Sellerscast: The Power of Amazon's Enhanced Brand Content


On November 20th, 2018 our own Andrew Maff, Director of Marketing, sat down with our own Gina Milazzo, Head of Accounts, to talk about the power of Amazon's Enhanced Brand Content.



Andrew Maff:  Hello, welcome to Episode Four of Seller's Cast. I'm Andrew Maffettone.

Gina Milazzo:  I'm Gina Milazzo.

Andrew Maff:  And today we are talking about the power of Amazon's Enhanced Brand Content.

So, I am going to let Gina start.

Gina Milazzo:  Sure. I love EBC. We're just going to call it EBC for the rest of this video because three words is really long and hard to do.

Andrew Maff:  Yeah. We got places to be.

Gina Milazzo:  Yeah. Whatever. Come on. I love EBC primarily because people are too lazy to read. With that being said, your EBC should be mostly images and not a lot of text. But there is a little controversy right now in the Amazon world about whether the content in EBC indexes and can be crawled by the Amazon A9 algorithm. We believe that better safe than sorry. You might as well fill in those content blocks if you can with things that are actually keyword dense.

The first module in your EBC has to be a branded logo banner, pretty small, doesn't take up the whole screen and then underneath is a description about your company. Within there, it has to be filled, so you might as well put a little information about whatever product category you're in, hit a couple keywords if you can. Obviously don't keyword SUF, everyone hates that. Yeah.

Andrew Maff:  To understand how to do EBC the best or better, would be to understand how the consumer actually comes across it. So, real quick on the customer journey for amazon. It's almost everyone shops like this. If you ever watch someone shop, even if you can mentally think about how you're shopping when you're on Amazon.

You search, you see a picture that looks like what you're looking for, you then read the product title, click on it, you goin, you glance at the title again, then you start going through the pictures. You look through all the pictures, which is why you need call outs and infographics, which is in a whole another-

Gina Milazzo:  Mobile friendly.

Andrew Maff:  ... another sale's casting we'll have to do. Chances are, you don't even read the bullet points or you glance through them. Then, you scroll down 'cause you wanna go see what the reviews are. EBC works because its catching your eye before you get to the reviews. It has to be bold, it has to stand out, it has to be very branded. It has to have all the information that you want across, in there.

Everything that you put in those bullet points that you want to make sure the consumer reads, they're not gonna read, so you wanna make sure you do them short and sweet and have call outs in the infographics in the enhanced brand content. You want to keep it as design heavy and as branded as possible, but then the other trick to that is so the modules that are all rectangular, the issue you're gonna have there is if you make them to big or if you put too much content in there, it's not mobile friendly.

A majority of sales start on mobile or they get finished on mobile and so if you consider people that start on mobile or convert on mobile, is significantly bigger than people that just shop on desktop. You want to make sure that your EBC is mobile friendly as possible.

When you have those big rectangular, horizontal, modules, you want to make sure that the content is not that small. And then you want to use those three blocks because they'll actually stack on mobile, at least as of right now. Making sure that, that thing is mobile friendly as possible is definitely a big one.

Gina Milazzo:  An easy way to test that is to view whatever image you're using on your phone. Keep in mind that you cannot zoom in EBC images on any version of the Amazon shopping app. If you browse on a chrome mobile browser or something like that, you can zoom but people probably aren't going to go through all that trouble. Just make it mobile friendly and save everyone the trouble.

Andrew Maff:  The last thing I would say is go into the reviews, see what people are saying, see what they really like about it and see what they really don't like about it and make sure you mention both. That way, you can clear out anything where you can explain to them, hey, this product doesn't have this or yes, this product does have that, to really drive that extra sale home.

Then, if you wanna take it, even do a step further, you can pull that EBC search term report, see what some of those top keywords are that you're converting for and just have those front and center in the EBC somewhere.

They're not gonna get indexed but if someone searches something and then sees that exact thing on that listing somewhere, it's going to make them feel a little more comfortable about their purchase and they're gonna purchase a lot of faster. The quicker you can get them in and out, the better and the more likely you are to convert.

Gina Milazzo:  Definitely. We like to say, answer the question before they think to ask it, especially if it's something that requires additional pieces of if it does or doesn't include installation instructions or mounting materials or something.

Make it super duper clear because if you don't, they're going to go looking somewhere else. They're either gonna look for instructions or a blog or something, more information about the product that you could have just given them and kept them on your page.

Andrew Maff:  Although enhanced brand content, all the content that's in there and all text that's in the back end. Although they say that ll text is actually indexed but you're supposed to treat it like all text and not just keyword STUF the hell out of it like some people do.

What you really should know is that it doesn't help increase traffic but it helps increase your conversion rate which is a major, major part of the algorithm, which means if you convert better and you start to raise in your organic ranking, you're gonna get more traffic. It's a bit of a stretch but you could still say that enhanced brand content does in fact help drive more traffic and of course helps on your conversion rate.

Usually you should see, can't remember what the average was, but about a three to 12% improvement in your conversion rate. If you wanna know if enhance brand content is working, document what your conversion rate is before you put it in, put it in, let it sit there for about maybe a month to get a good amount of data, and then see what that change is. But I have never seen it hurt someone.

Gina Milazzo:  Never. In all the EBCs that we've made across a ton of different categories, a ton of different types of products, we've never seen it have a negative impact.

Andrew Maff:  Beautiful. This week's tool, actually wasn't prepped for this one but I know which one I wanna use here. We actually started utilizing something in house, which doesn't matter if whether you're an agency or whether you're actually in house somewhere at your own eCommerce store. We use Red Pen.

It's been fantastic of being able to get edits done without having to go hey, that little call-out that you had like three boxes over, make sure you edit this and we're filling it all out in a spreadsheet or an email or anything like that.

With this, you can give them access to Red Pen. They can go in and mark it and actually write down what it is that needs to be fixed. And then that way you can go in and go, oh they want this changed here, they want that changed here and you can get those edits done really quick.

Gina Milazzo:  Yeah.

Andrew Maff:  Perfect. Very much appreciate it. Thank you very much everyone for joining us. Again, please make sure you subscribe and then of course, go ahead and comment, let us know what topics you want us to cover next week and we'll make sure that we start going through them. By now, we've really started to get a pretty good amount, so we're gonna start picking them out of a hat and just kinda going at it and see what happens. But thank you for joining us and we'll see you next week on Seller's Cast. amazon listing optimization ebook





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