How a shift from paid to organic marketing helped double sales

The story

BeaverCraft, a manufacturer of wood-carving tools from Europe, aims to provide its customers with high-quality tools at affordable prices. Its products include knives, chisels, and spoon hook knives—all handcrafted by professionals. The brand launched on in the US on amazon.com in 2017, in Canada on amazon.ca in 2018, and in Germany on amazon.de more recently in 2020 on a mission to grow its business. Hoping to understand how their advertising efforts were helping achieve their growth goals in the US, the BeaverCraft team registered for Amazon Attribution in November of 2019.

The challenge

During the 2019 holiday season, the BeaverCraft team launched a multi-channel marketing strategy to help drive brand awareness and sales for their products. Their holiday campaign included paid social and search ads, in addition to organic tactics on social media and their owned website—all of which directed to their product listings on amazon.com.

Using Amazon Attribution’s unique insights, which provide visibility into the sales impact of non-Amazon marketing channels, the BeaverCraft team quickly realized that relying solely on paid efforts for a niche category like wood carving was not driving sufficient value for the business. For example, between November 25-29, one campaign aimed at increasing sales for BeaverCraft Wood Carving Kit S15 on Black Friday resulted in a negative return on ad spend for the brand. The team saw other instances of this as well.

However, using Amazon Attribution to measure their organic marketing campaigns, the team discovered that educational content focused on wood carving drove higher customer engagement and ultimately a larger portion of their holiday sales. Their organic campaigns included YouTube videos, social posts on Instagram and Facebook, and blog posts on their website.

The solution

With insight into how their non-Amazon marketing impacted sales performance on Amazon, the BeaverCraft team used the following learnings to optimize their marketing strategy:

  1. Because wood carving is a niche hobby, customers are looking to learn—about topics like what it is, how to get started, and what to do once you do get started—before they are willing to make a purchase.
  2. Publishing more educational content across organic channels—like the BeaverCraft blog, their social page, YouTube, and email—drove consideration and ultimately sales among both new audiences just discovering a new hobby, and returning audiences that had already discovered their brand and have shown interest in the category.
  3. They realized they could maximize results using social as a paid channel to help surface their content to new and relevant audiences to continue to drive brand discovery.

With these insights, the team focused more of their efforts on creating a more robust content strategy, including tips and tricks, how-to tutorials, and patterns for those using wood-carving products—all of which linked to specific BeaverCraft product listings on Amazon. They launched this content in both video and article form across their website and on YouTube, using owned channels like their brand’s Facebook and Instagram pages in addition to their email list to drive engagement with this content.

The results

BeaverCraft launched its new organic marketing strategy, informed by insights from Amazon Attribution, in January 2020. As of March 2020, BeaverCraft has experienced a 100% increase in sales on amazon.com in comparison to the brand’s 2019 holiday campaigns. The BeaverCraft team intends to use the learnings from Amazon Attribution to inform their marketing strategies across Germany and Canada to continue to grow their business.

quoteUpBeaverCraft is a new company, still in its youth. From the marketing perspective, we’re still learning how to market our products in a way that drives value for both our customers and for our business. With the learnings from Amazon Attribution, we have been able to better understand which channels and strategies resonate with our niche audience and mirror that approach across all our marketing efforts. Ultimately, with Amazon Attribution measurement, we’ve been able to optimize our marketing strategies to help grow our business on Amazon.quoteDown
– Irene Pinchuk, Head of Marketing, BeaverCraft