As promised, here is the marketing plan that I will follow for my Amazon Merch on Demand account. There are many different marketing strategies to use and I’m not sure exactly which one is best. I decided to focus my attention on Instagram. I watched some YouTube videos and read some blog posts and it looks like a great way to advertise my designs for free and get targeted traffic to Amazon. Below is my 10 step marketing plan for killing it in sales on Amazon.
Ally’s Amazon MOD Marketing Plan
Step 1: Pick A Niche
The first step of my marketing plan is to choose a niche. The niche I choose should be something that has a lot of followers yet has little competition. When I search for a funny phrase or joke from that niche plus shirt, there should be less than 500 results. I will test several phrases, puns or jokes from this niche and all should have a low number of results. To see if there are a lot of followers in this niche, I will be checking social media pages in this niche and seeing how many followers there are in this niche. Ideally, I want to find two or three pages on Facebook or Instagram that have over 10,000 followers. I feel like finding a niche is one of the most important steps in my marketing plan and, therefore, I’m going to take my time to thoroughly research niches until I find one that meets all of my criteria. I already have a few in mind but I’m not sure if any of them will work.
Step 2: Create A Brand Name
The second step of my marketing strategy is to come up with a brand name for both my shirts and my social media pages. The brand name will be related to my niche. It will be memorable and easy to spell.
Step 3: Find 10 Puns, Jokes or Phrases Related to My Niche
I’ll be using Chat GPT to come up with 10 puns, phrases or jokes related to this niche that I can make designs for. They need to be something that people in the niche would want to wear on a t-shirt, a hoodie or a phone case. These phrases or puns should also be short and sweet – being funny doesn’t hurt either.
Step 4: Create 250 Designs
The one thing that kills my sales is copycats. I’ve decided to combat copycats by flooding the market. I will make 25-50 designs for each phrase or pun. When you search for the joke or even just the niche, you are bound to find at least one of my designs because I will have hundreds of designs uploaded related to that niche.
Step 5: Keyword Research
The next step in my marketing plan is to do some keyword research and find the best keywords & hashtags to pair with my designs. I’m really bad at keyword research and writing descriptions. I’m always afraid of keyword stuffing so I don’t put many keywords in my descriptions or titles. I need to do some research and figure out how to add lots of keywords while still following the rules.
Step 6: Upload Designs to All Products
I’m going to replace my designs that aren’t selling with these new designs. If a design has never sold and has been published for more than a year, then I will replace it with one of these new designs. The new designs will be uploaded to all products and in every market. It might take me a while to get all 250 designs uploaded since I only have 100 daily uploads but I’ll get there eventually.
Step 7: Create 30 Instagram Posts
I’m going to use Canva to make 30 different Instagram posts. Some posts might be mockups of my designs, some posts might be just the products, while other posts might be inspirational quotes. All the posts will look good together and will have the same color scheme, same fonts, etc.
Step 8: Start An Instagram Account
Step 8 will be to start an Instagram account using my brand name. I will add a description with a link to my Amazon brand page. I will schedule 1 or 2 posts to be added per day with relevant hashtags.
Step 9: Get Followers
My next step will be to get followers to my Instagram account. I’m going to do this by following other people in the niche and people who like those pages. I’ll also comment on their pictures and interact with them. The more followers I get, the more shares I will get and the more shares I get, the more followers I get. I would like to get around 1,000 followers to start.
Step 10: Continue Posting and Following
I will make 30 more Instagram posts and schedule one or two posts per day. I will continue making new designs for the niche. I will also continue interacting with other Instagram accounts in the niche to try to get new followers.
After I tier up to T1000, I plan on finding a new niche and starting this marketing plan over again with the new niche. I’m hoping that this marketing strategy will boost my sales and help me tier up quicker. At 10 sales a month, it’s going to take me at least another year to tier up. My aim is at least 100 sales a month while I’m still in tier 500. This marketing strategy should help me increase my sales. Here are a few videos I watched to come up with this plan:
I’ll be adding my marketing plan to my monthly goals. I hope to have all of the steps completed for my first niche by the end of the summer, just in time for Q4.