For many brands, Amazon Business—Amazon’s B2B platform—can be the perfect antidote to the current moment.
If you’re looking at your costs and getting nervous, shifting some of your ad money toward B2B buyers is the key to staying competitive.
Why? Amazon’s B2B shoppers buy in bulk and have lower ACOS than regular shoppers.
Basically, when you invest in Amazon Business marketing, you get a lot more bang for your marketing dollars. That can come in handy in a moment as turbulent as this one in the e-commerce world.
Of course, Amazon Business is not for everyone. It works best for brands in certain categories. Think electronics, office supplies, furniture, and industrial and scientific supplies.
But if that’s you, you should be thinking seriously about your Amazon Business strategy right now.
Looking for a way to reduce your marketing costs so you don’t have to raise your prices? B2B shoppers might offer just the return on investment you need.
And, with more controls at your disposal for B2B marketing on Amazon, now is the time to jump on it.
Why are Amazon B2B customers so cost-effective?
Amazon Business is Amazon’s B2B platform, where verified small-, medium-, and large business owners register to buy products in bulk.
For more on what Amazon Business is—and how to join the Amazon Business Seller program—read our breakdown here.
What is important to know is this: First, Amazon Business is expanding. Amazon has been pushing smaller businesses to join its B2B service, offering steep discounts to new Business Prime Essentials members.
And second, Business shoppers cost a lot less to market to than regular shoppers do. Business shoppers have a 3x higher conversion rate than B2C shoppers after viewing a product page.
They also order 74% more units, and return products at a 42% lower rate.
Essentially, marketing on Amazon B2B is a way to notch a few strong ACOS wins and cheaply move some product in the process.
How do I build an effective Amazon B2B marketing strategy?
Marketing to this coveted cohort of B2B buyers is also easier than ever. In recent months, Amazon has made it simpler to create a unique B2B campaign that is distinct from your regular B2C strategy.
If you master these controls now before your competitors do, you’ll have a real chance to pull ahead on Amazon Business.
Step 1: Adjust Sponsored Products bids for your Business shoppers
The Intentwise Ad Optimizer just made it easier to manage your Amazon B2B strategy in the same place where you already manage your B2C campaigns.
Essentially, we added B2B as a placement modifier for all Sponsored Products campaigns.
That way, you can adjust your B2B bids at the same time as you adjust your bids for Top of Search, Product Detail Page, and Rest of Search placements.
You can also set automated rules for your B2B campaigns, and let your Amazon Business strategy run automatically in the background.
Agencies can easily copy/paste these rules across all of their client accounts, and set alerts to flag when a campaign is doing particularly well or particularly poorly.
Step 2: Create custom B2B audiences
Many of the powerful tools available through Amazon Marketing Cloud can also be leveraged for your Amazon Business strategy. Think about audience creation, for instance.
You can generate any custom audience you want in AMC, push it to your Sponsored Products campaign, and use B2B bid adjustments to bid up when Business buyers from that cohort see your ad.
Let’s say you want to create a custom audience of shoppers who have recently searched “[your brand name] in bulk” but who have not made a purchase, for instance.
Push that audience to your SP campaigns, and set a much higher bid when someone logged into a B2B account sees that ad.
You can also directly target Sponsored Display ads to Amazon Business shoppers. You can use one of Amazon’s pre-built Business audiences, which are broken out by business type (like “Healthcare Manufacturing”) or size (“Small to Medium Businesses”). Just type in LS – B2B – Amazon Business when you’re creating a campaign.
Or you can do this by once again creating your own audience in AMC, and exporting it to your SD campaign. Want to reach B2B shoppers who have already seen one of your ads or who have a high life-time value? Now you can.
Step 3: Track your B2B performance
Intentwise now also brings Amazon Business data into Intentwise Analytics Cloud. Glance at your metrics on the go, or bring them into your reporting system, so you can separate out your B2B and B2C metrics when you present to your boss or to your client each month.
Our detailed filters and roll-ups also let you see how your B2B campaigns are performing compared to each other or to similar B2C campaigns. Sort the data however you like, or ask our AI assistant Wizi to do it for you.
And of course, if you want more of an insight into your B2B performance, our custom services team can whip up the query or dashboard of your dreams for Amazon Business. Just reach out.
