SEO Podcast The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing

Mastering E-Commerce: Strategies for Success on Amazon and Beyond with Caroline Lowe

• bestseopodcast.com • Episode 623

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E-commerce expert Carolyn Lowe joins us to delve into online selling, sharing insights from her pioneering days at Dell to her role as founder of an e-commerce agency. Carolyn discusses the digital transformation reshaping consumer behavior and explains why a strong e-commerce strategy is essential for modern businesses. She reveals key steps for integrating online sales into any business model, especially as global events speed up the shift to digital. Focusing on e-commerce economics, Carolyn outlines a path to profitability, whether on a personal site or Amazon’s vast marketplace.

The conversation intensifies as we explore Amazon's strategies. Carolyn shares secrets of brand positioning and storytelling, highlighting how influencers and high-quality visuals boost conversion rates. Discover Amazon’s push into advertising, positioning itself to rival Google by shifting focus from product sales to ad revenue. We also consider Amazon's potential TikTok acquisition and innovative ways for brands to leverage platforms like Twitch and Fire. Packed with insights, this episode is a must-listen for anyone aiming to thrive in the competitive e-commerce world.

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Guest Contact Information: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolynbyronlowe/ 

https://roiswift.com/ 

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Find more great episodes here: https://www.internetmarketingsecretspodcast.com/ 

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Speaker 2:

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, matt Bertram. Today we're going to actually jump into it. I have a special guest for you. We've been talking a lot about e-commerce and I'm going to be building a playlist because a lot of people come and ask me hey, how do I learn SEO or how do I learn content marketing, or how do I learn FBA selling or whatever it is? And so we're going to put together an e-commerce kind of playlist and I invited Caroline Lowe on from Austin, texas. She's close to me. How are you doing, caroline?

Speaker 1:

I'm doing great. How are you, Matt?

Speaker 2:

Great and you're pretty impressive. We have similar messages because we started our business to help a million businesses grow for wow internet marketing and as we were talking I realized that you have a similar message of people you're trying to reach. So I'll kind of turn it over to you to introduce yourself and credentialize yourself and then we'll we'll kind of jump into it, sound good?

Speaker 1:

That's great. Thanks, matt. Yeah, no, carolyn Lowe, I've been in e-commerce for 25 years. Started at Dell 25 years ago. People were buying their first computer, so I've sort of been in e-commerce since this is crazy to think, but before the iPhone even existed so worked for big corporate and then went to a small mom and baby company in 2014. They were a $3 million company and I was their whole e-commerce and Amazon department and had so much fun 5Xing them. They got acquired and while in the meantime I started the agency because I wanted to, I had a Robin Hood mission much like Matt you and wanted to help you know 499 more brands grow profitably Because there's so many we've all heard of you know bad folks out there or snake oil salesmen, and so just trying to give digital marketing and Amazon agencies a good name.

Speaker 2:

No, I love, I love that. Yeah, a quick personal note my mom was one of the first employees of Microsoft and Dell was one of her accounts, and then one of my best friends growing up. Him and his wife both work in Del in the sales department and so really interesting environment with the boards and everything and yeah, they were definitely on the forefront of building a computer and selling it online. I remember when content they were just like please, you can have it free, listen to it, just do anything online, give us your credit, and everybody was worried about the credit card information and it was so new and the world's changed so much. Now we're kind of having those conversations about AI now. So it's pretty wild. So it's pretty wild.

Speaker 2:

I've bumped up against and have done marketing for a number of companies that typically have an e-commerce component. Also, as the listeners know that have been listening a long time, my co-host has a supplement company and we've helped grow his personal brand and sell supplements online and go through the process of building a call center and support and shipping as well as manufacturing. So I've been right there along him and he's now and the two other partners doing that full time, so they've left me to run the agency and that's kind of what I've been doing. He's also the founder of this podcast over 12 years ago, so he's kind of passed the torch to me in some ways, and so I'm excited to continue to expand the education in the area of e-commerce. I don't personally have a product that I'm doing that, and so Chris was kind of my resident subject matter expert for clients that came in from an e-commerce standpoint, so I would love to kind of talk with you for people that, and I think I told you in the pre-interview too.

Speaker 2:

I did an interview with one of the programmers over at Google and he was really talking about this was pre COVID that everyone needs to have a cart on their website, everyone needs to look at how to streamline their process on a website and needing to have an e-commerce component, and then COVID hits and then everybody is scrambling. I had a MMA company that had to shut down, right, because MMA is pretty your face, pretty close to each other, and they had a ton of traffic online and they were looking at okay, we start some e-courses and stuff like that, but then they're like hey, we have like a hundred thousand people that are coming to our site every month. Can we like sell meat, can we sell courses, can we sell all kinds of stuff? And so there was really this transformation of people that were maybe in a service-based business, productizing those services, trying to sell those online as well as building the e-commerce component. So it wasn't like a direct to response or direct to consumer environment.

Speaker 2:

But since that point that's expanded, that's grown, and then you're seeing, just like HIMSS, for example, direct-to-consumer just blowing up online. I've seen t-shirt companies and you got a TikTok store, you got Instagram store. Tiktok just did the deal with Amazon. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity and people coming into the marketplace and Amazon's just so powerful from a search standpoint. You got all these buyers in one place, just like in Google. You have all these users. So I would love to just kind of turn it over to you and to set the table for someone that's maybe considering moving into the e-commerce space and what they should be looking for.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, that's a great setup. You know it's funny. E-commerce doesn't work for everybody and you know, I think folks need to look at the economics, whether it's on their own Shopify or WooCommerce or, you know, bigcommerce website, or whether it's on their own Shopify or WooCommerce or BigCommerce website, or whether it's on Amazon. So the first thing that we've seen a lot of times is we'll be working with these brands that are maybe doing eight figures a year, but they're unprofitable on Amazon, and so I think the first thing that most folks need to do is look at overall profitability and understand your numbers. So if we just say we start with, you know, say we start with a supplement brand that's selling a $30 product, right, maybe it's $30. And you've got to think about okay, maybe your COGS are 20 or 30%.

Speaker 1:

They're usually lower you know, higher in food and beverage, lower in other categories, but say it's 20%, then you have 80% margin left, right, and then. So then you look at okay, if I'm going to sell on Amazon, I'm going to pay a 15% referral fee just for being on the platform. So now I'm down to 65% and then I have to figure out what my fulfillment fees are. And Amazon, as you can imagine, shipping hasn't gone down over the past few years. It only keeps increasing, right? So you know shipping.

Speaker 1:

You used to be able to ship things in Amazon two-day prime for maybe $3. It's really hard to get, hard to get that low. So maybe you're paying $5 on a $30 product, right? So then you're paying a significant fee there. You're paying maybe 15% and then you've got your 15%. So you're at 70% before your COGS, 50% before your COGS, and then, of course, you're not going to show up on page one on Amazon, just like Google. So you probably have to spend 20 to 25% in in, say, in supplements. It's a very crowded category. So at the end of the day, supplements that are $12 are really hard to make money on online. So first thing is is like do the economics I see so many people jump in, start selling stuff and then you know they get in, they realize it's not profitable.

Speaker 2:

They look at their numbers and they're like I've sold this much stuff and then it's like, well, what do you have left after all that? And really I think, looking at the basket price and we kind of have tiers that we recommend on if you should sell stuff. But yeah, if you're in a low margin business at a low dollar value business, you got to have your math down really really good.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and we worked with a natural cleaning brand and we look at even SKU level economics. So which products are making money, which ones aren't? And they were selling these $9, it's a great natural citrus based cleaning company, but they weren't making money on their $9 ones. It's a great natural citrus-based cleaning company, but they weren't making money on their $9 ones. So we said okay and we optimized for the maximum weight. So a lot of times the first two products, first two pounds, are expensive to ship, right, and then after that it only doesn't add that much more incrementally. You might only pay 40 or 50 cents for another pound. So we literally looked at where all the shipping cutoffs were and we engineered a size count that was the lowest percent of fees. So we dropped their fees from, like you know, 35% to 15% by changing the size and the number of counts in the package.

Speaker 2:

Now I think a lot of people don't have those numbers down. Is there calculators out there that can help you calculate a lot of this stuff before you learn what your actual numbers are? A lot of times with ads, we have to start running the ads in different industries and we can get, we can get comps, but really them what the offer is, what the product is, the platform right now is election time, right, so so there's a little bit of a lift there. But really trying to understand what is that baseline and what does that baseline look like this month, this quarter, this week, and you know it, it takes. It takes setting that baseline to understand where you're at. But, uh, on the e-commerce side of things, you got to know your numbers before you go into it or you could get, uh, into some real trouble.

Speaker 2:

I have known a number of companies that just kind of jumped in and, uh, didn't, didn't know their numbers, and then they started getting a ton of bad reviews because they were trying to do their own fulfillment and everything. With Amazon. It's like next day, same day, two day and a lot of these other orders if you're selling stuff on Facebook Marketplace or wherever not maybe Facebook Marketplace, but just Facebook in general, and you deliver them two or three weeks out. People are like I even forgot I bought that and then it comes and it's a little bit like Christmas. But if people are expecting it, they, they keep. They don't wait for two weeks anymore, they want it instantaneous, you know.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly. And so that, like you said about calculators, um, if you're going to do self-fulfillment, you can work with either FedEx or USPS or whoever you're working with and basically get their rates and breakdowns. If you're working with a fulfillment company like a ShipBob or someone who does that, they can give you those breakdowns so you can optimize. And then Amazon has a calculator like an FBA calculator.

Speaker 1:

Now the trick is you have to have an account with Amazon, you have to have a seller account, but before you start listing products you can look and say, oh wow, this one, my fees as a percentage are this high. Maybe I'll go back and create another, I'll create a two-pack or I'll create a different size. You know harder to do in apparel, but I just got off the phone with Amazon. We have an agency team at Amazon in the US who works with us and our brands and helps them, and we said well, one shirt at $30 is not really attractive, a three-pack at $89,. Your fees, you know are, are significantly reduced by like 20 to 30%. So you've still got a 15% fee regardless, but the shipping fees go down a lot.

Speaker 2:

The, the bundling. I think the bundling and and also like all those major commercial holidays are, are so good because people want to buy stuff or somebody else, or him, hers there's a lot of different things that you can do to increase that basket price. I think that that's one of the biggest things. When we were doing some marketing calculations, when we were looking at Target versus Walmart like the overall basket price of when they were leaving the store and checking out what they were buying and Target the dollar value it was less items but it was a higher dollar value. Walmart they're buying more stuff, but it was lower dollar value and it was like, okay, how do we tackle that? And then, of course, with what's going on with Jet and I just saw actually a Walmart delivery vehicle that looked very similar to the Amazon delivery vehicles on our street this week. It was it was pretty wild, and so that I mean the overall space is really quite, quite exciting. I mean you also, when you log in, you have to figure it out Do you want Amazon to carry it for you?

Speaker 2:

Are you going to carry it yourself? You have to figure it out. Do you want Amazon to carry it for you? Are you going to carry it yourself? Are you going to ship it? Well, you got to make that decision right up front, you know, before you pick your style account. And then also there's kind of and you can. I'll let you get into this.

Speaker 2:

But depending on what things that you sell, you may want different accounts for different things, right, you might not want to when people look at your store. You might not want to sell everything under the sun. You might want to specialize in a certain kind of category. And then there's a lot of the copycat sellers right, that there's certain products that they can buy and there's good margins and you can look at the data and then you can sell that. But you're now competing basically with the same item, really on price or reviews versus somebody else and visibility. And so how, how do you? How do you handle? Well, that's a whole, I think, different business than working with specific brands. So I don't know how do you categorize it when someone's coming to you and looking to do X, y, z, from consulting to delivery of services?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so when you do set up your account, you can flip back and forth between merchant fulfilled and Amazon fulfilled. So if you run on a stock a lot of times we'll flip it over to merchant fulfilled because maybe Amazon is slow. Amazon right now is very slow in receiving stuff. So if you typically keep four weeks of inventory right now, you want to be sending more in when it's down to six weeks, because they are extremely slow. Stuff is taking forever to be received in the fulfillment centers. It's only going to get worse as we get closer to the holidays. So that's like. One thing to know is, you can definitely flip back and forth.

Speaker 1:

But as far as with brands, I think the biggest thing is one of the things we've seen is that we've got. I just tore my calf playing tennis yesterday, last week and um, and so I immediately went online and I ordered a knee sleeve like a calf sleeve sorry, calf sleeve from from one of our clients, because it was. It was amazing. I couldn't walk at all. And I put this compression sleeve on my calf and, lo and behold, I could walk within 24 hours. So it was. It was life-changing.

Speaker 1:

But they are a premium price and so the way we've been able to grow them like 30%, 300% since we took them on is really just telling that story. So people don't realize how important those images and videos are. They put up pretty pictures, but they're not converting images. Same thing on your website, right, you might have a pretty product detail page, but it doesn't convert. So we actually did this with a bunch of brands.

Speaker 1:

With one beauty brand, we looked and their conversion rate was only 4%. And on Amazon, 2% to 3% is good on your Shopify site, right, if you're not a high consumable product, but 10% to 15% is where you want to be minimum on Amazon if you're not a consumable product, and theirs was at four. So we redid their product page and their conversion went from four to 12%. So we tripled their conversion rate. They didn't pay Amazon any more money in ads. They didn't pay them any more money in anything. All the people that were coming there. We told the story better through images about why you should buy this brand and why you will love it, and it tripled their conversion.

Speaker 2:

I've really seen that on the brand positioning side of things, on the videos, on the quality of the images, right, even going back to those copycat sellers, some of them have better images of what it does and how it communicates it. And then you're looking at that with with the reviews and and that's that's one of the big things that that I see happening is there are brands that are now expanding on different media channels and Amazon is so big, there's so many customers out there. You could add a book or you could add a product, and now you're reaching more customers in a new channel. That that helps kind of make your brand more three-dimensional across different platforms. And, and if you are an online brand, I mean Amazon's where everybody lives, and it does come down to the value proposition that you're showing and the storytelling that you're providing. And, um, I would love for you to speak to also.

Speaker 2:

Um, there's two things that I've recently heard about. One client, um is uh, uh uh outdoor like patio furniture company that I work with. And, um, amazon called her with a special program where it's like helping to ship to a local area, so utilizing the traffic online to ship there. And then there's also I have some buddies that are doing like product reviews and they're like creating like influencer stores on Amazon to say, hey, I like these products by these prospects and they get like a referral fee out of it. And so there's this whole ecosystem.

Speaker 2:

I mean it's crazy to think that when we were talking about pre-internet, he had a vision of rare books that people are going to buy a couple of times a year and I'm going to own that market. That's kind of how Silicon Valley does it. They're like I'm going to own this market, I'm going to add a new market, add a new market. And he's added like every single market. And now it's like the biggest marketplace online where, to your point, the conversion rates are so much higher because they're all buyers looking for that product. So it's really like when you walk into a car lot, I mean you're in the market to buy a car. If you're walking onto a car, you don't just go look at a car lot. So I think that's the same thing with Amazon. Maybe they're not like, oh, I'm going to buy right now, but they're still thinking about it. They're in the decision phase at some point, or even discovery of whatever they're looking for. But I mean, yeah, people are looking to buy and you've got to tell that story better.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. No, absolutely. And I'm glad you brought up influencers, because you know Amazon is actually doing, you know they do. They give influencers and affiliates like a kickback, so they give them like a 10% If you drove. So instead of paying Amazon 15% referral fee, you only pay them 5% because they say, hey, you drove your own traffic here, so we'll just pay you. You just have to pay us 5%. So there's these whole different platforms. There's a really good one that we like, called Levanta, and they have aggregated. It's almost like a Grin or an Aspire-like type affiliate platform, but it's only for Amazon affiliate platform, but it's only for Amazon.

Speaker 1:

So, for example, there was a guy on our team who he was a basic. He had 25,000 Instagram followers. He would do flop shots over his sister or through his minivan or whatever I mean crazy stuff and he can just basically say all these golf brands can go find him and say, hey, would you use our golf balls? He's got 30,000 followers. He gets like 2,000 engagements on every post. He makes a video of him doing a flop shot through his minivan with the doors open, and so now this platform puts it together.

Speaker 1:

They find all the influencers, they find all the brands and the brand can literally just go on and say I want these seven people and instead of driving them back to their website, they're driving to Amazon. So it's almost a wash. Because you pay the affiliate 10%, Amazon gives you a 10% discount. You're just paying a few hundred bucks to use the platform each month. So I think it's brilliant and we're we see, in certain categories it drives a ton, Like, for example, our knee sleeve calf sleeve brand. Like Novak Djokovic wore it in a major and their Amazon sales like shot through the roof.

Speaker 2:

So Influencer placements, absolutely. Yeah, I know, I think that that that is that is what I've seen. Even the trends online, there's landing bylines and guest posts and stuff like that. I think that that's really moved to influencers and moved to social media and there's been really a broadening of people are only on Google for such a short period of time. I think a lot of people don't know this, but the reason they set up Google like Chrome and gave all that away was to track your usage, because you're only on a search engine for you know whatever it is, till you find what you're looking for. They don't they don't really have any other kind of data and Facebook was getting all this other kind of data that they could utilize and monetize and do those different things. And I mean, can you speak to maybe you know TikTok has actually hired two of my friends recently and TikTok's mostly in the TikTok store, and there's a big deal that was just done with TikTok and Amazon. How do you see that kind of unfolding?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it's well. I think the whole. We recently got out of digital marketing. We've grown some pretty amazing household brand names on Meta and Google. We no longer do that as of July. We went a hundred percent all in on growing brands on Amazon because of iOS issues and privacy issues, and then TikTok and regulation and you know Chinese potential. You know US trying to force a sale or partial sale, so. But I think Amazon is smart and I mean this is crazy. But when Amazon bought Whole Foods like we saw that coming, anybody who knows the Amazon ecosystem knows that certain things don't fit their their platform.

Speaker 1:

So they, they couldn't their their market and their delivery. Doesn't work for groceries, right, doesn't work for frozen food, so they had to. Basically, they could have gone and built it all out, or they could have just gone and bought Whole Foods, or they could have just gone and bought Whole Foods, which they did, I think, similar to TikTok, amazon's like okay, amazon surpassed Google as the number one place where people start their search, but I think the number one product discovery is becoming TikTok. So this is crazy. But if I had to guess, I still say I don't if, if I were, you know, I, I still say Bezos, cause it's not him anymore, but you know, um, if I was Amazon, I would seriously think about buying Tik TOK.

Speaker 2:

They. I mean, I can see that. I can see that, I mean when, when they bought whole foods, I did not like see it coming, but it made sense after they did it, it gave them, uh, you know, uh, a foothold like at not, I mean, there's too many grocery stores, there's too many banks, there's too many, you know, the footprint was was too wide. Um, I think whole foods had done it right, and also they wanted to get some kind of brand identity. I think Amazon didn't have enough brand identity, and so so I I thought it was a great purchase. A lot of people were like very confused by it, but it helped with distribution, it helped with like all kinds of stuff, right, cause they got to pay. I mean, they're driving, I see, with Amazon, they're driving everybody to the, to Whole Foods or the Amazon stores versus a UPS. And if you can get those margins down even a little bit, there's this huge impact that happens on drop-offs and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

And there's a high correlation between Whole Foods shoppers and Amazon shoppers, and I think they also saw Walmart coming at them when Walmart introduced their unlimited shipping for $99 or whatever similar to the Prime program. And then they realized, wait, 90% of America lives within five miles of a Walmart, and so that is where they were like, wait, walmart's doing home delivery. Walmart has you know I forget what the number is like a massive percentage of the grocery wallet share, and so I think they were like we've got to have a grocery presence because otherwise, I mean Walmart could then just outdo them. Walmart opened up third-party selling right, it wasn't just walmartcom that Walmart had inventory of. So they did that, which was like Amazon. They announced their equivalent of, and then they did grocery delivery and curbside pickup. So, yeah, I think it was really smart. There was a saying that Jeff Bezos said. He said he never makes decisions based on what's going to happen in a week. Every decision he's making is like two to three years in the future.

Speaker 2:

I read there. I read an article. I can't remember the guy's name, but there was kind of somebody that um Bezos was watching like certainly like businesses at a certain level, but there was a guy that had developed products and I think he had bought them out like one time and then another time, and then that was actually the guy that helped launch the e-commerce for Walmart. So it's like his nemesis if he had one. It was pretty interesting to see how all this stuff works. But understanding how these big moves happen, if you're a small guy operating in this ecosystem, you need to know these things and expect these things and certainly, like even on social media, there's certainly like de-platforming issues and there's a lot of difficult things and and certain products too are are restricted classes that you can sell or not sell, um, and so so it gets it gets very tricky and so you need to understand the macro to to execute on the micro. Um. I want to go into a little bit more of the kind of ecosystems that are happening on Amazon, like I briefly touched on it, as far as, like influencers that are on Amazon building stores, a buddy of mine has a pretty big it's two guys. They have a really big podcast where they do product reviews right, and so they're doing constantly doing product reviews and then if someone buys in a certain period of time, they get that affiliate fee right and they can really move the needle. I mean, one of the some of the best videos that are out there that I've seen grow like channels grow really, really quickly, are product review channels right, and so it's just people opening up packages and and even on the kid's side of things, kid toy openings, right, it's just I have a four and a six year old. It's just I mean it's it's gone through the roof as far as, like they get the dopamine hit, like it's their opening the toy is what I think it is, um, uh.

Speaker 2:

But but I just I want to know, kind of, um, what I've found from a content creation standpoint, if you understand, um, what the goals are for the quarter of the month or even for the year for these different platforms, whether it be LinkedIn or something else, and you align your content with them. And we found this with podcasts too. If there's a certain month that they're pushing something and we align with it, they'll feature it Right, and so I would love to hear, kind of you. You think they're going to buy TikTok. What else are you seeing from a trend standpoint that that people might be aware of on on Amazon, cause I love that you're, you're all in on it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think what we're seeing and what and what Amazon is seeing, usually when Amazon makes a decision or does, does something, it's it's because they see something coming right. And so the whole affiliates and influencers they said wait a minute, affiliates and influencers are driving traffic to people's own websites and they're buying there, you know. And so they said we'd rather make 5% than 0% on that sale. So that's a big reason why they started launching this is to keep their traffic up and to boost their traffic. And Amazon, the 15% referral fees are okay, but I mean they've already I mean five years ago, they surpassed Microsoft in terms of advertising revenues and you know they were. You know they're edging up on Google. So Microsoft is, I mean Amazon is quickly becoming an ads platform and in addition to a marketplace. I mean now they've launched, they have DSP, you can advertise on Twitch and fire and all their other properties. So I think they're, if their traffic goes down.

Speaker 1:

Obviously I've done the Wall Street dance. I came from Dell Technologies, which was a public company, so we did the quarterly dance for Wall Street and that's one of the indicators for them is traffic and profitability. And the other interesting thing was, like in Q1 of this year, amazon's revenues were only up 12% in North America but their profit was up 454% and a lot of that profit was driven from ads. That has a $0 cost versus shipping, product and fulfilling and all of those things. So that to me was like an eye-opener that if their traffic goes down, you know more like more of their profits coming from ads than from actually selling products.

Speaker 2:

Well, and Amazon web services right Is is their most profitable unit. So the advertising model that Google has I mean they have enough traffic and they have buyers. Yeah, that was pretty exciting when you could advertise on on Amazon, Is it? Is it? Is it correct that you don't even have like you can advertise whatever you want on Amazon, or is it tied specifically to a product? Because I've advertised for products, but I thought they opened it up to like it's just an ads platform now, basically.

Speaker 1:

So, on Amazon advertising, you have to drive them to a product or a store that is actually selling on Amazon. But when I first started with Amazon in 2014, we were running ads on Amazon that went to our website because it was more profitable and we didn't have to pay the fees. And then they shut that down, so you used to be able to take people off Amazon. Now they've sort of like no, we want that, we want to keep it in our ecosystem, um, but now you can run, you know you, you can do retargeting off Amazon, you can do um DSP, so you can do a lot of display stuff um, on on, both on and off Amazon. But it still does have to lead back to a, an Amazon product.

Speaker 2:

But um, for some of those it definitely helps build the brand. If your brand's kind of, everywhere you're you're getting, you're getting that visibility and that sort of thing. What were we going to say? Sorry, there's a little lag.

Speaker 1:

No same same sort of thing. On some of those other off Amazon platforms you can advertise for, you know, things that aren't sold on Amazon. But, um, those off Amazon platforms are great. If someone came and they went to your product page but they didn't buy your supplement, you know. You can then follow them around on Twitch and fire and all the other Amazon platforms.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you can also. In addition to fire um, netflix now has opened up Um.

Speaker 1:

In addition to fire um, netflix now has opened up Um Disney plus is about to open up at ESPN is about to open up. You can obviously find video, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, like Hulu's kind of changed over to the Disney plus platform, and so I think we're just in the golden era of of advertising and and I I think that there's going to be a resurgence of of of branding, especially with, like AI. I think a lot of people at least what I've seen currently right now, they're using the same large language models, and so the ads are looking very similar. If people are even social media posts, people are just grabbing stuff and posting it, and so people are looking for that creativity, people are looking for that differentiation, and so I think that that's the biggest thing that I think you hit on is, like, really, what is your brand doing? What is that value proposition? How are you communicating that over anybody else? And if you have buyers all lined up ready to buy, why are you different? Why should they buy from you versus somebody else?

Speaker 2:

We're getting a little close on time here, but I wanted to talk a little bit about okay, if someone's made the commitment to say okay, like I've been trying to do this Amazon stuff myself and I have a product that I believe would do great on Amazon, it just hasn't happened yet. Um, and I need some help. Like, what are the things they need to be looking for, what are the things they need to be doing and yes, of course they need to call Caroline Um but what are the other things that they should be looking about or even be prepared when they meet with you, because there's a lot of crunch in the numbers that you really have to do when you?

Speaker 1:

advertise on.

Speaker 2:

Amazon.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so. So I think, like you said, it's, it's important to to know that and just you know, if you've got a twenty five dollar or higher product, you've got decent margins. The other big thing is making sure there's a market for it. Right, matt? Like we had a brand come to us that was doing like $60,000 a month on their like bestselling SKU and they were number one and number two was only doing $20,000 a month and I was like there's not a lot of market share to go get. This isn't a big category.

Speaker 1:

So the first thing we do is we look at how big the category is, like just like you would do with SEO keyword research, right, like you're not going to try and build a page on something nobody's looking for, and so very similar is like, okay, first, make sure you can be profitable. Second, make sure that you have a market. And then, third, you know like people will contact us and we refer out 30% of the business. Or, if they're just getting going, we have teams at Amazon. We can get them hooked up with that. Give them a year's worth of free help so they do it correctly, um, as they're launching. So, um, and we also have something on our website like seven questions to ask your agency before you hire them. So those things, I think, will all sort of keep brands from you know making a making a bad decision when they're trying to get going on Amazon.

Speaker 2:

And so one of the questions that I I forgot to mention it to you prior, so I'm going to, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit, but I but you've been dropping all kinds of little golden, golden advice throughout this pod is what are the unknown secrets? Right, what are the unknown secrets? What's an unknown secret of digital marketing as it relates to Amazon? And bear in mind that people aren't utilizing enough 100% that people go straight to ads.

Speaker 1:

There's like millions of ads companies. Everyone has an Amazon ad tech, right? Um? There was a big Amazon conference here in Austin this week called unboxed, and you know there's every. You couldn't walk downtown and not run into somebody that had an Amazon ads platform, right, um? And but I think too many people that the hidden secret is your organic page, like people ignore, ignore that and they go straight to add. So it's just like your website. Two ways to get more sales on your websites more traffic or higher conversion. Amazon is exactly the same, so you can increase your sessions or you can increase your conversion or you can do both. So it's pretty simple. It's really two levers, right? And by improving your product page and your images and all your backend SEO and all of that on Amazon, you can improve both your sessions and your conversion rate. And I think too many people head straight to ads and they don't do enough testing and optimizing on their product page. Just like you see with SEO on someone's website, they might not do enough testing and optimizing on their website.

Speaker 2:

No, that's an exact correlation. I mean, there's so many different industries, like lawyers, for example. They just want to run up that cost per click to the point that it's not profitable for anybody to compete on this platform. I actually had a company that I ran a campaign for as they were first into the market. It was a healthcare spa and essentially it was like 30 cents a click roughly to target this market. Campaign worked beautifully on ads. After COVID, five years later, whatever a bunch of different players in the market people knew I did this brand here in Houston. They came to me I hadn't talked to this other company in a long time. I said, if I'm not working with them, yeah, I'll put your stuff together. Put it together. Started running a very, very similar campaign. Cost per click was $3 and 30 cents. Okay, the economics of the campaign didn't work. So we had to restructure the whole strategy and approach, to go to go to market with it because it just didn't work.

Speaker 2:

And there are a lot of industries that are getting oversaturated on Google with ads and Google's trying to figure out what to do. And you know, in my mind it's like if you're selling a product, why don't you just go over to Amazon. That's where the people are shopping anyway. Why are you paying on on on Google, to, to, to drive them to a Amazon listing If you can just advertise directly in that ecosystem and and the, the AI is going to work better. It's going to know who's looking for what, and it's certainly a way to go.

Speaker 2:

But man, I see it so much People go to ads so quickly where if you look at conversion rate, optimization and SEO and those organic rankings, you get better quality traffic. Only a few people actually, at least in Google it's about 20% of people look at ads and then about 80% of people go organic, and then there's a very small amount of people that overlap. I would assume the same thing as with Amazon. If it's saying, oh, it's selling me this with the advertisement, I don't know how I feel about this. I want to go to find the organic listing and and click on that and and I feel like you know you've it's earned. It's an earned click more than buying it, I guess.

Speaker 1:

So I think that's great, 100%. You're so right, matt.

Speaker 2:

Awesome, all right, so I I am running a little against time on this one today. We started a little late, but I would love to know if people would like to know more about you, caroline. How did they get in touch with you? You know what's anything that we didn't cover that you just want to let the audience know?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, if you want to hook up with us, easiest way is either our website or LinkedIn. Our website is ROI Swift, so return on investment Swift. That's what we do, so we figured that's a good name no-transcript.

Speaker 2:

I'll put those links in the show notes as well. Everybody next time. I do have some housekeeping, but we'll cover it another time. Until the next time, bye-bye for now.

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Matt Bertram

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