053: Tactic Tuesdays: Maximizing Market Share & Amazon Insights

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Welcome to another episode of Brand Fortress HQ.

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This is our Tactics Tuesday and today.

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What we're going to be talking about is maximizing market share and Amazon Insights so that way you can maximize that market share.

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So we are also doing this on LinkedIn Live as well today.

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So if you're interested in asking your questions live, we're going to be over there on LinkedIn.

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We try to make it every Tuesday, so come check it out.

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And with that we're going to start this conversation, and this is, I think, a really important conversation, especially as Amazon has changed over the last couple of years to really understand your market share.

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So with that, mike, I'm going to actually turn it over to you, because I know that this is something you've thought quite a bit about with your brand in the pool space.

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Yeah, I think you know it became fairly relevant, I guess you know, through COVID, because the thing that we noticed and that I, quite frankly, hadn't really paid a whole lot of attention to previously, we had always been pretty top of category in the pool space, you know, ever since we started back in 2014, 15.

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So I never really paid a lot of attention, as long as we had good ranking, you know, I was pretty pleased.

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But the problem that I was running into was, you know, I was seeing that our sales were remaining steady and actually were increasing, but our ranking was decreasing, and so there was kind of this mismatch.

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It didn't make sense to me.

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And so then I started seeing articles that were coming out, you know, talking about how the swimming pool space essentially was growing as a market because of COVID, because there were so the e-commerce sector, because in the past there were a lot of pool owners who, of course, would go down to the local pool store to buy most of their items.

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Now, during COVID, they didn't have that option and so a lot of them were forced into that e-commerce space.

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Obviously, then the market was growing even more because of that, and so I was seeing this mismatch.

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And so, as I started to research further into it, what became very obvious was that the market as a whole was growing in leaps and bounds but we were not keeping up with that growth.

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So in essence, we were losing market share in that space to competitors.

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Now, to some degree it was inevitable because many of the new players in that space that were coming in were very low price competitors selling at a third of our price.

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So there's the question of as a whole, in the pool market as a whole, we were losing ground.

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But then the question became okay, yeah, but within our market, which isn't the entire pool space, it's a very specific you know pool owner within that space that has an in-ground pool, that is a you know fairly, you know kind of higher income type individual that are buying those higher price products.

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You know where were we in that space.

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And, of course, you know our market share within that particular niche was still solid.

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But within the, you know, but within the industry as a whole, we were losing market share.

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But we would have never known that because our sales were going up.

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So if you're not paying attention to it and you're not looking at the numbers from all sides, you wouldn't know that you're losing that market share and in some cases that could be a very important thing to know.

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Yeah, and I think it's important to know that that also works in reverse, in the sense of so, if you're looking at why your sales are down, some of what that boils down to is understanding how much of that market share you have, especially when you start kind of niching down this market share where it could be that you have as much, if not more, market share than what you had a year ago.

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It's just that there's less search volume for your particular keywords.

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I think we saw this quite a bit coming out of the pandemic, where there were certain keywords that had spiked because everybody was at home and buying habits had changed pretty considerably, and then the year afterwards there was a lot of brands that were really frustrated with the fact that their sales were down in those categories.

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Well, if you look at it, a lot of that can be connected to what the search volume is on those main keywords that were driving your sales from the year before.

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And that's where it's important to know.

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Hey, if you know, it's because there's just not as many opportunities out there, especially from an ad and strategy standpoint.

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That tells you kind of where you want to put your efforts, as far as ramping up or increasing your ads isn't necessarily going to solve your problem.

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It might be an issue of needing to expand your market or expand your offerings to a different customer segment.

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Checking, maybe there's other keywords that are increasing, whereas the ones that you've been targeting are decreasing.

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So there may be opportunities out there, but you wouldn't know to look at them.

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You know, or look for them if you're not paying attention.

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One of the things that I wasn't prepared for in the barbecue accessory space.

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I knew, obviously, that summer was a big time, but like that first year, I didn't.

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I don't, there wasn't as many tools like product opportunityity Explorer, for example is, by the way, I think, one of the best ways to determine the market size and how big the actual market is at a point in time and historically that didn't exist back when I was starting in this category.

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So while I did know that summer was a big part of it, I thought that was my only season.

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I had no real way because I didn't have any data I wasn't selling in that category yet that actually there's a lot of gifting that happens around the holiday season for barbecue accessories and I wasn't prepared for that that first year.

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So had there been a product opportunity explorer or a tool, something like that, I could have checked seasonality before.

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I mean, maybe there was and I just wasn't privy to it.

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But that's why, in going the reverse, when sales are down, understanding and looking at data in the market, as opposed to just what your sessions are in a vacuum, is a lot more important now and easier to do than it was before.

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Yeah, I think that's an important point, and so some of that data was available before and we'd look at it via Helium 10.

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Now it's not nearly as, especially when we're talking about seasonal products.

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Now I'll say and this is not a knock on Helium 10.

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I think there's a lot of things that they do great, but it wasn't as rich as what we get in Product Opportunity Explorer looking at 365 days, looking at 90 days.

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And then the other thing is that, of course, helium 10 does a great job of identifying what that data is within an 80% to 90% accuracy, but they're using other things in order to figure out what those trends look like, whereas when we look at Product Opportunity Explorer, that data is coming directly from Amazon.

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So you know that data is going to be as accurate as it gets when it comes to what does that look like, for you know, 360 days, 65 days versus 90 days, and I think you know, matt, you touched on something that's really important there, which is, if you have a business and I think, to a certain extent, a lot of brands are like this where you know you have a high season and a low season I think that really helps also identify, okay, if our sales during low season are down 40% but search is only down 20%, that tells me something is off, that I'm not getting there's more market share to be had, and actually what I'm doing is I'm losing market share.

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And again it goes back to that conversation of now.

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The first thing is to identify the problem, and that's usually 50% of the solution and what you do about that.

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There's a number of different things you can take from there, but once you identify that, I think there's a lot more options that you can take and strategies that you can implement.

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Well, and it's interesting because that specific scenario that you just outlined, which is kind of that okay, I'm a seasonal product.

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Let's take the pool market, for instance.

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We're very seasonal.

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We sell the majority of our products in about a three to four month period during the year, but in the off season we still sell a fair amount of product because there are individuals who have their pools open year round Florida, southern California, texas.

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So there's still sales to be had.

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But let's take that scenario.

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Let's say that as a rule, the market is cut in half during the off season but for whatever reason, you as a seller in that category, your sales drop by 70% or 80% in that off season.

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If you're paying attention and you see that data, what that likely would tell you and of course again, if you're not watching the data, you wouldn't know but what that would likely tell you is that in those states where the pools are still open, you don't have very good control of the market share.

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You have control of the market share as a whole, maybe you know, over the entire US, but in those states where the pools remain open you don't have good market share there.

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So then you come into geo-ranking and geo-targeting, because at that point then it becomes relevant.

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I need to start targeting Florida, texas and California, to start boosting my market share there so that in the off season I'm ready for that and I'm maintaining, you know, that market share in those in those States.

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So something to pay attention to, you know, when you're looking at that data, looking for kind of those anomalies, yeah, absolutely Well, and I think you know.

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the other thing that I want to make sure that we touched on here is, you know we've talked about a market share from just a search volume perspective, but there's other aspects of this, especially when we're looking at Product Opportunity Explorer that I think really gets lost in the conversation typically, which is when you're talking about market share, it's not just about search terms and that type of stuff.

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It's also about the quality of the product, your return rate and that type of stuff.

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And I really encourage people, if you haven't spent some time in Product Opportunity Explorer, put in your ASIN, put in your significant keywords it's not going to have every keyword, but the ones that it does have you can actually dive into not only related keywords but also what are those competitor products and how much of the market share are they taking.

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And then what I really find interesting is there's a lot of data in there on reviews.

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As far as hey, what are the top positive comments and also what are the top negative comments and return issues that you're having with your competitors, which is incredibly valuable data when you think about how do I and sometimes it's not a matter of changing your product.

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It's just a matter of changing your messaging in order to reduce that return rate or those negative comments, in order to gain that market share.

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Well, interesting that you mentioned that, john, because one of the things that we just discovered recently and although we didn't find it in the data, we found it in another way, but I kicked myself that we didn't know this sooner because we really have caused ourselves a problem in this area and that is we sell pool nets, and one of the things that just blew my mind within the last couple of months was determining.

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We started going after UGC content really hard, and what we found was we're sending these samples out to pool owners and having them use our poll and our net and then recording that UGC video and stuff.

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The number of those individuals that were using our net upside down was ridiculous, and even though it works technically that way, if you're trying to clean the bottom of your pool with our net upside down, it does not work very well at all, and so I can never figure out why we had so many negative reviews that were like hey, I can't scoop the leaves off the bottom of my pool.

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Now I know why they're using the net upside down, and when I look at it, it seems so completely obvious that this is the way it is.

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Clearly, that's not true for customers, so now we need to start putting a sticker on there that tells them the site is up, you know, so that they know how to use the net.

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I think that's going to actually have a huge effect on our review profile and we didn't even know it.

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You might have, you know, somebody might have found that if they were investigating, you know, into the product opportunity explorer and things like that, you know, to establish just that one little thing, you know, put a sticker on the top of the net and all of a sudden here's one big problem that you've solved.

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Yeah, one of the tools that they I think I found that about six or seven months ago is that they're actually a lot more specific.

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Amazon's giving you a lot more information about negative reviews and what customers are saying, and then they actually use AI to summarize a lot of that for you.

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So once I started to dig into exactly why I mean, that's a great example and how awesome that you found that out through just analyzing UGC.

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But that's another one of the things to pay attention to is looking and analyzing your own reviews.

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To make sure, I had one of our products.

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I got a bunch of bad reviews as well, and it was.

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I found out later that it was the customers putting it back together after they cleaned the product is what was causing the problems, and I couldn't understand why they couldn't get the product to work.

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But it wasn't getting it to work the first time, it was after they put it back together.

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They just weren't so like for us.

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What we did is we included an entire module in a plus content on how to put it back together after cleaning, which again like your point.

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To me, it was obvious how to put it back together, but for them it wasn't.

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It doesn't matter what's obvious to us as the brand owner, because we're so intimately familiar with that product.

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What matters is what what the consumer deals with on their side.

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Well, and I think that's you know.

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You know what the consumer deals with on their side.

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Well, I think that's.

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Mike.

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You gave a really good example of that side, of how do you fix it from You're the brand owner.

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But think about how valuable of an insight that would be if you found that for one of your competitors as well.

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I mean because we do this all the time as we look at review insights using Helium 10 and Product Opportunity Explorer, and we'll find something where people have complained about that product and if there's a way that we can solve it better, we make sure to highlight that, even if there isn't a big difference between the product that we're working with or our client's product versus their competitor, because obviously what we see out of that is that customers, there's a certain aspect of it they do care about and they don't want to go through that particular pain or something's not working properly for them.

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And by addressing that, that's a huge advantage that we see for that brand in order to take market share.

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Well, and I think that's such a great point, is that there's a guy that I know in the space and he was speaking at a mastermind that I was at, and one of the things that he talked about was in a category where it was these water bottles, I think it was, and essentially in that category nobody was mentioning that their bottles were BPA free, even though virtually all of the brands in that category were BPA free.

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They didn't have it in their listing.

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Brands in that category were BPA free.

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They didn't have it in their listing.

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So he put it in their listing to say we're BPA free, and all of a sudden their sales within that market, you know, skyrocketed because everybody wanted BPA free but none of the competitors were actually listing it as that.

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And of course, eventually your competitors are going to catch on to that and they're going to, you know, put that in.

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So you know.

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So the messaging only lasts for so long before somebody else catches up, but in the meantime you get to grab those sales and grab that market share and hopefully, if you make some adjustments over time, you can keep it.

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Yeah, well.

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I think that's such an important point too is that market share is one of those things that it depends on how competitive your category is.

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Maybe you don't need to be looking at it every day or every week, but it's something that should be on your regular checklist, depending on how competitive your category is, because I think it gives you a really good idea of you know how you're doing within your niche, because otherwise you might wake up one day and you'll see that your sales are down 50% and you don't know why.

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And it's you know without having some sort of pulse on, or your thumb on the pulse of your niche, you can easily have competitors sneak up on you and, using those insights that we've talked about already, Well, and the bad thing is is that on Amazon it's 10 times worse.

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You're like, if this is happening to a DTC site and you're losing some market share out through Google search and you know, search and brand awareness out there, it's rectifiable in the sense that if you notice it, okay, now here we are and we can start moving right, whereas on Amazon everything's a flywheel.

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But if you're not paying attention to it regularly, by the time you do notice it that you've lost market share.

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If you weren't paying attention, chances are that means you lost a lot and that's why you noticed it.

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And now that you've lost that, you're already on a downward spiral on Amazon by the time you see it, and so rectifying the ship and getting yourself back to where you were might actually be impossible at that point on Amazon because of that flywheel effect.

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Yeah, or at least very expensive, yeah, at that point on Amazon because of that flywheel effect, yeah, or at least very expensive, yeah for sure.

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Well, I think the other thing you know, just thinking about that that you know we've done in these cases where you know we were the bigger brands, that I think also just gives another opportunity is is that, you know, depending on your niche again, you'll you will see.

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You know, very aggressive competitors come in, especially from China, where they'll spend a ton on ads for a few months or whatever.

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Well, in order to get that sales velocity.

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The nice thing about that is that if you've got a decent review profile and you've got your brand kind of set up pretty well, those are great opportunities in order to competitively target them, because they're paying a ton of money for all that additional traffic and if you've got a strong product that you know can compete against theirs.

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We used to look at that and see who was really coming up in the rankings.

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If we were in first, second, third, who's really coming up in the rankings of seven, eight, nine?

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And then we target them aggressively because we can see that they're spending a lot on ads and external traffic to try and gain traction and we can benefit off that as well.

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Yeah, it's much cheaper to siphon their their traffic off than to pay for the traffic at the top end.

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Yeah for sure.

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Yeah, one of the ways that I I personally I love looking at the search results of my top Like I do that that's part of my SOPs is just looking at the search results of my top Like I do that that's part of my SOPs is just look at the search results Cause, like like you said, like watching who's coming up in the rankings, but I like watching who's spending.

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So like I will take a screenshot of who are, who has the sponsored brand headline ad, who has a sponsored brand video ad, who has some of those more expensive ad placements and pay attention to that week over week and see, because a lot of those challenger brands, especially if they know what they're doing, they're increasing their top of search to be at the very, very top of page one for that 30 to 45 first days.

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So paying attention to not only the rankings and who's in those rankings and some of these tools, but also just looking at search results and who's spending money on advertising.

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That maybe wasn't just a couple of weeks ago.

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Yeah, and I think those are good clues too as far as we start looking at.

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How do you maintain that position?

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And then also if you're that challenger brand of who to target, maybe you don't want to go after the big kahuna right out of the gate, but targeting whoever is in four, five, six can make a lot of sense, especially if they're out of sync with the market as far as their review profile or their pricing or something else that you can take advantage of.

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Well, the other thing to come back to as well, I think it's I just wrote up a paper for pool pros for trying to help them kind of build their businesses, and I think one of the things that I focused on there was looking at the difference between grabbing a really large portion of a smaller market versus a very small percentage of a much larger market, and, number one, how much easier it is to do that and number two, how much more effective it can be to do that.

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So you know, looking at it as so what I was saying was like, in a local sense for these pool pros, you know much better to grab.

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You know 75% of a small, you know pool owner market of maybe you know 200 people.

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So you've got 150 people locally that fit this very specific you know demographic and customer avatar, whereas maybe in the entire community there might be 2000 pools.

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But if you can only grab you know 5% of those because you're not really targeting, then you have much fewer you know overall within the market.

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I think that's true of any market that you're in, whatever it is that you're selling, especially if you're at the front end of that.

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You know if you're entering into a market or something like that, but is niching down and then grabbing all of that niche.

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You may end up with a larger share of the whole market by taking all of this little market within it and then you can always expand beyond that later potentially.

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But grabbing a really huge share of that small portion of the market, getting that really dialed in customer avatar, I think, is, you know, it's going to be a much better approach.

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Yeah, and I think that's so smart and I just I think brands are listening to this really just need to to double click on what that means for them.

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Because what I see a lot, especially you know kind of the initial consults from a lot of brands is they'll come in and they'll be like, hey, we want to have that.

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You know, sell this to mom, dads, aunts, uncles, you know, brothers, mothers and the whole nine yards and they want to put all those keywords you know into their title and their bullets and try to speak to them in their secondary listings.

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And the problem is is that when you peanut butter spread that across everything that you lose.

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You know all that power of being really focused and understanding.

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You know kind of that.

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You know let's call it the smallest, most viable niche that you have and you can always expand on that later, because the you know the truth of it is is that you know we're not Coca-Cola, that we, you know, are the right fit for everybody.

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You know we're more like RC Cola where it takes, you know, a very specific fit for everybody.

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You know we're more like RC Cola where it takes, you know, a very specific taste for someone to be like yep, that is definitely my jam, that's the brand that speaks to me and that's what I want, right, all right.

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So, as we kind of wrap this conversation on market share, matt and Mike, do you guys have a couple of action items that you would leave our listeners with?

00:22:13.903 --> 00:22:27.333
Yeah, yeah, actually I think that product opportunity we talked about product opportunity explorer, which a lot of people, just by the name, think that it's looking at what kind of products to sell and see if it's viable.

00:22:27.333 --> 00:22:41.843
But there's so much information and so much data in that product opportunity explorer that I think the first thing that is actionable right now is go, take a go, take a peek and explore the new things and you know there's new data in that every single time I look at it.

00:22:41.843 --> 00:22:55.395
So I think using the product opportunity explorer more frequently and looking to see the type of data that it's giving you is something that you can do today and you're going to learn a lot about not just your category but how you're doing in that category.

00:22:56.305 --> 00:22:58.051
Yeah, I would say that's absolutely true.

00:22:58.051 --> 00:23:08.451
I mean, even for myself, for the longest time, I didn't even open Product Opportunity Explorer, because that's what I thought it was was exploring for new products, and we already had so many products we knew we wanted to release.

00:23:08.451 --> 00:23:10.252
It's like I wasn't really interested.

00:23:10.252 --> 00:23:14.055
I was like I've already got this line of products that I want to move on, so I didn't even look at it.

00:23:14.055 --> 00:23:15.836
So it's kind of misnamed.

00:23:15.836 --> 00:23:17.317
So make sure you take advantage of it.

00:23:17.678 --> 00:23:22.881
I think the only other thing that I would say is just don't, don't sleep on this.

00:23:23.161 --> 00:23:38.054
You know like, again, Amazon operates on a flywheel, so everything that happens good or bad as soon as it starts, it's already on either a downward spiral or an upward spiral, and if you don't catch it early, you're going to miss it.

00:23:38.414 --> 00:23:41.773
And so, when it comes to market share, you need to know what your market share is.

00:23:41.773 --> 00:23:48.535
So make sure that you're finding the data, whether that's product opportunity explorer or whether that's some third party service that you're using.

00:23:48.535 --> 00:24:00.236
Just recognize that if it's third party, like Helium 10 or something like that, a lot of it is estimations and calculations, and they may be pretty good estimates, but they're not the same as first party data from Amazon.

00:24:00.236 --> 00:24:06.513
So product opportunity explorer and something like that is going to be a much better way of determining just how much market share you've got.

00:24:06.513 --> 00:24:12.352
But also make sure that when you're trying to calculate that, recognize what is your actual market.

00:24:12.352 --> 00:24:31.892
You know I'm not selling to every pool owner, so if I'm comparing myself and trying to find out what is my market share of that market, you know that's a very different thing than calculating how much market share do I have among this specific demographic that is my actual customer avatar and these search terms that actually relate to my product specifically.

00:24:32.965 --> 00:24:47.988
So maybe pay attention to both, but really dial in on that one that's very much more specific to your brand I want to add one more thing to what you just just said Not only are you not selling to every pool owner, but you're also not competing against every other product that's selling the same thing in your category.

00:24:47.988 --> 00:24:50.776
That's another really important thing to note in there.

00:24:51.184 --> 00:25:09.974
Yeah, and I'll leave it with this just to build off that product opportunity explorer piece of it is, think about how you can use that, especially the negative reviews that you get in the return data, in order to lower your return rate, because return rates, you know, also drive one-star reviews and you know we've talked about it before.

00:25:09.974 --> 00:25:14.619
Eliminating, you know, a one-star review is 10 times more powerful.

00:25:14.619 --> 00:25:28.971
We all love five-star reviews, but really eliminating that one-star review is 10 times more powerful and there's a lot that can be done just by communication and messaging within your listing and within your brand in order to do that.

00:25:28.971 --> 00:25:40.750
One example that kind of came to the top of my head as we were talking about this is just looking at, I have a client who sells automotive accessories and he's got ones that are specifically for Ford and ones that are specifically for Chevy.

00:25:40.750 --> 00:26:00.717
Well, putting that very plainly in the images, in the title, in the bullet points, and making it as obvious as possible, even if we can reduce that return rate by 1% and reduce the negative reviews by 1%, that is a massive win for that brand.

00:26:00.717 --> 00:26:13.056
So, yeah, look at that data for and think about how you can reduce either your negative reviews and or your return rate by using that data for your products and product opportunity explorer For sure.

00:26:14.661 --> 00:26:15.142
Fantastic.

00:26:15.142 --> 00:26:18.008
Well, guys, I think this was a great episode on market share.

00:26:18.008 --> 00:26:20.092
I think you know listeners out there.

00:26:20.092 --> 00:26:23.759
I would definitely say that the biggest takeaway is get into that product opportunity explorer.

00:26:23.759 --> 00:26:25.310
It's not just about launching new products.

00:26:25.310 --> 00:26:32.499
There's a lot you can learn about your products and also some competitive advantages in order to take market share from the other sellers that are out there.

00:26:32.499 --> 00:26:34.431
And yeah, check it out.

00:26:34.431 --> 00:26:37.265
And we'll be here again for another Tactics Tuesday.

053: Tactic Tuesdays: Maximizing Market Share & Amazon Insights

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