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Launching a new product on Amazon is a thrilling yet potentially dangerous dance. While putting a new product out on the platform has the potential to accelerate your brand’s overall business growth, there are more than a few places where a missed step could lead to catastrophe. 

This also involves what’s often referred to as Amazon’s product launch honeymoon period. 

Because sales history is such a critical aspect of the way that Amazon traditionally ranks the products on its marketplace, the chances of any seller successfully launching a new product without historical sales data would be approximately zero.  

The solution that Amazon seems to have come up with is to overlook a product’s sales history when ranking new products. The result is a much greater likelihood of acquiring authority and rankings for the keywords that you had hoped would be driving traffic to your listing. 

Ecommerce experts have differing ideas of the length of the period in question, but are almost all in agreement that for between two weeks and a month, every right move that you make will receive an extra positive algorithmic push.

More importantly, there are no do-overs. You’re going to need to get it right the first time!

Sending a new product out into the marketplace is an art, and something that Canopy Management has perfected over the years.

Here at Canopy Management, we don’t just want you to succeed—we want to put you in a position to conquer your selling niche. In this post, we’ll highlight the three most common mistakes that could spell doom for your Amazon product launch, and how Canopy Management can help you steer clear of them.

Mistake #1: Not Conducting Thorough Market Research

Make sure to measure twice and cut once. 

Every carpenter has their own story about why that sentence is so true. Just like making that cut, an Amazon product launch is an opportunity to double down on the data collection phase of the project. That’s why a successful Amazon product launch needs to begin with extensive market research. 

Many sellers make the mistake of leaping headfirst into the product launch without understanding their target customers, competition, and sometimes even without determining if there’s a market for their product in the first place. 

This lack of knowledge could lead to a poorly performing product.

How Canopy Helps:

At Canopy Management, our approach to market research is comprehensive and systematic, designed to eliminate ambiguity and provide you with actionable insights. We know that understanding the marketplace is not an optional step in the product launch process; it’s an essential foundation upon which successful strategies are constructed.

Canopy Management’s market research begins with a deep dive into your target niche. Our analysts take time to understand your potential customer demographic, what they value, and how they make purchasing decisions. This involves exploring buying behavior, customer pain points, and an understanding of what drives their loyalty and satisfaction. 

Canopy’s goal is to craft a precise buyer persona, a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. This will guide the creation of persuasive and personalized marketing messages.

Once we’ve clearly defined your target audience, our analysts turn their attention to the competition. We conduct a thorough competitive analysis, assessing their product offerings, pricing strategies, brand positioning, and customer reviews. By uncovering their strengths and weaknesses we’re able to find opportunities for differentiation. 

Canopy also examines market trends, customer preferences, as well as the potential regulatory or economic impacts that could influence your product’s performance. By keeping a pulse on the industry and the wider environment, we can help you anticipate changes and stay ahead of the curve.

This extensive knowledge of your customers, competition, and market conditions makes it possible for our experts to seamlessly collaborate with you to develop an effective marketing strategy. It involves a combination of choosing the right price point, crafting compelling product descriptions, tailoring promotional campaigns, and positioning your product in a way that resonates with your target audience and stands out in the crowded Amazon marketplace.

Mistake #2: Inadequate Product Listings

It goes without saying that your Amazon product listing is the primary tool for showcasing why ecommerce shoppers should purchase your product instead of the competition. Poorly designed listings, lacking in SEO-rich descriptions and high-quality images, can turn potential customers away. The listing is your first impression, and a weak one can be a surefire way to doom your launch.

How Canopy Helps: 

At Canopy Management, our team of expert copywriters, SEO strategists, photographers, and videographers have years of experience which allows them to understand and leverage the nuances of Amazon’s constantly evolving algorithm. Amazon’s algorithm, which underpins overall search functionality, utilizes a multitude of factors to decide which products to show customers.

Knowing what Amazon is looking for gives Canopy a distinct advantage. 

Our copywriters specialize in creating rich, engaging content that skillfully integrates the right blend of keywords. They strategically weave these keywords into the product title, description, and key feature points, making your listing not only informative and persuasive but also search engine optimized. This precision, coupled with a compelling storytelling approach, increases the likelihood of your product appearing in relevant customer searches, thereby driving more organic traffic to your listing.

Meanwhile, our experienced creative services team understands that high-quality images and videos are just as important as compelling descriptions. They know that Amazon’s algorithm favors listings with clear, high-resolution images that accurately represent the product. Employing a blend of a primary image that makes your product stand out in search results, detailed close-ups, infographics and lifestyle images that highlight key features, our photographers meticulously craft a visual narrative that appeals to your target audience.

But our listing optimization efforts don’t stop there. We make sure that the backend keywords are fully built out, and ensure each image is tagged with relevant metadata and alt text. These invisible details are picked up by Amazon’s algorithm and further improve your product’s visibility in search results.

By optimizing both the textual and visual elements of your product listing, we make it easier for your target audience to discover your product organically. This holistic approach to Amazon SEO not only improves your product’s visibility but also enhances customer engagement, enticing potential buyers to click, explore, and ultimately purchase your product.

Mistake #3: Ignoring Amazon Advertising

Amazon’s marketplace is becoming more competitive every single day. Amazon advertising used to be one of the strategies available to ecommerce sellers. Now, it feels like the price of admission. You can’t afford to ignore advertising. Sellers often think their products will sell themselves or fail to set aside an adequate budget for promotion, severely limiting their product’s visibility.

How Canopy Helps: 

Canopy Management’s advertising team is adept at harnessing Amazon’s full suite of promotional tools to help your product cut through the noise and capture the attention of your target customers. We design a custom, strategic plan that elevates your product’s visibility and maximizes return on your advertising spend.

To begin with, we leverage Amazon’s powerful par per click (PPC) advertising options like Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display ads. Each of these advertising formats has its unique strengths, and we understand how to utilize them effectively based on your product type, target audience, and business goals. For instance, we might use Sponsored Products to increase visibility on search result pages, while Sponsored Brands are employed to help build brand recognition.

Next, as one of the few agencies that are able to take advantage of Amazon’s next-level, demand-side-platform (DSP), our ad specialists are able to connect (and reconnect) with ecommerce shoppers wherever they might navigate to in today’s increasingly fluid, cross-platform shopping journey.   

This is a critical component of success in 2023 with many ecommerce pros saying that off-Amazon traffic has come to the forefront as a pivotal factor in a new product launch. 

But our work doesn’t stop at just setting up ad campaigns. We constantly monitor and analyze performance, using Amazon’s robust analytics to make data-driven decisions. We measure key metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and sales to evaluate the effectiveness of each campaign.

Moreover, we manage your ad spend meticulously, ensuring that every dollar is put to work effectively. We focus on improving your Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS) and strive to maximize your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). This might involve adjusting bids, refining target keywords, or tweaking ad copy based on performance data.

Mastery of Amazon’s promotional tools allows us to design and manage a tailored advertising strategy that boosts your product visibility and maximizes your advertising budget. Through our strategic approach and meticulous management, Canopy Management ensures your product not only reaches your target customers but also resonates with them, leading to increased sales and a successful product launch. 

To start the conversation with one of our Amazon experts and make your next product launch a success, click here.