ExportX uses Sponsored Products to introduce new products globally

ExportX finds ways to help manufacturers in one country deliver their products to consumers in other countries where it would otherwise be impractical to sell. Using Amazon Sponsored Products is one of those ways.

“From the Amazon shoppers’ perspective, they’re finding products that in most cases have never before been available in their country,” explains Paul Grey, Chief Executive Officer of ExportX. “From our manufacturers’ point of view, we’re delivering their products to global customers who would normally be difficult for those manufacturers to reach.”

ExportX recognized that it needed a cost-effective way to showcase its manufacturers’ products better on Amazon. To address the challenge, the company became one of the earliest adopters of Sponsored Products—the cost-per-click (CPC) advertising program that prominently positions listings in Amazon search results and on detail pages.

ExportX uses Sponsored Products to sell locally manufactured products around the world. “We’re running 90 Sponsored Products campaigns in the US, 25 in the UK, 23 in Canada, 17 in Germany, and a dozen in France,” says Grey. “For us, Sponsored Products has earned its place as an essential part of new product launches in each marketplace.”

He cites a particular benefit of creating campaigns with automatic targeting—a feature of Sponsored Products where ads are automatically targeted to relevant customer searches. “We have the ability to advertise in non-English-speaking countries without having to determine all the keywords for that region,” he says. “For example, we can use automatic targeting for a German campaign without the need for a German-speaking marketer."

Grey says that Sponsored Products is especially useful to introduce items targeted to niche markets. He explains that when shoppers visit Amazon to search for a particular product, they might not expect to find a premium variation of it that they had never heard of. “With Sponsored Products, we can surface new products in search results to gauge shoppers’ interest,” he says. “We won’t know if they want it—and they won’t know if they want it—unless we try to sell it, and Sponsored Products is the ideal tool to help us do that.”

Grey says that ExportX runs a Sponsored Products campaign for nearly every product among the 50 brands that it’s responsible for. “For the product lines that take off and become popular, where Sponsored Products has been key to effective marketing, we log it as a success and continue the promotional plan for them.”

And it has worked. Grey attributes about 25% of ExportX sales to Sponsored Products. With such quantifiable success, the company’s manufacturer-clients are increasingly eager to collaborate on Sponsored Products campaigns. “Our manufacturers tell us that using Sponsored Products seems like a much more effective way to spend their online advertising budget than what they’ve spent on other competing services.” Grey concludes, “The key metric we focus on is advertising spend as a percentage of revenue, and with Sponsored Products, we get what we want.”

If you have products in a smaller country such as Australia or New Zealand, there's no better way to get them to the multibillion-dollar United States marketplace than with Sponsored Products.

— Paul Grey, Chief Executive Officer, ExportX