How to Navigate Amazon: Strategies for Successful Toy Brands

05-MAY-2024_Launching to Success_Strategies for Toy Brands on Amazon

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. “Every product we develop is really inspired by some of the real life experience that we have with our son.” “Major retailers.” “Yeah, yeah.” “We think this is cool.” “The thing with Amazon is just, It become more and more complicated over the years.” “Yeah, maybe you can also consider to create more online resources.” will guide you through the enchanting world of toy design, marketing, and manufacturing. Now let the unboxing begin!

Jason Hsieh: Hello, welcome to today’s webinar about launching to success a strategy for toys brand on Amazon. For those of you are watching or joining us live, please comment in the YouTube channels and let us know where you’re tuning in from. And also for those of you that’s watching the replay, you can also interact with us and ask any question by posting question onto our [00:01:00] YouTube channel as well later on. I’m going to go ahead and get started here and talking about today’s webinar. 

This month’s webinar’s goal is to learn the initial step to effectively manage inventory, automizing listing, and develop impactful marketing strategy to ensure a successful Amazon product pre-launch and also relaunch. Gain insight into how to leverage external traffic, how to master review collections, and how to utilize data the latest PPC or pay per click advertising on Amazon, all while preparing for a smooth launch and foster a supported community for toy sellers. 

Today’s agenda is a few things. First, we’re going to start on outlining the key step and strategy to ensure a smooth, effective launch on Amazon. Then second, we’re going to talk about discovering impactful marketing strategy, including the PPC advertising and how to drive external traffic. [00:02:00] Then we’re going to discuss about all the different strategy on collecting reviews and how do you build trust and credibility. Then I’m also going to share some real life experience example and case study how to do that for toys brands on Amazon. 

Okay. First of all, let me reintroduce myself if you haven’t met me before, my name is Jason Hsieh. I’m the founder of Toy Launch and I’m also a serial entrepreneur. I also own a toys brand called LakiKid which we designed toys for kids with special needs. Where it started for me is back in 2013, my son was diagnosed with autism and ADHD while we were living in Japan back then.

My wife is Japanese and Taiwanese. I do speak Japanese and Chinese as well. English is my third language, so I still have a little bit of accent. I’m still working on my accent. But the thing about Japan, just like almost all the other countries in Asia, [00:03:00] there’s a huge taboo around disabilities.

Actually the situation was so bad in Japan, we used to live in Tokyo, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world, but we can only find two therapy centers in the entire Tokyo metropolitan area for our son, who have autism and ADHD. So we decided to move to United States in 2015 to find better resources and therapy for our son and for my family.

However, after we moved to the US, we realized when it comes to medical insurance, US is the worst country to live in. Those of you that are watching today’s webinar that’s also living in the US, I’m pretty sure you can resonate to that. It’s because the medical insurance doesn’t cover majority of the therapy that we needed for our son back then.

And we’re talking about OT, PTs, ABA, whole kind of different therapy. And that’s usually $100 an hour that require 10 to 15 hours a [00:04:00] week. So if you do the math, that’s $6000 just on medical expense alone. No middle class family can really afford that kind of medical expense. That’s why I started dabbling into e-commerce on top of my day job in 2016.

And I started my own toy brand, LakiKid back in 2017. I was able to grow the business over the year and finally quit my day job two years ago, and now I do this full time alongside with toy launch, which is my digital marketing agency, we specialize in helping other toys brand like ourself to be successful online. 

At toy launch, we’re not just a typical digital marketing company we also own a toy brand. That’s something very unique about us. Majority of the digital marketing company you talk to they do not also own the toy brand and they also do not specialize in toys the way we do.

I’m just really passionate about the industry. I am also a [00:05:00] host of a podcast called Toy Business Unboxed. Feel free to listen to our podcast by searching for it on any of the major podcast platform. We are also a Klaviyo partner, Shopify partners, Amazon app partner, and also PickFu certified partners and we are also a member for Astra. Women in Toys and also United Inventors Association. So I’m really deeply involved in the toy industry and I’m also attending a lot of different toy trade show. 

this is usually the three major principle when we work with any of the brands that we work with as far as toy marketing.

First is conversion optimization, which as today’s webinar, I’m also going to dive into what does that mean? How do you really improve your conversion for digital marketing, online marketplaces, et cetera. Number two is profit optimization, which I’m also going to talk a little bit about doing today’s trainings on how do you determine your profit margin on Amazon, which is very important [00:06:00] as well. The third is, Ongoing optimization, what kind of step can you do for your own toys brand on Amazon to ensure the ongoing success for your brand to really try to come up with different hypothesis, change different images, change different title, change different advertising strategy, change different keywords. That’s a lot of different things you can do for ongoing optimization. Optimization to improve your toy brand’s performance on Amazon over time. And again, Amazon is really a marathon. It take a long time to build up to be a successful brand on Amazon and you need a lot of patience dealing with Amazon as well.

I’m going to first start talking about how can you make sure your product can be launched successfully on Amazon. Here are the five typical phases that all the toy brand or any toy new product need to go through in order to have a successful launch on Amazon. First, you need to have a great listing, [00:07:00] obviously, because listing is the only thing they see. The images, the videos, the title, the bullet point, the description. That is what they see when they are shopping on Amazon. That is going to make or break your brand. When I’m talking to a lot of toy brand, that is that have a present in the retail space. One thing they didn’t realize is majority of the customers, when they go shop in any kind of retail store, maybe a toy store, maybe target Walmart, the first thing they will do is they’ll look up the same product on Amazon and try to find out how many reviews this toy have.

I do that myself when I’m buying like any tech product, buying a laptop. I always check in for review. What does everyone say? So by having a great listing, that also will enhance your brand’s legitimacy and also the overall brand. If you’re not doing a really good job on your Amazon listing, and when other people find you and find out your listing is just not really well optimized, that also has a really poor reflection on the overall brand as a [00:08:00] whole.

As we all know, Amazon is so big nowadays. Everyone uses it, and that’s also the number one place when people are searching for any physical product right now. People don’t start their searches in Google, people start their searches on Amazon when they are trying to find any information about physical product. Especially in United States, of course, and that’s very powerful. So by having a great listing that really, will improve not just your online presence, but also with your retail presence as well. It help with one another instead of against one another. I know there’s a stigma in some of the specialty toy industry. People don’t want to talk about Amazon. People are just afraid of Amazon. But I would say we should embrace Amazon as a toy business owner and instead of going against them, we should incorporate that into our holistic toy digital marketing approach. Amazon should be A piece of your overall strategy not just something that you think about it later on. 

The second phase you want to think about is how can you get review? [00:09:00] Amazon, again, is a review system, a search engine. The number one thing people see before they click on your product is what is your price? What is your image and how much review you have? And I’m also going to talk about a few different current strategy for in 2024 that’s legitimate and you can still get review with Amazon system including Amazon bind. There’s also a couple of different other strategy you can do to try to get reviews as well. I will talk a little bit more in today’s training and then the surface is sales price. This is also where you need to do a competition analysis and figuring out how much is all of your competition currently selling for. What is your average price point? What is your price point? Are you on the high end, middle point, or low range? And it depends on the entire market. You need to come up with a pricing strategy. Of course, you need to make sure this pricing strategy also align with your retail strategy. Of course, you don’t want to sell your product lower on Amazon than your [00:10:00] retail partner, your retail partner not going to be very happy about that.

Having a map pricing strategy across all the channel, including Amazon is critical. But you also need to understand for Amazon, especially when you are doing launching or relaunching, you want to use Amazon coupon or any other special promotion that’s a limited time only for, let you say, 30 days only available on Amazon to improve that velocity for the first 30 days, which I’m also going to explain why the first 30 days so important in my next slide.

Then the next phase is PPC. What you also stand for, pay per click. For pay per click advertising for Amazon is getting more and more complicated and more and more complex over the year. I’ve been selling on Amazon myself since 2016. And over the year, Amazon just keep on adding more placement, adding more functionality, adding more feature. So it’s getting more sophisticated, but also it’s getting harder and harder for people to learn. And that’s [00:11:00] also very important because Amazon is a pay to play platform. If you don’t run ads, it’s just so hard to gain any kind of traction with Amazon platform nowadays. And last but not least, you should also consider is outside traffic.

Do you have a social media following? Do you have an email list? Do you have a big TikTok presence maybe? Or do you have anything outside of Amazon that you can drive people to buy your product on Amazon? The reason why this phase in this strategy is so important because Amazon award and give additional, I would say ranking juice when you drive external traffic to Amazon from your email list, from your social followers. And that is critical, especially when you are launching brand new product or relaunching one of your existing product. 

So let me transition and explain what does Amazon product launch usually look like. This is a typical launch cycle. I divided the launch stages into three phases. Launch [00:12:00] phase, growth phase, and profitability phase.

Launch phase usually lasts about one month. That’s often referred to as a honeymoon period for Amazon marketing. For the first 30 day, Amazon will give you all the ranking juice. So you can rank a lot higher than a typical new product can, because Amazon is trying to give you a benefit of doubt. Their algorithm is to design, to test new product and see if this new product can make Amazon more money.

If at the end of the 30 day, you prove yourselves, oh, this product is selling really well, and Amazon is making a lot of money from you guys from this product, and then you’ll get ranked more in the organic rank. But if after 30 day, you cannot prove to Amazon that your product is worthy of being ranked, then you start losing all the ranking, and no one will find you anymore.

Often, that’s like an inside joke in digital marketing. The best place to hide a dead body is on the second page of the search result. And that’s what will [00:13:00] happen after 30 days. If you cannot rank on Amazon, we in the top, usually one to 20 position organically, then you will just lose rank after 30 days, especially for brand new product launch.

Then the phase two for Amazon product launch cycle is really, that’s what we refer to as a growth phase. That’s usually months two and months three. And that is where you can be a little bit less aggressive compared to the first 30 days. And you really use that opportunity to grow the brand, get more reviews and get more ranking.

And also really trying to figure it out and hone in on your targeting and figuring out what kind of keywords working, what kind of keywords not working and really trying to optimize your listing. The last phase, which is the phase we all want to get to is profitability because in the first three months, your product might be just breaking even or lose some money because sometime when I’m doing product launch for my own brand. [00:14:00] I’ll be losing money for the first couple of months because I try to go really aggressive on my marketing strategy, on my advertising strategy to gain that organic rank, once I gain that organic rank, that is where the, Amazon game start become very, interesting because you not only people can find you through your ads, but they can also find your product organically.

And this is something very unique to Amazon that you won’t have. If you only sell your product on your own website. Because Amazon have the trust, they have the buyers, and everyone have credit card. I have my credit card information in my Amazon app. With two click of button I can buy anything I want and arrive at my house within a few hours usually. If you live close to a major metro area. The visibility that you can gain from Amazon can really make the business successful. For my brand, I’m 100 percent digital. I do not have any retail presence. I don’t sell to any retail store. This is only until 2024 where I start looking into [00:15:00] possibility of getting into retail stores.

That’s why I’m attending Astra, that’s why I’m attending ToyFest, ToyFair, all the other toy trade shows. Talk to sales rep group, talk to retailers, and try to figure out what is my path if I want to sell my toy into the retail store. But you know what? For the past seven years, I’m 100 percent D2C, 100 percent Amazon and Shopify. That’s all I do. I don’t do any retail, and I did okay for myself, and that’s why it’s so important if you can make it work on Amazon for your toys brand. That is a huge opportunity for you and for your brand, but it does take time. That’s why I want to explain this overview because people sometimes think, Oh, it’s easy, just throw some random stuff on Amazon and it’s going to sell. Totally not true because the Amazon marketplace is getting more and more competition every single day. understanding and setting the right expectation before you start with your team is very important because you need to let your team know that again, this is a [00:16:00] marathon, it’s not a sprint. You need to make sure you prepare for it, do your trainings. And for Amazon, there’s a lot of foundation we’ll be going into in today’s training on all the foundation you need to make sure you establish before you start or even if you’re already selling. Those are the foundation you need to revisit and really re optimize everything in order to have that long term success on Amazon that your toys brand really truly deserve.

The next thing a lot of people don’t like to talk about it, but unfortunately, 100 percent necessary because that’s a lot of legal on compliance requirement when you’re selling on Amazon. So this is a few things I would recommend before selling, or if you are already selling on Amazon, you want to check is to review Amazon policy and guidelines on a regular basis and check for your product categories.

This is very often in the Amazon marketplaces, sometimes Amazon will mis categorize your product into different categories. And because their system is so massive, [00:17:00] sometimes their algorithm will scan, or scrape your entire listing and think your product is in a different category than what a real category should be. So you want to have someone on your team to check your product category on a regular basis, because let’s just say you have a toy, but then you got miscategorized as a gardening tool and you can imagine how is that going to affect yourself when your product is showing in the garden category, instead of a toy category, you’re going to lose sell.

Checking your product category on a regular basis, at least once a month. You don’t need to check it yourself. Just have someone on your team, check it. Go to your Amazon listing and just check what category is it under. Second is, do you have IP? Do you have trademark? A lot of the toy designers I talk to, they don’t even have a trademark yet. Trademark is the number one thing you want to start if you don’t have one yet. Because Amazon have a program, it’s called Amazon Brand Registry. Without the Amazon Brand Registry, you lose all the advantage of selling on Amazon, [00:18:00] including you can run video ads, you can do enhanced brand content, you can do a buying program to get reviews. There’s a lot of special features that you can only unlock once you have the trademark. So definitely having that IP and at least the trademark will really help your brand on the long term success. And if you have any design pattern or utility pattern, those is always a huge bonus. 

The next thing you want to check is product safety regulation. Amazon has been really cracking down this year in 2024 on implementing and asking different toys brands to submit their CPC, Children Product Certification, to submit their like safety data sheets, submit a whole bunch of different documents. Make sure you have all the safety documents, all the paperwork, well documented in case Amazon asks for you. you usually have less than 30 days to provide everything with the format they wanted, otherwise your listing will get suspended by Amazon about 30 days. So that’s another thing you want to check on a regular basis. [00:19:00] And of course, I’m not a lawyer, so make sure you consult with a legal expert if you need any kind of legal help on intellectual property.

And also use Amazon’s tool and resources, having a regular system, like I mentioned earlier, on a monthly basis to check your compliance, to check your category, to check all the other potential issues related to legal and compliance for your toy brand on Amazon is really important. Otherwise, you will be losing a lot of potential sales if you are not checking that on a regular basis. 

The next thing I want to talk about when you are doing any kind of marketing on Amazon is Market analysis and buyer personnel’s creation. I feel like a lot of people don’t talk about this enough. So I want to spend a few minutes explaining what this means.

First of all, I know Amazon product launch is a long journey. And you want to understand who are you trying to sell your toys to? Who is your target audience? Who do they like? What kind of [00:20:00] life do they have? What do they think? Really create a marketing personnel for your ideal customer. This will ensure your long term success for any kind of marketing, not just Amazon, but any kind of marketing. You could be radio ads, it could be like ads on the podcast, it could be like billboard ads. But you need to understand who are you trying to talk to. That’s really important and that’s actually marketing 101. So if you’re not doing that already hopefully you are. do that right now, do that today, so you can have that data. And that data can translate into your Amazon listing as well. If you know you’re speaking to a parent that have young kid, have a picture of parent with young kid in Amazon listing. That’s why you do this kind of analysis. This is an example of an analysis I did for my own brand when I first started the brand in 2017. This particular market analysis exercise is called StoryBrand Brandscript. StoryBrand is a book written by Donald Miller. For those of you that are [00:21:00] interested, you can look them up by Googling him.

He’s also a marketing guru, so to speak. And I bought his book and I follow his framework. His framework to put into the layman’s term is you want to create your brand as a guy. For those of you that are Star Wars fans, you want to be the Obi Wan to the Luke Skywalker, and you want to be the guy to your customer. Who is your customer? What kind of character they are? What kind of problem do they have? And how can you position yourself and your brand, your business as a guy to, to their hero’s journey? You are not a hero here. Your customer. How can you position Your customer as a hero, how can you position yourself as a guide to guide in their own hero journey? What kind of plan can you give them in their journey? What is your call to action for them to take? And what will be the scenario if they don’t use your brand and engaging with your product? What is the success look like? What is a failure look like? [00:22:00] And what is the character transformation look like?

Having this kind of deep understanding about your customer avatar is super critical for for your long term digital marketing success. This is actually the exercise I did for my brand, LakiKid, I can explain it really quick. For my brand, LakiKid, we designed toys for kids with special needs because my son has special needs. And the people I’m talking to usually are the parents like myself, or a teacher in the public school environment And the type of struggle they usually have is the kids get overwhelmed, the kids have a tantrum, the kids cannot focus, the kids cannot do certain things. And our product is designed to help them to live a more fulfilling life. Our mission with my brand, LakiKid, is to empower, support, and educate kids with learning differences so they can live a life full of possibilities. That’s my mission. What is your mission? does your digital marketing can [00:23:00] convey that mission? If not, then you’re missing the ball here. So make sure you revisit your avatar. Who’s the people you want to serve? What is your mission? How are you going to interact and serve them as a guy? How can you provide the best advice? So the people that buy your product, buy your toys, your board game, whichever wonderful product you create as a business owner, how can they use it?

So that is this exercise I highly recommend for the people that’s watching today’s training live or watching the replay just search for story brand script. You’ll find it. This is a free tool you can find online.

Okay, so enough about marketing analysis. I’m going to transition and talk about competitor analysis. 

 Identifying your top competitor on Amazon is actually fairly easy because Amazon is an open source platform. With Amazon, you can see how much review your competitor have. What kind of listing they have, what is their image, what is their videos? What is a good thing that the [00:24:00] customers say about them? What is a bad thing the consumers say about them? And if you use tool like Helium 10, you can also find out exactly what is the revenue they are making on Amazon as well. You can also conduct image analysis to figure out what is everyone’s image. Usually when we do competitive analysis for our client is, we’ll identify the top 10 competitors and just compare them side by side. How is everyone’s listing optimized? Usually we use a metric called listing quality score, a scoring system from 1 to 10. 10 being the highest. So where is everyone’s listing at? Is everyone at eight? Is everyone at five? Then you can see how strong your competition are and you can also analyze their price and how much review they have. Then you can assess when you are trying to go into this particular market on Amazon for your toy business, what is the overall market look like.

Those are all the research you can do on Amazon for free. And you cannot do [00:25:00] that with a retail channel. That’s why Amazon Marketplace is so powerful. If you know how to read the data, how to analyze those reports, and you can find out so much information about your competitors just by looking at Amazon data. This is a screenshot of what competitive analysis look like. I know the screen is small, so I apologize. But as you can see here, there’s a very small thing here. It’s called LQS. It’s Listing Quality Score. Like I say, explained earlier, it’s a scoring system from 1 to 10. 10 being the highest. And you can also see where is all the sellers coming from, what is the region. You can also see their monthly sales. How much unit are they selling? How much revenue do they have? How much review do they have? You can see all this information with a third party tool like Helium 10. This is a very critical information for you to know before jumping into the market, because you don’t want to go after a market with people that’s already super established with [00:26:00] like 10, 000 review. It’s really hard for you to overtake that kind of space when you don’t have a lot of money to spend. 

Next I want to talk about is. Branding strategy and design. For those of you that is currently selling on Amazon or planning to sell on Amazon. Here are five core thing you want to think about when you are designing your Amazon storefront, when you are designing your Amazon listing.

First, reflect on your brand identity, the packaging, the insert card, and also your listing, the images, the video should be all aligned with the brand value. you should have a creative guideline to create what is the brand’s fun, what is the colors and all the things that you want to use so you can stay consistent across all your product both online and offline. So the brand have a consistent look and feel to it. Just like when you look at Lego, you know it’s a Lego because they do an amazing job with their branding. You know right away it’s a Lego. 

The second thing is [00:27:00] highlighting those key selling points. What is your unique selling proposition for your toys that no other competitor have. You should highlight those in your listing, in your images, in your video, in your A+ content, which is a product description. You should highlight those key selling points everywhere and really trying to convince the buyer that your product is better, have a better quality, have more reviews, have more trust. Those are all the branding strategy you should implement. And one thing I like to do with my own brand is to just show a picture of me and my family because I’m a small family business and I started a brand because of my son. You’ll be surprised how little people do that with their Amazon listing.

 that’s another thing I highly encourage people to do if you’re not doing that already. The third thing is, how can you create a memorable unboxing experience? I know we we’re talking about online marketing, e commerce marketing, but they still receive the product after they buy it, right? So how can you [00:28:00] create an unboxing experience? Maybe you have an insert card, or you have any kind of additional training, like a free training, you can give them by scanning a QR code. What kind of experience can you create? And the company that do the best for this is really Apple. Their packaging design is amazing. That’s why a lot of people keep the box for iPhone and stuff, because they just did an amazing job with their packaging. So maybe your customer wants to keep the box. That’s another thing to consider when you’re doing branding strategy and design for your toy brand on and off Amazon as well.

And then the next thing is to make sure you include the informative insert card design. That’s actually going to be part of the unboxing experience. The insert card really provide the opportunity to engage with the customer beyond the initial purchases and offer additional information like the QR code or any kind of tips. Those are the information you can include in the insert card. And then last but not least is, of course, [00:29:00] we all sharing, the same planet. It’s very important. We try to be as sustainable as we can. That’s something to be honest, I need to do a better job with my toys brand as well. we’re also trying to eliminate or at least make our box smaller. To reduce on the potential impact to the environment by try to ship the same product in a smaller box and try to reduce the CO2 emission that way. So that’s another thing you can consider, especially if your brand truly believe in sustainability, you want to also showcase that in every single aspect that you do within the business as well.

The importance of Amazon storefront design. I’m going to give you a live example right now why it look like if you are looking at any kind of product on Amazon and how do you navigate to Amazon store, a storefront. I’m on Amazon right now, and this is one of my product with my toys brand. If you see, there’s a link right underneath the product title called Visit [00:30:00] LakiKid Store. If you click on this link, this go to my Amazon storefront. This is what our current storefront look like. You have all the different categories, you have our stories, you have all the different products, different categories. So this is something you want to make sure you design because this can also serve as a branding strategy because people like to look at, Oh, this, I like this brand. Oh, let’s check out what other product they have. But a lot of the toy brand I consult with. They actually don’t have a really well designed storefront. This is another thing you want to spend some time and energy with your in house team, or if you want to hire someone like us that specialize in doing it, we can also help you out with your Amazon storefront design. This is another thing to consider, because this also add a lot of value, allow you to showcase multiple products on the same page and also make a seamless shopping experience for your customer and also increase your organic traffic and also increase [00:31:00] your Amazon rank if you can do this properly.

The next thing I want to discuss is listing optimization preparation. there’s a lot of step when you come to listing preparation for Amazon. This is 11th step that we do internally when we are creating any Amazon listing for our own brand or for our client’s brand is first, you want to create what we call an Amazon listing master, inside the Amazon listing master. You should have all the key product detail. What is the product dimension? What is the weight? What’s the carton dimension? What is the carton weight? What is the cost? What is the cost of goods sold? How much are you selling for? How much margin do you have? You want to keep all this information into the spreadsheet so you can keep track of all your product correctly. So when you are creating and updating your catalog in Amazon, you should have a spreadsheet in case you need to update anything.

You should have a master spreadsheet with all the information in it so you can easily update and [00:32:00] maintain all your product data for Amazon in one giant spreadsheet. Second is, you want to first create a skeleton listing. What I mean by a skeleton listing is, It’s pretty much a listing that’s empty, the listing that only have one word, just like a placeholder. The reason why we do this is once you create a skeleton listing, then you can generate Amazon barcode. You can generate a lot of different things as you are getting your listing ready. So creating that skeleton listing ahead of time, will help you streamline your listing creation process. Usually we do that first, then once we finish everything else, we’ll go back to the skeleton listing and the final fully optimized listing, which I’m going to talk about the next step. 

The next step is creative guideline. What is your creative guideline? I mentioned it earlier in the branding process, you want to make sure you have this right font, the right color, the same design across all your listing on Amazon. So everything you create for your [00:33:00] brand will be on brand and be consistent. The fourth step is to create a SEO optimized Amazon listing. Again, Amazon is a search engine. So you need to make sure you use the right keyword for your title, bullet point, and product description and try to embed the keyword in different places. That’s also keyword you can embed in the backend, for example, image alt text. Let me explain, I know this is like a digital marketing lingo, so you might not understand what I mean by alt text.

So let me show you one of the light example. Alt text is a SEO term. Every single images on the web have a keyword that’s behind the images. Let me turn on one of my Chrome extension. See, every single image here have alt text. See, this image have Altec saying empowering special needs children and their families across the United States with our sensory tools. That keyword, I know it’s very small for those of you that’s watching, but that keyword can help you rank and help you [00:34:00] index with Amazon search algorithm. So by utilizing this Altec field for every single images that you have on your Amazon listing, will also help you to improve your SEO, improve your organic rank by doing it. Correctly.Because if you do SEO correctly, this is free traffic. If you can rank on the keyword you want to rank for, you can get a lot of free traffic on Amazon.

Going back to the listing optimization step here, so I just talk about SEO. The next stage is listing image creation. When you’re creating your listing image, keep in mind majority of the buyer on Amazon, when they shop, they don’t read nowadays, all they do is they will open up one of the image then, they are going to scroll, scroll, scroll scroll, then buy, scroll scroll scroll, then buy. And so you want to make sure all the images you create for your Amazon listing have infographic, key selling feature, like I mentioned earlier in a different slide. What is your unique selling proposition? [00:35:00] What is the benefit of using your product? what make your product unique?

I also sometimes include some social proof in the listing. And like I mentioned earlier, I always include a picture of myself. So this is a picture of me and my wife and our three kids. Our oldest kids are 14. Then we have two daughters, 10 and 6. I’m a family man. So I like to share, that with the customer on Amazon because human being love to buy from another human being. So by showcasing yourself as a business owner and also share a little bit about why you started the toy brand, it is really powerful not just for Amazon, for any other digital marketing or any other marketing in general to share your story and I’m a huge component to that. If you scroll down here under for the brand story, I share my story here as well. and showcase all the other products we also carry as a toy brand.

In the product description, again, I’m trying to make sure we have very vivid images and very big font. So people can read it both on [00:36:00] desktop and mobile. Keep in mind, 80 percent of all shopper right now is shopping on a mobile device. So you really want to optimize your listing for mobile buyers.

 you can also include video in your product description. If you have premium A plus content, premium A plus content is approved only program you can get approved. If you submit, I think 10 different design for your product description, then you can unlock some special feature inside the Amazon platform. It’s called premium A plus. then you can include a video inside your product listing. Let me show you optimized Amazon video should have. This is an example of our video. So as you can see, fast transition, super big font, super easy to read font. Because a lot of people when they’re shopping on Amazon, they actually don’t turn on the volume. They just watch the video silently. So you need to make sure people understand what are you trying to say in your video, without the sound, that’s why we design our video this way. [00:37:00] And this little girl in the video, this is my niece. My sister’s daughter, my sister is my marketing director. Again, I run a family business and she sometimes in some of our product video as well. So this is an example of what kind of Amazon video you can create for your Amazon listing. This is very different than the video you put it on your website. For your Amazon product video is straight to the point. You want to show all the benefits like right away. What is the feature? What is the benefit? Like what is all the things that you have with your toy that other competitors don’t have? The best way to show it is to put it into a video. 

And the next thing beside the video that you want to automate is optimize is also try to show as many social proof as you can. As you can see on my listing here, trusted by over 10, 000 families. This is all the different kids and all the different family that have bought our toys over the years. And then you can also do cross selling on showing, casing, all your other toys that you have or you carry as a brand. And this is how you can also increase [00:38:00] the average order value and also your car value on Amazon too.

So I talk about step five, next step, I already talk about step six is that high quality product video that I just showed you. And then the enhanced brand content is the thing I just showed you as well. This part again is called, is Amazon Lingo is called enhanced brand content or some people call it A plus content. This is whole thing under the product description. Now you want to turn on Amazon coupon as well. And then you can also set up virtual bundles, which I can also show you what it looked like on Amazon. So virtual bundle look like, let me see if I can find a good example of virtual bundle,if you have multiple different toys that people like to buy together, you can also put them into a virtual bundle as well. So that’s another strategy you can, implement on Amazon. And last but not least is You want to create a master keyword list. Master keyword list is a list of keywords search term on Amazon that based on the data you look at in your Amazon [00:39:00] marketplaces, what people usually search and usually will buy your product. You can see all this data in Amazon by downloading your search term report. Search query performance report. And you can also download a report from Helium 10 called Cerebro report. Those are the three reports I would recommend. For those of you who don’t know how to do it, I probably will just create some other training video about it. I don’t have enough time in today’s webinar to go into the detail on how to create your own master keyword list for Amazon. That’s going to be a separate webinar just to do that because that’s a pretty in depth process. 

So let me talk about how do you get review? Because that’s also a very commonly asked question I got with the people I talk to is, okay, how do you get review nowadays with Amazon? First of all, you can run your own in house ambassador program. For those of you that’s doing D2C that already have an email list like we do with our own in house brand, we have about 20, 000 email with our in house brand because all the D2C marketing we, done all over the year. If you do [00:40:00] have an email list, like the one I just described, you can enroll your email subscriber to be your ambassador and say, As an ambassador, we would love for you to engage with us and use our product. And then you can also ask them to provide what we call user generated content, means those ambassadors can take pictures and take videos of their kids using it.

We actually, at Toy Launch, we run an ambassador program for the brand that we work with as well, using our ambassador. So we can ask our ambassador to create videos content and image content for the toy brand that we work with, then we’ll ask the ambassador to upload those images and video back to Amazon. When you are launching, you have a lot more social poop in the beginning with videos, images, and different people using the product. Instead of just you talking about it, you have other people talking about using your toys and how great your toys is.

The second step is enroll in Amazon Vine. Amazon Vine is a Amazon early review program. [00:41:00] For each parent product, you can enroll up to 30 units into Amazon Vine per product. And I think Amazon changed their fee. I think it’s 200 per, per enrollment now. Don’t quote me on it because they keep on changing, they keep on changing their pricing structure. But that is another easy way for you to get review. Word of caution here, just because you pay Amazon for getting review from Amazon Vine reviewer, doesn’t mean you always get a positive review. I have client that enrolled and they get a three star review, because some people don’t like the toy they receive for whatever the reason. So that’s no guarantee just because you pay Amazon, you’re always going to get a five star review. Just keep that in mind when you’re enrolling into Amazon buying program. 

The third thing you can do is to set up review requester using third party software like Helium 10. Helium 10 is our partners and we use their software a lot. Inside their software, there’s a function. You will auto request review by sending the Amazon shopper an email to remind them to leave [00:42:00] you a review. Otherwise you can do it manually by clicking on request review button in your Amazon seller central one by one, which is very tedious. You do not want to do that. You want to use a third party software that can set up and just auto request a review on your behalf. The next important thing you need to understand and you need to know this number as a business owner is What is your profit margin?

Do you know your current contribution margin for your Amazon listing? You should be aiming for 25 percent or higher. Use Amazon Revenue Calculator to determine your margin. It’s a free Amazon tool where you can input your product dimension, your product weight, your selling price, your cost of goods sold, and all the other costs that you have that you incur as a toy business, and then you can calculate what is your profit margin, or I refer to as contribution margin, for Amazon. And if your margin is lower than 25%, that’s a lot of work you need to do. How can you lower the cost? How [00:43:00] can you streamline your supply chain? How can you maybe make the box smaller?

Sometimes just by simply making your box smaller, you will save a lot of money and really increase your profit margin, especially when you’re selling online, because that’s a lot of shipping involved, shipping from China to your warehouse, from your warehouse to Amazon warehouse, from Amazon’s warehouse to the customer’s house. So that’s a lot of different logistics thing you need to consider if your margin is not 25% or higher. Those are the thing you can consider to improve your profit margin for Amazon. And as Amazon charge a lot of different fee. That’s Amazon referral fee. Amazon PA fee, Amazon story fee, amazon long-term story fee, amazon low inventory fee. It goes on and on. It can drive me nuts sometimes, how many different fee Amazon charge. But you need to understand what are all the fee that’s involved. If you really want to be serious with your Amazon present for your toy brand, those are a critical number that you need to understand.

By understanding that, that’s also how [00:44:00] you determine the initial sales price. Because you need to know how much margin you have, so you know, If you want to lower the price, do a sales promotion, how much lower can you get without losing money, right? You want to maybe sell at break even, then that might be a strategy, or you want to sell at a little bit of a loss, but not too much, that might be your strategy. It all depends on how aggressive you want to be in your product launch. And you also want to look at every other persons in your space, like I mentioned earlier, in your competitive analysis and do that analysis and figuring out what is everyone’s sales price? How many reviews does all your competitors have?

Within the first 30 days, doing the launch phase, which is also referred to honeymoon phase, you want to make sure you do a special coupon or a special promotion. So you can drive as many cell velocity or as many cells and try to get as many review possible within the first 30 days, [00:45:00] and that’s really going to determine your long-term success on Amazon. That first 30 day is so critical, and then you slowly raise your price. As you have better organic ranking, you have more review, you can slowly raise your price and instead of, okay, $10 off, now you do $7 off, then you do $5 off, then you do $2 off, then you just don’t do any like percentage of or dollar off at all.

Eventually if that is the route you want to do. The next thing for advertising Amazon, I’m going to touch on high level because that in itself require a whole different webinar because the Amazon advertising is so complex. For those of you that never done any kind of digital marketing or PPC marketing before I’m just trying to explain it on a high level.

 But the first thing is you want to research the most relevant keyword for your product on Amazon. Second is you want to set up keyword tracking on Amazon. How are you ranking or are you even ranking at all? You want to check your indexing. [00:46:00] What that means is if your product is not being indexed for this keyword on Amazon, No one will ever find you on Amazon. So first step is make sure you’re indexing. Then you want to set up to track where are you ranking organically? Are you in position 35 or are you in position 5? That’s very different. You want to be, of course, the long term goal all of us want to be at is we’re in position 10, 1 to 10. That is the best spot you want to be at as a toy brand on Amazon is ranking for the main keyword. We’re in organic position 1 to 10. But you won’t know that if you are not tracking your organic ranking on an ongoing basis.

And then you want to create custom images for Amazon headline ads, which is a little bit more advanced, but that’s also different specific banner images you can create to run Amazon ads. You can also run Amazon video ads. That’s a couple of different strategies you can do. And this is usually what we do when we work with our client is for Amazon advertising [00:47:00] segmentation.

Those are the four categories of Amazon ads that you want to create. That’s auto campaign, which is targeting user using Amazon algorithm. Then there’s category campaign means you’re targeting user searching specifically for the keyword you want to target, and that’s also relevant to your product. The third type is competitor, campaign. Those are targeting user who’s searching for your competitor’s brand name or searching for your competitor’s product. You can be in front of those buyer and try to steal some of the market share from your competitor. Last but not least, it’s called a branded campaign. You want to target user that’s already searching for your brand and protect other competitor to steal your market share.

So those are the four major advertising campaigns type that you want to set up in your Amazon account. And this is actually very similar to Google ads as well. If you have any experience running Google ads, which I do, similar to Google ads. Then I’m going to talk about external traffic really quick [00:48:00] as well, because this also, if you have resources to drive external traffic to Amazon, for example, I mentioned earlier, if you have an email list, if you work with an influencer or a blogger, or do you have any social media, you have a decent social media following. Those is the best time to leverage while you’re launching a product or relaunching a product on Amazon.

Next thing you want to consider is inventory management and also launch timeline. Because once you create an inbound shipment, it depends on where the warehouse that Amazon assign you to. Sometimes it take about, I’ll say 10 to 14 days for Amazon to receive and deliver fully into their system. So your product is available for sale. So when you’re launching a brand new product on Amazon, you want to make sure you create an inbound shipment ahead of time and make sure you have enough inventory in Amazon and come up with your battle plan for Amazon. What is your launch going to look like? How much initial inventory you want to ship in? Do you have any backup in your US [00:49:00] warehouse in case the product launch went too well? Actually that’s a real case scenario, we happened with one of my clients, the product launch went too well when we sold out of stock under like less than two weeks, we are completely out of stock in the U S warehouse. The product was selling well, but we have no more products to sell, which is also not a very good situation to be in, but sometimes with Amazon product launch, you just never know how much you will really sell. Of course, we try to make the best guess estimate on how much we think we can sell. But sometimes the launch go crazy and you sell out of stock, like within two weeks. Again to consider, do you have any inventory that’s closed in US that you can ship in right away if the product take off and it’s selling like crazy, then you want to ship in ASAP so you don’t run out of stock.

So that concludes today’s training and today’s webinar. I know there’s a lot of information I’m trying to condense into a one hour training, pretty much I’m trying to share what [00:50:00] I’ve been learning since 2016, which is like almost a year of my knowledge into one hour, which is impossible. I try to do my best, try to condense all this information and all my knowledge and all my experience. But feel free to comment in the video if you’re watching the replay, also you can comment if you have any questions in our YouTube channel, I will try to answer any of the questions as we receive it. 

Okay, so you just went through this whole training and it’s oh, this is too much and you don’t want to do it yourself. If you need some help, this is what toy launch is here for. We’ll do three different audits for your toy brand for free, for Amazon. The first audit we’ll do is the Amazon competition audit.

The competition audit, I was explaining in the webinar earlier. We’ll do that for free for your brand. And we’ll show you a spreadsheet of all your competitors with all the data. And then we’ll do an Amazon profitability audit for your brand also for free. Remember I mentioned about you want to make sure your profit margin is 25 percent or higher. Our team will do that analysis [00:51:00] with you and show you your current Profit margin, and how can you improve your profit margin? That’s a different strategy we can consider. Like, how can you get into a lower sizing tier in the Amazon system? And that in itself can save you quite a bit of money. And then the third audit we also do, if most of you that’s already selling on Amazon, we can do an Amazon advertising audit for your brand for free. In Amazon Advertising Audit, what we’ll do is to analyze your campaign structure. Do you have all the campaigns set up? Do you have sponsor products, sponsor brands, sponsor display? Do you have all the scenes set up? Do you have all the automation in place? What is your A cost advertising cost of sales? What is your tacos total advertising cost of sales? What does your matrix look like? What is the main keyword? And we’ll give you a detailed report about what you can do. And you can take this report and just implement it with your own team, with whoever you’re working with, your own brand. And yeah, so that’s something I want to offer for anyone that’s [00:52:00] watching today’s webinar or watching the replay.

If you want to get our team to do the free audit for you, feel free to visit toy-launch.com/schedule. Then you can schedule a time with myself, which I will get to know your brand a little bit and do all the audit that I just mentioned. Or you can just give us a call at 602 560 6300 that’s our business line. Feel free to leave us a voicemail because sometimes we are not always at the desk. Those are the few ways that you can find us and I’m also going to a lot of other toy trade shows over the summer.

I’m going to Origin in Columbus, Ohio as well. And I’m going to content Tokyo, which is in Tokyo is a toy licensing show in Tokyo in July. So hopefully I can see you guys in one of the upcoming toy trade show. If you are attending any other ones and thank you so much for joining with me on today’s webinar. And again, I’m here to serve you. I’m here to serve the toy [00:53:00] industry as a whole, feel free to ask me any questions either through any of our videos or with any of our social media posts. Have an amazing week, have amazing summer and go out there and really make a difference with your own toy brand.

Thank you so much, everyone. And have a wonderful day.

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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