1. The Mountain Strategy

The premise of The Mountain Strategy is very simple. You can’t ascend to the next level until you have achieved/completed everything on the level you are currently on.

Operations: It’s impossible to achieve sustainable success on Amazon with poor operations. This consists of factors like; inventory management, fulfillment, customer service, communication etc.
Brand: It’s all about your brand touchpoints at this stage, predominantly focusing on; your listings, your storefront, your packaging. In essence, any opportunity whereby you interact with the customers as a brand. The focus though is where the conversion happens, so your listings!
Advertising: Now that you’ve got a strong operational base and a beautiful brand presence that converts and delights customers, you can start to drive traffic. This can be the bottom of funnel traffic through Amazon Advertising, or higher up the funnel through social advertising, like Facebook.

Operations

The following pieces of training are going to help ensure you’ve got your house in order from an operational perspective.

If you want to keep it simple and focus on one area though, I’d recommend drilling into maximising the potential with FBA and ensuring you have a stronghold on your inventory management. Being out of stock on any item that you’ve worked hard to get to page 1 can set you back many months, it can also be a waste of the effort you put into getting onto page 1, so this is crucial. Finally, having a system to build reviews is paramount for continued growth so you need to have that in place.

Brand

I’ve plucked a handful of courses that will help you delve deeper into the necessities of building a brand on Amazon.

I’ve not included it again but product inserts (touched upon in the reviews course) are super important for building that connection with existing customers. However, your listing is the crucial thing you must be nailing here. Go into the community and share your listing in order to get feedback, or if you want to book in some time 1-2-1 we can do that as well. Your brand’s presence will make or break your success!

Advertising

Below are some relevant links that will help you understand Amazon Advertising in more detail. We highly recommend utilising the community to ask questions and get the most up to date strategies on the topic.

Additionally, social advertising is becoming increasingly more important. You cannot just rely on one source of traffic, you must be diversifying, which means trying Facebook advertising alongside your Amazon efforts. Here are some good videos to start with:

As always, the community provides you with a platform to go and ask questions on any topic. If you need anything else, let us know!

2. The Flywheel

By this point you should truly understand what The Mountain Strategy is and ideally have mapped out areas that you have and haven’t completed yet.

For instance, have you got a list of all your ASIN’s and marked those that are 70% optimised, in comparison to those that are 90%+ optimised? You need to be aware of your shortfalls at each stage of the MOUNTAIN in order to continuously be tweaking, improving and progressing.

Now for the Flywheel, we’ve created a short video breaking down what it is and how you can use it. Then below we’ve included some directions to which courses/materials we feel will help you achieve the strategy.

Optimise

As we are talking about your product, what we’re referring to here is LISTING OPTIMISATION. Within The Mountain Strategy we covered this a little so apologies for the overlap, but here are some resources we recommend starting with:

Remember that this process is ongoing. You want to be going back over your listings, studying conversion rates month over month, to see if you’re still doing everything you can to ensure you’re listings are primed to convert.

Marketing

In the Mountain Strategy section of this roadmap, we looked at strategies to drive traffic to Amazon listings. I’d highly recommend going back and reviewing that again. If you’ve already done that then you can see some additional resources below that go a little deeper into advertising both on and off Amazon, ensuring your utilising all tactics available.

Reviews

In order for the Flywheel to really start flying you must be collecting reviews. Once you’ve achieved the magic 21+ reviews that is deemed as social proof, it’s important to keep building on that number. Not only do we see conversions increasing with more reviews, but your sales rank will improve, cost per click will decrease and you’ll also be gathering data!

Data

So by this point, your Flywheel should have spun a large number of times. You’ve significantly optimised your brand touchpoints, you’re been driving high-quality warm leads to your listing from Amazon and social advertising, you’re making sales and building reviews!

We recommend spending anywhere from 1-2 weeks, right up to 1-2 months to collect data. It depends, if your product is brand new then you’ll look to make adjustments more regularly, whereas seasoned products shouldn’t need as much frequent work – providing you’ve set things up well.

Your advertising data is a very good starting point.

As mentioned before, the community really is the best place to go when it comes to digging into your data and getting help understanding it! You can also request a 1-2-1 session with our Amazon Advertising team to dig into your data and provide some bespoke advice. If you’d like to speak about this please email us on george@thelistingppl.com

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