BookMachine CAMPUS Review: Amazon Advertising Courses
By Joanne Boustead
Making the most of your Amazon A+ page
This course is a step-by-step guide to creating a professional Amazon A+ page that will help you to maximise sales. The course is run by Claire Morrison, who has eighteen years of trade publishing experience (including Vintage and Headline). Before this course, it had never occurred to me just how important it was to correctly market titles on Amazon. I found this course to be incredibly helpful, and I’m sure it will be a brilliant tool for all marketers as well.
The first module provides an in-depth look into planning and preparing an Amazon A+ page – particularly useful for someone new to creating these pages! The accompanying downloadable materials are a brilliant tool to help with the planning and preparation, and I would definitely recommend using them and tailoring them to your specific needs. Make use of the checklist! Not only does it cover each module, but it also serves as a handy reminder to keep you on track.
When I first learnt about metadata and the importance of keywords, I thought it was quite a daunting task to come up with so many keywords – especially ones that could make a real impact on sales! That’s why the keywords module in this course is so useful: it gives you plenty of online tools to search for and create relevant keywords that might just turn your campaign around. Watching how to build an A+ page has also been helpful, with Claire taking the process step-by-step. These Amazon-specific tools are ones I never knew existed, and now that I know they exist (and how to use them!), I feel that I would be more prepared to create an A+ page if I were to start a marketing role!
How to run Amazon advertising
The CAMPUS “How to run Amazon advertising” course gives a thorough look at how to run advertising on the Amazon platform. The course is run by Elke Desanghere, a digital marketing expert who has worked for Penguin Random House and Nosy Crow. Again, this detailed course is brilliant for those new to advertising on Amazon, and breaks down the individual campaign types that are available to use on the platform. Before taking this course, I would wholeheartedly recommend taking the “Making the most of your Amazon A+ page” course, which you can read about above!
Throughout the entire course, Elke encourages you to think like a consumer – not just a marketer. From this viewpoint, you are able to gain further insight into what the audience wants, and how best to market to them. The course also covers campaign run times, and the differences between automatic targeting and manual targeting. Similar to the “Making the most of your Amazon A+ page” course, “How to run Amazon advertising” also dives into keyword targeting, and provides a multitude of tools to help you determine the best keywords to use in your campaign. Unlike the previous course, this one also uses tools from outside of Amazon – including Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends.
Modules three and four provide a step-by-step guide to creating a sponsored product campaign, a sponsored brand campaign and a sponsored display campaign. Elke guides you through each process, and encourages you to complete your campaign alongside the course. Whilst this part of the course was not as helpful to me (unfortunately, I’m not a marketer, nor am I designing an Amazon campaign!), I have no doubt that it would be incredibly helpful for first-time marketers, and marketing departments looking to improve their campaign results.
The course finishes with advice on how to evaluate your campaign results, and also suggests metrics to keep an eye on whilst the campaign is running – all things I would never have known about if not for this course! It also suggests that adjusting your campaign is completely OK, as long as you’ve given it enough time to start collecting data.
Marketers will find both “Making the most of your Amazon A+ page” and “How to run Amazon advertising” to be essential resources, and they should be at the top of your list for Bookmachine CAMPUS courses to complete. Brilliant for newcomers to marketing, these courses provide you with a wealth of knowledge on the Amazon platform, and will help marketers to hone their campaigns and increase visibility and sales!
A note from BookMachine
“BookMachine CAMPUS is our suite of flexible, publishing-specific video courses designed to empower you in your career development. At BookMachine HQ, we're delighted to see the impact of the courses across the industry and how they are helping learners develop key skills! Our recent Spring Release saw the addition of six brand-new courses to the online library. Led by our knowledgeable tutors, specialists in publishing skills from TikTok to legal contracts, our catalogue is packed with expertise. Learn more about what you could achieve with CAMPUS here.”