5 Quick Ways to Refresh Your Amazon Listing This Summer

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:00

Welcome to the BRING your PRODUCT IDEA to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly, practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:27

Hello and welcome to this episode of BRING a PRODUCT Idea to life. So in this episode, I want to talk about things you can do to improve your product listings over the summer period.

Because we all know that summer can be a slower time for sales. It can be a quieter time in our businesses.

Perhaps not for all of us, but for some of us, you know, we might have kids at home and we might have less obligations to do other things, maybe networking or meetings and things we usually do on hold over the summer months. And even if we're taking a little bit of time off, hopefully we all have a little bit more headspace, at least, if not actual time.

So for these reasons, summer can be a really great time to review your Amazon product listings and see if there's any changes you want to make ahead of Q4. Another reason to think about doing this now is obviously we're coming up, as I've mentioned, to Q4. It's going to be here before we know it.

That's going to be the busiest time of year for sales on Amazon and everywhere else. And it'd be really great if you could go into September thinking, you know what, my listings are as good as they could be. Everything is ready.

I'm all set. Rather than rushing in September when kids are back to school, school, things started getting busy again.

Life, you know, feels like things start ramping up and you've got so many other things to do, it just might never make the priority. So today I'm going to suggest five really quick things that you can do to refresh your Amazon product listings.

And by the way, if you don't sell on Amazon, but you're somehow listening to this episode anyway, first of all, welcome. This will work anywhere where you're selling products. So what I'm talking about here is applicable to Amazon.

But you could do follow these same steps anywhere that you're selling your products if you want to give your listings a bit of a refresh as we head towards the end of quarter three. So my first tip is to try updating your images. Why do I say this?

Well, depending how long you've had your listing up, it might be that you've used the same Images that you've had for years.

Maybe you've had new photography taken since then, but you just haven't got round to update your images because you know your listing looks good as they are. But trying to add, trying to, to update your images can be a really great way of refreshing your listing adds a little bit of interest.

So especially if sales aren't perhaps where you'd like them to be, trialing a new main image might help with click through rate. So it's definitely worth trying that out.

Remember if you are trying a new main image on Amazon that the requirement for this is it has to be your product on a white background.

But it might be that perhaps you've your main image now is your product from one angle and you might want to try actually if I, if I showed this product from a different angle, would that convert better with more people click through? It's definitely something to look at. It might be the images aren't as high resolution as you'd like.

For whatever reason, obviously on Amazon you want your images to be as high resolution as possible to allow for zoom. If for some reason you think, actually I've got crisper images now, I've got high resolution images, why not swap those out?

That could be a really good idea. If you've only ever used shots of your product, this could be a really good time to maybe add some lifestyle shots.

So maybe you've had an opportunity to have some lifestyle shots taken of your products since you set up your listing. Maybe you've got some user generated content.

Maybe customers have sent you images of your products sort of in their real lives and maybe they would be happy for you to use those images. Obviously you have to ask permission for this kind of thing.

Or maybe you've got some time over the summer to go and take some lifestyle images yourself, which is entirely possible. That can be a great way of updating your listing. It also might be a good time to think about some infographics.

So maybe you want to highlight key features. Maybe you want to zoom in on certain parts of your products, show things off.

Maybe you want some text based images where you're, where you're highlighting particular benefits. Maybe you want to have an image with some award wins on there. Maybe you've won something recently you'd really like to highlight that.

Just have a think about are your images as best, as good as they can be? Are they showing off your product to its highest potential? And can a customer who flicks through your images, let's say they don't go to the text.

They're shopping on mobile. Lots of us, when we shop on mobile, myself included, will flick through the images as the first thing before even going to the text.

Because to get to the bullet points, you have to scroll down. And as we know, lots of people shop on mobile. So imagine someone comes to your product listing.

If they were just to click on your listing and then flick through the images, would that give them all the information they need in order to decide to buy your product? If not, think about what images are missing and what you can add in to improve that. And I promise that will make a real difference.

So my second tip for things you can do to refresh your listings this summer is to rerun your keyword research. So things change. When you set up your listing, it might have been amazingly well optimized for search.

In fact, I hope it is really, really optimized for search, because obviously on Amazon, that's how you get found. But things change. And the terminology people use, the things people are searching for, the wording, the phrasing can and does change.

So it's always worth rerunning your keyword research maybe a couple of times a year, just to see if there's any words or phrases that customers are searching for that are relevant to your product that aren't included in your listing. So there are lots of keyword research tools you can use for this. I like Jungle scout. There's also helium 10. There's plenty of other tools out there.

I'm not going to list them all. You choose the one that's appropriate for you. You can also use the Amazon search bar for some basic unpaid, you know, free keyword research.

Of course, that's not going to give you the depth, but something you can use, which is very exciting. And I'm actually going to cover in next week's episode. So please do listen to that. Is brand Analytics. Brand analytics is brand new on Amazon.

You may be familiar with it, you may have had a look. You might not even know that you have it. You might not even know what it is.

Next week's episode I'm going to go into this in lots of detail, but I promise brand analytics is going to be a really useful way of finding out what words and phrases customers are typing in the search bar to find products like yours. So however you do it, it's definitely worth just taking a look at taking a look at your analytics and what people are searching for.

Another way you can do this is you can review your ads so you can look at if you're running any ads on Amazon, you can take a look at your search terms and you can see are there any keywords that are converting via ads aren't actually included in your listings?

Any words, phrases the customers are searching for, they're finding your product, they're clicking on your ad, they're then going on to buy, which is important. Is there anything that they're that meets that criteria that isn't actually included in your listing text?

If there is, you should be adding those into the text of your listing because then you can start to rank for those organically. Because at the moment you are ranking for those search terms via your ads.

But wouldn't it be nice if you could start getting some more organic traffic as well? And the only way that's going to happen is if those words and phrases included in your listing text.

I'm not talking about a complete rewrite here, by the way. It might mean you just updating your title or one of your bullet points. That's, you know, that really is the extent of it.

I'm not, nothing I'm suggesting here should take you too long. I hope maybe that maybe the five things I'm going to go through, maybe some of them will apply to every listing, maybe some of your listings.

You'll only need to do one or two of these things. Obviously that's for you to know.

But I think it's just really useful to think about all of these five things when you're reviewing your listings and think, okay, which of them are relevant and how can I refresh and improve my product listing? And the final thing you can do when it comes to keywords is take a look at your competitors.

Obviously, you know, I don't agree with copying, but if you look at every single one of your competitors has a word or a couple of words or a phrase in their product title particularly, and you don't, there's probably a reason for that. And the reason is they've probably done the keyword research recently and they know that people are searching for that. So that also might be helpful.

My third tip of things you can do to refresh your listing are to review your bullet points and your product description. So not just based on keywords, as I said earlier, but just having a quick read through.

Maybe get someone else to give them a quick read through and just make sure they're benefit focused, they're concise, they're easy to scan. Is there anything missing?

Leading me on to my fourth tip, which would be to check your customer reviews for Clues, because your customers will tell you if there's something missing from your, from your product listing in the form of a review and possibly not a good review.

If a customer thinks your listing is misleading in any way, or they're confused about something, or there was a key piece of information they didn't get, your reviews will tell you that.

And while this is not nice, like nobody wants anything less than a five star review, what's really useful is you can use the information in those reviews to improve upon your product listing. So it might be that you haven't included the size of your products and people are leaving reviews saying, gosh, this is much more than I expected.

Well then perhaps you can add size detail into the text and even better, you could add an image that kind of shows your products in relation to something else to make it really clear what the size is. So that's just one example.

But hopefully by having a quick look at your reviews, which I think is worth you doing fairly regularly anyway, not all the time. You don't want to be constantly reading up on reviews. That's probably not, not good for anyone.

But just a couple, you know, a few every couple of months, just reading your reviews, particularly the most recent ones, seeing what people are saying, even seeing what people like are the things that customers really like about your product that you haven't highlighted enough. So let's not just focus on the negative.

Are there things that your customers are telling you they love about your product or ways customers are telling you you're. They're using your product that you haven't included in your listing? If so, I think this is a great opportunity to just do a little refresh.

As I say, not a rewrite, just a refresh to add these things in and help to make your listing more relevant. And then my final tip for how you can refresh your listings this summer is to add or update your A content.

So if you don't know what a content is, that's the sort of image heavy content you get towards the bottom of an Amazon product listing. And to have this kind of content you have to apply for Amazon's brand registry.

To apply for Amazon's brand registry, you need to have a registered or pending trademark in the UK if that's where you're looking to sell, or the US if that's where you're based. But basically in the country that you're looking to sell your products on Amazon.

And if you're eligible then for brand registry, then a content is something you get completely. And I Think it's really worth having on your listings if you can.

One, because it's free and two, because it can really help improve, improve conversions. And it's just, it's more, it's more space. It's more space of you to tell people about your product.

It's more space to use to add images or graphics or whatever you want. It's basically just more real estate on your listing. I mean, why wouldn't you use it? It's completely free. So Amazon does have templates for A plus.

And when I first started working on Amazon, so this is probably, I want to say it was about 10 years ago, maybe not that long, eight years ago, and A plus content first existed, I was using those templates. So you've probably seen them. You can add banners of different sizes, you know, images with text overlay.

There's one where you can have like three boxes with a block of text under each of them. They're okay, they look kind of, they do look a bit basic and I'm starting to feel that nowadays they're looking a little bit old fashioned.

More and more people now are moving away from using the Amazon templates and creating their own content. And the easiest way to do that is you select one of the larger image format formats for each of your blocks of content. Create your own images.

I like to do it in Canva and then just stack them. So the way I would do it, if this is helpful is I would use the.

I think it's, I think it's the large, the largest image that you can possibly have as a block because the way a works is basically blocks that you stack. So you have something at the top, so you might have a banner and then you'd have a, you know, to have something below that.

You can just stack five blocks of images.

And that's a really great way, as I say, because you can use your own colors, your own fonts, you can make it really cohesive, you can create it in canvas, you can see how it will look when it's laid out.

And in my opinion that looks much nicer and more modern than the old Amazon templates where you're kind of having to fit your content to their templates and it's not probably what you want. The text is quite small. It doesn't look great on mobile.

Whereas if you're creating your own A plus, you can add different images for mobile versus desktop. So you can make sure that everything's really legible, looks really good in both formats.

Remembering that a lot of People are shopping on their phones nowadays and I think it's a really good thing to do. So if you don't have any A plus content, this could be a good time to add it.

If you have A plus content, but you're using the old Amazon sort of pre, pre. What do we call them? Pre made formats. Whatever we want, whatever we want to say, it might be a good opportunity to refresh it with your own branding.

If you don't use it, have a brand story on your. A content that could be something you might want to add.

And finally, my favorite, if you're not using comparison tables, that's definitely something to add this summer. So a comparison table is a table you've probably seen at the bottom of other listings where you can basically highlight other products in your range.

So if you have products that complement the product that you're selling, or maybe you sell that product in different sizes, or even if your products aren't, you know, aren't really related to each other other than they all come under your brand. So let's say you're a hair care brand and you've got shampoo and you've got a conditioner and you've got a serum and an oil.

You might want to use all of these in the comparison table just to make it easy for customers to buy from you because it might be that the product they're looking at isn't the one they want to buy. And then they say, oh, actually this brand is selling a different product and that is what I want. So comparison tables are great for that.

So that's the final thing you can add to your A content if you don't have one already.

And my top tip on this, by the way, is that if you have a variation listing, so let's say your product listing is for gloves and you're saying gloves in five different colors. Please don't put all of those five colors in your comparison table because customers can choose the color of the glove from the top of the listing.

Instead of that, put your, you know, put a link to your hat in the. In the comparison table or your scarves or your other, you know what I'm saying?

I don't know what you sell, but your other products, not the ones that are already available on that listing. Because what we want from these tables is to make it really easy for a customer to buy something else from you.

So they might buy the products they're looking at. But wouldn't it be great if they buy something else as well or if they don't buy something else as well.

Wouldn't it be great if they bought something else, but it happened to be one of your products because you've made it super easy for them to buy from you. So hopefully this is all really helpful. I've tried to keep this brief because I know I've covered a lot. It's not intended to be onerous.

If you can, I would say my challenge to you is to try and do a mini review of one of your product listings this week. As I say, it might not be that you need to do everything that I've outlined and I'm sure it won't.

I'm sure your listings are fantastic and it might be that you just need to make one or two tweaks, you know, to improve them. But I think it's a great time to do it.

Hopefully you've got some time and some space where you can look at your listings and I promise any changes that you make will really make a difference when we go towards the end of this year. If you need any further help with this, I have a free audit checklist. This is an Amazon audit checklist.

It's completely free and it takes you through not just product listings, but all those little niggly Amazon tasks, all the things that you could look at over the summer to just check that your listing, your whole, your account as a whole, not just your listings, but your Amazon account is as well optimized for success as possible.

If you'd like that, there's a link in the show notes and if you are really not sure where to start, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I'm sure my listings needs to work, but I'm really not sure what to do. Why not book a power hour with me?

I can review your listings for you and give you some really tailored specific feedback if that's something you're interested in. Again, there will be a link to that in the show notes. So thank you so so much for tuning in for this episode.

I'll be back next week where I'm going to talk about the Amazon updates that you can't afford to miss this year.

So things that have happened, things that are going to happen, all the things you need to know about, including an in depth update on Amazon's brand analytics as I mentioned earlier. And I will be back with another podcast interview this Friday. So until then, have a lovely week and I shall speak to you very soon.

Vicki Weinberg: 00:16:35

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode. Do remember that you that you can get the full back catalog and lots of free resources on my website, vickywineberg. Com.

Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.

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