online giant gives a leg up to hundreds of house brand and exclusive products that most people don’t know are connected to Amazon
It took Robert Gomez about five months to get his Kaffe coffee grinder to the big leagues in e-commerce: among the first three search results for “coffee grinder” on Amazon.com.
Gomez, founder of Atlanta-based consumer goods startup 4Q Brands, said he obsessively refined his photos and description, amassed reviews from happy customers, and paid Amazon $40,000 a month on advertising to boost sales, one of the elements Amazon tells sellers will increase search ranking.
Robert Gomez, owner of startup 4Q Brands, in his warehouse in Buford, GA on October 6th, 2021. For more than two years, his coffee grinder had been one of his best sellers on Amazon. Rita Harper
Then Amazon introduced a competitor from house brand Amazon Basics and another from a brand that sells exclusively on Amazon, DR Mills.
“They ranked well right away,” Gomez said, each of them appearing among the top-three results for “coffee grinder” searches immediately. The reason, he said, was clear: “Their search ranking is high because they’re an Amazon brand.”
An investigation by The Markup found that Amazon places products from its house brands and products exclusive to the site ahead of those from competitors—even competitors with higher customer ratings and more sales, judging from the volume of reviews.
We found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive could predict in seven out of every 10 cases whether Amazon would place it first in search results. These listings are not visibly marked as “sponsored” and they are part of a grid that Amazon identifies as “search results” in the site’s source code. (We only analysed products in that grid, ignoring modules that are strictly for advertising.)
We used machine learning to try to predict which product Amazon put first in search results based on various factors. Source: The Markup/Amazon.com
When we analysed star ratings and number of reviews, neither could predict much better than a coin toss which product Amazon placed first in search results.
Amazon told Congress in 2019 that its search results do not take into account whether a product is an Amazon-owned brand.
Sellers say it doesn’t seem that way to them. Gomez said Amazon’s brands have “unfair advantages” that make it harder for small merchants like him to compete” on its open marketplace. “Who bears the cost are those entrepreneurs and small businesses that don’t have the means to fight.”
The Markup found Amazon placed its Happy Belly Cinnamon Crunch cereal, with four stars and 1,010 reviews, in the number one spot ahead of cereals with better and more reviews including Cap’n Crunch (five stars, 14,069 reviews), Honey Bunches of Oats (five stars, 5,205 reviews), and Honey Nut Cheerios (five stars, 11,702 reviews). A vacuum cleaner from Amazon’s exclusive Noisz brand was placed on top, ahead of models from Bissell, Eureka, and Hoover with higher ratings and more reviews. And the Amazon-exclusive Concept 3sneaker from Skechers placed number one, four spots ahead of a similar but not exclusive to Amazon Skechers sneaker with the same star rating but 77 times more reviews.
A former Amazon employee told The Markup that the company used to give its new house brand products an unearned place at the top of search rankings when they first launched. He said the practice has since stopped.
However, we found that Amazon brands and exclusive products overall received an outsized portion of the top spot on search results, one that was far out of line with their proportion of the sample.
That’s not what shoppers expect.
We commissioned a national panel of 1,000 adults. We included (non-Amazon) competing brands Champion and Brooklinen as a control. Source: The Markup/YouGov
In a national survey we commissioned from YouGov, only 17 percent of respondents said they assumed Amazon put its own products first. Half said they expected the first non-sponsored product on Amazon’s search results page to be the cheapest, highest rated, or bestselling.
By giving its brands top billing, Amazon is giving itself a significant leg up in sales. The first three items on the search results page get 64 percent of clicks, according to one ex-Amazon-employee-turned-consultant.
In a short, written statement, Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company does not favour its brands in search results and declined to answer any of the dozens of specific questions posed by The Markup.
She said the company identified its brands to shoppers by adding “Amazon brand” to the list of product features on the product page and sometimes to the listing title as well. We only found this to be the case in 23 percent of products in our sample that were Amazon-owned brands. She said brands that are exclusive to Amazon would not carry the disclosure because they are not owned by the company.
Invisible tags
A signal, invisible to the public but coded into the listings, suggests that most of the Amazon brand and exclusive products that were listed first were ads. In 87 percent of cases, the listing’s source code identified them as “sponsored”—though that label isn’t shown to the public. Instead, Amazon labels the products “featured from our brands.”
Rona, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company considers “featured from our brands” listings “merchandising placements” and not “search results,” despite their presence in the search results grid. She also said they are not ads, despite the “sponsored” label in the source code. Rona said they are “clearly labelled to distinguish them from search results” but did not respond to questions about whether the company believes such disclosures were clear enough under Federal Trade Commission requirements.
Mary Engle, who retired as the FTC advertising practices associate director last year, said that what Amazon calls “merchandising” is actually advertising.
“Amazon’s placement of its own products on its own site is advertising, whether or not money changes hands,” she said. She said it would require an investigation to determine whether “featured from our brands” is sufficient disclosure under the FTC’s rules.
Bill Baer, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice and former director of the Bureau of Competition at the FTC, said if consumers expect Amazon’s product search results to be neutral, but they are not, and the site is essentially a monopoly, that could be a violation of the FTC Act of 1914, which prohibits unfair competition and unfair or deceptive practices in commerce, or the U.S. Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits monopolies from using their market power to harm competition.
“If basically you’ve got somebody with market power that is restraining competition both in terms of site access or where things appear on the site,” he said, “that is potentially problematic.”
Amazon’s online marketplace garners more than five times more sales than its closest online competitor, Walmart, which also allows third-party sales.
Congress is considering a package of anti-monopoly bills aimed at big tech, including the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, which would make the practice of platforms giving their brands a leg up explicitly illegal.
Amazon refers to its own brands and brands developed by others that sell exclusively on Amazon as “our brands.” They peddle everything from snack chips and vitamins to fashion and furniture.
Using public records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Amazon’s own statements, we identified more than 150 brands registered by or owned by Amazon. These include both brands with an obvious connection, such as Amazon Basics and Amazon Commercial, and those that are generally known to be owned by the company, including Kindle and Zappos. But they also include dozens more, such as Happy Belly, Daily Ritual, and Society New York, where the connection to the company is not obvious. Those are in addition to the estimated hundreds of third-party brands that are exclusive to the site.
We analysed search results on Amazon for 3,492 popular internet product queries in January 2021 and looked closely at what Amazon placed in the first spot. In 60 percent of cases, Amazon sold this spot to an advertiser and added a public label indicating the listing was “sponsored.” Of the rest, Amazon gave half to its own brands and brands exclusive to the site, and the other half to competing brands. But Amazon brands and exclusives made up only 6 percent of all products in the sample, and competitors made up 77 percent. In short, Amazon was hogging the top spot.
In more than a quarter of searches in which Amazon gave its brands the top spot, it placed its products above competitors that had both better ratings and more reviews than the Amazon brand or exclusive product.
‘They would shut us down’
Sellers said there’s no mistaking the effect on sales of Amazon’s choices in search results.
“If the customers are not seeing [our products] in the top five offers, then it makes it really hard for us to reach customers,” said Gabriela Mekler, a Miami mom who co-founded the organizational products company Mumi in 2014.
Mumi’s top product—a set of color-coded packing cubes—struggles for visibility on Amazon, even after more than two years on the site. She said the coronavirus pandemic decimated her sales—they dropped by more than 68 percent—costing the company a hard-won “Amazon’s Choice” badge on its packing cubes.
Mumi has not been placed on the first page of our search results for “packing cubes” for months. At the time of this writing, Amazon Basics took up eight spots on the first page; one was labelled “featured from our brands.” None were visibly marked “sponsored.”
“Their product will always show before yours,” Mekler said.
One Mumi product has still been selling well despite the pandemic, she said: reusable pill pouches. For now, there is no Amazon Basics pill pouch, and Mekler hopes there won’t be anytime soon.
“We’re a small company,” she said. “They would shut us down.”
Some annotated examples of popular searches we collected in January 2021. Source: The Markup / Amazon
The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, which represents more than 30,000 distributors, submitted a letter to members of Congress in July 2020, complaining that Amazon “abuses its position” to give preferential treatment to its house brands.
But when The Markup asked to speak to some of the sellers the group had quoted anonymously, NAW’s vice president of government relations, Blake Adami, demurred.
“Our members are still very hesitant to speak out against Amazon for fear of retaliation,” he said in an email, “even anonymously.”
Many sellers whose products we found were placed below Amazon products with fewer sales or ratings also declined a reporter’s request to be interviewed for this article, saying they were concerned it would negatively affect their livelihoods.
“Everybody’s so scared of Amazon,” said Paul Rafelson, executive director of the Online Merchants Guild, which represents Amazon sellers. “Their whole livelihood relies on them.”
‘This was a knockoff’
Some of Amazon’s competitors have accused the company of knocking off their products to sell under its house brands.
Williams Sonoma settled a lawsuit that included the claim that Amazon was copying West Elm furniture and selling it under the Amazon house brand Rivet. Allbirds co-CEO Joey Zwillinger wrote an open letter to Jeff Bezos when Amazon’s 206 Collective brand copied his company’s wool sneaker, urging Amazon to adopt Allbirds’ sustainability practices in addition to its design.
In March, Amazon Basics started selling the Everyday Sling, a camera bag with a similar design, the same name but a much lower price than a product from Peak Design.
“It wasn’t like they took some styling cues from it. This was a knockoff,” CEO Peter Dering said in an interview. The smaller company produced a parody video that now has 4.6 million views on YouTube. Within hours, Amazon changed the product’s name.
Dering said he wasn’t worried about losing sales because Peak Design mainly targets wholesalers and customers who want a high-end brand. Still, he said he found the move “highly distasteful.”
Rona, the Amazon spokesperson, said the company “did not infringe” on Allbirds’ or Peak Design’s “design rights” and “strictly prohibit[s] our employees from using non-public, seller-specific data to determine which store brand products to launch.”
Hard to spot
Identifying all of Amazon’s brands and brand exclusives to the site for this investigation was cumbersome. The company does not provide a complete list. The Markup’s reporting team used various filters on the site, reviewed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records, and reviewed Amazon bestseller lists—but even then we likely missed some.
Consumers would have an even harder time. We found Amazon does not consistently label its brands and exclusives.
Of the products in our sample that Amazon considered “our brands,” about two in five were not labeled as such in search results nor did they carry a name that many people would understand was connected to the company, such as Amazon Basics, Kindle, or Whole Foods.
Inconsistent labelling, combined with an almost endless stream of its own private brands, leaves customers in the dark to decide whether Amazon highly ranked a particular product because it was a good buy or because it benefited the company’s bottom line.
Nine in 10 respondents to the national survey The Markup commissioned in July didn’t know that Amazon’s highest-selling house brands, apart from Amazon Basics, were owned by the company.
Even there, 24 percent of respondents could not identify Amazon Basics as an Amazon brand, and half didn’t know Amazon owned Whole Foods.
To test your knowledge, Select all products from Amazon brands and exclusives: link
Alex Harman, competition policy advocate at Public Citizen who has studied Amazon’s marketplace, said that to him, the strategy of creating a stream of brands without a clear affiliation to Amazon feels “deceptive.”
Large brick-and-mortar retailers also have house brands. Costco has Kirkland Signature. Target has Up&Up, among others. Historically, he said, when large stores create brands they have been clearly affiliated with the store.
And Amazon’s search results are different from a store shelf.
“Unlike a retail store where you see everything on the shelf, the platform may be in a position to elevate its goods in a way that is harder to do in a retail outlet,” said Baer, the former FTC official, and assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.
By creating more than a hundred trademarked brands, most without an obvious connection to the company, Amazon can preserve its reputation if one of its homegrown products flops. This happened in 2015 when customer reviews for its newly launched Amazon Elements diapers included complaints about leaks and “sagginess.” Amazon pulled the products after just seven weeks to make “design improvements.”
Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the small business advocacy group Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and a frequent Amazon critic, said that as Amazon’s brands squeeze competitors, those competitors have less money to spend on innovation—and consumers lose.
“Consumers don’t even know what’s missing,” she said.
Case in point: Brandon Fuhrmann, who runs the New York Amazon Seller Meetup. He was considering expanding his kitchenware brand into a new type of dishware. While checking trademark registrations and U.S. import logs for sellers with similar products, he realized that the majority of his competition would come from Amazon brands.
“When that happened, we realized we couldn’t even compete,” he said. He decided not to launch the product.
Rise of Amazon brands
Amazon has continually set its sights on dizzying growth.
It launched in 1995, with the goal of becoming “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” Four years later, it declared its intention to become “Earth’s Biggest Selection.”
To reach this point, it took a page from rival eBay’s playbook, inviting individuals and business owners to list rare, used, and collectible items—which quickly transitioned to third parties selling mainstream, new wares on Amazon.
In 2003, Jason Boyce got a call from Amazon asking him to list his company’s basketball products on the nascent marketplace.
Jason Boyce, photographed at his home, on October 4th, 2021. (James Bernal for The Markup)
“We’re like, what are you talking about? You guys sell books,” he said. “What do you mean you’re selling sporting goods?”
Boyce took the plunge and his company’s basketball sales took off on Amazon.
By 2018, third-party sellers like Boyce were responsible for 58 percent of physical goods sales on Amazon. They helped boost Amazon’s North American sales by more than an order of magnitude, from $24.5 billion in 2009 to $386.1 billion in 2018.
The volume created fortunes for small businesses across the world. It also created a deep reliance on Amazon. A 2021 report by JungleScout, which provides software for Amazon sellers, found that Amazon was the only source of income for 22 percent of Amazon’s third-party sellers.
“Within two years of getting on Amazon, most of my clients, whether they want to or not, it becomes their single biggest sales channel,” said James Thomson, who was a manager at Amazon from 2007 to 2012 and now works at the e-commerce consulting firm Buy Box Experts.
And these new third-party sellers had lots of competition, eventually from Amazon itself.
Boyce said Amazon started undercutting his business, selling the same sporting goods—Spalding basketballs, for example—for less.
Unable to compete with Amazon on price for brand-name products, Boyce and his brothers launched their own brand, Harvil, in 2007, to sell sporting goods and home recreation equipment on Amazon. They figured Amazon couldn’t undercut their prices if he and his brothers owned the brand.
They had no idea Amazon was also beginning to launch its own brands and to enter into deals with companies to develop brands exclusive to the platform.
Among the first Amazon brands was Pinzon (a likely nod to the first conquistador to stumble across the Amazon River), which Amazon registered as a trademark in 2007 to sell bedding. Then came Denali for tools, and Amazon Basics for a slew of products, including household appliances and office supplies.
Sometime in 2017, Boyce was searching keywords related to his products on Amazon—”bocce ball,” “air hockey table”—when he noticed a new brand, Rally and Roar, peddling very similar products to his own. They showed up at the top of search results.
Rally and Roar are exclusive to Amazon, labelled as “our brands.” The company was moving in on his territory, again.
The speed of Amazon’s expansion of its own brands has been accelerating, according to several e-commerce and retail research firms. TJI Research counted 598 Amazon-exclusive brands in 2019. Coresight Research said Amazon brand products on the site tripled in the two years between 2018 and 2020 alone.
Amazon invites companies and individuals to join its “our brands” family through programs like Amazon Accelerator, which promises increased exposure for products sold exclusively on Amazon in exchange for extra fees, and sets a sales price if Amazon chooses to later buy the brand.
Boyce and his brothers had already been talking about getting off Amazon’s platform when they noticed Rally and Roar pop up. That settled it.
“We’re like, we’re not going to sit around and wait for Amazon to knock off the rest of our private-label products as well,” he said.
They sold the business.
A leg up
For years, Amazon gave items from its own brands multiple advantages when they first launched, said JT Meng, a former house brand manager at Amazon—though he said the practice has since stopped.
Employees manually applied the Amazon’s Choice label to a new Amazon brand product, even if it didn’t meet the usual criteria, he said.
And instead of starting from scratch in search results with zero reviews, sales, and stars, Meng said employees used a tactic called “search seeding” for new products, “cloning” a competing product’s search ranking and allowing the new Amazon product to appear immediately below that competitor in search results.
“We would use that for all of our products from the get-go for the first six months or longer,” he said.
Meng worked on the launch for Amazon Elements baby wipes, which he said were seeded against similar products from Huggies, Pampers, and others.
Sales spiked so quickly that his team had to stop promoting the Amazon Elements wipes so they didn’t take too much market share, he said.
Once a new house brand product was established, Meng said employees would turn off search seeding. “Without fail, your product would drop in ranking,” he said, “but the hope was that it would drop a small amount.”
By the time Meng left Amazon in 2016, he said search seeding and adding the Amazon’s Choice label to new Amazon brand products were no longer allowed.
Sellers who do try to compete with Amazon brands today said they feel compelled to pay for sponsored listings in order to get a higher result for non-sponsored listings on Amazon. On its Seller Central site, Amazon underlines to sellers how important sales are, stating that “better-selling products tend to list towards the beginning of search” and that as sales increase “so does your placement.”
“You can’t not advertise anymore,” said Boyce, who after selling his sporting goods line founded a consulting firm, Avenue7Media, which advises companies and individuals who want to sell on Amazon.
“You turn off the ads and you lose organic rank within days,” Boyce said. “It’s pay to play.”
Lots of companies are paying.
We found that inside the search results alone, 17 percent of products were paid listings. That doesn’t include entire rows of sponsored products that appear as special modules on about a third of search result pages. (Including those would roughly double the ad percentage on the first results page.)
Amazon is the third-largest seller of online advertising in the U.S., after Google and Facebook, and is growing fast. “Other” revenue, which the company says “primarily includes sales of advertising services,” jumped 52 percent from 2019 to 2020, to $21.4 billion a year.
Struggling for visibility
“If you’re willing to spend a ton of money, you can sell a ton of product,” said Evan Patterson, vice president of business development at California-based Linco, which is one of Boyce’s clients.
The 47-year-old family-owned institution makes casters, the small wheels that attach to office chairs and industrial gear—and has a solid reputation in the offline world for premium products. It competes against a product from Amazon Commercial, among others.
It’s so well known in industrial circles that Linco’s competitors advertise against its name within Amazon’s search results, Patterson said.
Still, Linco hasn’t consistently listed on the first page of search results for “caster wheels,” despite selling on Amazon for years. It will appear on the first page for Patterson, but did not in repeated searches by The Markup.
The only thing that seems to help Linco’s search ranking, Patterson said, is to spend more money for paid listings on Amazon. The company now pays about $10,000 a month for advertising.
“Our search ranking has improved dramatically,” Patterson said.
But it still has a ways to go. When The Markup searched for “caster wheels” at the time of writing, Linco appeared in the middle of the fifth page.
There are hundreds of online tools on the market and, of course, choosing the right one sometimes becomes a difficult task for most entrepreneurs.
The drawback that many entrepreneurs find is that given the large number of tools, they do not know which one can best adapt to the needs of their company. And they waste a lot of time testing and researching.
But don’t worry, I’ve also gone crazy trying tools. I have discarded those that do not add value to me and those that have not been useful to me. For this reason, I have created a list of tools, divided into different areas, so that you know the ones that have made my life easier when managing my company.
Keep in mind that each business has its peculiarities and needs, but in general all these can be perfectly adapted to any project, whether in one sector or another.
List of the 15 best tools for entrepreneurs
Next, I am going to name some tools and resources that have helped me optimize my time and improve my work performance (and that of my employees).
These are some areas that I have focused on to classify all these tools: business productivity, project management, presentations, communication between teams and email marketing.
These three tools are essential to be more efficient in your work:
Google Calendar : you can see your calendar at a glance to check your calendar, create an event and schedule a meeting. You can choose different ways to view the calendar, according to your preferences.
Lastpass : a tool to securely manage all the passwords of all the online programs you use, thus improving productivity on the computer.
Google Drive : the best tool for syncing files online, where two or more people on the team can make changes to a file in real time. Everything is stored in the cloud and you can access it from any device. And it has 15 Gb for free!
Tools to manage projects
Image: Depositphotos.com
How many of you are to write down in a document, on paper or online, the pending tasks to be done? And not only yours, but also those of your employees … Many of these tasks fall into oblivion, which prevents you from reaching your goals.
For this reason, I recommend these online task managers, ideal for working collaboratively through intuitive dashboards. These are structured in columns and each one represents different states: assigned to someone, pending, in process, completed. The cards go through the different columns until they are completed.
One of my favourites is Ora , a task management tool that is especially relevant when there are several departments in a company and the members of each have to communicate to carry out certain actions. Other similar tools are Asana and Trello .
Tools for creating presentations
Image: Depositphotos.com
A good entrepreneur will also need to have basic design notions. Although the normal thing is to delegate this task to a designer, sometimes you need to create something quickly, be it for networks or email marketing , and you need to get out of trouble.
To do this, there are three tools that you should know and that will save you on more than one occasion:
Canva : with more than 8 thousand free templates, it is considered one of the most complete for creating visual content, be it posts for social networks, presentations, covers, flyers , business cards, posters, etc. In addition, it gives you the option to create your creations from scratch and add your images, text, icons, etc.
Prezi : If Power Point gets you a little crazy, Prezi is the best alternative to create, schedule and share dynamic and professional presentations for any important event or meeting. You can add videos, add sound, narration, add a predesigned template, and use the zoom feature to highlight something.
Powtoon : Another option for creating presentations, but it stands out for the functions it offers to create animated videos. Some functions that it integrates are text effects, character animations, varied icons, transitions or backgrounds.
Tools to maintain good communication with your employees
Communication between teams is key so that you all go in the same direction and meet the established objectives. For this, I recommend that you know:
Zoom : both to speak with my team and to speak with my clients or other collaborators of my company I use Zoom . With the paid plan you can hold group meetings of up to 500 participants. Other features that I like are shared screen and the option to record your meetings.
Chanty – A chat tool that I use to improve communication and productivity between teams. You can use mentions, create private groups, bookmark your most important channels, and use emojis and gifs.
Slack : Another tool that I have already tried is Slack, a messaging service that allows the entire team to be in communication in real time. And what I like the most is that it integrates other tools such as Dropbox , Google Drive or MailChimp .
Email marketing tools
Image: Depositphotos.com
Undeniably, one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers is still email marketing . Email, although many of you deny it, is still a powerful communication channel with which you can maintain a medium and long-term relationship with your customers.
So choosing a good email marketing software to correctly manage your emails will be key to your strategy. To choose one or the other, you must take into account aspects such as: quality-price, customer service and that it complies with data protection regulations.
My favourite is Mailrelay for all the features it offers and especially because it has a free version with many advantages. With the free version you can reach 15 thousand contacts, sending 75 thousand emails per month for free. There is no limit of shipments per day and you have support included.
To start this software is great. Afterwards, you can contract another paid version if you need it. It offers you tutorials, autoresponders, easy scheduling to make your shipments, statistics system, advanced subscriber management and A / B tests for your campaigns.
Other programs you can analyse
Mailchimp : its free version allows you to reach 2,000 contacts per month. And the support is free for 30 days.
Getresponse : this does not include a free plan, although it lets you try the tool for 30 days. The basic plan costs $ 15 a month, reaching a thousand subscribers. If the size of your list is larger, you can select it from the basic plan, for a higher price.
I hope that all these online tools for entrepreneurs are useful to you and that you can get the most out of your project with them.
Image: 
Image: Depositphotos.com
Image: Depositphotos.com
Image: 
Image: Depositphotos.com