When people think about Amazon’s success, they often picture overnight wins, “three simple tricks”, and screenshots of seven-figure months.
The reality is less glamorous and much more practical. Success on Amazon today is about market fit, smart systems, and a willingness to learn by doing.
In this episode of the Powerful Marketing Tips podcast, host Mari-Liis Vaher sits down with Pasha Knish, CEO of AMZ Optimized, to unpack what is really working on Amazon today.
Pasha has been in the Amazon space since 2011 and now runs a full-service agency helping brands grow profitably on the platform.
They talk about how to choose the right products, why visibility depends on strategy rather than luck, and how to think about Amazon as one piece of a bigger ecommerce ecosystem.
Mari-Liis also turns the conversation into a mini live consultation about her book The Greatest Marketer, which is now available on Amazon.
Table of Contents
Why Marketing on Amazon Still Matters
There is a reason both small brands and established companies continue to invest in Amazon.
- People are already searching with strong buying intent.
- You can “borrow” the platform’s traffic instead of building everything from scratch.
- Even if it is not your main profit driver, a solid Amazon presence supports your entire ecommerce ecosystem.
Amazon, however, should not be the entire business. If you rely only on the platform, you are exposed to policy changes and account risks you do not control.
The healthiest brands treat Amazon as a powerful distribution channel inside a broader strategy that also includes DTC, social, email, and partnerships.
Product First: Why Market Fit Matters More Than Hacks
One of the biggest myths about Amazon is that you can succeed with any product if you just “optimize” the listing or run the right ads.
In reality, market fit is non-negotiable:
- Not every product sells well, even with great marketing.
- Simply slapping a label on a generic factory product is much harder to pull off today.
- Being too unique can hurt, because no one is searching for your solution yet.
- Being too similar puts you in a race to the bottom on price.
The sweet spot is a product that:
- Solves a real problem.
- Has a clear search demand.
- It is similar enough to existing products that shoppers recognise it.
- Still offers a meaningful improvement or twist you can explain and justify on price.
A practical way to find that sweet spot is to combine keyword research with a deep dive into negative reviews:
- Use product research tools to identify keywords with good search volume and low to medium competition.
- Look at the top listings and read the 1 and 2-star reviews.
- Ask: “What are people constantly complaining about that we could fix without making the product unaffordable?”
If you can solve a recurring problem in a way that is cost-effective, you have a much better starting point than just copying what is already there.
Step By Step: How to do Marketing on Amazon
For someone who wants to start from zero, Pasha’s blueprint looks roughly like this:
- Start with keyword and market research
- Identify a sub-niche with real search volume.
- Map competitors, their price ranges, and recurring complaints.
- Define the product and supply chain
- Decide how you will improve the existing offers.
- Explore suppliers beyond the obvious options when it makes sense.
- Prototype and sample
- Order samples from several suppliers.
- Test quality and any improvements you plan to introduce.
- Set up your Amazon presence properly
- Get brand registry in place.
- Prepare your storefront and detail pages.
- Create conversion-focused content
- Keyword-informed titles, bullets, and descriptions.
- Strong main images and infographics that “sell the scroll”.
- A+ content that tells the story and answers objections.
- Secure initial reviews the right way
- Use approved programs like Amazon Vine to build early social proof.
- Launch with consistent advertising
- Use ads to drive visibility, rank, and data.
- Monitor performance and optimise, rather than expecting instant profits.
How to do Marketing on Amazon for an Existing Amazon Brand
What about brands that are already selling and growing slowly but want a real breakthrough?
Pasha points to a few key levers:
- Advertising efficiency and scale: At some point, you have to decide whether you want to maximize revenue or short-term profit. Scaling often means accepting slightly thinner margins in the short term to gain rank, subscribers, and organic visibility.
- Subscriptions and lifetime value: If your product is consumable, programs like Subscribe & Save can significantly improve lifetime value and make your ad spend more sustainable.
- Geographic expansion: Many US-based sellers never move beyond the US. Expanding into the EU or other regions, even with higher VAT and logistics costs, can open up new pockets of demand that are far less competitive.
- Catalog expansion: New products that are closely related to your winners can be added as variations. That way, they benefit from existing traffic and reviews instead of starting from zero.
Behind all of this is a simple principle: if you want different results, you usually need to change your level of investment, speed, or risk tolerance.
How AI is Changing Amazon Search and Listings
Amazon’s search is shifting from pure keyword matching to intent-based search. That shift changes how you should think about listing optimization.
There are now essentially two layers to get right:
- Frontend content for humans and AI
- Titles, bullets, descriptions, and A+ content still need to persuade real people.
- At the same time, Amazon’s systems need to clearly understand what your product is, who it is for, and what problems it solves.
- Backend data and classifications
- Attributes, categories, and hidden fields are becoming just as important as what is visible.
- Amazon is effectively one huge structured data table that AI is querying against. If your data is incomplete or inconsistent, you will not be surfaced as often as you could be.
Pasha’s team is actively building internal tools to help clients fill in and optimize this “hidden” data layer, because doing it manually is tedious and easy to get wrong.
For smaller sellers, AI also makes it more accessible to:
- Draft listings from keyword sets.
- Generate image concepts and infographics.
- Create test landing pages and creatives for demand validation.
The main risk is using AI output without critical thinking or real editing.
What inspires Pasha into Action
- 🎵 Favourite song: Dust in the wind – Kansas (By clicking the link you’ll find the complete Spotify list of all Powerful Marketing Tips podcast’s guests favorite songs)
- 💡 Favourite quote: “Work smarter, not harder!”
Connect With Pasha Knish
Pasha Knish is the CEO of AMZ Optimized, where his team manages Amazon strategy, content, advertising, operations, and account health for e-commerce brands.
You can find him here:
- Website: amzoptimized.com
- Amazon seller tool: amzbrain.ai
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pasha-knish/
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