Question

Topic: Advertising/PR

How Can Traffic Be Driven To My Amazon Listing?

Posted by charles on 12/21/2016 at 12:58 PM ET 250 Points
About a month ago we launched a company, selling a new concept in kitchen cutlery on Amazon. You can see our listing by going to www.amazon.com and doing a search for "EXCALIBUR Chef Knife". We have a Trademark, and we are listed on the Amazon Branded Registry. We are running Amazon sponsored ads, Facebook ads, and we have a couple of videos on YouTube. We have done several email campaigns of 2,000 recipients or less each, where the open rates have varied between 3 to 23% but no sales - actually we got our first email campaign related sale yesterday. We also have gifted and deep discounted several dozen chef knives to boost interest and to get more reviews. User acceptance and approval appears to be very good. We have received no complaints. Some of our customers have come back already to buy additional knives.

A new movie is scheduled to be released in March 2017, where the term, "EXCALIBUR", will be used in the title. It is about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. We are wondering if we could somehow capitalize on that somehow.

Currently. we only have one product, and that is an all stainless steel 8" Chef Knife. We have set the retail price at $149.98 and a current sales price of $104.99. We have done several email campaigns to recipient lists of less than 2,000, offering between 50% to 90% discounts off our sales price. Our pricing is slightly lower than a company we regard as our primary competition, which is Global Knives out of Japan.

We are confident if we could get broader exposure for our product, that we would experience much more sales, which now are only about 30 units per month. Some of our competitors are selling hundreds and even thousands of units per month. Is there any way to piggy back on the patronage enjoyed by some of the big bloggers? Does anyone have any suggestions?

I would really appreciate some help.

Best regards,

Charles Traylor, CEO
Barefoot Frog, LLC
[Contact info deleted by moderator, as per KHE's guidelines.]
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on 12/21/2016 at 1:14 PM Moderator
    This looks like a juicy consulting project. And it starts by understanding your target audience really well. Who are the folks who would buy this kind of product? Where? Why? What are they using now (i.e., before they buy)? What are their current habits, practices, usage frequency, attitudes, values and beliefs? What other brands are they using in related fields?

    Until we understand the target audience, we'd be shooting in the dark when it comes to marketing strategy suggestions. Does your target audience use online search to find knives like yours? What keywords do they use? What precipitates their online search?

    As for pricing strategy, I'm wondering why you would want to be less than your Japanese competition? Is your product inferior? Is your product unique in some important way? What compelling benefit should a customer expect if/when he/she buys your knife? Your price is a clear expression of what you think the product is worth. Is it worth less than the Japanese competition?
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 12/21/2016 at 7:54 PM Accepted
    If I search of "chef knife" on Amazon, I see lots of 4.5 and 5 star 8" knives for a fraction of your knife. For the average buyer, what's so much better about your knife?

    Maybe your average buyer isn't your customer. Maybe your buyer is a "professional chef". Searching for "professional chef knife" show knifes in your price point, but still a wide range ($20-$200). How would you convey its value to this audience?

    Right now I wouldn't focus on more eyeballs - I'd focus on more conversions. Once you dial in what the right audience is looking for, and how to articulate your offering for them, then open up the traffic spigot. Otherwise, you'll likely be paying for people to see but not buy from you.
  • Posted by Gary Bloomer on 12/23/2016 at 2:06 PM Accepted
    PPC. Social media posts.
  • Posted by charles on 12/23/2016 at 8:29 PM Author
    Thanks for the responses in this forum. I will be glad to award my offered 250 credits, when I see a response, or responses, of real value to me.

    Regarding price, one gets what one pays for. Twenty dollar retail prices for cutlery do not even cover the production and the overhead for our product, which although manufactured in China, is STILL manufactured at a tenth of what it would cost to make a similar product in the US.

    Our company is using online sales and marketing, and we have good conversion rates from those efforts. What we do NOT have is volume. We need much more marketplace exposure. I am concerned about making our expenditures to promote exposure wisely.

    Our EXCALIBUR hypoallergenic 100% stainless steel knife is nickel free, including a fully forged blade and a single cast injection molded handle, making a totally seamless one piece perfectly balanced precision kitchen cutlery instrument. Believe it or not this knife is unique and alone in the marketplace. No one, and I really mean no one, is offering a product with similar specifications. Judging from sales to date, our knife appears to have appeal both to household as well as to professional cooking.

    I think our closest competitor is Global, which is a Japanese knife maker of 100% stainless steel cutlery, like ours. However, almost all Global knives have low quality 1 mm thick stamped sheet metal stainless steel handles, which are too lightweight to provide counter balance to their blades, and so Global entraps sand in the handles to get balance…to me not a very elegant solution. Where their knives have solid handles they are hopelessly out of balance, because the handles are too heavy compared to the blades.

    It is my impression that the food industry has a pent up demand for sanitary nickel free cutlery. For example, the National Sanitation Foundation does not endorse multipart kitchen cutlery for use in commercial environments due to concerns for the potential harboring of germs and bacteria in joints and rivets. Professional chefs are adamant about perfect balance, and various local health departments have begun to pressure restaurants in their jurisdictions to stop using multipart knives in favor of plastic handles, which completely enclose the handle tangs. Nevertheless, such knives STILL have joints between the plastic handles and the steel blades…not good…and plastic handles in a commercial kitchen soon become pitted and as unsanitary as multipart cutlery.

    The demographics of sales we have made to date, listing on Amazon, pretty much defy definition. Product fulfillment has taken place all over the country, including men and women in a wide cross section of demographics.

    We are experiencing a variety of success and failures with our online advertising campaigns and discount sales. What I am interested in right now are answers to a number of questions, such as whether or not to throw our lot in with someone like Channel Advisors, who supposedly take product launches quickly into multi channels, or to scale up the successful parts of our current and recent advertising to higher spend rates, assuming that a little money spent on a little success might be proportional to spending a lot of money on a lot of success. I don’t want to fall into a trap of spending more money on promotions than we can possibly ever bring in from sales.

    I am interested in hearing back from this forum. Thanks.
  • Posted on 12/24/2016 at 3:42 PM Accepted
    It isn't a good idea to offer marketing advice without understanding the components of what's working and what isn't. Sure you could increase your spending level and get more traffic, but it might or might not be profitable. That relates back to your pricing strategy which still doesn't seem to be consistent with the product positioning.

    If this were my project, I'd interview a dozen people in your target audience -- presumably professional chefs and serious amateurs who spend money on cutlery and cooking utensils/cookware. I'd ask them to describe their process/journey when they want to buy something for the kitchen. Ask them what's important for them when they're buying a quality knife. How do they search the options and make a purchase decision?

    I'd also analyze the conversion rate for various keywords to find out which words/phrases are generating the greatest ROI for you now. Traffic COSTS you money; CONVERSION makes money for you. Would you rather increase your conversion rate among current traffic, or increase traffic at the current conversion rate?

    Have you done any A/B testing on ad and/or landing page copy? What did you learn from that?

    As I commented earlier, this is a juicy consulting project ... mostly because there are so many embedded questions that need to be answered before we can make a well-reasoned recommendation. Don't settle for a shoot-from-the-hip solution. If that's all you want, just increase your Adwords budget. You will get more traffic for sure. But it may not be the best solution to your problem ... and you won't know until you've spent the money.


    P.S. Don't worry about the points you're going to award. We are not here for the points. We're trying to help you zero in on a sound strategic solution for your problem.
  • Posted on 1/3/2017 at 2:40 PM Accepted
    I'd just like to add a couple things to the excellent advice you've gotten from mgoodman.

    a) You mention a movie and wondering if you could "capitalize" on it. I would be worried about copyrights and licensing. If you don't get their permission, don't do it.

    b) You mention a retail price, a sales price, and then offering 50% to 90% off the sales price. As a consumer when I see something on sale for 50-90% off that's a red flag that it was never worth the retail price in the first place. By giving such big discounts you are undermining your product's perceived value.

    c) You asked about piggy-backing "on the patronage enjoyed by some of the big bloggers." What you're talking about here is influencer marketing, which has mixed reviews. Yes, it can get you exposure to the blogger's audience, but if you pay them to review and promote your product, their audience may find the review and promotion inauthentic, which means it won't have the same effect as an organic recommendation. You might consider sending a free knife to the bloggers, without actually paying them to review or mention it, but there's no guarantee that will succeed. You could also seek opportunities for guest blogging, but big bloggers are often inundated with such requests.

  • Posted by Shelley Ryan on 1/5/2017 at 12:08 PM Moderator
    Hi, everyone! I'm leaving this open for at least another week since Charles posted during the holiday season. Hoping he can get some additional responses now that KHE activity is (almost) back to normal levels.

    Thanks for contributing your marketing advice,

    Shelley
    MarketingProfs
  • Posted by Shelley Ryan on 1/18/2017 at 4:20 PM Moderator
    Hi Everyone,

    I am closing this question since there hasn't been much recent activity.

    Thanks for participating!

    Shelley
    MarketingProfs
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