How to Boost Your Toy Business with Data-Driven Insights: Insights from Jason Hsieh

08-AUG-2024 Decoding Toy Trends

Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Toy Business Unboxed, your gateway to the secrets of the toy industry. Here, Jason Hsieh, a toy entrepreneur and expert in the field. “Every product we develop is really inspired by some of the real life experience that we have with our son.” “60 percent of all toys last year were sold on Amazon.”

“Be passionate about it. Because it’s a road. It’s a journey.” “Like when you have an idea that you think is gonna somewhat change the world, make things better, I’d say go for it.“

Jason Hsieh: Hello, good afternoon, welcome to our August webinar. The topic we’ll be talking and discussing about is decoding toy trend, mastering data driven marketing strategy in the toy industry. Today’s webinar is going to be a little bit different than the typical webinar, I’ll be doing a lot of screen sharing, [00:01:00] real life case study of what we have tried with our own in house brand and some of the data that we and my team currently look at on the daily, weekly, monthly basis. And feel free to ask questions in our YouTube channels and in the chat, and I will try to get to all the questions at the end of the webinar.

The webinar goal is to equip toy industry professionals with knowledge and how to effectively manage different Data points in your businesses. There’s a few agenda first. How can we use data as the main asset and how can we make a customer centric marketing decision based on the data that we receive and how can you use the data to make Data driven product development for your toy brand and last but not least, we’ll be also talking about how can you use the data to gain the competitive edge over your competitor in the current market and the current landscape.

First of all, let me start introducing myself. My name is Jason Hsieh, I’m also a [00:02:00] serial entrepreneur in the toy industry. Currently, I run a few different businesses. First, I have an in house toys business, which we design toys for kids with special needs. So sensory toys, fidget toys, and weighted toys. I have been doing that business since 2016. I also run a toy digital marketing agency called Toy Launch, which we do digital marketing for around 15 clients both on Amazon and also off Amazon with email marketing, SMS marketing, social media marketing, and paid social media advertising management, et cetera. I also operate a nonprofit called Sensory Inclusive Classroom Foundation, which we donate sensory toys to low income school district and also different churches in the Phoenix area. And I also run a small Facebook group called Phoenix online sellers and also organizer there. And I have a podcast as well called toy business unbox podcast, which I interview all kinds of different professionals in the toy industry, including toy inventors, [00:03:00] toys, entrepreneurs, toys industry leaders, and people that’s new to the toy industry all the way to people that have been in the toy industry for the past 30 plus years.

A little bit about how it started for me, for those of you that doesn’t know my background story, is in 2013, our son was diagnosed with autism and ADHD while we were living in Japan. However, Japan, just like all the Asia, other Asian countries, there’s a huge Taboo around disabilities, really hard to find the help, the therapy and an opportunity for our son to be successful in his life. So me and my wife decided to move back to United States in 2015. Actually, for me, I have to convince my wife to move to United States with me. I went to high school and college in California. I was born and raised in Taiwan. My wife was born and raised in Japan. We met in Hawaii, but that was a whole different story. Back then in 2015, my wife speak zero English. We have no friend, no families, and no connection in United States. But we were just [00:04:00] making the decision based on the belief that if we do move to the United States, we will get a better resources. And that’s why we decided to move back to the state in 2015 and we used to live in Seattle, Washington, a little bit too much rain so now we live in Phoenix instead. In 2015 I started working in the United States in corporate finance, but I realized when it comes to medical insurance, US is really one of the worst country to live in, it doesn’t pay for the therapy that I needed for my son. That’s including speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and ABS therapy is about like 15 hours a week of therapy and each hour require a hundred, at least a hundred dollars out of my own pocket. So if you do the math, it’s a hundred times 15 times four, that’s 6, 000 a month of medical bill that I need to put out of my own pocket in order to support my son with his condition with Autism ADHD. That’s why I started my first company, LakiKid, back in [00:05:00] 2017. I started dabbling in e commerce and different online businesses in 2016 and officially created the brand, which is I still own and operate as of today in 2017. So that’s my origin story and how I got started in the toy industry is a little bit different than maybe other story you have heard.

A little bit about Toy Launch. At Toy Launch, we’re not just a digital marketing company. We are also partners with our client in the world of toys and we dedicate our focusing on Amazon marketing and also off Amazon marketing. We not only help brands to be successful on Amazon US, but also we have client on Amazon Canada, amazon UK, Amazon EU, and also Amazon Japan. As you can imagine, I speak Japanese fluently. I also speak Chinese fluently. That’s my little bit of advantage. We are also partnered with Klaviyo, Shopify, Amazon, PickFu, and also we are part of Astra. Which is a big toy association, also we are part of Women in Toys and United [00:06:00] Inventor Association.

There’s three principle of our toy marketing that we always talk about when we are talking and advising to our clients or advising to the people and the partner we’re working with. First is conversion optimization. In today’s discussions when it comes to data. Data and conversion optimization is hand in hand. You cannot improve your conversion online without looking at the data to see what needs to be changed. I’ll be also showing some of the real life case study on how to use some of the data to improve your conversion, both on Amazon, if you do sell on Amazon, or on Shopify or your own website, if that is the main channel you are selling your service.

Second, profit optimization. We’ll maybe touch a little bit about how do we optimize for profitability within our toy companies and within our toy businesses. Third is also ongoing optimization, and this is where data really play a big role in today’s discussion on how can we use data to make that business decision and try to improve the [00:07:00] business over time.

First of all, I’m going to start talking about the power of data in the toy industry. Data is super, super important, and I cannot further stress the importance of the data. With digital marketing, you have all kinds of different data, compared to traditional marketing, where you run ads on newspapers. The data that you can get is very limited. You don’t know how many people see your ads in a newspaper. You don’t know if they actually even open a newspaper at all. But in today’s digital marketing space, you see exactly whether or not they see your ads, how long do they see your ads for, if it’s a video ad, how many seconds do they actually click on your ad. What is their click through rate? Do they actually stay on your website? How long do they stay on a website? Where do they look at? Where do their eyeball is tracking? Where is their mouse clicking? Everything is being tracked. So as a marketer, that’s all the data that we can use in our advantage to improve our digital marketing campaign and really help and [00:08:00] improve our businesses over time.

And one of the key decision is you need to understand how to read the data and also understand how to use those data to improve your business and I’m going to do a lot of the live case study today on the webinar, showing you a few example on how to best use all the data. 

Collecting consumer insight. This is super important as far as doing additional consumer researchers and doing maybe play study in the toy industry. That’s very common to do a play study with a small group of parents or teachers, you send them product, collect data, it’s about what does parents think about a new toy? What does a teacher think about them? Or if, your product have therapeutic use, like some of ours, you can also send your product to therapist, occupational therapist, physical therapist, and get their feedback as well. The more data you can collect from the end user, the better that you can improve the product over time. One way we usually do it is first [00:09:00] utilizing survey and focus group, which I mentioned. The effective way of focus group, this is one of the tool that we use currently, it’s called PickFu, this is my account and this is a survey that we did using PickFu’s system. PickFu is like a online survey platform that you can pay them a fee to run a survey for you. And they have a database of people that will see. For this poll, it’s a poll conducted with 50 users. And they answered the entire poll within 3 hours and 40 minutes. And this is a question we asked in our survey. When shopping on Amazon, which product will you be more likely to buy and why? In four of the choices, this is one of our product and this is, oh, the other three is our competitor. As you can see, one of our competitor is actually picking as a winner. Of course, then we get into the details, like why did everyone prefer this one? And the nice thing about PickFu, also give you an AI summary of, okay, what is the reason based on everyone’s feedback? You say, okay, option D emerged as a clear [00:10:00] winner in this survey because the characteristic, you have a colorful design, inclusion of positive affirmation on the band. I guess they do have some kind of wording on the band as well. This software will actually use AI to summarize all the individual feedback that we got from the end user. As you can see, the software will also ask the user to put a feedback. See, this person say, I put option D first because I like that the kick band has positive messages on them for the kids to read throughout the school day. That’s one of the reasons why they picked them. Based on this kind of result, a toy manufacturer, a toy designer, myself this is one of our products. Maybe we shouldn’t put our logo on it. We should change it to a positive affirmation instead. That might help us to sell more of those products, if that is what a consumer is looking for. This is like a focus group. Focus group provide you with in depth information and you can also identify challenges and the pain point that the consumer is facing to allow the business owner like us to tailor their [00:11:00] product and messaging to address those issue effectively, which is essentially what this survey is doing. And the end goal is how can you turn some of those data into actions? The data gathers through those messages should be translated into actionable strategy that improve your overall customer experiences and drive a further brand royalty. 

The next thing I want to talk about is digital analytic for consumer behavior, which is also very important. Are you tracking exactly what your consumer is doing? Are you also optimizing your online presence based on those data? Are you doing any kind of behavior segmentations? Are you looking at performance matrix? So the example I’m going to give you is. If you saw on Amazon, Amazon is doing a really good job on sharing a lot of the data with a business owner like us, and they haven’t shared all this data in the past. For those of you that’s currently on Amazon, I really encourage you to go to brand and click on brand analytic, this is [00:12:00] really a treasure chest of data and information that you should look at. At least on a monthly basis, if not on a weekly basis, as a business owner that’s currently selling through Amazon channel. Amazon will share with you your customer royalty analytic. How many total customers you have, who is the top tier customer, who is a promising customer, who is an average customer, and who is a hibernating customer. So there’s a lot of different data you can look at, they even break it down to different consumer segments. And they also show you how many repeat customer you are getting. But this is not the most powerful report. The most powerful report I like to use as a marketer on Amazon is, I always love to look at search query performance report. This is straight out from Amazon. Historically, I’ve been selling on Amazon since back in 2016. Amazon doesn’t share any of those data with us. So there’s a lot of third party software that’s trying to guess exactly what is the search query volume for a lot of the keyword, but guess what? Now Amazon is sharing all those data with us [00:13:00] as a brand owner. So we can see exactly, For the keyword, for example, chair band, which is a product I just showed you guys. That’s one of my product. That is how much search volume is currently having for that particular product, see for 1500 searches. My market is fairly small because it’s very niche. It’s product designed for kids with special needs. The search volume might not be as big as some other search volume, for example, vitamin C. Vitamin C is like a huge search term. But for me, usually my search volume is a little bit smaller. Usually less than 10, 000. Then you can see sensory toys for kids with autism. That’s a bigger search term. 36, 000 search volume, I think this is per week. Let me change it to per month. You can also select the year, select last month, July, then all this data is going to be updated in real time. Then you can see what is your impression for the keyword? How many click are you getting for the keywords and how many purchases are you getting for the particular keywords? So impression clicks. And also how many add to [00:14:00] cart and how many purchases that you get for those keywords. By looking at this, myself and my PPC manager will make the decision on, we are doing well for the some of the keyword. Maybe we need to change some of our advertising strategy. We should be increasing the bid on some of the keyword in our sponsored product or we should be adding those keywords as a single keyword exact matching campaign on Amazon. For those of you doesn’t understand what I just said. I can do a whole different webinar about Amazon advertising, which is another one hour webinar just in itself. There’s a lot of different match type you can do within the Amazon algorithm. There’s also a different strategy that you want to implement on Amazon to make sure you get ranked correctly with the highly searched and highly relevant keyword specifically for your product. And of course you can also use different tools. It’s like search category, performance report. There’s also top search term report. That’s a lot of different information you can use by leveraging Amazon’s database and they have a lot of information. You can [00:15:00] even look at consumer behavior and analytics, and you can see what is your repeat purchase behavior look like. And also for demographic, Amazon will also show you what is your demographic look like. For example, if I change it to last Quarter for 2024 quarter to apply. I can see exactly, what is the age group? Okay. Look like majority of my customer is in, I see total of 20%, 35 to 44 years old. 12, 11%, 45 to 54. So you can see some of those data as well. You can even see how much Income your customer is making as well. Amazon apparently have that data as well. You can also see for your demographic, what is their education? Are they less than high schooler? Do they have high school diploma? They went to some kind of college and are they female or male? Are they married or single? So Amazon actually show you all those data right now through Amazon’s platform. You can also look at the data like market basket [00:16:00] analysis to see all the product that when people buy, what are the frequently bought together? This is another advanced strategy you can do by targeting and running ads, it’s called product targeting ads on Amazon and target those product that’s frequently brought together for example, this product. Apparently when people are buying our fidget marble maze, they often, buy it with some other fidget toys. So maybe we can do a dedicated marketing campaign to target some of our competitor or some of the related products for the customer to consider by also adding our product to their shopping cart before they check out.

The next thing I want to talk about is, of course, we cannot talk about digital marketing without social media. Social media listening is also a very important skill set that you as an entrepreneur or a manager in your company should be aware of, especially if you’re a marketing director or someone that’s working in any kind of digital marketing capacity. You should be looking at social media and look at the social media data and try to figure out [00:17:00] what is trending and to see if there’s any negative thing people are saying on social media regarding your brand. It’s called social media listen. One way you can do that is just simply by looking at your Facebook data, Facebook also share a lot of data with us as a marketer. Unfortunately, as we all know, Facebook organic reach is horrible right now because Facebook really forced the business to pay now. If you don’t pay, your posts don’t really go anywhere. That’s even with my Facebook account, as you can see, we have 14, 000 followers, but only 69 reach. Out of the fourteen thousand followers, my post only reached sixty nine people? What the heck? Doesn’t make any sense, but guess what? This is how the game is being played right now on Facebook. If you want to reach more people, you need to pay Facebook. However, you can still game the system by just reviewing what actually get any kind of traction or not. Let’s look at this year. This year, this is my account in Facebook. Total reach is only 6, 000, which is still [00:18:00] not a lot. But you can see there’s a few peak. There’s a few times our organic reach actually almost hit 600. See, that’s another time that we almost hit 800 organic reach. Then I will try to identify, okay, what is the post that we actually got 6, 000 reaches? You can look at all the individual posts and this is something that your social media rep or your social media manager or if you’re a small business owner, it could be yourself. I do have a social media manager on my team. So I don’t really look at this data on a frequent basis. But your social media team should be looking at those data and identify what kind of social media content you have the most organic reach, and why? Is it because the first three seconds you say something that really catch people’s attention? Or is it because the content that you share was shareable and people, it’s just going viral by itself? Because, oh, this is great content, or this is a great video, let me share it with my friend. Let me share it with my teacher, let me share it with my neighbor. Something like that. This is something you need to spot and of course, social [00:19:00] media is very tricky nowadays. A lot of the platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it all become like a pay to play platform. Of course, you can still go viral on some of the platforms, but you really need to look at the data on a regular basis to identify. We sell toys for kids with special needs. So majority of our followers are women. Because we all know who is the boss in the household is always a mom. For Instagram, we have about 1, 396, which we don’t have a lot of followers for Instagram, but you can also see where is the top countries our followers and you also show you like different benchmark. Facebook or Meta also share a lot of the information with us. But unfortunately, just like I mentioned earlier, social media is getting really hard because every single social media expect the business like us to pay in order to reach more people. So we’re not even reaching half of our followers for some reason. Unfortunately that’s very common across all social media platform, not just Facebook, Instagram, X or Twitter, that’s the same, and even with TikTok it’s [00:20:00] not really guaranteed. You just need to create a lot of the content, and hopefully some of the content will go viral. 

My next slide, which is understanding your key demographic. Understanding your demographic and do a demographic profiling is very important and you can also personalize some of your content if you can really understand who are your people that usually you resonate or resonate with your brand. One of the exercises I will recommend is called, Story brand transcript. You can Google them. It’s called Story Brand by Donald Miller. He’s a marketing guru. He wrote a few book about digital marketing and also branding. One of his framework I really like is called story brand script. And this is a brand script I created for my own brand back in 2017 or 16. This framework is talking about who is the character that you can help as a brand owner. What do they want? So for example, this is my brand is usually our customer is they want a lifestyle that a typical family [00:21:00] enjoys and live freely and also re engage with their kids and what kind of problem do they have? You need to really put your head in your customer’s shoes. For me, I have a unique situation because I am also my own customer. I have a kid with special needs, same as my customer. So I can relate it to my customer a lot easier because I’m one of them. But in your case, whatever the toys or the board game you design, that might not be the case for you. So for you, you need to understand and really have that one on one conversation with your target audience. What kind of problem do they have? What is their external problem? What’s their internal problem? And for example, internal problem, I can give you a few. It’s I don’t know if my son will able to live freely ever again. For my son, He was non verbal until age six. In one time of his life, me and my wife thought he would never speak for his entire life. But guess what? When he was age six, all of a [00:22:00] sudden something flipped, and he started talking, and now he talks way too much, and he wouldn’t stop talking. I don’t understand, but that’s just how the life are sometimes. That’s my story and that’s my internal problem. I struggle as a parent with kids with special needs. Do you understand the internal problem that your customer is going through as a business owner? If you don’t, you should spend some time talking to them, chatting to them, have a zoom meeting, 30 minutes. Like I’m the founder of so and so toy brand. I would love to have a 30 minute conversation with you and understand how can my toy or my product serve your family better and we’ll give you some of our product for free in return of your time. There will be people that will take you up on that. They just have a conversation. Just talk to them. Understand what they need. Your brand, yourself, and your business should be the guide to your consumer and to your customer. How can you create authority in the space to help them to be successful? in their own journey. It’s called the customer’s hero journey. For [00:23:00] those of you that watch Star Wars, pretty much you are trying to become the Obi Wan. Obi Wan is a mentor to Anakin Skywalker, the main character in Star Wars. He is the mentor trying to teach him how to become the Jedi Knight, so to speak. When you come to digital marketing, You should be the mentor, the guide to your customer with your product, with your services. I see a question about whether or not this is a sales funnel. It could be a part of your sales funnel is in your sales funnel. You should be convincing them. Every single copy that you write, the images you create should be resonating with your end consumer. The first step is understanding your brand identity and how can you position your brand. Your brand as a solution to other people’s problem and what is the process was agreement and what kind of call to action you can ask them to take and what would was success look like for them and what would a failure look like for your customer and what kind of character transformation by using your product, the parent could have. [00:24:00] For me, if they use one of our fidget or sensory product, you could actually help some of the kids to gain more confidence in their learning environment to live a life full of possibility. That’s one of our mission statement is to empower, support and educate kids with learning differences so they can live a life full of possibility.

The next thing I want to talk about is analyzing marketing trend. It’s important to stay current, but also I need to be cautious about chasing it. So let me give you a live failure example. Of course I do what I preach because I also run a toy brand. So this is a real life example of what I tried a couple of years ago. I tried to chase this trend called fidget popper. And this is Google trend. As you can see last five years back in 2021, that was like a huge trend. You will see fidget poppers in the mall. You’ll see in store everywhere, every single toy store have them. And I thought, okay, this is a good business opportunity. Can I create one for my brand and try to sell it? Guess what? I was a little bit too late. [00:25:00] So by the time I jumped on the trend, already started dying. We launched our own fidget poppers in our own Amazon store toward the end of 2021, I believe. But look at the trend. Like at the end of 2021, the whole interest just died. It go from like super high demand to no one really care about a fidget popper anymore. I’ll be very cautious on chasing trend because I still have a couple thousand of fidget bubble popper in my warehouse right now because I try to chase the trend but I was a little bit too, late to the trend unfortunately. 

The next thing is you need to understand the difference between a seasonal trend and long term trend, right? For me, a seasonal trend is something that is like a fidget popper or a fidget spinner that only lasts for a few months. And then after the trend dies and people don’t really care about it anymore. You need to understand those are like two fads. And unfortunately I didn’t learn the lesson back then. I shouldn’t be investing overly into that trend. [00:26:00] And guess what? I, need to own up to it. I take a hundred percent responsibility. If you look at the word fidget popper on Amazon right now, look at how much product is still being sold, but majority of it is not selling at a revenue it was right now, and this is a third party tool I use to look at Amazon data and this tool is called Helium 10. I do have a exclusive discount code. If you guys want the exclusive discount, which is the lifetime 10 percent off, just comment in the training. One of my team member will send you the discount code, but anyway, so the tool will enable you to see a lot of the data on Amazon. Fidget popper right now, search volume is about 1, 832 per month. And this is how much revenue you make. Of course sometimes you need to go through this data and make some judgment. See average price is only $10 average rating, 4. 7. And what is the best seller? See, there’s a lot of fidget popper right now in the marketplace. This is a perfect example of a [00:27:00] seasonal trend. 

The next thing I want to talk about is competitive analysis in the toy industry. How can you identify the market gap? How can you position yourself as a better product in the market? And how can you come up with different digital marketing strategy and try to out compete your competitor? The best example that I can think of is just look at Amazon data. So again, Amazon, a lot of the data is all transparent. You can use tool like the one I’m showing you right now on the screen to identify, okay, usually I will hide all the advertising result first. And now just sort. Which one have the most sales right now? This is like a pack. So this is not what I’m looking for. This is also a pack. This is also some kind of bulk order, so I’ll delete those from my selections. This looks like something very interesting, but they, sell it at 7. That’s low, I don’t like to sell super low ticket item as much. My preference is at least $10 to [00:28:00] $15 or higher, usually 15 higher, because Amazon take a lot of fees. And this is also part of your data analysis when you have, Like evaluating potential product and potential marketplace. Let me just do a quick live exercise with people that’s watching the webinar. Let’s just say, me as a toy inventor, I want to create a new version of a fidget ball or fidget puppet ball, however you call this product. And let’s see how much money you can actually make. First of all, there’s a profitability calculator that you can use with the Amazon platform. And you can say, okay, maybe I can make this for $1, maybe? Okay, if I can make it at $1 in one of the factories in China, how much profit do I make after all Amazon fee? Amazon charge referral fee, Amazon charge FBA fee, Amazon charge storage fee. That’s a lot of different fee that you need to be considering when you are selling on Amazon as a channel. So if I only sell this product for 6. 99, And my cost is $1 with all fee. I only make [00:29:00] 1 back. That’s not really a lot of profit for all this work. So something to consider. And if you only have $1 of profit per unit, that’s not a lot of margin for error. If you mess up, for example, you miscalculated anything, then you can very quickly found a positive net margin to a negative net margin really, because your margin is so, slim. Your margin is only 1. 84. What if Amazon increased the fee by 0. 80? Then you lost like half of your profit. So that’s all the things you want to consider when you’re doing market analysis. And then the other thing I also advise people to look at is look at their review. So you can also analyze their reviews. Look like this guy sell a lot of those. So we have 9, 000 reviews. Let’s see what people say about those reviews. You can also sort it by most helpful, usually I like to look at negative review. The reason is because those are all room for improvement. Those are the data that you can look at. [00:30:00] For example, in the tool, I will hide all the 4 star and 5 star. And I will only look at 1 to 3 star. And usually those are the good information. Okay, so let’s say what is PeopleSoft. We have a defective box. One of the pager Ball was deflated, already deflated after five days, not worth it, not that good, poor quality, not a good poppers, don’t hold airs, what’s the point, it stressed me out. You get the point. So the point is Take a look at your, competitor’s negative review and see how can your product adjust those negative review. So you don’t get the same negative review when you sell the product yourself, right? Those are, like, gold mines of information you can use. Like everyone’s complaining that you want whole air. How can I make sure my version of my toys will actually hold air? So people don’t complain about the same problem, right? So that’s very, important. You just need to pay for a software like this that I’m showing you right now to get all this data. Besides the software [00:31:00] cost, all the information is there. It’s available in public. You can see all the reviews. 

The next thing I want to really talk about is, of course, you understand your competition now, you also understand the gap and you also know how to adapt the strategy. The next thing is, how do you apply some of those data to product development? This is really important as a toy designer or a toy manufacturer, because we are always thinking about new toys to develop, how can you use some of those data from your potential customer and try to come up with the best version of the product you are looking for. So let me give you an example of the survey I did when I was doing product research for one of the potential product I was looking into developing. Again, my own toy brand, we design sensory product for kids with special needs. In the special needs space, there’s a product called Body Socks. It’s for kids with sensory issues, the kids can wear it, and really help them with reducing anxiety. Actually, my son used it in his occupational therapy before, when he was younger. So I was looking at, okay, how [00:32:00] can I create my own version of this that’s better? See, this is some more example, and this is a survey. We want our design to be fun and interesting for kids to use and enjoy with our new animal series, we want to design our body socks and compression sheet using animals that your kids love. Please review the animal pattern below and let us know your top three choices. So my idea, my thesis for this product is, okay, I see all this product. But it’s boring, it’s like blue, okay? Red, green, whatever, it’s just colors. What if we make it more fun? What if we use an animal pattern? It’s almost like wearing a Halloween costume. Maybe look like cow, maybe look like giraffe, look like leopard, look like tiger, whatever. Zebra. So that was my thesis when I was thinking about developing this product a few years ago. And I was using those data to see what the response say. Let’s see what the customer say. Okay, apparently the number one response is Tiger. We got 22 percent of our, the people [00:33:00] that fill out the survey say Tiger. Another 26 percent they like different type of pattern. And also what is the second choice, third choices. This is the data that you can use by sending out survey to your social media followers or to your email list and just ask them for real feedback. What is the pattern you like? What is the design you like and why? And you can use those data to really make the informed product development decision for your brand going forward. This is how I use it for my own brand. This is also part of how can you make data driven product design, focusing on creating product to meet with the real needs and desire of your consumer to ensure the product is both relevant and also successful. Toy design and toy marketing is not one and done. It’s ongoing processes. You’re going to create maybe new additional additions, and you want to get data from your consumer to allow for [00:34:00] continuous refinement and improvement. To lead to a better quality product over the years. You also want to minimize the risk. Because what if the product idea that you have in your head, you think it’s great, but everyone else hated it. You don’t know that if you never did any kind of survey. How do you know the patent that you choose, people actually care about it. Maybe no one care about the giraffe patterns, right? So you don’t know that. Do the survey, get the data from the end customer. The data not only guide the design process, but you also spark innovation. Leading to the creation of unique product that really stand out in the competitive toy market. Because toy market is very competitive. It’s not easy to run a toy business. I’ve been doing this since 2016. I still feel like it’s very competitive. It never get easier. It always get harder. 

The next thing you also want to think about is create a feedback loop to improve your product with the data. So you want to make continued improvement. You also need to be agile to your feedback and the [00:35:00] response. One of the best way to look at it is, again, you can look at your reviews. That’s one way. And also look at any kind of ongoing problem you are solving, how is people responding to the product? And if you do sell on Amazon, the best way to look at it is just look at your review for your own product. So this is sound of the review for sound of my product. You want to look at the review. I go, why do people say that? Like, why are the people leaving us negative reviews? Is there a particular reason? Is there a pattern? Is it something that you can adjust as a manufacturer, as a toy designer, to adjust that in your next version of the toy that you’re going to launch or develop? That is all part of the feedback loop. So it’s establishing this feedback loop will enable you to collect the data, analyze it, and allow you as a brand owner to refine your product and stay aligned with the customer’s expectation.

 The next thing I also want to do is a few case study of having different data on launches. When you want to do product launches at Amazon, the most [00:36:00] important thing you need to know is keywords. Amazon is a search engine with any kind of search engine, including Google, Amazon, or any other search engine that you use, it’s all about what is the keyword that you want to optimize. This is a live example of our master keyword list for my in house brand, LakiKid. Depends on the keyword, we’ll categorize the keyword into titles, Categories, or sometimes we have keywords in different kind of groups, and we find the keyword from different sources. We try to get search volume, keyword sales, search trend, is it trending down or trending up? As you can see, this is the example of the failed product failure I shared earlier. Fidget Bubble Pop. Every single search term, majority of it is trending downwards, see? Search trend, minus nine, minus 18, minus 24, minus 49. So all the keywords trending down because no one really care about the visual popper anymore, unfortunately. For Amazon, it’s super important to identify, okay, what is the [00:37:00] main keyword that you actually have a chance to rank on organically? And there is a saying in digital marketing. The best place to hide a dead body is on the page two of the search result because no one will ever see it. Same as Amazon, if your product is on the page two of the search result, no one will ever see it. People always look at page one and they, change the searches and they never look at page two. Very, rarely they will look at the page two of the search result. As a toy entrepreneur, as a digital marketing manager yourself, this is the data that you need to know and you need to review on a monthly basis. What are the keywords? That is most relevant and have the most search volume for, us for this particular product pop it fidget toys, 7, 719 search volume per month. Keyword sales volume is about 95 sales per month. However, the search trend is currently trending down at minus nine. But we’re still using it as part of our title because that’s the most relevant and have the most searches. 

Jason Hsieh: Amazon [00:38:00] is all about keywords. I did a whole webinar about this a couple of months ago about how to optimize your Amazon listing using different keywords. And keyword is like the building block of your Amazon businesses, because everything you do in Amazon is keyword based. So that’s very important to have, especially like the one I’m showing you for every single product inside your product line. So you know exactly for each of the product inside your product categories, what is the main keyword? What is your hero keyword? What are the secondary keywords? What are some of the competitive keyword that you can also target? Super, super important when you’re launching product or when you’re relaunching product on Amazon, even for your Shopify store off Amazon, is a lot of it is still very keyword driven. When you’re launching product, make sure you put together a master keyword list for each of your product inside your catalog to make that inform digital marketing decision.

The next thing I wanna talk about is how can you personalize some of the marketing based on the data [00:39:00] that we were talking about today? One of the way you can do that is you can use third party software. For example, if you sell on Shopify, one of the software we use is called smile. It’s like a royalty program and you can actually collect a customer’s information and you can give them points and give them reward. You can give them a whole bunch of different stuff. You can give them VIP tiers and you can give them points for sending, refer to you. Those is all kinds of data that you can potentially utilize and really try to build. Improve your customer experience and also using a loyalty program like this, you can also make personalized marketing a strategy because you can say, Oh thank you for being a VIP customer for the last year. We will send you a personalized coupon code that you can get it for 30 percent off. That’s a really personalized marketing based on the consumer’s buying behavior, and then you can also enhance your customer’s experience shopping on your website. And so that kind of covers all the things I [00:40:00] want to cover in today’s webinar about how to master a data driven marketing strategy. Let me go ahead and answer some of the questions here. We have a question earlier about if this is a sales funnel. It is, not a sales funnel, but you can use some of the strategy inside your sales funnel for sure. And I have another comment from Matt talking about are you, question one, are you doing any businesses on Amazon Business? Yes, we do businesses on Amazon Business. There’s not a lot of personalized marketing you can do with Amazon Business. Pretty much you need to upload your Amazon Business certification, and you also need to turn on business pricing for Amazon Business. So hopefully that answer your question. Let me know if that doesn’t answer your question. The second question you have is you want to introduce me to people for the podcast. Okay. Sure. Just send me an email about a podcast and I would love to have you on the podcast as well. 

Thank you so much for everyone to participate in this month’s webinar. I hope [00:41:00] some of the information I shared today was helpful and beneficial to your businesses. And let me know if you have any other questions in the YouTube videos. I will try to answer all the questions. And for those of you that’s watching the replay, Feel free to put some of the questions in the YouTube video after the fact. One of my team members will also review the comment and see if there’s any additional questions that we can address.

For those of you that need help with your digital marketing for your own toy businesses, you can also reach out to us at 602-560-6300 that’s our business line number, or you can just visit us at http://www.toy-launch.com forward slash schedule to schedule a time to speak with me personally, which I will try to understand your situation and see if we can help you in your circumstances, even if we couldn’t help you, I will try to give you advice and share some of the things that work for me and my businesses and hopefully that will help your [00:42:00] businesses to be successful as well. Thank you so much for everyone for participating and I will see you guys next month in the next month’s webinar. 

Outro: You’ve been listening to Toy Business Unboxed, hosted by Jason Hsieh. Thank you for joining us and exploring the fascinating world of toys and the ingenuity behind them.

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