Advertising with Black Business Accelerator
Amazon’s Black Business Accelerator is dedicated to providing growth opportunities for Black-owned businesses through advertising promotions that help customer find your products, educational resources that coach you along the way, and a variety of other benefits.
Here are the themes we’ll cover in this guide
Benefits of the Black Business Accelerator
Part of Black Business Accelerator? You’ve come to the right place.
With this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know to kick-start your advertising journey, including how to take advantage of the benefits available to you.
First things first - if you haven't joined the Black Business Accelerator yet, check your eligibility and sign up here.
Sellers within Black Business Accelerator are eligible for a range of an Amazon Ads benefits that include:
Financial assistance
Credits and cash investment opportunities to help jump-start business growth and customer acquisition.
- $500 credit to assist with start-up and operational costs for newly-registered Amazon Professional sellers.
- Sponsored Enhanced Digital Certifications for Black-owned business through SupplierGATEWAY.
Business education and coaching
Account management and education resources to help you get started and find success in our store.
- Access free education resources to help you sell in Amazon’s store.
Marketing and advertising support (For brand owners)
Free services and credits designed to help brand owners showcase their unique products and increase discoverability.
- Free imaging services for up to 50 products to help showcase your products.
- Unlock exclusive BBA Advertising credits within 30 days of starting with BBA. See here to learn more.
In order access these benefits, all you need to do is complete the next four chapters in this guide:
We recommend using your earned advertising click credits to launch a Sponsored Products campaign.
— Rodney Marshall, President and CEO, AldevraBlack Business Accelerator has been valuable in identifying opportunities to increase revenue and save money. We’ve been able to hire another employee.
Launch a Sponsored Products campaign
Suggested actions for your campaign set-up
Create and launch a Sponsored Products campaign
The campaign set-up should only take a few minutes, and the campaign manager guides you through it step by step. Yet, there are already a few decisions to make. Taking the suggested actions during the campaign set-up stage can help you maximize the success of your campaign.
If you have already launched your first campaign, it’s worthwhile reviewing these suggested actions to keep them in mind when you launch your next Sponsored Products ads, or for optimizing your ongoing campaigns.
Follow these 8 steps below:
1. Select Sponsored Products and begin a new campaign.
2. Give your campaign a name. This may be the types of products that you’ll be advertising, seasonal merchandise that you’re promoting, or anything else you want to distinguish and organize this campaign from others.
3. Set your campaign duration. You can choose a custom start and end date, but we recommend an always-on approach by running continuous campaigns without end dates. For this method, simply leave the end date blank.
4. Set your daily budget. This is the maximum daily amount you want to spend on advertising the products in this campaign. You can change this at any time.
5. Choose between automatic or manual targeting. We recommend using automatic targeting for your first campaign. With this method, Amazon matches relevant shopping queries to your ad based on keywords and products.
6. Add the products you want to advertise in your campaign. For your first 30 days, we recommend you advertise at least 2 suggested products in the first campaign because they have high quality product detail pages. You can find the products by applying the “suggested” filter.
7. Set your cost-per-click (CPC) bid. This is the amount that you’re ready to invest for a click. The suggested bid featured on-screen will estimate a recommended range based on other winning bids for ads similar to yours. We recommend applying the suggested bid for automatic targeting.
8. Set your bid strategy. There are three strategies to choose from: dynamic bids - down only, dynamic bids - up and down, and fixed bids.
- Down only - Amazon may reduce your bids in real time for clicks that are less likely to convert to a sale
- Up and down - may increase your bids for more-promising clicks that have a higher chance of leading to a sale or reduce bids for clicks that are less likely to convert
- Fixed bids - Amazon will only use your exact bid throughout the campaign
For your first campaign, we recommend you to choose dynamic bids – down only to help control costs and reduce spend on clicks that may not convert for you. This way, as your campaign progresses, you can modify your bids for each keyword based on performance.
Join Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA)
Let Amazon pick, pack, and ship your orders
Join FBA, and get free shipping, returns, and more
Fulfillment is the process of storing, packing, and shipping orders, as well as handling returns and exchanges. Some businesses manage fulfillment in-house, while others use a service, like FBA, or some combination of in-house and third-party fulfillment options.
Using FBA can help you earn trust with customers by providing a seamless, reliable experience. This service also can make your life easier and minimize headaches as you scale your business. With FBA, you can:
- Manage customer orders without handling delivery
- Send shipments on time
- Use one end-to-end solution for inventory storage, shipping, and returns
- Attract Amazon Prime customers with fast and FREE delivery
To no surprise, shipping costs are a major consideration for customers. A study on U.S. shoppers found that:
- Free delivery is the most important factor for 83% of shoppers when ordering online
- More than half (54%) have abandoned online shopping baskets because of delivery costs
Considering these findings, it’s important to work with an affordable fulfillment service you—and your customers—can trust.
How FBA works
Step 1 - Set up FBA
Create your Amazon selling account, and log in to Seller Central to set up FBA.
Step 2 - Create product listings
Once you add products to the Amazon catalog, specify FBA inventory.
Step 3 - Prepare products
Prepare the products for safe and secure transportation to a fulfillment center, according to Amazon packing guidelines and shipping and routing requirements.
Step 4 - Ship products to Amazon
Create a shipping plan, print Amazon shipment ID labels, and send shipments to Amazon fulfillment centers. Learn more about sending inventory to Amazon.
Once Amazon receives products at the fulfillment center, customers can start buying those items.
Visit Seller Central Help to learn about how to manage FBA orders.
Prepare your product detail pages for advertising
Check your product pages for advertising readiness
Make sure your product detail pages are advertising ready
Sponsored Products promote individual product listings in shopping results and on product detail pages. These ads can help audiences discover and purchase the products that you sell in the Amazon store.
When customers click your ad, they see your product detail page—so it’s important to keep in mind that the quality of your product information and detail pages can have a direct impact on your ad performance and sales.
Here’s a list of improvements you can make today to help get your ads in front of customers with a better chance at engagement:
Do your product detail badges have…
- A title between 25 and 200 characters long?
- Zoomable images?
- At least 4 images?
- A description?
- Search keywords?
- More than 3 bullets?
- Featured Offer eligibility?
- Advertising eligibility?
Create your brand foundation on Amazon
We have the tools for creating a cohesive, scalable brand strategy.
In the Amazon store, products are being discovered and brands are making new connections every day. According to a survey by Tinuiti, 75% of customers use Amazon to discover new products and brands.1
Creating your brand identity is about reaching and connecting with shoppers
By creating an engaging brand presence in the Amazon store, you can reach customers where they’re already shopping and looking for inspiration for their next purchase.
Amazon is ready with the tools you need to create a foundation for your brand – from registering and protecting your brand, to optimizing your product pages, to advertising your products and creating free brand shopping experiences.
Creating a cohesive brand strategy can help you establish a connection with customers and get them excited to shop with your brand, no matter where they are in their shopping journey: browsing for ideas, considering specific brands and products or actually making a purchase.
Take control of your brand experience
Amazon Ads offers a range of free and paid self-service products that you can use to create a scalable brand strategy. You can use these solutions together to help customers learn more about your full product line and to tell your story in an intentional, compelling way.
To help you get started, we put together a checklist that you can follow to take control of your brand experience and to get your business ready for advertising:
- Tactic #1: Enroll and register your brand in the Amazon store
- Tactic #2: Create the building blocks of your brand identity
- Tactic #3: Optimize your product pages for better engagement
- Tactic #4: Start boosting sales with self-service ads
- Tactic #5: Leverage free brand shopping experiences
- Tactic #6: Bring your brand story to life with Sponsored Brands
- Tactic #7: Connect your ad strategy with your business goals
Together, this strategy can help you accelerate awareness, deepen engagement, and bring more highly relevant traffic to your product detail pages.
Amazon Ads has been very pivotal for a brand like ourselves. We have all of these tools at our disposal to reach the relevant audience and a way to stand out. Amazon has been instrumental in our growth as a brand.
— Ralph Newhouse, CEO, Chefman
1 Tinuiti, “The 2020 Amazon Shopper Survey”
Thank you for reading
Advertising with Black Business Accelerator