As Yamaha’s Amazon partner, DEPT® utilises the full breadth of its expertise and proprietary software, ranging from strategic consulting to content creation, advertising to retail management, monitoring and reporting to help Yamaha achieve a 354% year-on-year growth.

In this case, we drill into how we helped Yamaha introduce a new product to market on the Amazon marketplace. 

Creating organic visibility in a competitive environment
The soundbar category is very competitive. Firstly, we thoroughly evaluated the landscape by looking at the strongest brands in the soundbar category and determined the right competitors to target. While it is highly competitive among the top 100 products, there are also many brands that make up the highly fragmented competitive field on the lower end. We had to make sure we were looking out for smaller sellers and setting our products apart from those as well.

Driving conversion through USP communication
Because there are so many soundbars out there, how do we communicate the key USPs to set these apart from the rest? Conversion rate (CR) is a measure of how successful a product detail page is at converting a potential customer into an actual customer. We know that CR is a key driver of boosting both ranking and organic visibility, and the key ways to improve it are through detailed page optimisation, Amazon deals, average rating, and number of reviews.

Since the easiest aspect to influence is detail page optimisation, this was our main solution for this challenge. Not only did we maximise the product title, highlights and descriptions, but also built Premium A+ content for Yamaha Soundbars. Premium A+ allows us to introduce the brand to the shopper in a way that builds trust and loyalty, and to provide additional product details and incorporate eye-catching images and interactive graphics to best demonstrate the product.
 
For these specific products, we highlighted Alexa as the main unique selling point. The A+ Premium content allowed us to not only make a visually appealing page that has the feel of a brand website within the product detail page, but it also gave us a chance to exhibit the product features that sets them apart from the competition. Everything we included in this content was guided by our Content Relevance Analysis, so we were sure to include exactly what the customer is interested in knowing about these products, so they can make an informed purchase decision.

Driving product awareness
Before considering increasing the conversion rate, we needed to take a step back and look at how to bring shoppers to the detail pages. Traffic is measured through Glance Views (GV), which is the number of visits detail pages receive. GV can be improved through keyword optimisation and twister set-up, as well as advertising methods.

After the content has been optimised, you can ensure higher GV’s by developing a holistic advertising strategy. At the start of the launch, we ran a combination of Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display ads in order to maximise product visibility.
 
When running so many campaigns, it is crucial to maintain a structure that ensures every move you make is working towards the same goal, so we developed an ideal paid advertising workflow. 
 
We begin by taking a look at the products and determining how to best advertise them (e.g. how are the ASINs best clustered). Next, we define which KPI we should focus on. This goal should reflect the goal of the entire portfolio on Amazon, rather than just in advertising. Next, we began working on the campaigns. 
 
We set up all of the campaigns with the different targeting strategies, and began to optimise them. We looked at the best keywords and bidding strategies, with the help of our factor-a suite software, to determine if we had some untapped potential. Finally, we monitored the ASINs as the campaigns were running to keep an eye on any stock issues or lost Buy Boxes, as well as other issues that may arise.
 
Focusing on just one aspect (for example, defensive keywords) is not enough to drive conversion for a brand new product launch.

With an October launch, we were able to ride the wave of the holiday season and maximise the traffic around Black Friday and Christmas. We used the competitive nature of the Christmas season to immediately launch a lot of promotions, and then the calmer January and February months to dive deeply into our strategy, going more for market share to steadily increase performance.
 
It is important to keep in mind that search advertising only targets those customers that are already shopping on Amazon. When using search advertising, you remain in the lowest part of the funnel since the customer likely found your product by searching for something similar. It is important, especially for a product launch, to consider other advertising options which enable you to reach the customer at a higher point in the funnel, for example, through the use of the Amazon Demand Side Platform (DSP).

For a product launch, the use of search advertising is good, the use of DSP is better, and the combination of both is the ultimate advertising approach. The use of both advertising options is what allowed us to gain precision in addressing the right audience for data-driven market development across the entire sales funnel. 
 
DSP provides access to those shoppers at the top of the funnel; maybe they are browsing within the category, but haven’t yet made their way to our product yet. Another benefit of DSP for the soundbars case is the retargeting ability as soundbars, along with many more expensive electronics, do not necessarily lend themselves well to impulse buying.
 
When shopping for an  expensive product, shoppers tend to browse multiple brands, compare features, discuss with friends and family, wait a bit and then maybe come back to review a few products. The decision process can last many weeks, so it is important to use DSP to retarget those shoppers that haven’t yet made a purchase. DSP can be the trigger to push a shopper towards purchase, which is why we decided to use this strategy for the Yamaha Soundbars. 

Amazon DSP allows you to target based on demographic, behaviour or advertising. Amazon is not so focused on who their shoppers are (i.e. gender, age and location), but rather on what they are purchasing. As far as behavioural targeting options, Amazon offers the option to target based on lifestyle and in-market activity, using a shopper’s search, browsing and purchase history. DSP also allows advertising-specific targeting, which uses pixels and customer information for remarketing and lookalike targeting, and is often used along with behavioural targeting.

Our DSP approach for Yamaha consisted of monitoring, optimisation and analyses. Key to our DSP strategy is to ensure that we are tracking the ASINs that are not in stock (OOS) or those that have lost the buy box, so that only the products that are currently available will be advertised. 
 
We update website blacklisting and segment targeting regularly through continuous optimisation in order to achieve the maximum ROAS. Finally, we conducted frequent analyses and extended reports to share our learnings.

Following our Yamaha DSP campaign, we achieved great ROAS values with the retargeting, and found that sales were especially high in November. Our main learning from this was that the holiday season, especially, is a very important time to keep a close eye on the budget. There is a lot of traffic and with the deals and promotions surrounding events like Black Friday, there is also quite a bit of competition. We decided to make greater investments, which turned out to be the right move as we would have lost sales if we didn’t decide to increase the budget during this time.
 
We made a comparison from the beginning of our Yamaha Soundbars advertising campaign to 12 months later and we achieved:
 
 +67% CTR
 +407% Advertising Sales 
+11% Conversion Rate
 
The soundbars have proven to be drivers for performance in the Yamaha portfolio overall. When looking at the YOY growth for both soundbars from the launch date, it is clear how successful they were. From July 2019-October 2020 alone, we saw +612% growth for the larger soundbar and +245% growth for the smaller one.

Thanks to our holistic approach, the soundbars turned out to be true diamonds in the product portfolio and continue to grow and support Yamaha’s overall Amazon growth.