– Hello everyone and welcome to episode 67 of Two Amazon Sellers and a Microphone brought to you by Sellozo. Today Kris and I are gonna be talking about creating your Amazon PPC foundation with a special guest on with us today, Corey Thomas from AMZ Atlas.

– Hey guys, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

– Thanks for joining us, this is gonna be a lot of fun, just diving in just to sort of what you do at AMZ Atlas to create PPC foundations for your clients. And we, you know, it was fun because you guys had a big summit that you put on last week and Kris and I were just honored to be a part of it. That was just, the production of that was phenomenal. I know it was great value. So we had an absolute blast being a part of that.

– Well, thanks again for setting aside the time and helping us out and I’m glad to be here to share a bit about that. So I can kind of jump into a little bit of the background and what we do at AMZ Atlas and kind of my personal background over the years working on Amazon. So, I’ve been in the Amazon industry for about 10 years now, started on the resale side of the business. So I think, you know, as you’ve described your audience I empathize with what it means to do resale and you know, that that company as I learned how to, you know, use the right tape and cut the right box and don’t overhang your pallet by more than an inch, or you might not, you know or they’ll eat your inventory at the Amazon system. You know, I like been there and totally got that and I think at the time, you know, 10 years ago resale was pretty savage and was a low margin business and some made it work but we had a hard time making it work. So we really pivoted to the direct import strategy and brand building and that, that kind of came through. We had an insight to go off and build an algorithm. It became, you know, kind of widely used to forecast demand and when you can click a Chrome extension and see what demand is on Amazon, you can spin up some pretty interesting private label opportunities. So we built a real large private label company that you know, it was one of the five fastest in the world growing based on the kind of marketplace pulse insights. If that’s a blog, anybody I’ll plug, plug that blog that’s a great resource. And so anyway, that was really where it all started. So it was resale moving into private label. And I had this moment though, where I was like, well part of the reason we were being really successful was because brands were having a hard time paying attention to what was like one layer removed from their branded search. You know you at our summit last week talking about kind the, the Coke, Pepsi search, you know the one about soft drinks. And so, that was kind of the opportunity that I saw. Wow, like private label is getting crowded, it’s getting really competitive and you know it’s gonna go down the path of resale, but if brands whether they’re big or small, take really good care of their brand on Amazon and not just care about their moat around their branded terms, but terms like soft drink, the, it it’s so much bigger than anybody can imagine. And so that’s where I transitioned into the Amazon agency space have started several agencies managed, you know hundreds of millions of dollars in sales across different verticals, but it’s all in the name of helping brands leverage the channel. And that’s what we do as a kind of a full services agency at this point is outside of warehousing people’s goods or taking product photos, we’re in the business of doing everything, but this is all that we do. Like we’re not, we’re not multi marketplace. We don’t, or I’m not trying to build websites out you know, out the back door we’re just totally obsessed and focused on Amazon because Amazon changes so much, you know, it’s a, it’s an update to radio frequency requirements last week. And this week it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s an update to you know, the, how you enter tracking information from merchant fulfilled orders. I mean, that, that stuff. And it was in the news section on Amazon yesterday like just is what it is. And so our team of all these different elements of our business have to pay attention to all those details and keep up for on behalf of our clients. That, that, that is that enough of my soap box for a minute.

– Well, it, it is interesting because laser focusing your agency approach on just Amazon I think is important. It’s enormous, it’s a beast. I mean, there’s like you said there’s so many things changing and, and to have for someone who is, you know, a seller, let’s say like Kris or myself, who’s posting their products working on all these things that we’ve done. There’s so many other things that take an expert you know, like, like PPC, which we’re going to dive into here in a second and just creating the best listings and inventory management and it always changes. And so you’re able to leverage what you’re doing with all of your clients and what you’re learning day-to-day to help everyone else out. And I think that’s important. I think it’s really easy in this e-commerce world to be too broad, you know and they can hurt you.

– Yeah, you know, I mean, I, it’s something that I I’ve read, you know, over the years and tried to stay like plugged into of what, you know really good marketers or entrepreneurs had done in the past. And I feel like though, the ones that I really respect in the world have made really good cases of theirs. There’s a lot of failed companies that tried to do too many things. Very few companies fail when they’re exceptionally good at something very specific. And it helps that it’s a growing industry. I mean, geez, what did Amazon grow 50% last year? It, it really helps that there’s tailwinds but I would rather build a company that knows a tremendous amount about one thing than kind of dilute our offering for other things that we don’t really have any business being an expert in. No, we could add that over time. Like it took 10,000 plus hours to become an Amazon expert on, you know and it doesn’t come quick, 10 years later, it’s still hard but it, at least we can stand for something. And I, and I think what that allows us to do we have clients that have it’s a solo entrepreneur with a handful of products and we have clients that are publicly traded. Like, I mean, we have anything in between but what you just said, Dustin, that it really is, it’s about complimenting what’s already being done by, on behalf of that brand whether it’s a small company or a large one because there’s just so much nuance. Every category has got nuance. And can you use two variations? And what’s the review strategy or what. I, you know, it’s just, it’s endless. It is an endless list of random nuanced insights that can make or break the business because at least in my experience on Amazon is if you can get the nuance to help start in that flywheel spin in your favor, that really works. But if everybody’s using the same basic tactics there’s no way to get past that. Like if you’re reading the same blogs that everybody else is reading and you’re adding the same emoji to lead your bullet point as everybody else does, like, you know, what does it mean? Again, financial services they talk about like the market has absorbed that like, it just it quickly absorbs it. What’s the best practice that, you know, you somebody published somewhere on a blog. Well, if everybody races to do the same thing then it’s now that’s just what everybody does. And so you have this kind of this requirement to be doing unique things. And that requires I think agency partners that can see the bigger picture across dozens or hundreds of brands to on behalf of the brands that you work with.

– You’re the third person in a row that we’ve talked to that brought up emojis.

– I hate seeing those on product pages. Ah, yeah

– It’s it’s, it may, maybe years ago when nobody had one it made you stand out a little bit but it cheapens the listing for sure. That’s the consensus that we’re in.

– I am in that whether, even if there’s a 1% SEO lift the brand reputation hit that you take with a fish emoji as you know, or something it’s just like it just can we just put that to bed and not do that anymore, please? That’s my one request to your audience. Can we stop the emojis?

– I do want to jump into the PPC and we, we have lots of questions about that, but I want to touch on real quick about something you brought up earlier, just when you do hear this a lot and you see this a lot, Amazon is way more competitive than it was when Kris and I started or when you started 10 years ago. It’s so much more, it’s so much tougher maybe to launch a product in a competitive niche, but at the same time, it’s enormous. It’s way bigger than it was back then. So when you, when you win it’s a bigger win than it could have been back in the day. There’s more people that are shopping on Amazon. There’s more marketplaces now. Just touch on that, just in terms of like talking to someone who’s starting in selling and worried about competition, all that. What, where it’s still it’s still great to be joining Amazon right now.

– Oh gosh. Like, well, and it’s, I mean, if we just think about how much the market grew last year, I mean it grew by a hundred billion dollars in total sales. Now some of that came from other channels and came from retail because of, you know, the pandemic like there’s a variety of places that came but that’s not going to like slosh back to every other channel because especially in, you know call it shelf stable product categories, which is most of them, it’s pretty hard to beat near same-day fulfillment or next day fulfillment for whatever product you want. I mean, the, the, the old saying of like there’s riches in the niches. I mean, Amazon is the ultimate riches in the niches game because you can win in a vertical that would never stand at no one would ever stock your product in brick and mortar because they can’t turn it for the foot traffic that they have. It’s too specialized. But on Amazon, it’s like the ultimate niche grocery store on every in everyone’s pocket. So I think it just, when the channel is growing as fast as it is, there’s more opportunity than there’s ever been. And the ecosystem of support is accelerating in kind as well. I mean, that’s not that that doesn’t make headlines but when you think about all the different ways people are starting to use data or even, you know a platform like yours at Sellozo, like that’s a sign of a healthy ecosystem when there are more services entering the space, when there’s more agencies entering the space, when there’s more brands entering the space. Like that’s just going to help the flywheel that is Amazon spin faster and faster and faster because it’s very dynamic and there’s just a lot going on. And when there’s that kind of competition there’s gonna be huge rewards for people, you know when they, when they can make it work. But I do again, I think you can’t you can’t listen to a podcast from four years ago and think that that’s going to get you there. But I, I, you know, I’ve been listening to those podcasts for eight years and the topics are a lot. It has required a much broader set of skills and a lot more specialization than this, hey, I’m going to import it through an FN skew on the container I bring in from overseas that I bought from Ali-Baba. And I hope this works out like that. I mean, the days of that level of strategy and precision and the, you know, the near guarantee it used to be to launch a private label item. It demands more from, you know professional sellers of all sizes than it has ever before. So again, I think it’s a vibrant business but it’s also very demanding. It’s like the utmost demanding business.

– No doubt. And we talked to new sellers all the time and they’re, you know they’re trying to piecemeal this together, go to YouTube, watch a lot of videos and they’re trying to figure it out. If I had to do it all over again, I would jump into a course or some type of training because there’s so many moving parts that you just don’t know about yet. And you think you just can throw a label on something and put a UPC code on it and you’re up and running. Those days, or those days are gone. You can get your account suspended in the first couple of weeks, and then you could be really in trouble. So I’m with you. You gotta, you gotta have some, some type of group or some type of training you’re involved in because it’s just not like it used to be.

– Yeah, and I think, I mean, we’re, we’re even seeing it for Amazon is starting to become a lot stricter about you having to almost go through the brand registry process before you even get a seller central account. I mean, the days of, and again, it’s just not every case in every time, but we have clients come to us that have been in business for 20 years off Amazon. And it is a process to get them onto Amazon and maybe their products have already been selling but they’re ready to engage the market directly because of all the stuff that’s happened in the last year. And it’s a pain. Like maybe their products have a thousand reviews, but their seller has never existed before. And so it’s this big, you know, guilty until proven innocent process that Amazon is putting new sellers through. I think there’s, there’s never been more urgency that if you’re ever going to do Amazon, you’ve gotta start because it isn’t this light switch anymore where you just like, log on, fill out a form, put in your you know, sole proprietor, you know, social security number and you’ve got a seller central account that you can go make happen. That’s not how it works, versus an account that maybe you only sell a few thousand dollars a month of product, but because you’ve been in the ecosystem, building a reputation as a seller for a couple of years, you have barriers. Like some of the barriers to entry that keep getting higher are, are just lower ’cause you’ve been in the space longer, even if you haven’t been a big seller. So I think that that’s what I would tell in any of your kind of people who are evaluating whether they should get into this business. Did you have any interest at all, get a visit like get an LLC, get your seller central account going and start at least with a little bit arbitrage or something. Because if you don’t like, at certain point Amazon is going to have this question of do we really need another 10,000 in another 300 sellers an hour joining our platform or whatever the crazy stats are? You know, like do we need an extra thousand sellers a day? They’re adding like 1% overall. It’s probably not worth the risk that comes with, you know nefarious behavior on Amazon. Like they literally and when you have 5 million sellering accounts how many more do they need? So I think there was an asset to actually have an account that has reputation on Amazon no matter what you’ve been selling before you go off and import a container of $20,000 worth of product and like roll you, roll your retirement dice and hope it works out. Like, like you may not even they may not even give you a seller central account. Like, what are you going to do then? So you’ve got to get in the game. Like you’ve got to do it and you’ve got to start small. You can, you can do things and you can dabble, but learn. That’s where you talk you know, Kris about the class is I think classes make sense, but if, you know, if somebody’s going to charge you like thousands of dollars for a class, you know, what’s the thing like for those who can’t do teach, you know, or whatever and here we are trying to teach. I don’t know what that says about us, but you know it’s one of those that, that, there’s, there’s lots of that. I say there’s a lotta noise in the industry, you know of the it’s so easy. Anybody could do it. That’s not true. Again, like you gotta put in the work just like any business, just like any business trying to get into a brick and mortar retailer, like that’s hard. Like this is not a fly by night off the side of your desk side hustle that you can put an hour into every week and hope it’s gonna work. It’s not that anymore. Maybe it was, but it’s not that. But if you like, you stay small and you stay focused you don’t have to make it a full-time job either. You but, you gotta invest. You’ve gotta spend every day, you got to get educated. You gotta do these things and trying to shortcut your solution by paying three grand to some class somewhere that’s gonna give a thousand people the same instructions and they’ve been just replaying the same class for the last year. I don’t think that’s how it’s gonna like that has never worked in my opinion because the news gets old quickly. You’ve gotta stay up to speed with all the changes and that just comes from effort. Like there’s no quick ways to the top in this game when it’s this competitive. I don’t think.

– Yeah, it’s great points that you bring up. I mean, you can invest that money into an agency or into software that’s gonna help you move on, move along faster.

– Yeah, or into marketing, like not, not to do like a very deliberate plug, but in a lotta ways, it’s like, I mean the knowledge and the insight that you probably need to get started you could consume the basics in a couple hours. You know, Amazon itself is publishing the how to get started, you know, videos. And, you know, they can, you can get going pretty easily and get started. But then I would way rather put it into, you know some marketing efforts or some product development or trying to test more than one product instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. Like put it there rather than in a class that, you know everyone who runs a class gonna hate me for this, but rather than a class to have someone else to tell you their story like teach yourself some of these things or bring in an agency that actually will help you manage it, not just give you a playbook that they wrote two years ago like a two-year-old playbook needs to be realized that there’s dust all over it. It’s all old and out of date versus an agency or a partner like Sellozo, that’s in it, in it every day for the clients that they already work with. That’s what we’re, we’re in it every day on behalf of all of our clients. So it’s much, I think it’s more fresh information.

– Good stuff. All right. Let’s, let’s pivot here. And let’s talk for a few minutes about PPC foundations that you would set for our clients. You’re you’re in, you’re in it every day. There’s it seems like every couple months Amazon releases a new way you can advertise on their platform. So you’ve got lots to stay up on and those if you’re not filling those spaces someone else is a lot of time. And we talked about that on the summit, but look, okay. Someone comes to you. What the first thing you’re going to do is obviously I’m sure is audit what they’ve been doing. And then what what’s a, what’s a just a foundation, just a starting point to get started with PPC for a client of yours?

– Well, it’s, it’s a little counterintuitive but I think if you haven’t for you, the brand that you have if you haven’t filed for a trademark, do that yesterday because some of the ad properties you can’t even participate in without that, you know like you’ve got to be a legit brand. And if you’re not yet from a, you know, the USpto.gov get that started because it’s going to take six months whether you like it or not. When you have that, that opens up really important elements. And I think from where, where we sit in a strategy that we always use when we work through like evaluating how a brand is already doing you’ve got to use the sponsored products ad type for your brand name. I mean that you have to do that both from a defensive position, but also the other off Amazon marketing efforts you’re doing and brand building people are gonna start by searching for your brand. And then you got to win those and you got to defend there. But then what we what we see is Amazon understands that the advertising business as a pretty compelling opportunity as their platform means they can build their own little Google inside of their, their marketplace. So they’re gonna add more like they’re going to add more abilities to advertise. I mean, it’s sponsored brand video is a big big winner right now. I mean, that ad type is under utilized and Amazon is juicing the heck out of that. Like, we, we are getting clients that if you use that, I mean, the ROI that you get on sponsored brand videos is incredible. And so I think what I would suggest, again you don’t have to have a huge production budget to go build a sponsored brand video. Like you can literally make a, the, the right format and the right file. It could be of a bunch of stills. It doesn’t even have to be emotion. So I think you got to have a trademark so you can use all the ad properties at your disposal. You’ve got to defend your brand with sponsored products and sponsored products has the low, like you’ve got to be in that space because there’s such great ROI. But then I would really seriously evaluate sponsored brand video because not a lot of people are using it relative to the other ad types. And Amazon is really reinforcing the value of what you convert off of a video they give you a ton of credit for that. And, you know, talking about SEO value there’s a ton of drag that pulls that forward when you’re using sponsored brand videos

– You touched on the sponsor product. We’ll go to the sponsor brand video because I think Dustin are both big fans of those ’cause they, they do convert like crazy, which is awesome. But on the sponsored product side, I’m a new seller. I just got my product launched. I get to the campaign manager and I’m like where do I start? What do I do there?

– So something that I, maybe I’m a little more data-driven but especially if you have a, if you’ve gone through the brand registry process, and so you have insights from Amazon’s brand analytics, I like use that information. It’s across the top of your tool bar. Under the brands tab, brand analytics is gonna be sitting there, use that information. You can click brand analytics and go back in time a year and look at day by day by day, the search velocity. And it doesn’t cost you anything. This isn’t another tool you have to pay 50 bucks a month to like get access to this is Amazon’s own data and start looking at generic terms relative to your item. Like what’s the seasonality of your, you know food item, your sports, and outdoors your home and improve that all your tool, whatever it is start looking for the terms that actually matter and mine that information. And, and I like to encourage people to grab the ACNM and a product they’re trying to emulate, plug that into brand analytics and see what that performs well for at a keyword level. And then export that, use that as some foundational insight about what you’re the competitive product you’re trying to pursue looks like and what they’re performing well for. And then start looking at each of those keywords. You’ll get 100 keywords to look at from brand analytics, then do the work and pull those up. How well is insert XYZ brand? How well are they actually while they may be your goal product to emulate, how well are they advertising against the terms that they’re actually performing well for? I think you inevitably will find holes. You will find holes in their strategy that as you try to emulate them as where you go after ’cause you’re not going to beat them on the best terms on day one but maybe the 22nd term that they perform well for. How about we try to sneak in there using sponsored products very specifically. I like, I think back to your original question, Kris I’ve, use the data and brand analytics to see what your how well your competitors are performing and what they’re performing well for. Then you take those keywords and you put them in a sponsored products campaign, so that you’re actually able to target very specifically campaigns and keywords that your product has a chance to be successful for. And I think again, Amazon and the ultimate like feast or famine momentum business is it’s way more important to convert well on five keywords than it is to have a million keywords in my opinion. Like, if you convert well on five specific ones like it will be this like nice olive branch that will branch out into six and then it’ll be seven. And then it’ll be 12 This whole like throw a million keywords into the wind and see what happens to me is really challenging to manage and scale. And then Amazon doesn’t even give you impressions ’cause you’re never even converting. So I would rather have a client, or I would rather have give suggest a new seller start winning on three keywords and put all your budget into a thing that’s like a bullseye for your product and start winning on three because Amazon will let you show up for more. Then add a fourth, then add a fifth. And as you do that, you’re gonna organically start to like elbow some people out. And you’re going to take up space and impressions with great products are going to lead to sales and that flywheel takes off for you.

– And I got, so I got my three keywords. I’m now I’m at the match type area. There’s so many broad phrase, exact what where am I going with this?

– I, you know, I think the days of broad in our opinion are are getting harder and harder to justify. We’re very much into phrase and exact strategy especially when you’re going kind of data up, I think and a new seller. You don’t the the new seller who’s trying to get a sale a day two sales a day, five sales a day, eight sales a day, you gotta start tight in my opinion, because again you’re grounded in the data. You know, what’s going to work before you ever advertise. Now you just need to be taken seriously by Amazon phrase and exact, you’re going to keep it real tight. The moment you get into broad you’re gonna start to underperform because you maybe only have a handful of reviews. Like broad to me is a great, it’s counterintuitive to think that you would start with the more narrow focus and then go to broad as you’re more successful. But I think that represents how Amazon rewards rewards transactions. You need to get transactions to perpetuate more of them. So it’s phrase and exact match types grounded in brand analytics keywords for your competitors is a pretty compelling strategy in my opinion. And it works for us a lot.

– Okay. And now I need a budget. We get this question a lot. Like, what’s my budget. What should my budget be? And our, our default is always like around $30 a day because that’s what Amazon says. And inside the app, yes, that’s our central they’re like $30 a day. And then some people are like, okay, well I’m maybe 10 20. I’m like, you can do whatever you want. Where do you guys, what do you guys think about that?

– You know, I think $30 makes a lot of sense or between 30 and 50 when you’re getting going. And part of the reason for that is if the average click cost, again, it matters per keyword but average clicks are getting 75, 78 80 cents a buck 20, depending on where you’re at. If you’re doing $10, you’re going to get 10. You may get eight clicks in a day. You could be doing everything right. But the conversion rate on Amazon like a 10% conversion rate is still pretty good on ads. So you may just not have survived long enough on your budget to even know that it was working. So if you think about the per click costs, you’ve gotta be in the game long enough to get enough clicks to see if it works. But it also I mean, that agencies that make money off of ad spend would justify you go out and spend $2,000 a day. Then, you know, like, so there is some happy medium there but if you start small, that’s again coming back to that really tight focus. I don’t want to throw one click my entire budget of 50 it’s it’s the don’t spread the butter on the bread too thin. Like there’s only so much if you’re doing 30 to $50 that’s not a lot of butter for all of these different keywords. So put enough into one that, you know if it’s going to work or not, and if it doesn’t work for a week, stop using it and then move onto the next one. Like, don’t do so little across so many things that you don’t get any conclusive evidence of anything. That I think is really important. Again, you can do it with $30 a day. You can do it’s $50 a day but stay really tight so that you learn, hey, insert that, that term I thought I would do really well for. I did it and we did it for five days and it didn’t work. I need to put that on it now towards another keyword. And when you’re that granular about it I think you can have a really good control over where you’re spending your money and learn where you’re going to have wins ’cause then once you have a profitable sale, okay now carve out $15 just for that term. ’cause it’s working now. Let’s go back to the drawing board and put another 30 or $40 towards another term. Oh, that one didn’t work. Get rid of it. Repurpose the 30 to $40. Like you’re kind of slowly but surely doing the land expansion.

– That’s what I’m going to use next time. How much butter do you have? How big is the piece of bread?

– There’s, there’s two things that I think you’ve hit on that are just mistakes that people make that, that casting the wide net early on, it, it, like you said, it doesn’t give you enough data. If you’ve got two or three clicks each on a bunch of different keywords there’s no velocity at the keyword level. Even if you’ve got the one sale. What does one sale on one keyword going to do for you? It’s not gonna move you. And so that I think across the board is the right idea. You should be laser-focused on what, but I really love what you talked about at first, ’cause I think another mistake is is going after the word that you are, the keyword that’s the main keyword for your product early on love with and it’s so competitive. And like you said, it your competitors are already dominating that space and it would be. So I think it’s really counterintuitive. And I love it though, but get find out where those holes are and attack where there’s low hanging fruit, where there’s opportunities. I mean, I’ve, I’ve never heard it really explained that way. That’s the sort of Kris and I talked about this sort of in a different way, but that is that, that is, I think all of the people that we talk to that come to us and say I’m wasting so much money on ads. This is why they’re not focused. Like you’re talking about. I mean, it’s great.

– And, and I, I, I, again, not to, I mean, you you have lots of brands that work with Sellozo. We work lots of brands, frankly. I’m not going to let you as an outside seller come in and take one. If one of my clients is doing really well in that top term, I’m sorry, but I’m like, you you’re not gonna win that now. Like I’m just not going to let that happen because we’re one of the top three results for that term. However, popular is with an Amazon and I’m going to stay there like that’s I think this challenge is the only way that you can pick at the professional sellers at scale is not by going head to head with them because they’ve got legacy history with Amazon. They’ve got velocity within that keyword. They have history. Hence the thing we talked about earlier, you gotta get in the game, you gotta start building some kind of history. So if you’re in the game and you can work through that then you’re able to do things that let you be not the newest seller on the block, but it’s not a, you know it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that it’s gonna be real hard If you go after soda, you know soda or soft drink, you know, like that’s expensive but maybe you go down like organic, you know, zero no corn syrup, like break it apart, break it into its components and use Amazon’s real data through brain analytics to tell you. You don’t have to guess. And again, I think this is what we talked about kinda the old playbook, the Google playbook of long tail, you know, mine, the million keywords. Yes, you will find a sale there. But in my opinion, when, like what is the stat like 70% of people never click to page two on Amazon. I, I just don’t see Amazon behaving in the same way that they’ll super long tail Amazon does or excuse me that Google had and where the SEO Amazon it makes money thinking about Amazon’s motivations to make money. They make money when product sells because they do the fulfillment, they get the ad dollars they get the referral fee, they get everything. There’s really, Google’s in the business of knowledge and selling like expertise. Amazon’s in the business of selling stuff. And so selling stuff means you need velocity and turn and you, you see it throughout the business. There now it’s item level storage restrictions that they have an inventory. And, you know, IPI scores are requiring 450, 500 last year. Like Amazon doesn’t want their warehouses plugged up with a bunch of slow turning inventory. They don’t make any money on, but you know, 65 cents a cubic foot for storage, that’s not what they want. They want to make 15% off items that sell a thousand units a day. And then you have to compete all day long for advertising to maintain that space. That’s a really good business for Amazon to be in selling one or two products across this giant landscape is just not what their platform is kind of built to do. So it’s better again, to win in one place very deliberately than it is to try to participate a little bit in a hundred places.

– It’s such good stuff. All right, let’s talk about it. Cause we want to talk about more things sponsored brand video.

– Sure.

– Starting, do you recommend right off the bat? So I’ve as a part of the strategy I’ve, we’ve, I’ve launched my product. I’ve, I’ve found this targeted keyword I want to go after and my launching sponsored brand video right now.

– It’s a, it’s a great question. There’s a little bit of a chicken and the egg sometimes of where a couple of reviews really matters. You don’t need a ton, but I think you gotta be a little bit deliberate and work through your first few reviews at times. And this is again, like getting really far down, if you even want to do a little bit of vine promote like something to get a reviewer to but at the same time sponsored brand video especially on a niche keyword probably nobody’s probably doing that. The, you may be the only one in that little niche that’s going to put up a video and actually care about that niche enough to do something about it. Good for you. That’s like that’s going to capture somebody’s attention. So while reviews help I have found they’re such good click-through and such great conversion on sponsored branded video ads that you almost can’t start too soon with those. It helps to have a handful of reviews, but get after it. But just stay really focused because those are such rich properties that they’re expensive. Like if you try to go at soft drinks but if you get into that, like niche way down there at the bottom, I mean that that’s going to make a difference because you’ll be the only one that has your video with your can of your 12 ounce can of some, you know, super you know, delicious kombucha or something, you know, like like get in on that video. And then it’s also, I mean just think about how people are consuming. Like more people buy on the phone than ever on Amazon. But I, I find, I make the mistake all the time of thinking about, cause I’m on my computer what the computer experience is like, because like, Oh I’m on my computer doing research and running my Chrome extensions and all that stuff. That’s not how, especially for items that are, you know consumable products or, you know kind of brand agnostic that is great for, you know starting sellers on the private, you know private label industry, that stuff is like cater made to buying on the app. And the app shows fewer products and page one of search results. It, it, it’s harder to go to page two. It shows different content. I think you gotta do that sponsored brand video. Cause that is pretty prominent on the mobile app with an Amazon. And it has great click-through and great conversion.

– That’s awesome.

– Yeah, You can make it off of still. It doesn’t need to be like somebody running around. Like it is really huge production value. It can be a little bit of motion on a still photo, like or something. I mean get creative and, you know figure out a way to make it on a low budget. But I think if you qualify for that SPV ad, get in there, get it, get started and start with a small budget and watch what happens.

– Yeah. It’s pretty easy. I use my own iPhone. Did mine just kind of just did it real quick. It’s not like the best quality and I only did it because I wanted to get it up fast. Like I want you to get up there and I just did a quick iPhone video.

– How did it go for you, Kris?

– It’s doing great. It’s awesome. It’s it converts like crazy. So

– And I love that. Like, I feel like videos, I mean sponsored brand always had the promise of AB testing, the term that you used versus sponsored products which is just like the title. I feel like you can do a lot more, especially if you’re doing it in the way you described Kris we’re like getting nimble about it is do some AB tests around what your video is like, what, what is the thing that’s gonna catch somebody’s attention as they’re scrolling through all these products looking for one thing, be, you know be eye catching, like pop out, try some different things. And again, start with small budgets and a limited number of keywords and see which of these five videos you want to run gets the click through rate that you want and the conversions like, again, get back to these like you know, tactics that I think help you be a bit more nimble than the giant that’s just gonna throw the same video at a million keywords and throw budget at the problem. Like that’s not the strength of a lot of sellers you’re describing is you gotta be you gotta be nimble. You gotta, you know, break things down and you gotta care about keywords that don’t have the most search velocity and you gotta care more than anybody else cares about that one keyword and go win that keyword and watch what happens.

– One thing you can certainly do when you’re when you’re niching down to that specific keyword that you want to target your video can be about that keyword. That should be the thing that they see. And then you get that that’s gonna improve that click-through and the conversion ’cause they just searched it. And now here’s a video saying the word that they just searched. You can, that is a way to, and the big guys probably aren’t doing that. Like you said

– For that, you know, that garlic press that you you know, the, the garlic press that you’re trying to sell you know, make sure it says garlic press or like, you know stainless steel, garlic press or you know something.

– Yeah, terrific.

– Forget about the barbecue gloves.

– Like, look at the term. What are people, what do people care about? Dishwasher, safe, garlic press. Do you have video of it coming out of a hot dishwasher? Come on now, like get creative, like and if it doesn’t work, then get a fancier dishwasher and try it in someone else’s house. I mean try different things or be crazy and smash some garlic in it. Like, I don’t know, like just try it out. It’s way more. There’s so much more creative control over a sponsored brand video than there is what’s my option for a sponsored product? And that’s all you got, you got keywords and budget on sponsored products, like be different in the sponsored brand video because the video itself is an entire opportunity to AB test.

– Look, I’m here. But one more question then we’ll, we’ll wrap it up. What, when do you start targeting other products in your campaigns? At what point do you start adding essence to your campaigns?

– You know, as a, I feel like there’s a lot of, lot of wasted money and there’s also some like gems in the hat. And I think I you gotta have a solid business before you’re going down that path and, and solid is relative. Like you gotta be selling units, you gotta have reviews. If you’re the product that’s got two reviews and you’re targeted in Asense that have 10,000. I mean, we’re just not, you’re just not there yet. You gotta stay the course on things that are in your lane because the diversion of someone who’s on a product page ready to buy a product, that’s a brand maybe they recognized that’s expensive and hard like the click-through rate and the conversion is going to be pretty challenging. So in my opinion, it’s, I guess kind of also a little bit depends on the way that you’re, you know the property you’re using like sponsored display. And I think of in particular, that’s just hard like that. That is hard and it is low, low ROI because you’re really trying to like steal a sale right at the bottom of a funnel. That’s really tough. Now, if you start targeting some Asense, in some ways it’s a very similar approach that I talked about with a very specific keyword, you know, the top 50 keyword rather than the top one keyword you could do the top 50 ASEN, you know, like what’s what’s the one that, you know, has good momentum. It’s got, you know, two, three, 400 reviews but it’s not the 10,000 review giant, like what’s that two or 300 one? Start picking at the edge of that one. Don’t pick at the edge of the 10,000 ’cause that’s not a novel idea. Everyone wants to kick it the Coke or Pepsi. How about three layers out from that? You pick it, the brand that’s like not nearly as established and still sells off of something besides their brand name trying to steal from a brand directly that has a reputation that’s huge, it’s really hard. So pick out one, that’s still in kind of that commoditized space, just like you are. And I think you’ve got a good chance to, again pretty deliberately in small ways, steal sales here and there. Does that answer your question, Dustin?

– It does. And this has been, I mean, this is really gold for someone who’s out there starting their Amazon business. Everything that you just laid out, that this is like us seeing these mistakes being made all the time and people coming to us saying advertising doesn’t work on Amazon. I’m blowing all of my money. My A cost is 400%. You know, it’s like, we just see this and you just laid out the roadmap to how, how to not let this happen. And it is counterintuitive. It’s, you’re, you’re taking baby steps. You’re working here, working into this giant, and I mean, it’s amazing. So, all right, somebody who’s been listening to this they’re like, Oh my God, Corey, he’s amazing. I’ve got to work with him. How do they get in touch with you and AMZ Atlas?

– Well, yeah, so just, you could reach out to me directly. My email is Corey, C-O-R-E-Y@amzatlas.com. That’s A-M-Zatlas.com. Just send me an email. We love to help out. And I think again, in an, in a noisy industry like we’re all a part of where there’s, you know, get rich quick schemes and it might as well be Bitcoin like, oh that’s just not how we operate. Like I would like, you know, honest to a fault. And so we’re, we’re just going to, that’s just how it is. You know, we’re, we’re going to tell you strengths and weaknesses of the brand that you have. If we can help, we’d love to do that. But also agents, you know, agency doesn’t come free either. And you know, somebody is just, I’m not in the business of making false promises. Like we’re, we’re going to be honest about the road ahead for somebody who approaches us. But that person who wants to get after it and is ready to like hear the truth not necessarily what they want to hear, we’re all about that. Like that’s the kind of the kind of client we want to work with. That’s like, okay, I’ll put in the work. I’ll do the time. I’ll listen to you when you say that selling an item for $8.79 on Amazon is the fastest way to lose money. Like, okay, we’ve got to find a way to multipack your item or sell it for higher value. Your FEAP is going to eat your lunch. Like, you know, there’s no ego here but I would hope that people that reach out to us also have that same disposition because I can’t convince somebody to make a good decision. We just tell it how we see it. And there are some major fundamentals that are pretty challenging on Amazon. You don’t have any reviews. Okay. This is going to be a tough road. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Been done before, did it last week with a client, you know put an item in the top 10 of a toys category with an item that was 45 days old. Like we did that like that wasn’t easy. It took a budget, it took an ad plan and we made it happen. But, to think Amazon’s too far gone, it’s not true, but you have to be very deliberate and you have to focus on the nuance because just throwing the tactic at it that everybody else does is not going to get you there. Especially if you have a product that’s brand new.

– That’s good stuff, Corey. Well, I mean, I know this has been ultra valuable to everybody listening. We’ll definitely have you back on because we touched on just one tiny aspect of the Amazon space. There’s so much more that we can, we can dive into. So we’ll we’ll definitely get you back on again soon, but. Thanks so much.

– Absolutely, any, anytime you need it, you know I’ll just crack the head open and just like, you know hopefully we didn’t, you know, we didn’t go in too much jargon, you know, when you start talking IPI score sometimes people’s eyes gloss over. Like I don’t, I don’t sell radios. I don’t care about FCC requirements. Like, well, that’s changing.

– So funny. Yeah. Well we will have you back on for sure. Everybody out there, thanks for listening. This content has been great. If you love and you want to learn more pure content like this on a regular basis, please go to all of our channels where we’re live streaming this. So we live stream this on Sellozo’s Facebook page the LinkedIn Sellozo page, our YouTube channel which is called Sellozo. We’re live streaming these every day. If you’re listening on the podcast we’d love for you to subscribe to the podcast so you get notified when we have a new episode with unbelievable people like Corey. So subscribe, give us a review and thanks again for tuning in. Hopefully this has been valuable. I learned something today, so that was worth it for me. Yes, winning, winning you raised the bar today.

– You did, Corey, you taught me something, which is fantastic. So, anyway, thanks again for coming on and everybody we’ll be back at this again tomorrow. Have a great day, everyone.

– Thanks everybody.

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