Josh Hadley 5:44 

Yeah, I think that that’s what’s really interesting is that you’re different than the typical agency, I think so many people, there’s a lot of Amazon agencies out there. And what they want to do is just, they’re like, you just hand over the keys, and we’ll kind of take it over for you, right, we’ll manage your ad spend, and we’ll charge you a percentage of revenue from all of this, or we’ll do full account management. But then they’re juggling multiple clients at the same time. So what you’re doing specifically is you’re telling, I guess, other businesses to make sure I understand you correctly, come to me with your existing team, let’s have these conversations, let me point out some gaps. And let’s even train up or coach your team. So then you can start executing these strategies rather than hey, yet, don’t worry about hiring your own team or having people do that yourself, will do it for you, like you’re trying to kind of push and help grow those businesses, rather than trying to absorb and do it all for them, is that correct?

Steven Yates 6:48 

Yeah, it’s not uncommon for us to even help them devise their job descriptions and determine their roles and responsibilities. And then we can fill in all the gaps while they’re building their team. But ultimately, my belief is, that’s really where you’re gonna see success, if you believe that Amazon and marketplaces, in general, should be a strategic part of your overall growth strategy and your overall business mix, then why not invest in it, and why don’t really know what you’re doing, versus trusting someone blindly to run it for you, to me that just never sat, right. And who wants to be locked into a long-term contract too. So literally, as your business grows or needs change, we change with you. So if someone leaves the company and now all of a sudden, you need an interim leader, we can fill the gaps for that. If you need someone to run the ad campaigns to hire someone to do that, we can do that for you or create content, whatever it is. But the key is, it’s all about developing your team, instructing them on what they should do, how they should analyze the business, how they should be thinking about future growth strategies and so forth. And then, basically, how can we help essentially, it’s a great partnership, and once we grow one shop we just say, okay, where can we help you next? We got really far on Amazon, let’s move to Walmart. Let’s move to international. We’re here to help our weekend.

Josh Hadley 6:49 

Awesome. So you help, obviously, with Amazon. But do you also help them with other sales channels such as WalMart, even Shopify? Is that something that you do that is expand that?

Steven Yates 8:28 

Yeah, so we’ve become kind of like a holistic commerce partner, I would say. So we’re like, for example, one of our clients, they had a dilemma on where they should publish and structure promotions for Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, and so forth. And I actually recommended that we do a lesser promotion on Amazon and their e-commerce website, because I felt that that was actually a better play, because they could do some fun, creative promotions on Amazon, on their own e-commerce website that they couldn’t do on Amazon, like buy multiple different products or something. That’s not feasible on Amazon very well. And I want to make sure that there’s always a little bit of a benefit for the VIP customers you have where you have a direct relationship, you can email them and so forth, as to where if we were a typical agency that gets revenue on Amazon, I wouldn’t think holistically about what’s good for their brand, I would think about what are we going to do to drive our own revenue because I’ve got revenue at stake, but it’s not really a good place to be. So yes, we can help with Shopify to some degree. But really, we specialize in marketplaces. So Walmart, eBay, any marketplaces throughout the world is where we specialize.

Josh Hadley 9:47 

I love that. Love that. And, Steve, what is your kind of, I guess, agreement look like with brands, how much do you typically charge or is it kind of like, hey, everybody’s different? And the engagements are different. And it’s kind of like custom tailored for people, just so people have an understanding of like, this is different than the normal agency experience.

Steven Yates 10:09 

Yeah, so our starting price is $2,400 a month. And we can go, obviously, as large as they need to some cases with interim management stuff, it can be expensive. But all of our engagements, no matter how big they are our flat rate engagements, or project-based engagements, and they’re month to month, so you can change it at any time, based on how your business needs change. And one thing I didn’t mention is, when I say project-based, that would be something like we do work with, like private equity firms that are looking to acquire a business. And we’ll actually do a full assessment and help them understand is this a business that you want to own and how much scalability is there and so forth, but most of our engagements are month to month. Simply, what do you need of us this month, here’s how much it’s gonna cost. There’s no surprises, and we don’t nickel and dime people or anything like that.

Josh Hadley 11:09 

Cool. No, I love that structure. It’s also cool that you’re working with a lot of private equity firms that are coming to you. So to say the least, you’re getting a peek under the hood of a lot of great businesses, maybe some that need help, but also some that are poised for exit, and you’re seeing what’s working there, or identifying the gaps of what can be improved for the next team that’s going to acquire that business. So this is gonna be an amazing conversation. One of the first questions I want to ask just kind of selfishly, for myself, because we’re looking to expand onto different channels right now, our business, we’ve grown to eight figures, just on Amazon alone, but we’re looking to, is it time to explore or double down more on Walmart, eBay, Wayfair? Do we try to get into Target? Do we go international, right, and start shipping stuff into Canada, Mexico, the UK, etc? So my question to you here, Steve, is what kind of sales lift do you see from those different marketplaces? Right? Like, what do you estimate as hey, you got to Walmart, it best case scenario, probably looking at a 10%, lift eBay, maybe it’s a 2%? So on and so forth?

Steven Yates 12:27 

Yeah. So it’s a very tricky question, because I’ve seen it wildly different. So if I had to put a rough assumption across a lot of different categories, and product lines, I would say, Walmart is the very next marketplace, you’re gonna want to focus on outside of Amazon. And by the way, don’t do it until you’re what I like to say, 80 to 90%, optimize on Amazon, don’t spend your time on these smaller marketplaces, because that’s oftentimes the shiny object that gets you in trouble. When you’re doing a whole bunch of different things, you’re not doing any of them, well, you got to be really well positioned on Amazon. And when I say 80 to 90%, I don’t mean of your total opportunity for growth. But if you’ve identified all these levers you need to pull on Amazon, you need to have a good storefront and you have a plus content, I need to have all of these different components pulled together, do you feel good about how well optimized they are? And are they in place 80 to 90% of where they should be before you start migrating to another marketplace? Because if you don’t, you’re essentially lifting and shifting and catalog is not optimized to another marketplace. And now all of your optimization efforts are going to be that much harder, because you’re doing full optimizations across a whole bunch of marketplaces. That’s always a risk. I would say Walmart is probably in the neighborhood of 10 to 20% of the Amazon business. And eBay is probably in the neighborhood of 10%, maybe five to 10% of the Amazon business. But it really does differ quite a bit. I’ve seen some people that actually sell more on Etsy than they do on Amazon, because it is sold out after on that website. I’ve seen people that do phenomenal on eBay, even though eBay is not growing it’s yes, it just so happens that their customers there and that’s why I go goes back to analyzing where your customers spend their time and money and make sure you’re present there, do it in the right order. But ultimately make sure your present there and where you go next is not a cookie-cutter answer just because everybody else gets to this next Walmart, Walmart next or eBay after that or whatever, doesn’t mean that’s the right cadence for you. So take a step back. Think about your product, your customer, where should you be?

Josh Hadley 14:52 

And to piggyback off of that, let’s say there’s a lot of brands that have been able to build their entire brand on Amazon but really haven’t spent much time or they haven’t even thought about creating their own DTC website, right, whether it be on Shopify, WooCommerce, etc. When do you recommend brands open up that DTC, their own website? How important is that in this overall strategy because as you know, like, that is a beast in and of itself and having to babysit yet again to kind of another channel that this one’s your own.

Steven Yates 15:27 

So I actually recommend an e-commerce Store on like, for example, Shopify, it’s easy, easy platform, it’s inexpensive, I would recommend that really early on, like that should be launch on Amazon and launch on your own e-commerce website and pretty good cadence together. And the reason being is, it’s multifold. One, if you’re planning to sell the business, now, you’re not just an Amazon seller, you’re a brand with multiple sales channels, you’re also able to then capitalize on the customers that go to Amazon, say, I never heard this brand before. I wonder what they are, what they’re all about that end up going to your e-commerce website to learn more, well, now you’ve got the cookie, you can have a pop-up modal to capture their email address, those customers are going to be more valuable, because those become the loyal brand customers. And then there’s ways that you can deploy with QR codes and stuff to say, hey, register your extended warranty here, or learn how to assemble this here or find recipes, how to use it here, or whatever, give them a reason, some sort of a helpful type of content or program that would be useful for the customers that you ultimately get them to your website. And before they leave the website, I recommend a pop up modal upon exit that, hopefully is allowing you to capture their email address. And the more you can stay in touch, keep your brand front and center, the better. So to me, even though you’re not going to get a lot of sales velocity out of it, it’s the right cadence to set yourself up for taking advantage of something that otherwise would have been lost.

Josh Hadley 17:09 

Yeah, I think that’s great advice. And a good recommendation for anybody. I think that step, especially if you’re trying to establish a brand, I think there are a lot of people that go on to Amazon, and then they go search for your website off of Amazon. We all talk about product inserts, and how do I capture the customer’s email address once they purchase a product? Yes, that’s good and important. But imagine being able to capture people’s email addresses that simply looked at your Amazon product. And then they go take a look at your own website, right? Imagine building an audience there of warm leads for your own. And not many people talk about that. So I love that you brought that up, Steve,

Steven Yates 17:51 

By the way, Shopify is so easy that it doesn’t have to be this expensive endeavor. I had a client once that was paying $300,000 a year for Magento. And because it was kind of a mess. And she was just throwing more dollars into development to fix problems that they mess up the first time. And I said, why are you doing this? Shopify can get you 95% of where you’re at, with 1% of the costs. And she actually launched it herself. This is a CEO and founder of Scrappy. She says, you know what, you’re right. Let me try it. And one weekend, she launched her Shopify website, and that’s the platform she was on, drop the $300,000 expense. And it doesn’t have to be the most robust, is just use a standardized template built on the imagery, use standard features to get out of the gate. And then as your business grows, you invest more and more into refinements.

Josh Hadley 18:46 

Cool. That’s great recommendation and good advice. So Steve, you mentioned earlier before people really start exploring other sales channels. If you’ve built a good-sized business on Amazon, make sure that you’ve optimized or you’ve pulled 80 to 90% of the different levers, you’ve maximized the different levers you can pull on Amazon, before you start going into these other channels, which I love that thought process. I think that’s important. But Steve, can you give us a list of the levers that people can pull on Amazon that can influence sales and help them grow their brand?

Steven Yates 19:28 

Yeah. So I don’t have a list of those levers off the top of my head, but I don’t have a list in front of me or anything but off the top of my head. I would say the key levers are is your product page fully optimized, and that’s a multi-part letter essentially. Do you have infographics? Do you have I’m kind of looking top of the page down. Do you have an optimized title? Do you have a video? Do you have a brand story? Do you have a plus content? Are you using In any pricing and promotional strategies, coupons, sale prices, promotion engine, those are the important things on page that are going to influence your conversion rate as well as your organic traffic. That’s a really big one. And it’s multifaceted. If you’re not doing those things you need to be doing them, or do you have all the backend keywords optimized? Are using prime? Are you leveraging all of the right things to do within your assortment? So for example, sometimes people put, if they’re selling in multiple channels, they put their best sellers on a channel and assume that their best sellers are the same on every channel. That’s not the case. Are you testing your assortment to learn what works well? And where do you have good positioning? And then adapting that? Could I come up with a smaller size bigger size multipack? Should I have new products that I’m bringing to market? Those are all things to consider? Am I advertising in within advertisements, am I doing those all the right types of advertising sponsored product ads are the no-brainer, you got to be doing that. It used to be optional on Amazon, it’s no longer optional. You’ve got to essentially participate in advertising. Because if you’re not defensively, participating, your competitors gonna buy ads against you. And if you’re not offensively advertising and your competitors are, there’s a good chance that that is going to help them grow at a faster pace than you. That mean, more reviews for them or traffic or more sales, higher ranking, you got to participate in it. But are you doing all the different types of advertising? Are you using sponsored brand ads, sponsored display ads, and so forth? All of those wouldn’t be considered levers. Are you using different programs that you should be leveraging on Amazon. So for example, Amazon has a program called the Amazon Attribution Program. And within there is a program or an option that you can sign up for a Brand Referral Bonus. So that actually allows you to have a 10% kickback against your referral fees for any traffic you drive externally to Amazon. are you leveraging that? Where could you be leveraging that your social media channels, your e-commerce website, sometimes it’s a good strategy to put not only a BuyBox on Shopify, but a buy on Amazon button to link them to Amazon because more customers feel comfortable with that you might actually increase your sales and conversion rates exponentially. And yes, maybe not as optimal, but at least it’s only a 5%? If it’s a 15% referral fee category, you’re paying 5% instead of 15%. So it really helps augment that. So there’s a lot of different programs that you can be leveraging on Amazon. If you’re small and lightweight are you using the FBA small and light program? Are you in all the betas that you should be in that Amazon offers for advertising and different programs? Do you have a brand store are using Amazon posts? Amazon post is a free form of advertising that anytime you’re doing a social posts on Instagram or Facebook, you should definitely be posting that on Amazon as well. It helps you gain followers, the more followers you have, are you sending customer engagement emails? These are all things that add up. And they should all be done in the right cadence. But if you’re not pulling all of these levers, you’re missing something. Just be careful you put them in the right order. A little bit of advice is don’t drive a lot of traffic, whether it’s external or internal, on product pages that aren’t performing well, you’ve got to focus on, what I like to say is first focus on talking to the algorithms so I can get exposure. So did I do all my thorough keyword research? And did I incorporate that appropriately? And then how do I optimize it for conversion? And once that has proven that okay, now I’m getting the traffic and conversions. That’s when you start doubling down on the advertising? Everything needs to be done the right cadence.

Josh Hadley 24:20 

I absolutely love that, Steve. And I don’t want to cut you off there. Because I think that that is the next step that I think is extremely important. And you’re just diving into it right is what is the correct cadence? And I think first and foremost, you’re saying, make sure you’ve optimized your listing page first, before a lot of these other things are how do we send more traffic to our listing, such as PPC, or the engagement emails from Amazon or posts and all of that stuff? It drives more traffic back to the listing. But if the listing is having issues, and your conversion rate is not good, well, you’re just further compounding the issues here. So Steve, I think what will be important is like, how do people know like, Hey, is my conversion rate at 5%? Is that a good conversion rate? Or is 15% good? Like, how do brands know if their conversion rate is good? Because it changes for every product category? Right?

Steven Yates 25:20 

Yeah, it really does. So it’s important to measure as much as possible against your peers in your category. Now, not all that’s available. There are some tools that Amazon provides. And there’s external tools that provide estimates. But the most important thing is looking at, one thing you can gauge is your product, your referral fee, or mean your metrics across all of your assortment, at just looking at that data without any external data, oftentimes, we can see where the problem lies. So for example, a company comes to us and says, hey, our business is down. We don’t know why. What did you find from looking at the metrics? And my most typical answer is, I don’t know what you mean by that? I don’t know why. Well, are you seeing a decrease in traffic? Okay, well, are you noticing that that traffic is organic? Or paid, that you’re decreasing in one of those two areas? Are you seeing click-through rates get lower? Meaning customers, for whatever reason, you don’t look as compelling on the search result page, because maybe your competitor has a better price, or they’ve got a better image or title? So people aren’t clicking in to your products as much? Is it the conversion rate? What is the data telling you, but typically, as I mentioned, with the click-through rates, that means generally, you’ve got a problem with one of only a few levers, you’ve got an issue with your main image, your title, your price, or really, I guess it’s those three, that could be promotions also could have hit play there. But once you land on the page, if they’re not adding products to their cart, and check the gown, what is it about my product page is not convincing the customer to move forward? Am I not telling them everything they need to know? Is it not compelling enough? Am I saying something wrong? Something that’s off putting. Oftentimes, it may look visually compelling, but if you’re not telling them something that’s important in their decision-making process quickly and succinctly, then they’re just backing out Amazon pay customers are impatient, you need to in a matter of seconds portray, what is it about this product that is the right fit for that customer? And if you miss one of those, you’re out. So taking a step back, even sometimes asking here, some say, hey, what would you need to know to buy my product? These five things. Okay, let’s look at these things. Are they easily understood? Actually, this one’s not understood, that is a problem to diagnose why I’m not converting, and you’ve got to improve those levers. And one of the things I would suggest there is, the book graphics should be used because so much of the traffic is on mobile, you want to have those infographics that really allow customers to make a choice on whether that’s the right product strictly with images, clearly, they flick through a couple of images, they should see all the key points just in the images. Next, you have a video because Amazon books a 3.6 times increase in conversion rates when Amazon customers watch a video, so not everyone’s gonna watch it. But when they do, you have your chance to really sell the products, a plus content, it doesn’t help from an organic perspective, but it has a big impact on customers impression of the product. And sometimes people get in a trap of trying to go after the fancy modules versus the ones that actually are going to portray those points succinctly. So it’s gonna be a balancing act. But the data will essentially tell you what the problems are and what you need to fix.

Josh Hadley 25:28 

No, I love that. All right. So I think we could diagnose each of those really quick. And I think you did a really good job of saying, Hey, is it an impressions issue? Or is it a click-through rate issue? Or is it a conversion rate issue? And then there’s different levers that you can pull to identify or to kind of resolve those issues. So let’s start at the top Steve, if, if you have an impressions issue, what are the levers people should be pulling if they notice, while I’m losing some impressions?

Steven Yates 29:42 

Yeah, well, I would say one of the most common things is their advertising. They probably got beat out by a competitor, and they’re no longer winning the same number of ad placements they were before with if their impressions drop drastically. So it could be that they are not adjusting their bid mouths and getting the paid traffic. But it also could be that something’s changed algorithmically that Amazon is basically suppressing some of their search terms. So I would use an index checker like Helium 10 to see are all my terms on my page being indexed appropriately? And look at ranking. Are you tracking the ranking for your top search terms? Do you see ranking declining? And why start investigating? Who’s winning the ranking? Why am I no longer performing on this front? That’s the kind of stuff that I’d be doing. First and foremost.

Josh Hadley 30:39 

Yeah. What do you do when you’re losing ranking? Because I think it kind of correlates with like, well, your conversion rate might be low. Right. And so you’re starting to slowly drop there. Let’s say you are losing organic ranking. What do you do like, what’s your first steps there to try to resurrect that?

Steven Yates 30:56 

Yeah, it could, it could be a subtle ranking decrease or a drastic ranking decrease. And I think that depending on how that looks, your levers what you do may change, but one of the things I would do is say, okay, if I was Amazon, on that particular term, do I paint the right picture for the algorithm, for example, I may only need to put that term in the title, bullet points, description or somewhere right to be ranked. But if I have it in one placement only, am I telling Amazon that this is really what I’m selling or not. Because sometimes you might put something that says, like, works with an iPhone in one placement? Well, Amazon knows that it may not be an iPhone, if it’s just referencing that. But if you say I found the title, I found in the bullet points, I found the description, you’re saying, this is something that either is an iPhone, or works with an iPhone, and Amazon sees that more clearly in their algorithmic decision making. If it’s only listed one place, they think it could just be a sporadic reference to something. So make sure that you’re painting that picture, and that you believe that you’ve overcome any potential concerns there. Next, I would say, like you said, it could be the conversion rate issue, it could be that conversion rates have dropped, and now my sales velocity is impacted. So I’m just not getting the same velocity, that’s gonna give me that ranking. Look into that. And it could be that you made a recent change on your page, it could be that, what I find is that a lot of times people make changes based on their emotions or feelings, like, oh, I know, this is gonna work better. Don’t do that. Use Amazon experiments to test, you can test the mean image, you can test the title, and you can test the a plus content, don’t change a bunch of things at once, change one thing at a time, put it in experiments and measure and think ahead, don’t wait until fourth quarter to test, test prior to that so you can put your best foot forward during the peak seasons. And there’s third-party tools like Splitly and stuff that you can use to test alternate images and other components that Amazon doesn’t allow you to test. But a lot of times, it’s kind of soft cost, or they made a change. And now, Amazon re-index that listing and thought, it’s not what we thought it was originally, and they did no harm. So always save every single category listing report or item set-up template, keep a master of that, and always have all of the past iterations. So you can always quickly revert back, should you ever need to. Or if you have copy changes, make sure you don’t forget what that old copy was, have that in a repository. So you can easily revert back if need be. But there’s a lot of things that could be happening, obviously, you’re competitive environment is one of the biggest right, your competitor selling and cheaper. Just because it clicks in your page doesn’t mean they didn’t already see your competitor. If your competitor looked more compelling, and is priced better than you, they could click on your page and actually not do you might be coming across just as well. But they’re comparing you to someone else that looks better now. So are you paying attention to that? And maybe there’s some price point fluctuations that have happened in the market that you need to adapt to?

Josh Hadley 34:25 

Yeah, I think though, the list goes on and on. Right. And I think it’s hard to there’s no cookie-cutter approach, as you mentioned, but I think you listed out a lot of good levers. When it came to click-through rate. I think you did a good job. I think you summed that up earlier by saying hey, with a click through rate, if you’re seeing that down, work on your main image. It could be a component of price. It could be a component of maybe a coupon or something that you had on there. Go ahead, what else?

Steven Yates 34:55 

The title also, I don’t think this title especially if people We’re reviewing on mobile and you’re not paying attention to how it’s truncated. Maybe one of the most important messages is now truncated and not even seen. So those are the main four components.

Josh Hadley 35:11 

Okay. And then outside of that you have the conversion rate, which we talked about. And with conversion rate, what would be your quick go-to’s to increase in, boost up conversion rate?

Steven Yates 35:23 

Yeah. So I would say the most impactful are going to be the infographics and the a plus content, I’d also make the bullet points as easily understood, at a quick glance as possible. All both your infographics and your A plus content needs to be optimized for mobile, larger tax simple messages, get things across very succinctly. In most of the, probably the biggest thing is, am I giving the customers all that they need to know? If you’re not, that’s a no-brainer. And you’ve got to make sure you’re telling them what they want to know. So, survey friends, family colleagues, are you incorporating all the right decision-making criteria, that’s especially an issue when people are selling products that they don’t really fully understand themselves, where people maybe gotten into a category, just because they know that they can win in the category, but they’re not a user themselves. And oftentimes, if you’re selling like home decor products, and you’re not a purchaser of home decor products, well, how often am I going to change the home decor products? How would I want to relate it to other home decor products, or what have you, those things matter. And it’s not necessarily a data point that you can reference, it’s something that is just a consumer purchasing behavior pattern that you have to really understand.

Josh Hadley 36:58 

Fascinating, I love that so much detail to kind of dig through here. So I encourage our listeners, I know I’m going to need to go back where you listen to this and go, jot down some additional notes for our own optimization process. This has been super valuable. Steve, do you have any case studies that you can share with us, where brands come to you and said, hey, we’re down, we need help. And you’re able to actually implement and pull some of these levers that we’ve previously discussed, to help them grow their business even bigger?

Steven Yates 37:30 

Yeah. So I’m gonna give you one example of a company that is doing about 50 million a year on Amazon, but they were down 10%, year over year, and they were in a category that was now seeing a lot of newfound competition, the competition offered an inferior product. But what we found was that their products didn’t have enough meat to why consumers should pay more. So when we first started working with them, we took a step back and said, okay, what’s going on here? What does the data tell us. And what we’ve learned was that their conversion rates were severely impacted. People just weren’t converting the way they used to. And it wasn’t anything to do with their product page, per se, it was all the competitors that now look really good up against their products that haven’t changed. They were effective before the competition really got strong. But now they need to one up that. And that’s by the way, a good learning in and of itself, always iterate always continue to get better and better on Amazon. And keep an eye on your competitors. Because they’re essentially using your product page, if you’re the best seller out there as their starting point. And the very next seller that starts competing against you is essentially already better than you from day one, because they took what you did copied, it essentially made it a little better. So what we did was help them build a strategy to say, okay, here’s what’s going on, we understand now, what the impacts are, what are the levers we have to pull. And what we found was that most of it was just messaging, the quality of the product was good. customers loved it once they purchased it, but it was now a big price disparity against new competitors. And the customers need to be understood or need to be talking to why they should pay more. So we helped them understand all the content improvements they needed to make. That was Cogito new titles, bullet points, descriptions, a plus content, infographics, all of the on-page content that were essentially going to be part of the purchasing criteria, and we help them implement those one at a time. So the very first month, we were able to get them up on flat. The next few months, we were able to get them up to 15%. Those are when a lot of the changes are happening content. Things are rolling out we’re going after the low-hanging fruit of the things that we can do quickly. But a lot of that just takes work, you got to mean it was a large catalog of products, he needed to be rolled out. Well, the very next month, in the following year after that we were up an average of 53% every month or every month, every year. And we’re talking a $50 million business. So it was really, really impactful. And it took time. But once we did the right things, we knew that okay, now we’ve fixed the problem, we can start really throttling up the advertising. So again, it’s all about strategically thinking about the problem is then executing it, making sure that you’ve now solved for the problem and then grow the traffic.

Josh Hadley 40:44 

So it’s really kind of coming back to the basics for that brand more than anything, correct. It’s like, hey, let’s spend some more time on your detail page. And they were missing some videos, right? Let’s build out the a plus content, the brand story, just as you mentioned, none of this stuff is rocket science, right? These aren’t black hat tactics. This isn’t some amazing hack on Amazon. Like this is simple. Like, this is a 101. Is that correct?

Steven Yates 41:11 

Yeah, I would say it was more than 101. But it was more advanced skills in each of those areas that really matter. But the basics, were there, right? So what fix their problem wasn’t, like you said some black hat tactic it was doing all the right things they needed to do better than everybody else. That’s the key better than everybody else. So and it’s really challenging when your product is twice the price of your competitors, you’ve got to nail that you’ve got to be, wow, I want to pay more for this, like, this is something that just give me, take my money. I need this. And that’s not always easy to do, you really got to portray it in the right manner. But yes, I would say when you look back at all the success stories where we’ve helped companies grow exponentially. It is not that black hat thing, it’s not that one big thing that we’re missing, it’s a bunch of things that made a 10% improvement here 5% improvement there, those things really add up over time. And what happens is oftentimes, it just gets set and forget, or it is done in a less than optimal manner. And that’s probably the most common thing. Oh, and I already optimized that it’s really good. Well, did you do it to your standards? Or did you do it to the best-of-breed standards where you’re now you know, setting up your price as well as anchor is in the electronics category. If you’re not setting high standards, you’re not fully optimizing your opportunity. And that’s actually why when we coach people on what they should be looking to emulate. It’s rarely looking at their competitors, it’s actually looking at here’s a best of breed seller like anchor, where they actually enter the space in a very crowded space of new products. And they were actually able to make such a big impact by the way that they presented their products and merchandise and, and helped customers understand why they would want to buy their product that they’re now a billion dollar brand, and are now selling in multiple channels. That’s the kind of company you want to emulate.

Josh Hadley 42:00 

But anchor started on Amazon, then is what you’re saying, right? And it was just over solid performance and well, optimizing Amazon, correct?

Steven Yates 43:41 

Yeah. So if you look at them, that’s like that’s a good case study, right? So when they started, they started installing in a battery banks. Well, at the time, battery banks all look like black boxes. And they essentially function the same. They had a 90-day warranty to a one-year warranty. The only thing they basically told people was this is how many milliamps it has, how many ports it has things that basic criteria, Anchor context, the Amazon or the Apple approached and said, customers don’t know that they don’t really care about that. They care about what does it mean to them. So they started saying, Okay, this product will charge your phone this many times, and they realized that customers were concerned about quality. So they added a bunch of safety elements. They did like showing a cut open. So you can see all of the interior components that essentially were the same as our competitors, but they made it look like hey, this is way more safe. I trust this more. Then they added a larger warranty they went to an 18-month warranty. Then they incorporated a little product inserts in their products so that when you had a problem with it, you reached out to them directly. You didn’t contact Amazon so it kept their return rates low kept their reviews high. And they did on just a lot of things that were just spot on, then I think I still to this day use them as an example. Now, actually, they’re not as good today as they were before because they’ve gotten a huge assortment and the company has grown and they’re not as well focused. But they’re still one of the best sellers on Amazon and someone that you should definitely pay attention to.

Josh Hadley 45:21 

Awesome. I love that. And I want to go back to the earlier mention that you had here, it’s not just going with the basics, right? It wasn’t 101 content optimization for this brand that you helped. Rather you said it was more advanced, right? Maybe we’re in the 301 course here. But you also mentioned like a lot of brands come to you and they’re like, everything is optimized. We have good infographics, we have good A plus content, right? But when you take a look at it, you’re like, no, like, there’s still room for improvement. So what is that? Like? Can you kind of summarize like, what are those advanced like content detail page optimization tactics, where people have already got the basics, they built out images, videos, a plus content? What are the advanced side of that, that people can be focused on?

Steven Yates 46:10 

Sure. So it really depends on what the problem is with their particular product pages. But for example, infographics, we see a lot of infographics that they pay, they’re too busy, they take too many points, and they’re not clear and succinct, Anchored does a great job with clear and succinct. Many competitors don’t they have a lot of lines with call outs and images that don’t relate to what it is? Anchor says, hey, here’s the main call up. And here’s a picture that kind of visually portrays what that call out is. So it just kind of resonates in your head. And it’s kind of an instinct get. So oftentimes, it’s just kind of looking at it with a more critical eye and saying, you did, yes, checkbox. Yes. But you missed the mark in these ways. And that might be as simple as making font bigger, it may be as simple as changing the background imagery may be as simple as rearranging the infographics to kind of sell them on the right most critical components of the product, it might be the title that looks optimized, but the words are in the wrong order, or they miss something that was critical, or something that’s going to be allowing them to win in the bullet points. It could be that, like, for example, we like to not focus on the feature, but focus on the benefit. So for example, what does that mean to me, like, let’s say we use the Anchor example, it might be something like charges, your iPhone seven times, or something, versus 14,000 milliamps, that doesn’t tell the customer what they need to know. So if you’re adding the right things in the bullet points, but the most important point is not clear, you missed the mark. And same thing with the a plus content. Oftentimes people use, like, for example, a lot of texts on an image well, because first off, don’t use a lot of texts, keep your messages really clear. Try and use mostly visual elements there. Don’t make it wordy, make it very instant, get, make sure you have a comparison chart, to be able to get if the goal is to get the customer make that decision quickly. The decision may be that that’s not the product they want. But rather than have them back out and find another keep going through their search, you want them to say, oh, this brand actually has what I want. If you’re not doing that you’re missing the mark. If you don’t have a brand story, for example, you’re not able to qualify for premium A plus content. If you don’t have a brand story, you have no links to your storefront, except for that little blue link at the top of the page, the brand story gives you that access to now say look at all the product categories I have that you may not have thought of. So it’s just a lot of things that we look at with a more critical eye with a more advanced level of criteria on what we think is good.

Josh Hadley 49:18 

Yeah. I love that. Steve, again, I think this is a podcast that people are gonna go need to hit repeat on rewind a couple times and jot down notes in a very detailed manner because you’ve shared a lot of great content that’s very actionable, right? I think everybody talks about yet create better main images or create better infographics. But what you just shared is like, how do you make those infographics better? So thank you so much for kind of that mic drop, I would say of just like you left it all out there for all of us. So thank you for that. Now, before we wrap things up, I’m got to ask you my final three questions. But before we get to that I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here are the three takeaways that I noted Steve, let me know if you think I’m missing something. Action Item number one and takeaway number one would be, you’ve got to maximize those Amazon levers. Okay, first and foremost, would be focused on your product detail page. And looking at the data behind that, that would be the impressions, the click-through rate, and then ultimately, your conversion rate. Make sure you’re focused on that listing to make sure that you’ve maximized everything right. Are we getting people to click onto the listing really well, when people are on the listing have we maximized everything that Steve just talked about in terms of how you can take your content to the next level? That’s the first thing that I would recommend any brand do, that’s going to be something that we do with our own brand. Because then step number two, and I think this is where a lot of the shiny object syndrome kind of comes, especially in the Amazon ecosystem, is kind of driving traffic, right? I think your first takeaway with in terms of driving traffic is focus on the Amazon traffic that you can drive first and foremost, right? Amazon PPC, Amazon posts and the Amazon engagement emails that you can send out right? Focus on that first, then start layering on the external traffic levers, Google ads, TikTok ads, Pinterest ads, the list goes on and on from there. And then last, but not least, would be to start expanding your sales channels, right? If you can say check on those first two takeaways. You’re like, yep, been there, done that, then you can start considering hey, now let’s go into the other marketplaces, Walmart being probably the next best one and Etsy and eBay, so on and so forth. But maximize first all the levers on Amazon. Because I think what you said really succinctly at the beginning, is if you don’t, and now you’re trying to optimize content on two different marketplaces, you’ve just effectively doubled your workload. And so I think it’s so important. So, Steve, how do you feel like I did in summing this up?

Steven Yates 52:19 

I think it was a good job, Josh. Thank you.

Josh Hadley 52:21 

All right, Steve, there’s one other thing that I forgot to ask you that did want to ask you earlier, was, in terms of tracking all these metrics, impressions, click-through rate conversion rate, there’s a lot of data to be had in Amazon, it lives in a lot of different places, do you use any tools to kind of aggregate that data and make it easier to see.

Steven Yates 52:40 

So we use a bunch of different third-party tools, but I don’t say any of them are our most of them have a good snapshot of current state, what we generally do is export a lot of that information and look at it in our own Excel spreadsheet. So we can see pattern trends over time, I think that’s the most critical thing that people fail to do is maybe now your conversion rates at 15%. But a month ago, it was at 18%, you may not actually pay attention, but the fact that it went down, but if you see it on a trend line with a chart, for example, and you can see, boy, this is a pattern of something that I need to I need to pay attention to what’s going on here. That’s most critical. And I find that exporting the data and slicing and dicing it yourself is, at this point, the most effective manner to really analyze your business.

Josh Hadley 53:37 

Perfect. That’s good to know. All right.

Steven Yates 53:41 

On analytic standpoint, I’ll just call out, make sure you’re using brand analytics, there’s a lot of great information in there that a lot of people do not fully utilize. And from a third-party tool, everybody knows the Helium10, to the world, and so forth. But you’re great, and we love us enough. But one kind of bonus tool that I’d recommend you try. It’s called nozzle.ai. And if you’re selling a commodity, something that people are buying again, and again, that tool charges a very minimal fee. And by the way, there’s no association between us and them, they charge a very minimal fee. I think it’s like $77 a month, but they pull in the last two years of data and show you how customers have continuously bought again and again of your brand. So what’s the repeat purchase rates? What’s the average lifetime value of the customer? And to me, that opens up the door to understand how much can I truly invest in new customer acquisition? And it also really helps you understand of all the efforts you’re doing what is driving new customer acquisition, because that should be your biggest focal point is am I getting more and more customers and then once I have the customer, my nurturing those customers, and if you have an e-commerce website, you’re actually able to do that in a more meaningful way.

Josh Hadley 55:01 

I love that you’re the second person to recommend nozzle this week. So there must be something to it. Yeah, I had never heard about it. And then all of a sudden, this week, I’ve got two people recommending it. So something people should be paying attention to, which is great. All right, Steve. So last final questions here? What’s been the most influential book that you’ve read? And why?

Steven Yates 55:26 

The Bible? And because that’s what it’s all about?

Josh Hadley 55:30 

Hey, I would echo that as well. I would agree with you there. Let’s go to the next question. What is your favorite productivity tool or resource

Steven Yates 55:39 

Productivity tool or resource? That’s a good question. I’d say Helium 10 is the most valuable tool that we use, because it does so much keyword tracking, and research for competitive analysis, and everything else I would say, is probably the one tool that I would say every seller has to have in their tool book. And that really adds a lot of productivity when you’ve got so many tools at your disposal.

Josh Hadley 56:13 

It’s true. Helium10 has a lot of tools. And it does save you a lot of time compared to manually having to do many of the things that they can automate for you. That’s awesome. All right. Last question, Steve, who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space? And why should sellers be paying attention to them?

Steven Yates 56:33 

So probably the first and I admire the most in the Amazon space, I’ll say Amazon, specifically, is James Thompson, the gentleman that I used to work with and Amazon that founded the Prosper Show, and I believe that he’s a quiet leader, someone that’s really helped change the industry, even he’s he founded the Prosper Show. And that was really a lead in to getting more and more sellers engaged in community and helping them to understand what is out there. In from a tool standpoint, helping gather knowledge from various knowledge sources and rallying everybody together to say we can really leverage Amazon to help businesses grow. And he’s a gentleman is not in the spotlight a lot. But I have a lot of admiration for him.

Josh Hadley 57:26 

Yeah, that’s great. And the Prosper show, I think, is very well known. I attended that last year. It is a great conference, great place to come meet up and meet other really experienced sellers. And to kind of rub shoulders. It’s conversations like these, where your mind starts to open. And so Steve, I’m glad we met ourselves at a conference. And it’s relationships like these that start to make changes in your business. So all of that. Well, Steve, where can people go to learn more about you to follow you if they want to hire you? Where should they be going?

Steven Yates 58:02 

Sure. primeguidance.com is our website. And you can reach out to us at 972-885-9262. You can also find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and so forth. Search for Prime Guidance. Thanks again for having us on, Josh. Really appreciate it.

Josh Hadley 58:20 

Yeah, thanks for your time again today, Steven. Take care.

Steven Yates 58:23 

Thanks. Take care.

Outro 58:25 

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