Over a million new Amazon third-party sellers entered the playing field just in the last year. As the seller community continues to grow, so does a whole ecosystem of resources for sellers to scale. There are now platforms that can help optimize Amazon listings, craft social media posts, develop Amazon editorial content, and manage advertising spend. No matter how niche the request might be, there is likely a service provider on the market to assist you.
In theory, the accessibility of these extensive resources is great—sellers can find help with virtually any issue they’re facing. In practice, however, sellers find themselves overwhelmed by opportunities for growth with little knowledge of which will be most effective for their business.
Understanding your options is vital, especially when you’re trying to scale up. Wasting time, money, and talent on services that only provide a short burst of revenue can be detrimental to companies on a budget. On top of that, if your competitors discover more sustainable growth opportunities before you do, your sales will decline.
One of the best growth strategies available to online sellers is Advanced eCommerce PR. When combined with Yardline Capital, this strategy can be an efficient accelerant for any and all of your growth initiatives.
Advanced ecommerce PR is a hidden gem—not well known, but powerful. These companies offer services that are highly differentiated compared to traditional PR, including writing your products into Amazon editorial content, collaborating with publishers for native commerce content coverage, tracking which efforts are generating the most revenue, and even tracking the efforts of competitors. Working with Advanced ecommerce PR companies is both easy and affordable. Because they work at scale with thousands of products, they are able to facilitate niche market matches with publishers looking for quality products to recommend in their content.
Matching, writing, and publishing can take several weeks and is not guaranteed, but it is much faster and frequently more successful than reaching out to each publisher individually. For example, Seller Rocket works with 100+ large publishers who are constantly seeking credible products to write about, and can typically yield results within 4-8 weeks of taking on a product.
The best of these companies are performance-based, meaning aside from a small flat fee, they only charge you based on directly attributable revenue. The “halo effect” of these mentions is harder to quantify but is often 4x the size of the directly attributable sales.
The only requirements to work with Advanced ecommerce PR companies are abundant product reviews and a high star rating. This is required by publishers specifically to ensure that the products they recommend are of high quality.
Growth capital firms provide funding to businesses that help them unlock opportunities to scale. For example: perhaps you’re having difficulty gaining sales velocity and want to pursue a new marketing campaign to increase your product visibility. Though you can try internal options like blogging, creating a newsletter, or offering discounts, these moves may result in only short-term gain, or take an extended period of time to see minimal results.
If you want to see substantial and long-lasting results quickly, you’ll have to invest in more broad-scale initiatives, such as brand awareness, product-specific marketing, expanded inventory, or new product lines. The problem is growing sellers typically don’t have the extra cash lying around to invest in these initiatives, which is where partnering with a growth capital FinTech like Yardline comes into play.
Though growth capital can be utilized at any stage of growth and is virtually unrestricted use, most entrepreneurs choose to accept the investment when seeking an inventory/marketing boost, anticipating a seasonal cash flow dip, launching a new product line, or when under Letter of Intent (LOI).
Though both ecommerce PR and growth capital are effective when used independently, the best way to optimize online business growth is by integrating the two. However, you will need to mind your timing.
New products and additional inventory take time to develop, and the 6-8 week runway for ecommerce PR should be aligned with your inventory availability for maximum impact. Put simply: there is no use having articles posted about your product if you have no stock to sell.
When growth capital and ecommerce PR act in tandem, these services essentially guarantee long-term revenue. By partnering with Yardline and Seller Rocket specifically, you gain the extra advantage of seasoned ecommerce experts at your service to help your business scale up most efficiently. Learn more here about how investing growth capital in Advanced ecommerce PR can help your business break through current and future growth roadblocks.
This post was drafted and contributed to Yardline by Maya Harper, Content Marketing Lead at SellerRocket.io