Sell More on Amazon with Market Research – in as little as 10 minutes
I want you to think about a product or a service you love. Maybe you enjoy using Instagram, reading on your Kindle, or watching Netflix on your tablet. Now imagine the CEO of Netflix approaches you and says, “we need your opinion on what you love and what you hate about your Netflix experience.” You respond with something like, “I love that my recently watched shows appear at the very top, but I wish I could shuffle-play episodes of Friends, so they play in random order.”
Market research and sentiment analysis are important tools for sellers because they allow you to pinpoint your product’s best benefits, worst features and future iterations. Also, you begin to understand how your audience feels, thinks and talks (the language they use). Thanks to you Netflix won’t be removing the “recently played” category from the very top. How do customers think about your product, or similar products, in your market?
Let’s talk about what market research and sentiment analysis mean, why they are important, and how you can do your own research in as little as 10 minutes that will help you improve your listing and begin selling more units immediately.
What is market research?
Market research is identifying who your competitors are and then defining what they do well and what they don’t do well on their listings and in their sponsored ads.
What is a sentiment analysis?
A sentiment analysis is cataloging unstructured data like text from reviews to determine your customer's feelings, evaluations and language about your product or service.
Why it’s important to conduct this research if you are a seller
Most companies will define their “buyer’s persona” which creates a target customer based on income, age, gender, education, etc. What good is this information if we don’t understand what motivates our customer to purchase? We want to know our target customer’s struggles, why they are struggling with it, and what we could do about it.
Market research on your competitors is essentially reverse engineering your customers’ behavior. We know these customers already purchase this product for some reason, so let’s look at their shopping experience and see what that brand might be doing well. If people are clicking on and purchasing from your competitor’s listing, we know that some factor is resonating with the customer:
Maybe the main image is more appealing and gets more clicks
Maybe the images are high resolution
Maybe listing images highlight benefits the customer wants
Maybe the bullet point descriptions are answering the questions they have
It’s also possible they are simply buying the brand they are familiar with, yet they wish their experience could be even better. This is where the sentiment analysis becomes very helpful, and the easiest way to do this is by reading reviews on your product and your competitor’s product. Reading reviews can answer questions about why customers make purchases that just studying the competitor’s listings cannot:
The product itself is superior to other brands
This brand delivers the product safely and it arrives undamaged
Customers need this product unexpectedly, and this brand offers free 1-day shipping
Customers tend to buy this product as a gift, and the box it arrives in is silver and tied with a bow
How to conduct market research and a sentiment analysis
Maybe you are transitioning your mini-chocolate brand to Amazon, but you are worried about competing with Hershey’s Nuggets. You do some market research and with one quick search discover that their listing has one bad image and no bullet points:
It would be a mistake to give up hope because “a name-brand this successful doesn’t even need to put effort into their listing to succeed.” Their name gets repeat purchases, but these same customers may still have complaints they want answered. You scroll down to the reviews and notice complaints ranging from bad flavor to poor packaging to melted chocolate:
The above research took less than 10 minutes. Assuming you read reviews on multiple mini-chocolate listings and found these same complaints, your listing images and copy could highlight features the customers in your market want and you would have a big advantage:
Classic milk chocolate taste
Guaranteed to arrive sealed in packaging or your money back
Product is properly packaged with insulation and cold pack
Here is a simple template that I use for 3-4 different competitors when doing research:
Questions to consider when doing market research:
Where are my competitors using ads? Are they using video ads, sponsored product ads, or sponsored brand ads?
Do my top competitors have any obvious weak spots I can immediately capitalize on?
Do the copy and/or listing images convey something our competitor has learned about selling this product to this audience?
We once sold a product that required a monthly subscription, and we noticed our top competitor had a long explanation about the monthly subscription in their first bullet point. We determined that they had learned that customers were upset about not knowing about this, and so we decided to make this very clear in the copy and listing images.
Questions to consider when doing a sentiment analysis:
What are our customers looking for when they order our product?
What did they enjoy the most?
What did they like the least?
How could our product be better?
What language do our customers use when talking about our product?
