How We Turned a 1 Product Amazon US Launch into a $2.3m Success Story

Launching a new brand into the hotly contested fitness device market on Amazon.com is no mean feat. Whilst the market is vast, it is also highly competitive.

Our success in delivering a 6-figure first year and then 7-figures in year two for Australian fitness brand Vibit is a testament to our ability to identify the core audience, understand their needs, communicate the effectiveness of the product in solving those needs, and then aggressively chasing market share to accelerate sales.

Challenges

Vibit offers a vibrating massage device that provides post-exercise recovery and pain relief. As a one-product brand with no established recognition in the US, our launch strategy needed to focus on a specific target audience. The brand did not have a preferred audience so we needed to apply our USP and keyword research methodologies to filter down to a niche that offered volume and lower competition. 

The founder-led company had big ambitions. Having built a strong fan base in Australia the business was confident in its brand and product. Our job was to learn from those successes and deliver even faster growth in the US market.

In the first two years, our objective was to accelerate revenue as fast as possible and establish a price point that would deliver the perfect balance between units sold and profit margin.

Solutions

We identified a market segment that was not only large but also growing. This provided an opportunity to enter aggressively, knowing the potential for expansion was strong.

Though the product addressed many physical ailments we committed to focussing on the product as an ideal solution ‘plantar fasciitis’, an increasingly common foot pain issue. The growing need for foot pain relief was an ideal target for us to focus on. 

With that brief, our content and SEO teams got to work developing our newly refined product positioning.

Having the confidence to hone in on a niche, rather than trying to be all things to all people, is a vital lesson that many brands can learn from. It meant we could pitch the product as being designed especially to treat plantar fasciitis and attract highly qualified traffic.

Note that this strategy is most effective when the target market is specific and large/growing. That’s what we’d discovered here. This was what was at the heart of the tremendous growth Vibit experienced.

Creating a Market Leading Position

With the confidence that we were targeting a relevant and growing market, we took the decision to bid aggressively against the most competitive keywords in the category. We coupled that with a strategy of broad competitor targeting. This second strategy allowed us to quickly increase product awareness amongst the wider audience.  

Our biggest constraint was the lack of brand recognition and how we’d persuade people to buy an unknown product.

With a $89 price point, Vibit was by no means a cheap product. The key to unlocking this challenge was emphasizing the product efficacy and visualizing the positive outcomes each customer would experience once they’d tried the product. This is a classic sales method called ‘future pacing’.

Selling a healthier future enabled us to justify the price point. As sales rocketed we began to test higher prices to improve profit margin.

Results

With 1 product in 4 colour variations, we created $950k sales in the first year and $2.3m in year two.

That remarkable growth was supported by hitting best-in-class results across our marketing KPIs.

We increased the price from $58 to $116 without having any negative impact on sales growth

Traffic increased from 4.956 to 26,312 as we began to rank for our target keywords

The conversion rate increased from 8.59% to 17.51% even as we drove far more traffic

ROAS remained consistently high as the price increased, allowing us to increase profitability.

Key Learnings

When you’re entering a market as large as Amazon.com it’s critical to have the confidence to target a specific audience. As long as you have the data to show it’s an exciting revenue opportunity, the more niche you go the better. That’s true of every strategy. On Amazon, that means a product-specific strategy. There’s no such thing as a brand strategy or a halo effect across products on Amazon. Strategy happens at the product level. 

Once you’ve defined your target audience, everything has to align with that audience – how you communicate, what product benefits you decide to prioritize, what keywords and competitor products you target, and how you price your product. 

Consistency in your execution is just as important as arriving at the right strategic insights.  

By following these principles, we were able to help Vibit transform from an unknown brand into a multi-million-dollar success story on Amazon.