It’s all too easy for brands to fall into the ‘Amazon Effect’ trap, believing that once they’ve listed a product on the platform, they can just sit back and watch the sales rack up. But the secret to being truly successful on Amazon is to think outside of the platform. You need a broad marketing strategy – with Amazon being an essential part of the mix.

Relying on shoppers finding your products organically is never going to deliver the strongest results. Optimising your listings content so that it works with Amazon’s algorithms to drive organic sales will help. But it’s not enough on its own. To really drive sales, you need to capture people’s attention way before they start their Amazon search, using other channels to raise awareness of your brand and product range before driving your audience to Amazon to convert the sale.

Our client Rockstar Spirits had this marketing strategy down to perfection. Following an incredibly successful pitch on Dragon’s Den, their PR machine went into overdrive with a run of appearances on high profile TV shows including Sunday Brunch, Steph’s Packed Lunch and Celebrity Masterchef to name a few.

But it was the brand’s appearance on This Morning that truly changed its fortune. Holly and Phil’s reaction to the Pineapple Rum product was so positive, the clip went viral becoming the show’s highest viewed Instagram clip with over 400k views (and still rising).

The coverage was gold dust, and Rockstar Spirits made sure they made the most of it by repurposing, posting, and sharing across all their social channels, always linking the content back to opportunities to purchase.

And to help the team capitalise on the brand’s new-found fame, we helped them launch their products on Amazon. Using our expertise, we created a media plan that gave Rockstar Spirits premium spots across Amazon by using Amazon’s sponsored ads to ensure products featured in ads at the very top of the first page of search results – fending off any potential threats from competitor brands.

Then to convert searches to sales, we created best-in-class content for product pages, A+ pages and an Amazon Brand Store to showcase the brand at its most premium. Stunning product photography and perfect serve suggestions were combined with brand credentials and product information to tell a story of quality and innovation. And our narrative was carefully crafted for Amazon SEO using keywords that would work with Amazon’s algorithms to drive organic sales.

It’s a perfect example of how off-Amazon marketing, PR and social can be used to complete the selling ecosystem on Amazon – driving sales and campaign performance from outside the Amazon funnel.

It’s a strategy that’s increasingly important considering recent data suggests that 48% of consumers are still using channels outside of Amazon when searching for products – retailer sites, other search engines, brand websites and social to name but a few. So, you could be missing out on almost half of potential sales if your marketing strategy only focuses on Amazon.