How the Best Marketers Get Products Seen and Sold on Amazon - Marketing Strategies and Pitfalls

WEBVTT

00:00:00.420 --> 00:00:01.943
Welcome to today's episode.

00:00:01.943 --> 00:00:04.126
Our guest today is Steven.

00:00:04.126 --> 00:00:07.873
He is a Amazon marketing guru.

00:00:07.873 --> 00:00:08.675
Welcome to the show.

00:00:09.439 --> 00:00:10.583
Thanks for having me on, Eric.

00:00:10.583 --> 00:00:11.788
You're remarkable.

00:00:12.960 --> 00:00:13.721
Appreciate it.

00:00:13.721 --> 00:00:19.126
So why don't we start by you sharing a little bit about who you are and what you do?

00:00:21.027 --> 00:00:30.176
So I own a $20 million AR agency with over 500 employees worldwide and 400 rands that we actively serve to help grow on Amazon.

00:00:30.176 --> 00:00:42.731
So we're doing typical marketing things like pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, design and all the fun merchandising and catalog work which nobody knows is the trickiest part of how to sell on Amazon.

00:00:42.731 --> 00:00:47.945
But that nice two-day delivery, one-day delivery, two-hour delivery the brown box guy drops off.

00:00:47.945 --> 00:00:51.926
Yeah, it's a lot harder for the seller than it is the buyer.

00:00:51.926 --> 00:00:52.889
Suffice it to say.

00:00:54.412 --> 00:00:59.409
Indeed, and the world does revolve around Amazon these days, doesn't it Half?

00:00:59.429 --> 00:01:00.070
the economy?

00:01:00.551 --> 00:01:01.093
It really is.

00:01:01.093 --> 00:01:03.588
It's mind-boggling to think about that.

00:01:03.588 --> 00:01:08.391
How have you thought about watching their growth?

00:01:08.391 --> 00:01:09.052
I'm just curious.

00:01:10.061 --> 00:01:11.748
I obviously made a business on it.

00:01:11.748 --> 00:01:17.373
I chose my Amazon guy because I was so confident in the trajectory.

00:01:17.373 --> 00:01:23.033
The challenge is that sellers who try and sell on Amazon run into a lot of roadblocks.

00:01:23.033 --> 00:01:30.783
It's like running an entire business soup to nuts, everything from logistics to marketing and operations and finance and all that good stuff.

00:01:30.783 --> 00:01:36.462
But because the platform is entering the maturity phase, the roadblocks are getting harder.

00:01:36.462 --> 00:01:40.918
So my job has become harder than sellers job has become harder.

00:01:40.918 --> 00:01:48.105
It's also some job security in a sense, but I think that there's nobody even remotely close to catching up to amazon.

00:01:48.346 --> 00:01:50.739
And we thought walmart was going to be the dog that did it.

00:01:50.739 --> 00:01:53.486
And then they bought jet and did nothing with it.

00:01:53.486 --> 00:01:57.084
And I don't know about you, eric, have you ever been to walmart's grocery pickup?

00:01:57.084 --> 00:01:58.647
But it's terrible.

00:01:58.647 --> 00:02:00.611
It's just a terrible experience.

00:02:00.611 --> 00:02:08.445
Right target went a little bit better, but some of the other platforms that are coming out, like TikTok, they don't have the infrastructure.

00:02:08.445 --> 00:02:09.868
That'll take them six years.

00:02:09.868 --> 00:02:15.789
Timu, I think, is the current hot thing, but by next year it could be not, who knows.

00:02:15.789 --> 00:02:18.442
It doesn't matter what company we talk about.

00:02:18.442 --> 00:02:21.586
Nobody has the logistics down like Amazon does.

00:02:23.628 --> 00:02:30.709
It's really incredible that some things that I go to buy on Amazon now we'll deliver it today, in like a few hours.

00:02:30.709 --> 00:02:33.688
It's crazy how convenient it is.

00:02:33.688 --> 00:02:38.352
What a crazy system they must have to be able to pull that off.

00:02:40.302 --> 00:02:42.430
It is a very complex ecosystem.

00:02:42.759 --> 00:02:49.080
Another interesting fun fact the left-handed Amazon doesn't know what the right hand is doing over on Amazon, like literally.

00:02:49.262 --> 00:03:00.960
I have some technology on my website and it shows me, when somebody comes to my site, who they are not just like what they are, but who they are and so I've been seeing Amazon employees come to my resources.

00:03:00.960 --> 00:03:04.308
I basically created the number one education resource on how to sell on Amazon.

00:03:04.308 --> 00:03:05.111
He's coming to my resources.

00:03:05.111 --> 00:03:15.319
I basically created the number one education resource on how to sell on Amazon, and in the last week, I saw seven Amazon employees come to my website and use my materials and I'm thinking to myself my material must be better than theirs because they're coming to me instead.

00:03:15.319 --> 00:03:20.259
And it's really about how the left hand at Amazon doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

00:03:20.259 --> 00:03:28.986
They don't like all the textbook answers, the help files, the things that are structurally built at Amazon are irrelevant, they're outdated, they're unusable.

00:03:28.986 --> 00:03:45.413
And the facts on the ground what an agency can see on a daily basis with access to hundreds of accounts, versus a single employee, versus a department or a brand it's a lot more resources that are available because we see on a daily basis.

00:03:47.860 --> 00:03:54.493
So tell us a story about some of the best marketing that you and your team have done around Amazon.

00:03:56.121 --> 00:04:00.673
So I have a very dynamic lead gen process.

00:04:00.673 --> 00:04:07.707
We shoot personalized videos and sell it out to sellers and basically show them what they can do to optimize their listing.

00:04:07.707 --> 00:04:08.913
We give out a bunch of free advice.

00:04:08.913 --> 00:04:20.512
Now some people listening to this might say, oh, that's sales, but in reality it's also marketing, because we're the number one education company in our space and we're marketing at a one-to-one basis.

00:04:20.512 --> 00:04:22.985
But the concept is global, right?

00:04:22.985 --> 00:04:26.983
I have 2000 videos on my YouTube channel, my marketing process.

00:04:26.983 --> 00:04:29.449
I post two and a half times a day on LinkedIn.

00:04:29.449 --> 00:04:31.721
We give away every single trade secret.

00:04:32.122 --> 00:04:39.646
Alex Sermozzi talks about the four quad of ways to generate leads or market people Warm, one-to-one, that's calling up people.

00:04:39.646 --> 00:04:44.947
The second being content, which is what got me from 1 million to 10 million in ARR.

00:04:44.947 --> 00:04:50.408
The third being cold, and that's where you got your cold sales promises, cold calling, cold emailing.

00:04:50.408 --> 00:04:52.622
So that's what got me from 10 mil to 20 mil.

00:04:52.622 --> 00:04:56.872
And the forest is to do advertising a la pay-per-click.

00:04:56.872 --> 00:04:57.860
That's the hardest one.

00:04:57.860 --> 00:04:59.846
I'm just barely scratching the surface there.

00:04:59.846 --> 00:05:04.601
I've spent 40, $50,000 on paid ads in the last six months Very difficult to crack.

00:05:04.601 --> 00:05:11.086
And so that marketing funnel and what we're building is all education-based soup to nuts.

00:05:11.086 --> 00:05:22.255
Everything we do is to teach, to share, reveal, guide, mentor and I got to tell you it's super easy and fast to build a marketing agency that's based on education.

00:05:22.255 --> 00:05:24.497
There's so many cursory benefits.

00:05:24.497 --> 00:05:27.826
Not only do my own employees learn, but I teach my consumers.

00:05:27.826 --> 00:05:31.971
I never lose a customer because they come back for education over and over again.

00:05:33.500 --> 00:05:44.668
That's awesome and it requires a lot of commitment to do those motions that you were suggesting posting on YouTube and LinkedIn every day right.

00:05:44.668 --> 00:05:49.290
Being consistent on that is probably part of the key right amount of content.

00:05:49.331 --> 00:06:05.225
My best piece of advice would be ask customers what do you want, give it to them, then ask did you get what you wanted?

00:06:05.225 --> 00:06:07.697
And so sometimes you give them a chocolate chip cookie and they're like I hate chocolate chip cookies, I'd rather get cake.

00:06:07.697 --> 00:06:10.288
And then you switch over to cake During that process.

00:06:10.288 --> 00:06:11.011
That's content.

00:06:11.011 --> 00:06:16.887
Every time you get a question or an email from a client customer, that's content right.

00:06:16.887 --> 00:06:31.673
Every single time a client had a problem, I made that into content every single time, no exceptions, and what I found is that those super niche ones that only one customer asked, 17 other customers were thinking it but didn't say anything.

00:06:32.781 --> 00:06:34.384
And so it makes your operations better.

00:06:34.384 --> 00:06:38.586
It teaches your own people how to solve these problems and it creates general awareness.

00:06:38.586 --> 00:06:46.129
So if you Google random Amazon challenges, there's a strong possibility my videos will come up first, even if you don't search my Amazon guy.

00:06:46.129 --> 00:06:50.050
If you go to YouTube and type in Amazon SEO, my video will come up first or second.

00:06:50.050 --> 00:06:59.528
If you type in how to solve a Catalan problem on Amazon, I got 200 videos that pop up, so that content becomes my sales team right.

00:06:59.528 --> 00:07:07.401
So I have 56,000 hours of watched content in the last 12 months of people just coming in and perusing content.

00:07:07.401 --> 00:07:15.904
It would cost me half a million dollars to hire the sales staff equivalent to do demos for that amount of time like just an exorbitant amount of price.

00:07:15.904 --> 00:07:20.894
So I think that marketing tactic is always solvent.

00:07:20.894 --> 00:07:25.612
Content is king, but meaningful content is even probably more like an emperor.

00:07:27.502 --> 00:07:28.386
That's fantastic.

00:07:28.386 --> 00:07:30.968
That is just awesome.

00:07:30.968 --> 00:07:36.512
So Amazon is very competitive for people selling products.

00:07:36.512 --> 00:07:51.987
I think there's a lot of issues you educate people on, but one of the ones that jumps to the top of my mind that I'm curious about is it just seems so competitive that you would have to really find a way to stand out because there's so many products there, right, yeah?

00:07:52.047 --> 00:07:53.591
The Me Too movement is dead.

00:07:53.591 --> 00:07:54.331
On Amazon.

00:07:54.331 --> 00:07:58.567
You can't just go to Alibaba and white label a product and expect to be successful.

00:07:58.567 --> 00:08:01.374
The Chinese are half of Amazon now.

00:08:01.374 --> 00:08:03.778
They can go to market and out-market you.

00:08:03.778 --> 00:08:05.704
They're teaching English in college.

00:08:05.704 --> 00:08:07.228
They're teaching marketing in college.

00:08:07.228 --> 00:08:09.482
They can out-compete the Americans on price.

00:08:09.482 --> 00:08:11.266
They're starting to compete on marketing.

00:08:11.786 --> 00:08:15.942
So in reality, I also failed to launch products right.

00:08:15.942 --> 00:08:17.646
So on my desk I have a bunch of products.

00:08:17.646 --> 00:08:24.168
This is one that still exists on Amazon, but my soap line under Age of Sage and I overinvested.

00:08:24.168 --> 00:08:25.939
I tried to manufacture stuff myself.

00:08:25.939 --> 00:08:28.187
I tried to build American-made products.

00:08:28.187 --> 00:08:35.528
I built tumblers and a bunch of other cool stuff, and I couldn't turn a profit in the last two years.

00:08:35.628 --> 00:08:52.251
After overinvesting, I made a quarter million dollars three years ago and then after that I took all my profit and put it back into the business and started losing money, because sourcing and making products is a totally different skill set than marketing, and I'm a marketer who tried to dabble, and so I got back in my lane.

00:08:52.251 --> 00:09:02.970
I sold my Amazon brand and I spun up another $8 million account, simultaneously doing retail arbitrage and buying from distributors in bulk.

00:09:02.970 --> 00:09:06.541
But private label and creating products is a very difficult task.

00:09:06.541 --> 00:09:13.171
And so if somebody's 55 listening to this podcast, thinking, oh, I'm going to go sell on Amazon as a retirement plan, I would not advise that.

00:09:13.171 --> 00:09:24.384
But for the 20-year-old, the 25-year-old, the 35-year-old, who's savvy, technical, this is a great opportunity because a couple of years into it you can make a multimillion-dollar brand.

00:09:27.532 --> 00:09:36.883
I'm curious what percentage of people's business, when they're selling their product these days, is on Amazon.

00:09:36.883 --> 00:09:40.046
Is it a majority percentage?

00:09:55.110 --> 00:09:55.230
will.

00:09:55.230 --> 00:09:58.923
But Amazon native-born brands are born 60,000 times a month, and the reason for that is because you can buy your way to success.

00:09:58.923 --> 00:10:01.611
You can earn your way into success on the marketplace a la Amazon.

00:10:01.611 --> 00:10:11.177
It's a true marketplace Off of the Amazon, whether it's a retail store or Walmart or wherever that marketplace does not exist.

00:10:11.177 --> 00:10:13.003
You have to create the demand.

00:10:14.029 --> 00:10:23.778
And so what Amazon solved for FBA sellers, for Amazon sellers, is the logistics hurdles of finding traffic and converting at high rates.

00:10:23.778 --> 00:10:33.509
So if you open up a Shopify website today and we were having a Shopify podcast, a 1% conversion rate would be solid and we were having the Shopify podcast, a 1% conversion rate would be solid.

00:10:33.509 --> 00:10:38.649
On Amazon, the default conversion rate is somewhere between 8% and 10% the default right.

00:10:38.649 --> 00:10:42.998
So why wouldn't you want to sell on Amazon with a 10 times better conversion rate?

00:10:42.998 --> 00:10:47.294
Sure, you got to pay fees, you got to pay the piper, no question about it.

00:10:47.294 --> 00:10:53.982
Margins are rough, but it's so much easier to launch and sell on Amazon than it is any other platform.

00:10:53.982 --> 00:11:02.053
Even today, even with Amazon adding the hurdles and entering the maturity phase, it's the greatest wealth transfer in my entire lifetime, no question about it.

00:11:04.370 --> 00:11:10.384
Is part of the reason the conversion is so much higher on Amazon because people trust buying from Amazon.

00:11:10.384 --> 00:11:16.851
They already have their credit card there, they know if there's an issue they can return it and they have that sort of trust in Amazon.

00:11:16.851 --> 00:11:19.722
Is that one of the things that makes a conversion so much better?

00:11:20.667 --> 00:11:22.773
Yeah, the Amazon Prime brand is very strong.

00:11:22.773 --> 00:11:28.211
About 70% of households in the United States today are an Amazon Prime member Name.

00:11:28.211 --> 00:11:35.058
Another membership program that has 70% of the entire country involved in all the way Netflix.

00:11:35.058 --> 00:11:36.042
I don't even know.

00:11:36.042 --> 00:11:40.592
It's crazy how powerful the Amazon engine is.

00:11:40.592 --> 00:11:42.658
They have complete vertical control.

00:11:42.658 --> 00:11:44.562
They're a monopoly in reality.

00:11:44.562 --> 00:11:48.038
Sometimes monopolies are good for consumers In this case they are.

00:11:48.038 --> 00:11:57.251
Sometimes they're bad for sellers absolutely are bad for sellers but at the end of the day, you work with the system that exists and try and make it better every day.

00:11:57.251 --> 00:12:07.763
There's a lot of challenges, but there's so many perks and benefits and businesses that sell D2C often can convert over to Amazon Anybody that's selling a product.

00:12:07.763 --> 00:12:10.937
If you're not on Amazon today, you might be irrelevant by next year.

00:12:10.937 --> 00:12:12.902
Like the platform is just permeated.

00:12:15.610 --> 00:12:25.186
That's just ponderous to think about, that one company has built something that has that sort of dominance and distribution.

00:12:25.186 --> 00:12:26.755
It's crazy.

00:12:26.755 --> 00:12:30.030
What is the out of all the education you have?

00:12:30.030 --> 00:12:31.432
I do recommend it.

00:12:31.432 --> 00:12:39.034
I'm going to link in the show notes so people can go to your website and start checking out some of this educational content and your YouTube channel as well.

00:12:39.034 --> 00:12:49.940
But if you were sitting down over a cup of coffee with a thousand of your closest marketing friends, what advice would you give them about how to win on Amazon?

00:12:49.940 --> 00:12:50.660
Marketing friends, what advice?

00:12:51.201 --> 00:12:52.221
would you give them about how to win on Amazon?

00:12:52.221 --> 00:12:55.403
I think you nailed the first entry point, which is finding the right product.

00:12:55.403 --> 00:12:57.063
So you got to find the right product.

00:12:57.063 --> 00:13:03.606
You got to be able to triple what you sell it for on the cogs, and then after that you've got to market it right.

00:13:03.606 --> 00:13:15.962
So you need to own a trademark, you need to register for brand registry, you need to spend money on pay-per-click advertising, and if you do all these things, your likelihood of success will skyrocket in comparison to not doing these things.

00:13:16.649 --> 00:13:23.657
But if you have a low price and a good product, you're going to probably succeed on Amazon, despite being bad at any other thing.

00:13:23.657 --> 00:13:26.510
Right, you can be bad at marketing if your product's good and price well.

00:13:26.510 --> 00:13:33.823
But most people can't get a good product at a low price and have good marketing.

00:13:33.823 --> 00:13:35.594
It's typically hard to get that strife back.

00:13:35.594 --> 00:13:37.980
So you got to pick and choose what you're going to go for.

00:13:37.980 --> 00:13:42.910
Some marketing strategies will advocate for launching at a lower price and slowly raising prices.

00:13:42.910 --> 00:13:44.235
I've seen that work very well too.

00:13:44.655 --> 00:13:47.894
But depending on where your skill set is, where you might choose to focus.

00:13:47.894 --> 00:13:51.995
Every company ever needs three things to run Finance, operations, marketing.

00:13:51.995 --> 00:13:54.562
You don't need an A on all three of these to succeed.

00:13:54.562 --> 00:13:59.663
But you need an A on one of those three C's get degrees, and the other two still a solid company.

00:13:59.663 --> 00:14:06.961
You and I could brainstorm here a bunch of companies that suck at two out of three of those and still exist today despite that because they're really good at one thing.

00:14:06.961 --> 00:14:14.043
Companies that are good at all three finance, operations and marketing end up becoming behemoths a la Amazon.

00:14:16.931 --> 00:14:17.634
That's a great point.

00:14:17.634 --> 00:14:21.508
I like that trifecta and thinking about it that way.

00:14:36.700 --> 00:14:42.143
Final thoughts before we close out Anything else people should know about Amazon's dominant position in the marketplace.

00:14:42.143 --> 00:14:44.124
The government's in bed with Amazon.

00:14:44.124 --> 00:14:45.424
Nothing's going to come from that.

00:14:45.424 --> 00:14:48.307
So if you want to deal with Amazon, you want to be successful.

00:14:48.307 --> 00:14:49.008
It's up to you.

00:14:49.008 --> 00:14:55.822
Nobody's going to help you do it unless you hire somebody like my Amazon guy or have the expertise and go learn it.

00:14:55.822 --> 00:14:57.436
But there's no degree in Amazon.

00:14:57.436 --> 00:14:59.719
You can't go to college and get a 40 degree in Amazon.

00:14:59.719 --> 00:15:00.794
You're going to pay your tax.

00:15:00.794 --> 00:15:02.836
You got to go on the platform and stuff.

00:15:02.836 --> 00:15:12.192
You got to make lots of mistakes.

00:15:12.212 --> 00:15:13.456
So one mistake I made on Amazon was selling hot sauce bottles.

00:15:13.456 --> 00:15:13.859
I made a sweet heat.

00:15:13.859 --> 00:15:15.062
I was the first to market with a sweet heat barbecue sauce.

00:15:15.062 --> 00:15:15.826
This is a five pound glass bottle.

00:15:15.826 --> 00:15:16.649
This was a mistake I made five years ago.

00:15:16.649 --> 00:15:17.652
I paid Amazon to do the prep work.

00:15:17.652 --> 00:15:21.485
So that means is I sent out a thousand of these in cardboard box.

00:15:21.485 --> 00:15:25.033
No retail packaging, paid Amazon to do the prep work.

00:15:25.033 --> 00:15:29.803
So what they do is they bubble wrap it like this and then they slap on a barcode and call it a day.

00:15:29.803 --> 00:15:41.082
What I didn't predict, what I didn't realize, is that Amazon doesn't do you any favors as a seller and they ended up shipping my product bubble wrapped in padded envelopes.

00:15:41.082 --> 00:15:46.361
There's a five-pound glass bottle I'm holding in my hand right now and Amazon shipped it out in padded envelopes.

00:15:47.230 --> 00:15:48.355
What could possibly go wrong?

00:15:49.153 --> 00:15:54.215
What could possibly go wrong Hot top fixtures that are just spewed all over the plates, broken glass shards.

00:15:54.215 --> 00:15:55.696
It was devastating.

00:15:55.696 --> 00:16:05.878
I still got positive five-star reviews somehow despite all of this and I could have kept the product going, but I was so upset with the fact that I had to learn a very important lesson at that point.

00:16:05.878 --> 00:16:09.416
Fact that I had to learn a very important lesson at that point.

00:16:09.416 --> 00:16:10.520
You must be retail ready to sell on Amazon.

00:16:10.520 --> 00:16:16.741
You must ship your own boxes that Amazon can forward on to the consumer, Because if you don't, they'll ship your cramping pen and envelopes and all bets are off at that point.

00:16:16.741 --> 00:16:28.878
It's a challenging platform but it's highly rewarding and that's what's put me in business is by threading the right needle, by preventing mistakes for the customers that work with me and understanding how to navigate this complex environment.

00:16:29.779 --> 00:16:30.160
All right.

00:16:30.160 --> 00:16:34.629
Thank you very much for sharing this advice and your stories Appreciate it.

00:16:34.629 --> 00:16:41.056
I encourage everyone to check out your website and your YouTube channel.

00:16:41.056 --> 00:16:43.996
I'm going to link to it in the show notes so people can get there easily.

00:16:43.996 --> 00:16:46.397
We appreciate you being on today, thank you.

00:16:46.397 --> 00:16:47.861
Thanks for having me on here.