Less Dollars, More Competition: How Can Consumer Goods Brands Win in Today’s Ultra Competitive Amazon Market?

It’s no news that any brand who cares about keeping and growing their customer base must excel at eCommerce. Why? Consumers enjoy making their purchases online. Online retailing grew a whopping 40% over the course of 2021. And it’s projected to jump another 16% YOY to hit the 1 trillion mark in 2022—a milestone that, pre-pandemic, analysts had only expected in 2024.

But the digital landscape presents a very different set of challenges than traditional retail, and brands must master the art of data analytics to make the opportunity theirs.

Today’s challenging playing field looks something like this:

Crucial Role of eCommerce Marketplaces in General, and Amazon in Particular

eCommerce marketplaces—always a vital channel in the digital game—have become indispensable. Their large trove of behavioral and purchase data, and huge volume of customer traffic, make them a critical channel to master. Amazon is still the clear leader in this sector, with massive 37% growth in 2020, and 21.7% over that in 2021. (That said, Walmart has made Walmart.com a core priority, and is gaining momentum and growing the size of their marketplace at a record pace.)

The (Re)Emergence of the Long Tail

As top-name, global brands came to increasingly dominate traditional retail, small brands found themselves struggling more and more to earn shelf space. Ecommerce, however, has helped these small brands compete with larger ones and even out the playing field. While the size of marketing budgets is still critical, eCommerce marketplaces offer a seemingly endless shelf, benefiting small brands. The result? Over 354,000 new sellers joined the Amazon marketplace in 2021 alone.

Need for Agility

To pull ahead of the pack, brands need to ruthlessly optimize. This means continuously testing and updating their own search terms and content—and understanding what’s working for their competitors as well. For many brands, this is easier said than done: few have the bandwidth to sift through Amazon’s vast and complex customer data. So most ‘auto-optimize’ with Amazon—a ‘good enough’ choice for the past, but one that lacks the precision and immediacy sellers need to grow in tightening markets.

Selling on Amazon in 2022: the Focus Camera Story

Focus Camera owns several consumer goods brands (such as Chefwave, Kratos, and Knox Gear) and are a 5-star seller of cross category on Amazon with a Focus on Camera’s and Electronics. In just 10 of years, they have achieved a spectacular growth rate of 15% YOY. To accomplish this, they have built data analytics capabilities into their DNA.

Focus Camera’s partnership with Noogata has played a key role in this winning approach.

Noogata is an AI Data Cloud optimized for CPG businesses, designed to collect, connect & analyze cross-channel Sales and Advertising data to drive business impact. Noogata allows you to quickly uncover opportunities for growth, understand your sales performance, competitive landscape, product positioning & impact of advertising spend. Noogata has allowed Focus Camera to accelerate their digital transformation and drive impact.

According to Chassy Kirzner, the Amazon Manager at Focus Camera, Noogata’s data platform allowed her team to rapidly move from a lack of accessible data to a fully-fledged data infrastructure—one set up to deliver the insights essential for top marketplace performance. Here’s how:

1. Content That Drives Sales
   
   Chassy noted that in the past, in order to ensure they targeted the right search terms, her team had had to outsource both private label content and Focus Camera’s own bundle content. This led to suboptimal performance and a lag in their ability to react fast as markets changed. Now, the team does this in-house with Noogata—giving them full control over the process and ensuring maximum exposure for their products. “We get much better SEO on Amazon with Noogata than we ever did when we outsourced,” she explained. “Not to mention, creating content in-house is much cheaper!”
              
2. High Performing Advertising Campaigns
   
   Working with Noogata has changed Focus Camera’s approach to marketplace advertising, and really bumped up ROI. “In the past, we tended to choose ‘automatic’ search term targeting and let Amazon pick our campaigns for us,” Chassy explained. “Either that, or we relied on an agency to decide. Now we can easily mine the perfect search terms using the Noogata platform, which gives us the opportunity to really test and fine tune. Our ability to create such granular insights has dramatically increased our ROI—in fact, we’ve seen over a 30% uplift. And without Noogata, it would be way too time intensive to do this type of targeting.” Chassy also noted that with Noogata, Focus Camera gets not only all the keywords that work for Focus Camera, but also everything that works for their competitors. “This way, we can start out and get the low-hanging fruit that works for everyone, and after can add on the keywords that work best specifically for our products.” Chassy has incorporated this keyword mining into her overall agile approach, repeating and fine-tuning as she goes.
                                                                                                                                                                                       
3. Hands-on Customer Success
   
   Chassy described Noogata’s onboarding and training as above-and-beyond anything her team had ever experienced. “Most of the platforms we tried let you float, and just figure stuff out on your own,” she explained. But the greatest tool in the world has no value, if no one knows how to use it. “With Noogata, every single member of every team got exactly the training that he or she needed. And we keep on getting that training. The company is extremely responsive whenever we have a question or a need.”                                                                                                                                                                                 

Results

Not surprisingly, Noogata’s content and search terms are driving sales and curbing spend. “We get super strong results,” Chassy commented. “And, we are seeing them happen live. In just the past two weeks, in just one campaign, we did 20K in sales with just a $700 spend. That is a 3.95% ACOS—which is remarkably high, considering the industry averages around 30%.”

“Overall, working with Noogata has helped us optimize for the strongest marketplace presence and performance possible, with the smallest amount of investment. The product is easy to use, well-supported, and not only helps us put our best foot forward with today’s products, but gives us a chance to test what we are considering for tomorrow. Overall, Noogata is a wonderful product that pays for itself many times over. It is definitely worth investing in.”