Brand Fortress HQ: Amazon FBA Success Strategies
Welcome to the Brand Fortress HQ Podcast, the ultimate resource for mastering Amazon FBA success. Dive deep into the world of e-commerce with your hosts, Jon Stojan, Mike Kaufman, and Matt Atkins—three seasoned Amazon brand owners who have seen it all and are ready to unveil the secrets of their success.
Your hosts each and every week are Jon Stojan, Mike Kaufman, and Matt Atkins. Jon is a former predictive analyst for the Air Force and brings his analytical prowess to the e-commerce battleground. After establishing his own 6-figure brand on Amazon, he founded First North Marketing, a beacon for brands aiming to conquer the Amazon marketplace.
Mike Kaufman is an e-commerce pioneer, having been navigating the online sales sphere for over three decades. His expertise has not only led to the creation of a mid 7-figure brand on Amazon but also birthed invaluable tools and resources to bolster other aspiring brands.
Matt is the jack-of-all-trades in the e-commerce arena, from building a 7 figure meal prep brand, multiple Amazon brands, coaching new brand builders, to helping brands of all sizes grow at Canopy Management. His passion lies in fostering a community of entrepreneurs, offering them the wisdom and connections needed to thrive.
Join us for Tactics Tuesdays, where Jon, Mike, and Matt dissect the real-life strategies propelling their own brands and companies forward. Plus, tune in every Thursday for enlightening interviews with the brightest minds in FBA—transparent leaders and business owners who are shaping the present and future of e-commerce.
With two episodes every week, the Brand Fortress HQ Podcast is your stronghold for insider knowledge, innovative tactics, and inspiring stories. Whether you’re an established seller or just starting your FBA journey, our hosts are here to guide you through the intricacies of the Amazon marketplace. Unlock your brand’s potential and build your own fortress with us at Brand Fortress HQ.
Brand Fortress HQ: Amazon FBA Success Strategies
070: Tactic Tuesdays: How To Guarantee a 'Failed' Product Launch
Launching a new product on Amazon can feel like navigating a minefield—full of potential missteps that could derail your success. In this thought-provoking episode, we flip conventional wisdom on its head by exploring what guarantees a failed product launch.
By inverting the success model, we uncover critical insights that can transform your approach to introducing new products. Our conversation dives deep into the psychology behind defining success metrics before you begin, revealing how unclear goals almost certainly lead to disappointing outcomes. We examine why competitive research isn't just helpful—it's essential for identifying your unique position in the marketplace and crafting messaging that resonates with your target customers.
The episode delivers surprising revelations about inventory management, with one host sharing a cautionary tale of their "best launch ever" that ultimately failed due to stocking out at the critical moment. We explore why having an established audience creates an unfair advantage for sellers, allowing them to generate initial velocity without deep discounting while collecting valuable feedback throughout the development process.
Perhaps most valuable is our discussion of differentiation in today's crowded marketplace. Your main image and title must stop the scroll, but your entire listing needs to deliver on that promise with conversion-optimized content. We break down why monitoring metrics during launch allows you to double down on what's working rather than stubbornly sticking to your initial assumptions.
Ready to transform your product launch strategy? Listen now to discover why the biggest mistake isn't launching a product that fails—it's not launching at all. Your next successful Amazon product might be closer than you think.
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Welcome everybody to another Tactics Tuesday for Brand Fortress HQ podcast.
Speaker 1:Today we're going to talk about something a little bit different and kind of an exercise around launching new products, since they are so important to growing a brand, and what we're going to look at is, you know, how do you guarantee a failed product launch on Amazon?
Speaker 1:Because we want to walk through that process as a mental model and this is something that actually comes from, I believe you know, Charlie Munger kind of popularized this idea of how do you take something that's successful and how do we invert it, so that way we can see those things that we want to avoid, and I think this is really important, as we think of things that we want to make sure that we're addressing in that launch process to give ourselves the best chances for success. So, you know, we were talking a little bit before this and I guess the first thing is Mike, you had a really good comment before we hit record on kind of that first step of how you guarantee you know failed product launch on Amazon starts with what does success look like? So tell me a little bit more about how you think about you know success for a product and how you'd invert that, if we're looking at you know, a failed product launch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, first of all, it's hard to know what failure looks like if you haven't defined what success looks like. So you know. Otherwise you don't know whether you missed the mark or not. And I also would say that not defining success is the first step to a failed launch, because if you don't know what you're looking for, then you know ultimately there's no way you're going to hit that target. So you know, I would say you know, when you're looking at the idea of you know what does a successful launch really look like? To some degree, that's dependent upon the product you know, and how much market share are you trying to get, you sorts of things, what type of a product is, is it a hero product, is it a loss leader, something like that. But ultimately there's a number of things that probably you need to be dialing in on and also setting actual goals for to determine what that success looks like. So, in other words, you should be setting some sales targets as to how many units or how much revenue, or you know, whatever the number is that you're going to shoot at, you know how many units should you hit within 30 days, you know, or within two weeks, within 90 days? You know the first few weeks after the product goes live. Because if that's all you're paying attention to, chances are when you get through that first few weeks, you know you're going to start losing ground because you don't have a longer term strategy. For what does that launch look like? Because you have to carry that trajectory out for a ways before Amazon really understands your product well, begins to recognize, you know, that it's a valuable competitor in that space, whatnot? So you really can't look at just that first two or three weeks. So what are your sales targets going to be after, say, two weeks, 30 days, 90 days?
Speaker 2:What keywords do you want to secure ranking for and what level of ranking do you think you can secure? Do you think you can hit number one on page one? Do you think you can hit number three or number four on page one? Like, what are you shooting for? Because, again, depending on the size of the market, being number three in that category could be a super good place to be in terms of sales. You know, in other cases maybe you really kind of are shooting at I need to be at the top of page one. So what are the? What are the keywords you want to rank for what ranking do you think would be a success? And again, how are you going to hold those rankings? Are you, how are you going to earn? You know, or did you earn, we'll say, in terms of defining success a steady stream of positive reviews and ratings.
Speaker 2:If you didn't have anything in place, then you're probably not going to get a whole lot of reviews and ratings out of that launch, and I would consider that a failure, because even if you were to get some ranking, you don't have any reviews on that. Then you're going to have a hard time maintaining that. Also, were you able to maintain healthy margins, or at least some profit margin, on that launch, or was the launch itself an actual loss? I don't think it has to be. Most people walk into a launch assuming they're going to lose money on it and hopefully they're going to make up for it on the back end. I don't think that has to be the case. And then again, how are you building a foundation for long-term and repeatable sales growth that's going to be able to continue long-term? I think those are the ways that I would define success. Maybe you guys have some things you'd like to add to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's a couple of great things that I hear out of what you said that I just want to break down a little bit. I mean, I think the first thing is, you know, defining what success looks like. And you know I think this is kind of an extension of you know discussion that we had last week of you know what is the role of that product? Is that going to be a hero product? Is it going to be a tripwire product where it introduces people to your brand? Is it, you know, maybe something complimentary to one of your hero products, where it's kind of an add on that adds to, you know, customer lifetime value, like identifying what that strategy up front I think is going to give a much better idea of what that launch playbook should look like, in the sense of you know, if it's a, for example, if it's a complimentary product, well then you probably don't need, you know, a super aggressive launch with, you know, a whole bunch of ad spend and stuff like that, when you're looking at, hey, this is going to be a product that well, may only have incremental sales, maybe you have really good margins on that complimentary product.
Speaker 1:So I think, yeah, starting with you know what that strategy is is is super important, and if you don't have a strategy, then that's one of the best ways that you can ensure that you're going to say you're going to fail is because you don't know what good looks like right out of the box. So that makes it really hard to know. You know, make these kind of you know, tactical decisions that we're talking about around how to execute that strategy.
Speaker 3:Once you define what success looks like. I think a lot of what Mike said success looks like is give you x-ray vision into the category, all of the competitors, where they're getting their sales from. I mean, there's a wealth of information that these tools give you that really direct your launch on where, what keyword, you're going to go after, where you know. Once you decide and determine where your top competitors are getting most of their sales from which keywords, then it's a fairly easy to build a map of what keyword you're going to go after in terms of PPC and where you're going to put them in your listing. So I mean, it all really starts with competitor research on Amazon using the tools that are available to you, and if you're not, then I think that's a really good way to guarantee a failed product launch. Is it not really not understanding not only who they are but where they're getting their sales from on Amazon?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, the other part of that, in terms of that competitive research portion, and I think absolutely you guarantee failure if you haven't done that, because it's not just about keywords, it's also, you know, pricing analysis. How am I going to price the product? You know well, you kind of need to know what the market is. You know what's the low end, what's the high end, what's the median. You know, like, you need to know what, what are the features that your competitors are offering in their product and do customers care about those features? One and two do they like you and two do they like them? You know, like, do they think that your competitors are actually nailing those? You know particular features Because, again, you know, another really good way to likely fail in a launch is to not differentiate enough.
Speaker 2:Now, again, it may be that, you know, depends on the type of product it is. You know, maybe you don't need a lot of differentiation, maybe you have a strong brand, this is just a complimentary product, in which case differentiation isn't necessarily the key, it's just hey, this is another product that we can sell to that same customer, and so you know you don't have to, but you still have to do the research on the front end, it's always if you can, if there's an easy way to differentiate yourself, whether that's in the product itself or even just in the listing, then you should do that. And again, it takes research to know what that differentiation looks like and how to do it, what things to highlight on your listing that maybe competitors aren't highlighting, those sorts of things.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I would say you know, just to piggyback off of what you might.
Speaker 1:What you said, mike, about pricing I think that's so important and something that a lever that isn't pulled enough, and so a couple of things to think about with that when you think about pricing is and we talk about failed product launches and that is making sure that you have you know some source to get those initial sales on your product, whether that's you know using, you know a list that you have pre-built, or you know ads or something like that.
Speaker 1:Cause I think what a lot of people who maybe haven't launched a product in a while don't realize is that you know if you're planning on offering some sort of discounts or something like that on your product, you have to have a reference price to start with, and if you don't have any sales right out of the gates, you may want your like, say, you want to sell the product for a hundred dollars, like you want that to be your reference price, but you're on the higher end of the market.
Speaker 1:Well, if you don't have any reviews and you don't have any sales velocity, it's going to be really hard for you to get those. You know, first few reviews and first few sales if you don't have some sort of list for your brand or some other resource in order to drive traffic and so having a failed product launch where, if the only thing that you have in order to get visibility for that product is ads from Amazon, it's going to be really tough and really expensive to get any sort of velocity on that product if you are on the higher end or you're a premium end product and trying to price yourself accordingly, when you don't have the ratings or the other social proof that people would expect from a higher end product and not listing on Amazon.
Speaker 3:I definitely suggest selling at the high end of the price point, no matter what category you're in, and a big part of that commanding a higher price point and giving a premium feel is also your listing. I mean, if you're not showing in your main image and you're not helping the consumer to understand why your product is the one to choose and you don't get very many opportunities to do that, especially in very crowded search results. So I think another way to guarantee a failed product launch is to not spend the resources whether that be time or money to really make your main image and your copy and the rest of your images really really stand out. You know, I think that the amount of time that people spend reading copy has decreased pretty significantly, so that means that our images are more important now than they've ever been. So I think another way to guarantee a failed product launch is to not put the necessary resources into having really really stand out images, and now there's starting to be less and less of an excuse for that.
Speaker 3:I just the other day was touching up some images using chat GPT's image generating tool, and I mean it did things that I was getting ready to have to send to a graphic designer and it did it in a couple of prompts. So, especially if your product like with. There's a couple of different types of products that I think AI are still having a hard time with, like pool cleaning tools, for example. For the life of any, no language model understands what a pool brush or a pool skimmer are, so I think in some categories it's not as prevalent. Using AI tools like that at least your main image and making sure that that is better than your competitors and running split tests and really knowing that it's going to convert at least as good as your competitors, is really important in the beginning, and if you don't, then you're going to have an uphill battle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say you know, just going back to what both of you said. So, john, essentially you know the thing that I think is critical there. You know, like you were talking about, you know, trying to get some of those initial sales at, at the price point that you want to be a reference point, it's it's going to be a whole lot easier to get those sales from individuals that already trust you. So, you know, maybe you can get friends and family, maybe you know something like that, but honestly, but honestly, it's good to be able to get that from an audience, a community that you have built or that you are piggybacking on. You know, so it's always best to have your own audience, as you can. But when you don't have one, then the time it takes to build an audience can be considerable, especially if you're not very good at lead gen and things like that. If you have that background, then you can probably do that and you probably understand what you're doing. But if you don't, then piggybacking on somebody else's community if they're the right avatar for your product and we've talked about this a billion times but that is the simplest, easiest, quickest way to find an audience that's going to trust you based on your association with the person that they already trust, which is the person that built the community. And so in that case, when you don't have reviews on your product, if you can gain that trust through another source and access their community, then you have that opportunity to sell at full price.
Speaker 2:You can always do a little bit of a rebate on the back end, you know, if you do. You know like you don't want to publicize this and make it a big thing, obviously because you know Amazon doesn't like it but on a small scale, for a limited number of orders in a private community or something like that, it's not really that difficult of a thing to be able to sell some full price orders at your reference price and maybe give a rebate on the back end. Or maybe it's not even a rebate, maybe it's some other freebie that they get. You know, like you've created something that they get as a result or something. It doesn't have to be a discount but to get those reference price purchases. But also, again going back to this and it's not like we haven't harped on this for ages but if you have that audience, it's not just useful for getting those reference price purchases, it's also useful for actual launch purchases.
Speaker 2:Like when we launch a product having an email list of 45,000 people that already trust our brand, that is gold for a product launch. And as long as you have a pattern to make sure that you trust our brand, that is gold, you know, for a product launch. And as long as you have a pattern to make sure that you can sustain sales after that and try to maintain ranking and whatnot, which is not easy, but at least it gives you the opportunity to get a lot of sales up front. Again, a lot of reviews on the front end, because those people who actually trust you and like your brand are going to be far more likely to go give you a review, especially if you ask them on the front end hey, do me a favor, go buy this product and then leave us a review. You know you're going to have a much better. You know conversion rate, let's say, to reviews from those orders. So that launch audience is really incredibly important.
Speaker 2:And then, on the back end of that, the product listing you know, matt, you mentioned. Hey, make sure that you're actually dialing in on and optimizing that listing. Well, one of the things that I think is important for our audience to know and to remember. And again, not like we don't harp on this all the time, but if you don't know who you're selling to, then how do you know how to optimize your product listing? You know like you can optimize it for keywords, you know, and things like that.
Speaker 2:Sure, but one of the things that Matt's talking about is not just getting the keywords right and all of those sorts of things and making sure you highlight specific, you know benefits in your images and that sort of thing. But part of it is what is the feel of the imagery? You know, and it doesn't have a cohesive feel. And is that feeling? Is that emotion that it evokes, the emotion that you want it to evoke for the person that you actually want to sell to most? And if you don't know who that avatar is, if you don't know who that person is, then you really don't know how to engender that specific emotion through your imagery, because you don't know who you're speaking to. So if you haven't taken the time to analyze who it is you're selling to, then again you're guaranteeing, if not a failed launch, you're certainly guaranteeing a far more expensive launch and a much more difficult road to success.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I want to circle back to something that, mike, you've talked about in the past and comes from having that list as well that almost back to the beginning, which is, as you look at Because most of the brands that are listening to this, you probably are selling already some product. You have a hero product or products on Amazon that you've got about leveraging your audience as to you know what should that next product be? You know, I think is something that is incredibly powerful, that when we look at you know how do you guarantee a failed product launch? Part of that is you know just, you know sticking to, you know horse blinders on looking at products. And maybe you know just looking at keywords and saying, okay, this is going to be you know that next year product, rather than saying, okay, here's what I think that product is going to be, and then going to a portion of your list and saying, hey, you know, we're thinking about developing product day, product B and product C, which one of these interests you the most? Okay, getting some information from there.
Speaker 1:So now you have a little bit of actual data from your customers and then taking that extra step to say, maybe even get on a call with somebody or Zoom or something like that, to say, hey, here's the benefits or features that we're thinking about really focusing on and here's how we're differentiating it and making it better than other products that are out there.
Speaker 1:And you know they might tell you, yep, that sounds fantastic. Or they may be like, yeah, I don't really care about that. And then getting those samples and actually having them try it and say, hey, I love this about it or I don't love that, which is a ton of work that you know I think a lot of brands don't do up front. Which is why they have kind of mixed results when they launch products is because you know at that point you're just kind of guessing. You know what your customers that you've built in your brand wants, and sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong. And when you're wrong, that's when you know your product launches end up falling flat. You end up investing a lot of money into product that you know doesn't really move the needle in the long run.
Speaker 2:Well and I hate to step in here because I kind of would like to give Matt a chance to talk but I think it's important to point out on that is that one you'll talk to a lot of Amazon sellers who, sure, once you get good at this, you can kind of get a sixth sense a little bit about the kind of products that may succeed or fail. But it's still just that it's still a guess at the end of the day, and in that you really have to be a lot more careful with the launch in terms of how much you spend on it, in terms of how much inventory you buy and things of that nature, because there's at least an average chance that the product does not succeed to nearly the level that you expected it to or hoped it would, because it's based on a guess, whereas if you have tested this out with an audience, if you talk to your audience, what product would you want? If you talk to them about what features they might want, if you talk to them about what they don't like, about the features of other products, you know what color do they want, what you know like we spend, we'll spend months, you know, in that conversational process with our email audience about a new product, letting them know, number one, that we think this is what we want to come out with. Is that something you'd be interested in? And going through all of that, but then also, okay, we have it. You know, does anyone want to prototype it? You want to beta test? You know, here's what the results were. You know we're going back to the drawing board to fix these things.
Speaker 2:You know and I've said this before but by the time it comes time for a launch, that audience feels like it's their product, like they developed it, and in that you gain a lot of confidence that the launch is going to go well, because one you already know. You're selling a product that a whole bunch of people in that space that represent your avatar have already said they want. They like the features that you created. They've tested it and it works well. The features that you've invested in are actually performing the way they expected them to, and so now, then, you also have this large audience that you get to launch it to, generally speaking, at a much lower discount than to people who don't know anything about the product or anything about your brand, so you can launch much more profitably. What that also means is you can invest in more inventory on the front end.
Speaker 2:And that is what I think is the next critical piece of this, and that is you cannot afford to stock out either during or after your launch.
Speaker 2:You know, especially if you've seen success with that launch and you stock out, you screwed the whole thing, and so it's way more of a risk to order too little inventory than too much.
Speaker 2:Too much inventory is a scenario where you can probably still rectify that, because even if the launch didn't go great, you can always liquidate the inventory. You can almost always sell the inventory, at least at cost, and come out break even. So that to me is the worst case scenario from buying too much inventory. But the worst case scenario of buying too little inventory is you invest a lot of time and effort and money in that launch and then you stock out and now you don't know if you're going to be able to regain those rankings, and that's a huge risk that I think it's not worth taking. And if you already know on the front end, this is 90% likely to be a really strong success because I know what my audience thinks and I know they're going to buy it. It makes it a lot easier to spend that money on the front end and buy a lot more inventory up there, knowing that it's likely to be a success.
Speaker 3:If you've done everything that we, if you've gone through all of these steps and you haven't guaranteed your product launch and things are going really well and you end up running out of inventory and not paying attention to this piece, I my best launch to date. I ran out of inventory Now, covid did play a part in that. But my best launch to date never recovered after ran out of inventory. Now, covid did play a part in that. But my best launch to date never recovered after running out of inventory that first time. Now that doesn't happen with all products and there are ways.
Speaker 3:Now this was a brand. Not only was this a brand new product, but it was a brand new brand. So I didn't have an audience yet. I did have kind of a tangential audience that I could point there and I did, but it wasn't anything like you know my other brands where I had a big, you know big giant Facebook group. So it it can't be stated enough.
Speaker 3:I mean you might knock the initial launch out of the park, but if you don't have the follow-up inventory to replenish after, I personally have gone through my best launch and not been able to recover, I spent a lot of money trying. I tried PPC. I tried all the things that I did initially to get the launch out of the gates and I mean it was screaming out of the gates but not only did it ruin the launch but it essentially put that brand in a really, really big hole right out of the gate by not just initial I did have initial inventory. Now the launch went so successfully that I blew through three months worth of what I thought was going to be inventory in about three weeks but I didn't have the follow-up inventory to replenish afterwards and that was very, very, very detrimental to not only that product launch but also the brand in general.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think inventory is one of those underrated things for new products. I would say the other thing, too, is that, even if all those things do go well, making sure that you have again within Amazon terms of service which we've talked about before but a way of asking for those reviews on the product, because that is one of the biggest. We started looking at reviews on your listing. I mean, when we were talking about Amazon, that probably is one of the strongest kind of barometers that you have for brand of. Not only you know what is your rating, but how many total reviews do you have on that listing? Because the reality of it is, if we look at the conversion rate for, you know, a product that has two reviews and a five-star listing, versus a product that has 1,000 reviews and a four-point, even if it's a 4.4 rounded up to a four and a half stars the product with 1,000 reviews is going to convert better. And it just boils down to what that social proof is of every customer when they're looking at it, saying is this product going to work for me?
Speaker 1:I think the other thing that maybe gets underrated that we haven't talked about yet, if we're looking at hey, guaranteed product launch or failed launch is, you know, not having something, especially when we start looking at those search query results that looks different, or, excuse me, the search results to even get the clicks to the listing. Because I think now you know, in a lot of categories, a lot of products look really, really similar and the problem with that is is that if you're the new kid on the block, you have to look different and you have to say something different in that first 80 characters to your title in order to get people to click into your listing. Because that is half the battle when we look at, especially for a new product, of being able to make a sale, is just getting somebody to click on your listing and, at least from my experience, especially in 2025 when we're recording this, you really have to look and sound different from everybody else that's on those search results in order to see some success with that.
Speaker 2:I think it's probably also important to pay attention, just from a psychological perspective, on what that looks like, because you know your click through is determined by your image and your title. I mean, that's a send up and price and deliver. You know how soon can it be delivered. So those are things too like distribution of your inventory. You know how soon can it be delivered, so those are things too like distribution of your inventory. You know is is going to be a factor in terms of you know how how short is your delivery window. That's going to affect your CTR. But let's, but let's look at the, the, the things that you're paying attention to. So when somebody's scrolling through the, through the listings, the very first thing that's going to get them to stop and pay attention as you said, john, is the image, like the title is not what's going to stop them.
Speaker 2:They're not reading titles as they scroll, they're scrolling through images, and when they see an image that interests them, then they read the title and so, in that, recognize that no matter what you have in your title, if your image does not give them a reason to stop scrolling, then you've already lost the battle.
Speaker 2:And so I think that's a key point that you know as you're optimizing that to get that best click through, make sure that that image is going to stop them.
Speaker 2:By the same token, you have to make sure that you're not going to that you're not going to create a bunch of clicks that don't convert. So you could create an image that will get really good click through, but if you haven't created a listing that ties into that image and into the title, so that when they click through, what they're seeing is what they expect to see, or what they're seeing is better than what they expect to see when they look at that image and that title, then you're going to pay a lot for clicks and you're going to get really low conversion rate, and then you're still screwed. So it's not just about clicks, it's also about conversion. But you have to get both. If you don't get any clicks, then your conversion rate's irrelevant, and if you get a whole bunch of clicks and no conversion rate, then you just spend a boatload and you don't make any money, so you got to pay attention to both ends of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's such a good point, especially around the, you know, looking at the clicks, and it's not a clicks or conversion rate, it's clicks and conversion rate, cause I do see this, you know, fairly often, especially when you know a client that we're working with might have a product that you know they, quite frankly, they have an emotional attachment to. It's maybe their third or fourth product that they've launched and they're like, wow, I think this thing is really great. And we look in there and they're like, oh, my conversion rate is, you know, is fantastic. And then you know they've had like 100 sessions in the last 30 days and they're like, yeah, my conversion rate is 20%. I'm like, okay, well, if I 10x your sessions, what does that conversion rate look like?
Speaker 1:And I think that's the important thing to look at is that, once you start really amping up the volume, does that conversion rate drop down dramatically? And in a lot of cases it does, because the only people that are coming through are the absolute hottest leads that are interested in that product, even though you know the main image doesn't make the most sense, the title doesn't necessarily make the most sense, but they know the brand or you know there could be a million different reasons, but you know they're, they're kind of that. You know 1% of buyers that you're you're serving, that are at the absolute hottest leads, but you're missing out on the other 99 percent that you could have if you had that listing set up properly for that product.
Speaker 3:I think another thing that you can do to guarantee a failed product launch is not pay attention to all of these numbers that we're talking about and just launch and sit back and hope that sales are coming in and you're just checking your bank account.
Speaker 3:If you're not checking your click-through rate and you're not checking your conversion rate and you're not looking to see the search query performance report, then you don't know what the baseline is. Yeah, you can do a lot of research in the beginning, but things very rarely are going to go exactly how you thought that they were going to go once you actually start selling, to go once you actually start selling. So, paying attention to all of these stats and watching what your click-through rate does as you change out your main image and split testing your main image with manage your experiments or a tool like PickFu or product pinning or something like that I think that is also. Yes, that's part of optimizing as your product becomes a lot more mature, but that's also a lot of the product launch also is paying attention to those numbers and watching what they do. I think building that muscle early on during your product launch is going to set you up for success. And if you aren't paying attention to that, then set you up for a potential failure.
Speaker 2:Well, I would build off that. Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 1:John. Well, I was going to say to build off that a little bit, you know we talked quite a bit about, you know, the product itself and to go a little bit more tactical, you know, and some of those products, some of those you know, some products hit, some don't. And I think the same thing is true when you talk about what you expect to be your hero keywords as well, in the sense that you know typically for a product and again, it depends on how many resources you have, what category you're in and how competitive it is. But just say, for example, you've got three to five kind of hero keywords where you're like, hey, I think these are going to drive the majority of my sales.
Speaker 1:I think it's really important to pull apart that data and why ads are so important in that early phase, especially for those exact match keywords, to really see what does that look like. Because you know, I think there's there's been enough times where we've seen, you know, maybe one or two of those keywords where the click through rate and the conversion rate is dramatically better than the others, and looking at okay, how do we double down on those keywords that are working for us, rather than trying to, you know, push hero keywords that we kind of wish or hoped or thought were going to be successful for us. And I think getting really granular with the data, especially on the ad side, gives you, you know, full visibility into that sales funnel to see what keywords are working for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure it's. You know nothing is ever going to work out the way that you expected it to work out. Hopefully, the best that you can hope for is that you're directionally accurate and then lean into the aspects of that that end up being the most successful portions of the campaign and really push on that. You know, down the road you can always push on some of those other keywords that you really thought were going to be. You know drivers that maybe weren't during the launch, but it doesn't mean they can't be afterward. But during the launch, paying attention to what is working and leaning into you know those aspects to really keep that launch moving forward, I think is a critical piece. I also think it's probably important to point out that, depending on the size of your team, there's only so much that you can pay attention to all at once. So one of the things that I would recommend and there's a fine line here, and I've said before that we've, as ProTough, I think we have sometimes erred on well, I don't want to say the wrong side of the line, but we, you know, instead of riding the line, we kind of pulled back from it. What I mean by that is you really should be consistently launching products. It is the best way to guarantee long-term success and increasing revenue numbers and profitability and profitability. So, you know, because, for a lot of reasons, one of which is the more products you have, the more cross-sell and upsell opportunities you've got, the more you know backend selling you can do.
Speaker 2:If you're building a list, you know like there's all sorts of reasons why having you know that larger list of products is useful, but the big thing is, though, your team is still only so big, and so I would recommend, first of all, that you do, within reason, as much of the work before the launch as you can. So, because once the launch happens, then everything is just this. You know churning chaos. You know trying to make sure that you're managing everything and getting it all right. If you're well prepared for that launch, though, and you've done all the research up front, you really have optimized the listing. You've created numerous different versions of your main image so that you can be testing those during launch. You've created numerous different versions of your title so that you can maybe test those during your launch.
Speaker 2:You know like the more you prepare before the launch, the easier the launch becomes and the fewer people it requires to be able to manage and pay attention to all these things Like we're talking about. You know monitoring your keyword, performance and monitoring. You know all of these things about the launch. If it's just you, that can be a little bit tough to manage, especially if it's a high volume product and there's other things going on.
Speaker 2:So just I think, before the launch, decide on what are the most critical aspects that you need to pay attention to as the launch is progressing. That will help you determine is it moving in the direction of success or is it moving away from success. Success or is it moving away from success, and what are you going to do about it? Because you can't focus on everything. You're not going to have the time, unless you've got a decent-sized team. You can't focus on every single little KPI, but if you focus on the main ones what's your CTR, what's your CVR, what's your sales numbers per day? Are they increasing? Are they decreasing? Whatever, then at least you've got a chance of being able to make the adjustments that need to be made when they need to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think so this might be a good place to wrap, because I think you bring up a couple of good points there that I think are a couple of my takeaways, which is the first is that I think, first of all, you know, when we talk about mistakes, probably the biggest mistake is not launching a new product. Like if you, you know, if you just said, hey, I'm not going to launch a new product, you know that is probably the biggest mistake for a brand long-term. And then what I would add onto that is is that you know, don't bet the farm on a new product launch, cause, especially if you're not doing these on a regular basis or you haven't done one in a while, you're probably, you know, gonna miss a couple of important steps in what we've just covered today. And sometimes that's okay, cause, if you know, maybe you're a one person team, you know, maybe you're still just a one person wrecking crew, you can only get out, you know, one new product a year. Well, going through that process at least once a year is going to be a make you 10 times more effective than if you just don't do it at all.
Speaker 1:Because I have talked to you know I can think of one client right now that you know hasn't launched a new product in probably three or four years and he is deathly afraid of launching a product that's not going to work out. And the reality of it is is that even if you do all everything perfect, there's no, you know, guaranteed magic formula that your product launch is going to be perfect. And you know, sometimes just getting in and doing it and learning from that process and continuing to evolve is going to give you more, better result in the longterm than trying to make one product launch perfect and never getting off the launch pad. So I'd say that's my biggest takeaway. I'll, I'll, I'll leave it to you guys to kind of share maybe one or two of the biggest you know kind of mistakes that you guys see and that you would, you know, want listeners to take away from this conversation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I think the biggest thing that we've talked about and something that we talked about a lot actually just with ProTip not too long ago is inventory. Inventory plays a really big part of this. Again, there's tools out there that tell you that kind of walk you through what your competitors are and what they're doing in terms of sales velocity. Over ordering, I think, is we've talked about in here and defined that that's less of a risk than under ordering. So I think inventory, paying attention to inventory, crafting the right plan in the very beginning and making sure that you have enough and making sure that you never run out of inventory I think is the biggest takeaway for me.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that I want to mention is just failure isn't fatal, you know, learn from it. But also, in specific to a launch, I think it's probably also important to recognize that, technically, just because you fail a launch doesn't mean that that product has to be a failure. And in my opinion, it may be such that if a launch starts going sideways and you feel like this is not really going the direction that you want it and it looks like maybe there's not a good way to pull out, you know, and when I say pull out, I mean really kind of pull up, let's say, and turn what is looking like a failed launch into a success. Maybe the better solution is to pull out and try again. You know, remove that inventory, restructure, whatever it is that you're going to do. You know in terms of what the, you know what went wrong, what didn't you do right, what did you miss. You know what were the pieces that didn't happen.
Speaker 2:And you know, and maybe make a decision to to relaunch. Now you're going to have to make the decision before you go removing inventory because you know again, like we said earlier, you could always liquidate and that's another option. You know like, okay, the launch didn't go well, I'm going to liquidate this inventory instead of removing it and trying to relaunch, figure out what went wrong, because if I still think this is you know, if I still think this is a product that should have succeeded right, but I know the errors that I made and I'm really sure that the launch didn't succeed because of those sure that the launch didn't succeed because of those. Then, whether I remove the inventory and try again, or whether I liquidate the inventory and then restructure things, create, a new listing and do it again.
Speaker 2:You know. Order the inventory up again, maybe change the product If there was something about the product that was the problem and try again. You know there's no reason you can't do that. I'm not saying you have to. Some products are a failure because the product itself is a failure and there's really no way that you're going to rectify that. But if you really can see where the errors were and you think there's a way to make that a success, you can always try again. You know, like, and you learned a lot from the first launch. Hopefully the second launch will go better because you learned those things and you fixed them.
Speaker 3:So Before you wrap it up, John, and to bring it full circle, if you didn't define what success looked like at the very beginning, then you have no way of judging if it was a failure or not. So, full circle again you have to define what success looks like at the very beginning.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, matt, and you know what I think that's a great place to wrap for today. So thank you for bringing us around full circle. Thank you, everybody for listening to another tactics Tuesday.
