72% of Indian businesses investing in Amazon Ads

The study found that nearly nine in 10 (85%) said that their current advertising strategy is successful in acquiring new customers. In comparison, more than three quarters (78%) said it had helped them to expand their India business. More than two-thirds (69%) said that advertising had helped them grow their business internationally within the last 12 months.

Amazon Ads refers to targeted ads that appear on the Amazon online shopping platform.

According to Amazon, the company provides SMBs with solutions and insights to make advertising as simple as possible. With the help of its self-service advertising tools and learning console, Amazon helps SMBs achieve a variety of business goals, including raising brand awareness, increasing sales and boosting customer loyalty.

Amazon Ads worked with market research agency, Opinium, to survey 4,138 B2C marketing decision-makers at SMBs in the UK, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, MENA, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, USA, Canada, and Australia. The sample is nationally representative, not a sample of Amazon sellers. The data was collected between 29 February 2024 and 20 March 2024.

In India, 300 B2C businesses were surveyed regarding their attitudes towards advertising across online and offline channels. 

This confidence in advertising led more than half (56%) of Indian SMBs to increase their spending on advertising during the past year, while 22% kept their budget the same year-on-year.

The most common motivations for this increase in spend include driving awareness of a new product or service (42%) or improving customer awareness of their brand (50%). Looking ahead, more than a third (36%) of those sampled said they planned to spend on streaming TV advertising during the next 12 months.

Of the 300 SMBs sampled, almost three-quarters (72%) of those sampled said they currently spend on advertising, compared to 28% that do not spend on advertising at all. 

Despite the success enjoyed by some, not all SMBs feel they need advertising to grow their business. 28% of Indian SMBs do not currently spend on any kind of advertising. When asked why they are not currently advertising, the most common response was that it is too expensive (26%) while a similar number (20%) said they haven’t seen a return on previous investments (ROI). 

Even among SMBs that are currently spending on advertising, challenges remain. Three in 10 (30%) said that their biggest challenge with advertising is knowing where to focus their advertising budgets to achieve their goals, while around a third (36%) said creating compelling content was the greatest challenge their business faced when it came to advertising successfully.