Just keep swimming, just keep swimming… 🐠
In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇
📦 Maximize your listings on Amazon.
📦 Ad campaigns can get messy – Un-silo them!
📦 How SEO optimization can make or break your ad performance.
📦 Revolving door retention strategies and $1k for a vacay? Yes please!
📦 Why the best offense is a good defense.
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
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✏️ Amazon audit
Y’all know what time it is… it’s the DTC Brand Breakdown!
We’re back for the final installment with the Amazon team at Pilothouse. We’ve been impressed by Dr. Squatch in the past, but can they keep up their momentum on one of the biggest platforms in the world? Let’s find out 👇
🦸 Hero or villain?
Dr. Squatch uses the classic “packaging on top” concept for the bars of soap. These high-quality images do a great job displaying all of their products that come in various packages.
However, the images could benefit from additional editing like a shadow or reflection to ground them in their space. By comparison, Dr. Squatch is doing a much better job with these hero images than their competition at Dove and Irish Spring.
📔 Maximize your listings
These are more examples of strong images that use on-brand text overlays. This technique effectively conveys a unique selling point (USP), even on very small images.
Unfortunately, they lack some of the character and humor Dr. Squatch is known for in their video content. By leveraging their brand voice in more areas, consumers will never second guess if they’re purchasing from THE Dr. Squatch.
Despite the quality, their listings typically have five secondary images, so two or three more could be added. Why waste the resources if they’re available to you, right? A different angle, visual concept, or close-up could give consumers a more comprehensive view of what they’re buying. 👀
Their longest-standing item on Amazon with the most ratings has this video as the primary content, while the community has uploaded other supplementary videos.
With the vast amount of entertaining content Dr. Squatch produces on their social channels, we expected to see the same vibes here… but we only have this product-focused video. Dr. Squatch should consistently distribute their best content across their portfolio because that humor is what consumers expect from their brand.
🧑🏫 We’ll give your A+ a B+:
Dr. Squatch’s A+ Content is fairly well done! It’s consistent with the same fonts and colors as the listing images but lacks in getting the brand’s personality and humor across once again.
Amazon provides access to premium A+ for brands that meet certain requirements on the platform. For example, premium brands can utilize a video and image carousel, so Dr. Squatch can use those modules to provide a much better branded experience for the shopper. 🛒
Are you using all these channels (or more than two)?
Then you know sorting out your ad campaigns can be messy. 🥴
Messy ad campaigns are inefficient but also unnecessarily expensive.
In the ad spending world, you don't need to be a BIG spender. You need to be a WISE spender. But keeping track of every single channel and making sense of what's working and what isn't can feel like...
A nightmare?
We get it.That's why AdRoll has created a new automation builder. It allows you to un-silo your marketing channels.
🤔 Wait, un-silo?
Yep! Meaning your messaging can feel consistent across channels, adding a layer of legitimacy to your brand and company.
Un-siloing your marketing channels is the key to unlocking higher ROI.
👉 AdRoll's automation builder is here to help you do it.
🤔 What’s in store?
This is not a bad look for Dr. Squatch on their homepage since they put one of their classic videos front and center, but we’re curious as to why the other pages lack that same care. Most are just basic product grids and do little to actually sell the products. 🤷
A huge opportunity has been missed as the store is the only Amazon place providing a full branded experience with no competitor ad placements.
Although traffic to the store is typically much lower than product pages, Amazon continues to roll out new ad types directing consumers to the store. We also see stores featured in search results more often, so don’t sleep on your store page — people will notice when you do.
😬 The daunting SEO
On their main listing, Dr. Squatch utilizes the full “generic keywords” field (248/250 characters used!) and fills it appropriately with single words separated by spaces.
Fathers Hombre gift Dad Boyfriend Girlfriend Women Travel Size toiletries Beauty Sasquatch Squash Sensitive Skin Organic Non-Toxic Essential Oils bodywash body wash face Shower Bath Eczema sanitizer deodorant loofah shea butter acne moisturize Hand
Dr. Squatch wanders a bit too far into other niches and misses opportunities to write “bar soap” including its misspellings and Spanish translations. 💃
Don’t forget about A+ Content’s alternate text (alt text)! It’s fairly common for brands to miss this aspect of SEO (Dr. Squatch included!)
Most of their alt text just says “Dr. Squatch,” but this is an excellent place to put more terms that will index with Amazon’s algorithm. Write out misspellings, the Spanish translation, and other variants of words they likely wouldn’t want on the customer-facing listings.
🏆 Claim your title
We typically suggest titles should be more optimized for search, but Dr. Squatch has focused on readability. With the prominence of their brand in this space, this is likely a good chance for that optimization to shine!
With so much branded search occurring for Dr. Squatch products, focusing on readability for those brand-aware customers is likely a good approach for their brand.
Maximizing SEO in titles is primarily used for indexing and ranking up-and-coming brands, so if you are just starting out, take notes!
☝️ Making a point
Dr. Squatch follows a similar approach with their bullet points, but there’s room for improvement. They lack a lot of potential search optimization and the brand voice and humor they’re well-known for. 😥 The brand focuses on the same typical ingredients and features as every other “natural bar soap” on the market.
Dr. Squatch’s Amazon listings are a bit of a letdown for such a well-curated brand. Although there are some areas where their content and brand personality shine, they’re not consistently leaning into their brand personality across the board.
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🃏 Playing the ad game
Dr. Squatch is in a unique situation by advertising on Amazon. Their branded search terms have more search volume than the generic searches in the space! 🧼
Let’s examine the keyword “soap” with an estimated 45k searches per month. When compared to “Dr. Squatch Soap” which gets an estimated 84k searches per month, it's critical they own their branded searches to not lose market share.
One thing to note for this analysis is that we can only see the customer-facing side of Dr. Squatch’s Amazon advertising. We can’t see how efficient these ads are or how well-targeted and segmented they are.
With their market share and size, Dr. Squatch could set up broadly targeted campaigns of each type and get a worthwhile return. Not to foreshadow too hard… but we doubt that’s what they’re doing because of their various ad types, strong branded defense, and holistic coverage of more generic search terms.
👍 On brand!
Dr. Squatch does a great job owning branded keywords in all ad types. They’ve put up a fantastic defense with sponsored product and sponsored display ads on their own listing:
Let’s compare some search terms to how Dr. Squatch’s sponsored product ads show amongst them (these placements may vary depending on the shopper):
It’s important for Dr. Squatch to have significant coverage on competitors’ product pages that direct even more consumers to their already high-ranking ads and products. They do exactly that, as seen in their three placements on Irish Spring’s bar soap product page.
🎉 Anything to float your boat
Shout out to whoever is managing Dr. Squatch’s Amazon ads! They clearly know what they’re doing because they’re utilizing one of the newest ad types: sponsored brand video to store.
Although we wish they would use one of their more humorous videos, seeing them utilize such an underestimated placement is pleasantly surprising.
For placements that only show the sponsored brand image rather than video, they’ve picked a great image that shows a person, rather than just the product, with a headline that’s very on-brand.
Of course, they’re also nailing it with sponsored product placements and display ads!
Well done Dr. Squatch Amazon ads manager! We’re seeing a fortified branded defense, good placement of ads, and diversity of ad types across generic terms with a strong presence on competitor product pages.
💪 Calling out the OGs
We couldn't help but recall the iconic Old Spice commercials featuring Isaiah Mustafa. Although Old Spice pioneered this branding approach a decade earlier, Dr. Squatch has secured a significant market share using this proven strategy to outperform Old Spice's online sales (based on search volume data)!
Traditional retail distribution may have been the stronghold for older, established brands like Old Spice, but Dr. Squatch is making waves in this space with their products now available in Walmart stores.
The key question remains: Can Dr. Squatch continue snatching market share from Old Spice on their turf?
👋 Until next time…
This concludes our journey through the portfolio of Dr. Squatch, guided by the amazing teams at Pilothouse. Even the biggest brands can find ways to improve, and adapting to our unpredictable marketing environment is important. Stay glued to the DTC newsletter for more insights from your favorite DTC brands in the coming weeks.
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♾️ Meta adds a new way to provide feedback on Reels. Facebook users can tailor their content feed with options like “Show More”, “Hide”, or “Show Less.”
📷 Snap outlines new ad opportunities within the My AI feature. “First Story” allows advertisers to take priority before Friend Stories are displayed to users.
🎵 TikTok commits $2m to support small businesses and will teach entrepreneurs about the tools available to them on the platform. Sessions and workshops will continue on Wednesdays throughout May.
🤑 Instagram revitalizes Branded Content Ads with Partnership Ads to boost the potential reach of brand collaborations. Partnership Ads now include hashtags, @ mentions, people tags, and product tags.
🤖 Microsoft is expected to release a private version of ChatGPT to small businesses with sensitive information for an increased cost. Data entered into a private version of the chatbot would not be used to train its model.
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DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Michael Venditti. Edited by Claire Beveridge and Eric Dyck.
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