Amazon is no longer a side channel for ecommerce brands — for many sellers, it's the primary storefront. But growing on Amazon isn't just about listing a product and waiting for orders. It requires a coordinated Amazon marketing strategy that spans advertising, listing optimization, brand building, and increasingly, affiliate and influencer channels.
That combination is exactly why so many growing brands get stuck. The skills needed to run Amazon Ads, manage Seller Central, optimize listings for conversion, and track performance don't usually live in one person. This guide breaks down what Amazon marketing actually involves, the core channels you need to manage, what it costs to do it well, and how to decide whether to build that capability in-house or bring in outside help.
What Does Amazon Marketing Involve?
Amazon marketing is the set of activities a brand uses to get discovered, chosen, and repurchased on Amazon's marketplace. It sits at the intersection of retail merchandising, paid advertising, and content optimization — disciplines that on most other channels are handled by separate teams.
In practice, Amazon marketing covers:
- Listing optimization — titles, bullet points, backend search terms, images, and A+ Content built around how shoppers actually search and buy.
- Amazon Ads management — Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns, including keyword research, bid management, and budget allocation.
- Seller Central operations — inventory health, account performance metrics, review management, and the operational hygiene that keeps a listing eligible to win the Buy Box. For a walkthrough of the platform itself, see our beginner's guide to Amazon Seller Central.
- Brand Store and content — building out an Amazon Brand Store and A+ Content to support brand positioning beyond a single product listing.
- Affiliate and influencer channels — using the Amazon Associates affiliate program and creator partnerships to drive external traffic into the marketplace.
The common thread across all of these is that Amazon rewards sellers who treat the platform as its own marketing channel — with its own search engine, its own ad auction, and its own conversion logic — rather than as a passive sales outlet for a strategy built elsewhere.
Because these disciplines are so different from one another, few internal hires cover the full scope well. That's usually the point at which brands start evaluating whether to build a dedicated function or bring in specialized support — the question we cover next.
In-House vs. Outsourced: Should You Hire an Amazon Marketing Specialist?
Once a brand's Amazon revenue reaches a meaningful share of total sales, "whoever has time" is no longer a viable way to run the channel. The decision most teams face is whether to hire a dedicated in-house Amazon marketing specialist, retain an Amazon marketing agency, or bring in specialized talent to run the day-to-day.
The case for in-house. A dedicated hire sits inside your team, understands your product roadmap and margins directly, and can move quickly on decisions that touch inventory or pricing. For brands where Amazon is the majority of revenue, having someone fully dedicated to the channel — rather than splitting attention across an agency's client roster — can mean tighter alignment with the rest of the business.
The case for outsourced or specialized support. Amazon marketing spans advertising, merchandising, and operations — skill sets that are expensive and slow to hire for individually, especially all at once. Bringing in an experienced Amazon marketing agency or a dedicated specialist through a staffing partner gets you platform expertise from day one, without the recruiting timeline, training ramp, or the risk of a single point of failure if that hire leaves.
A hybrid model is common. Many growing brands keep strategy and product decisions in-house while outsourcing the execution layer — daily bid management, listing updates, account monitoring — to a specialist who already knows the platform. This is where a role like an ecommerce operations specialist fits in: a dedicated person, often hired through a global talent partner to control overhead, who owns the operational and marketing cadence of your Amazon presence without the cost structure of a full local hire or a broad agency retainer.
There's no universally correct answer here — the right structure depends on how much of your revenue runs through Amazon, how fast you're scaling, and how much internal bandwidth your team has to manage the channel directly. What matters is making the decision deliberately, rather than defaulting to "we'll figure it out" as the channel grows past the point where that's sustainable.
Core Channels: Amazon Ads, Listings, Affiliate, Brand Store
A coherent Amazon marketing strategy touches four core channels. Treating them as a system — rather than four disconnected tasks — is what separates brands that scale on Amazon from those that plateau.
Amazon Ads
Amazon Ads (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display) is how most brands win visibility in a marketplace where organic ranking is heavily influenced by sales velocity — which ads help generate in the first place. Effective Amazon marketing services manage these campaign types together, using paid placement to seed the sales and review volume that supports stronger organic ranking, rather than running ads in isolation from the rest of the listing strategy.
Listing Optimization
No amount of ad spend fixes a listing that doesn't convert. Titles, bullets, backend keywords, images, and A+ Content all need to reflect both what shoppers search for and what actually persuades them to buy once they land on the page. This is also where much of the organic visibility in Amazon's own search results is won or lost. Our guide to product listing optimization covers the anatomy of a high-converting listing in more detail.
Affiliate Marketing
Amazon's affiliate program, Amazon Associates, lets outside publishers, content creators, and influencers earn a commission for driving traffic that converts on the marketplace. For brands, this means reach can extend well beyond Amazon's own search and ad placements — into blogs, YouTube reviews, and social content that sends qualified buyers directly to a listing. For how affiliate programs work more broadly, including whether the Amazon program is still worth joining, see our affiliate marketing guide.
Brand Store
An Amazon Brand Store is a free, customizable storefront within Amazon that lets a brand present its full catalog, tell a brand story, and give shoppers a destination beyond a single product page. It's particularly valuable for brands running Sponsored Brands campaigns, since those ads can use the Store as their landing page rather than a single listing — reinforcing brand recognition across a shopper's Amazon session, not just a single transaction.
One prerequisite worth knowing: for third-party sellers, both A+ Content and a Brand Store require enrolling your brand in Amazon Brand Registry, which is free. If you haven't registered your brand yet, that's usually the first step before either of these channels is available.
How Much Does Amazon Marketing Management Cost?
There's no single number that applies across brands, so treat any source that quotes one specific figure with caution — cost depends heavily on catalog size, ad spend level, competitive category, and how much of the work is handled in-house versus outsourced.
Broadly, the cost of Amazon marketing management breaks down into a few components:
- Ad spend itself — the media budget behind Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns, which scales with catalog size and competitive intensity in your category.
- Management cost — whether that's a salaried in-house hire, a retained Amazon marketing agency, or a specialized staffing arrangement, this is the cost of the expertise running the account day to day.
- Tooling and software — most serious operations use some combination of keyword research, repricing, and analytics tools layered on top of Seller Central's native reporting.
- Content production — photography, A+ Content design, and Brand Store builds are typically a periodic project cost rather than an ongoing monthly line item.
The more useful question for most growing brands isn't "what's the market rate," but "what structure gets us the expertise we need at a cost that scales sensibly with our revenue." A full-time local hire covering advertising, listings, and operations can be one of the more expensive ways to get started, particularly before Amazon revenue justifies a full salary. A dedicated specialist hired through a global talent partner is one alternative: GrowthAssistant's ecommerce operations specialists, for example, work full-time for one brand, starting at $3,500 per month on month-to-month terms, while strategic control stays in-house.
Getting Started: Building an Amazon Marketing Function
Whether you're launching your first product on Amazon or scaling a mature catalog, building a real Amazon marketing function tends to follow a similar sequence:
- Audit where you stand. Review current listing quality, Seller Central account health, and whether you're running any paid campaigns today. You can't build a strategy without knowing your starting point.
- Fix the foundation first. Listing optimization and account hygiene should come before scaling ad spend — driving traffic to a weak listing wastes budget that a stronger page would have converted.
- Register your brand. Enroll in Amazon Brand Registry so A+ Content, a Brand Store, and Sponsored Brands campaigns are available to you.
- Stand up Amazon Ads deliberately. Start with the campaign types that match your goals (visibility, conversion, or brand awareness) rather than turning on every ad type at once.
- Decide on your operating model. Determine how much of this work stays in-house versus how much gets handled by an Amazon marketing agency, a dedicated specialist, or a hybrid of both.
- Layer in Brand Store and affiliate channels. Once your core listings and ads are performing, extend reach through a Brand Store and affiliate/influencer partnerships.
- Review and iterate monthly. Amazon's search algorithm, ad auction dynamics, and competitive landscape shift constantly — a marketing function that doesn't revisit its approach regularly will fall behind.
Once the function is running, day-to-day upkeep — inventory, reviews, account health — becomes its own discipline; our guide to Amazon store management covers that ongoing layer.
For most growing brands, the fastest path through this sequence isn't hiring one generalist and hoping they cover all five disciplines — it's identifying which pieces genuinely need dedicated ownership and building a lean function around those roles, whether that means an in-house hire, an outsourced specialist, or both.
How GrowthAssistant Helps
Amazon rewards brands that treat it as a full marketing channel, not an afterthought — and the brands that grow fastest on the platform are usually the ones that get the operating model right early. GrowthAssistant helps you hire vetted, global ecommerce talent, from listing specialists to ecommerce operations hires, who work full-time on your storefront in your tools, month to month.
Talk to us about hiring your next Amazon marketing specialist →
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