Amazon Product Launch Strategy with Brandon Fishman

Introduction to Amazon DSP

0:00DSP it's something that really no one takes advantage of if you go to Amazon directly they have like a $50,000 a month for DSP so it's super important you work with an agency or a tool that has a seat on Amazon's DSP exchange it's just some different audiences that we run on there but applying Amazon marketing cloud data to DSP is really powerful especially when it comes to very similar audiences like you have for meta so now you can run lookalike audiences on there which perform really really well in an upper funnel perspective but also add to car different remarketing audiences and you can now mix in streaming TV as well

Launching Brez on Amazon

0:33well we're going to talk about another launch but it wasn't anything to do with Yeezy and it was nothing to do with anything that's really going to be in the 20s plus Millions yet but if you are an Amazon person that's like Hey how do you do this or if you're about to launch anything in that in that space we're going to listen to Brandon talk about how we just launched Breeze which was our non-alcoholic or non-alcoholic and non-infused on Amazon within the last 30 days 30 40 days yeah and it went very very well so we're gonna get kind of nitty-gritty on this right now everybody

Meet Brandon Fishman

1:06Welcome Brandon Fishman thanks guys happy to be here talk about how we launched Breeze Nick and his team did an amazing job launching this on D Toc and brought my team in to help launch on Amazon and super excited to talk about it a little bit I guess who am I first I've been in digital marketing a long time I started an agency back in 2004 4 sold that agency also started a company called vitacup it's a vitamin infused coffee business raised a lot of private Equity and built a lot of that business on Amazon so I really learned the ins and outs of Amazon teamed up with a group called cortile learned how to use AI on Amazon and then we decided to launch our own Amazon agency from all that we learned through vup and teamed up with Nick to to launch breeze so a little bit of the background

Brez's Amazon Success Story

1:56Breeze is crushing it they were the top beverage on Tik Tok shop crushing on meta ads and really growing it's a great brand huge LTV and they were kind of wondering how would we bring that over to Amazon and they also were going to launch a new version it was the new kind of non- hemp version because they couldn't launch the current version they had on Amazon so how do we grow it and how do we grow qu Subs quickly and how do we keep LTV up was really the main challenge so if you look at what we did here in the first couple months they did over a half a million on an Amazon for an Amazon launch I know it's not 19 million like Kanye West but it's a lot of money on Amazon great brand and the ads worked really really well so today I want to kind of talk to you how we did that and maybe you guys can learn a little bit about the Amazon tactics that

2:39we used little bit a little bit of a

Amazon Launch Strategies

2:43case study here the first month was just just under a quarter million which is the biggest first 30 days of Amazon really hard to launch a new brand on Amazon because Amazon caps the amount of inventory you can send in so it was kind of a half FBA half fbm launch but we were able to be pretty successful with it and this is a little bit on the launch strategy they have great creative so that part was pretty easy their team was really good getting us all the creative getting the listing set up you also have to make sure you set up brand registry which is extremely important

Importance of Reviews and SEO

3:12and also those first reviews everyone kind of knows how difficult it is to get reviews on Amazon these days so making sure you have a strong plan for that with your network with Vine with influencers getting the right SEO set up and really getting to be a fast start for those that know a little bit about the Amazon algorithm them the first 30 days is crucial and they see kind of your conversion rate your CTR your CVR those first 30 days to really determine organic rank so that was a big deal to make sure we came out of the Gates Strong and Nick and his team had a great plan too of launching email SMS everything to kind of go along with the actual Amazon launch we also launched DSP and we're going to talk about some of the other tactics too Brandon on the on the initial launch like we were going to do Amazon earlier but we were going to wait because we wanted email support and even even then like I think

4:05most of the work done you this is what you told you and the team told us as long as our keyword research was dialed from the start that's where the STL would have picked up then we were pushing email mainly for the reviews like we were trying to legally incentivize to get our our reviews up and get the people to send it right yeah we didn't want to we basically never really want to launch ads until you have a good 30 or 40 reviews on there because then it it will kind of give bad signals to the conversion rate and clickthrough rate so we got the listings up the bare bone listings up at least not even all the creative got some re reviews first and then really got going with the ads that's a little bit look on the first kind of month or so they spent just under 50 grand did about a 5.7 rowes we don't really look at rowes at Amazon too much we look more at tacos which is

Understanding Tacos and LTV

4:52total average cost of sale or spend divided by Revenue it's the healthier way to look at your metrics on Amazon because it takes into account organic it takes into account rep beat rate subscribers all that kind of stuff so really tacos is the main thing we look at and if you look at cpg on Amazon in general we'll tell you kind of the average brand has a tacos between 15 and 20 you'll see some really established brands that are around a 10 you'll see some high growth brands are even as much as 30 but as Amazon increases their fees obviously it's harder and harder to spend more on Advertising but 15 to 20 tacos is kind of that sweet spot a little bit look on the early LTV obviously not as high as Shopify but that will grow over time but it's getting up there we also look at repeat rates for every skew and really an important thing when you're looking at Amazon is to understand your repeat rate dead on on every skew and then look at

5:43the cogs and kind of figure out a CA to LTV ratio of what the brand can afford to be profitable it's very difficult to be profitable first order on a lot of Amazon products especially if it's a$ 3040 50 product so you really kind of have to look at LTV one thing we really focus on at

Subscription Strategies

6:00least that my agency is getting subscriptions up for cpg clients so subscriptions are really important and there's a few ways that we get them higher than most other people One is using SNS coupons that's kind of a new thing as kind of last year in Amazon where they can get a a discount off the first order Subs subscription and also using DSP audiences so using Amazon marketing cloud data we look at customers that have bought two times or more and haven't subscribed and we make sure we're hitting them with DSP banners and an SNS coupon and that combination really helps the subs grow the other thing we do is brand taer promos another feature that really helps click through rate and conversion right out of the gate for companies a couple audiences here for Breeze we brand cter abandoners and new customers but there's a whole bunch of brand taor promo audiences that you can run on Amazon as well and there's a new feature as of a few weeks ago to make sure the coupons

6:47do not stack so for a while they were stacking with each other now we can separate it so they can't get the brand Taylor promos and the SNS together little bit look at the title one thing that's really important in titles is kind of the first 100 or so characters because that's what you see on mobile even though there's 200 characters allowed so we make sure that

Creative and Ad Strategies

7:09it has a high conversion rate and clickthrough rate for mobile look at their creative which is really really strong it's one of the reasons they do so well on D Toc and we leveraged a lot of that for Amazon as well this is a look at their secondary images well and this you also we didn't have these to start like this is not what we launched with and then you guys were kind of like no this is for instance the the middle one so A Better Beverage infused with Organic sparkling and then vegan like those key words were the main things that kept popping up that we were competing against for kin for who's the other guys there was like one other core brand recess I believe thank you recess and kin were the two that we were trying to go hard against and then what I also which we are doing more and I think more and more Amazon brands are having to do this we're going very brand heavy on the demo we're

7:59trying to sell for which is the Miss as we see bottom left and then we're trying to show a lot more like health and wellness so we went more I guess like bushes if you will but this you were you were trying to tell us like this is more important to do this stuff this way because not many people are taking the time to do it yep and the other thing you should do is manage experiments when it comes to secondary images so test different ones you never know what's going to work better on Amazon and they have a great kind of manage experiments program also look at the Brand Story which is important and also A+ content just to show a few of those here this is a look at kind of the ad strategy that we rolled out with I mentioned this before but super important to look at lifetime value and ca for every skew and then we work with

AI and Amazon Advertising

8:45a tool called cortile which is really the most advanced AI tool for running advertising on Amazon and what we do is we establish an account wide tacos and an as tacos and we input those goals into the ciles AI system and the system hits it within a percentage point every single month so it's it's really Advanced that the way that it works it's a whole another talk but we're the ones kind of implementing the strategy and the creative and the AI Works to expand the ad campaigns in single keyword unit campaign so every campaign has its own single keyword and expands on there and this the the goals that we're implementing into the quartile system is called an i a cost so you're basically telling the system the max a cost that it can hit per as and then it has hourly and daily bidding as well this is a look at one of their reports for the first few months that spits out from the cortile system and you can kind of see the a cost and it goes up a

9:39little bit as we got a little bit more non-branded after the launch but that tacos have stayed around 13 or 14 with under their goal of 15 so out of the gate they had a big email and SMS launch with ads to help us and as we expand it goes up a little bit but stays in Focus the only issue Breeze has had is keeping all this stuff in stock because they didn't expect to sell as much on Amazon out of the gate yeah U that's why we have backup fbm listings so if the FBA sells out it goes over to fbm a little bit look at when we're putting goals into that quartile AI system on the right side there you can see that IIA cost typically what we'll do is if a company has a bunch of different asens we'll run the same IIA cost for 3 or four months and let the AI learn and then start to make adjustments based on where we see the potential scale or we have to kind of Zone down

10:29and this is a a look at the breakdown of what we're running specifically for them how how much in sponsored Brands how much in sponsored Brands video how much in sponsored display and the system will test every placement it'll test top of search middle search bottom of search we also have display that integrates in there as well we can even run Google to Amazon having a lot of success running kind of non-branded Google ads to Amazon getting a higher conversion rate than website in a lot of cases so this is just a split for this campaign but many campaigns are different I have a a dog bone broth company that we work with and 90% of their spend is on video CU it's a super competitive space and their video stands out so we kind of let the AI to help us figure out what's working and then make adjustments on the Amazon ad spend this is a little kind of display on how that AI Works with coffee as an example because I have a coffee

11:18company as well if you start bidding on an auto term on a term like coffee it'll start expanding to Broad and phrase match but every single one of those keeps growing so it's like an Accord and it keeps growing out and then it kind of Narrows in but every single one that starts off as an auto campaign will end up being an exact match non-brand campaign or exact match brand campaign and then the hourly and daily bidding works on eventually you're going to have thousands of keywords for an thousands of campaigns for an account where a lot of people just manage it manually with five or 10 campaigns we have some clients that have 20,000 campaigns that only AI can manage better than humans and it works better every time with the hourly daily bidding that I was just talking about it's kind of cool the AI and Amazon will look at time of day day of week and when you're more likely to convert so as an example a coffee company converts higher

12:10between 6:00 and 10: in the morning and a we have a sleep supplement company that converts high at night when people are searching because they can't sleep so the system knows that and it changes bids throughout the day so you can be more efficient had a lot of accounts that I've audited where they have a ton of spend at night when their conversion rate is low and it makes no sense so just a one application how AI can be used properly there's that example I was talking about and then placement adjust it something really no one does on Amazon except for quartile and a few others that needs to be done is that top of search converts way way higher than obviously middle or product page on search but it can be C very expensive for some Industries and some Industries it just makes sense to keep 100% of your spend on top of search so the AI does test different positions on search and then let you know kind of how to adjust

12:58it according L little success snapshot on just clients we put on this tool just how much their row as grows how much their increase in ad sales grows because AI will beat manual optimization every single time and then this is just a a slide to put up there to show you that about 90% of all of the results on Amazon are now paid so if you had an idea of launching a brand on Amazon without a paid budget just forget about it it's not going to happen how how how fast has that changed like it's changed considerably on the last 12 to 18 months basically since jasse took over Amazon and that their profit has gone up as well but how many of you guys are on Amazon right now yeah okay have you guys all like also show a hands how much of the profit you're making is dropping month over month basically everyone that's raising is that is that kind of just like the name of the game right now yeah so we'll

13:56go off script and talk about that for a second it's a big deal because they

Challenges and Solutions in Amazon Pricing

14:00keep raising their fees but they don't let you raise your price if you're in retail right so price match is a massive problem for everyone Walmart price matches they they price match Walmart there was a massive issue with Target this year where anyone that has their products in Target as well Target runs these thing called Target circles where they change the price but they knew that when they used to change the price it would affect people's Amazon buy boxes so for the last four years Target would just say 10% off 20% off 30% off and they wouldn't put the actual price on their site well the day before Prime day they had a new VP decided to change that and they crossed off all the pricing and thousands of Major Brands lost the buy box on Amazon we represent Proctor and Gamble for a few divisions all their tight and downies lost their buy box and you're talking millions of dollars because Target went on sale the day before so now you got this pricing war

14:50between Target Walmart and Amazon and there's a government case against Amazon about it too but you you they keep raising their price yet they don't let you raise their price there to offset their margins which is the problem so what are the ways around that right a lot of brands that we work with are creating unique SKS just for Amazon yeah different flavor different color different pack size doesn't work anymore because they will Matched on the per oun or in a gummy case a per gummy basis so you have to have a slightly different formula sometimes one of our clients we launched a pro version where it's a slightly different formula than what they have in Walmart and we got around the price match probably the most important thing impacting the whole Amazon ecosphere is this price matching thing because if you want to have a brand that goes into retail you can't go into Walmart and Target and expect to make money on Amazon if you have the same exact product so it's something you

15:40really have to think about thank you that's wild jeez then DSP it's something that really no one takes advantage of if you go to Amazon directly they have like a $50,000 month minimum for DSP so it's super important you work with an agency or a tool that has a seat on the Amazon's DSP exchange it's just some different audiences that we run on there but applying Amazon marketing cloud data to DSP is really powerful especially when it comes to very similar audiences like you have for meta so now you can run lookalike audiences on there which are which perform really really well on an upper funnel perspective but also add toart different remarketing audiences and you can now mix in streaming TV as well this is just a little bit more in some of those audiences that we run on DSP keep it there for a second this is would this be like hey as you're about to launch or consider these are the areas that you kind of need to like fill out or How

16:34would how would we execute one of these so there's a few ways to execute this one you need to work with someone who has a Amazon DSP SE which we do a couple agencies do not too many you have to have a creative strategy roll this out and you have to have the audiences you have to have enough data to create these audiences I find that you know some of these audiences that are a must are their adart audiences that Raz is over 10 every single time for every client we put it on the audiences kind of the retention audiences where you're pushing sub subscriptions the people that have two or more purchases is really crucial and those contextual audiences in the consideration realm that's basically the same thing as metas look alike and they work really really well some more stuff on DSP and where it goes and then kind of listings this is the process that we follow for all of our Amazon listing strategy kind of analyze who the leaders are establish

17:32keywords we use AI to help write all of our titles now it's it's just smarter than us so why not and then we constantly test constantly test Heroes secondaries A+ content and then monitor it daily this is an example also of little image changes that can make a difference I mentioned we do some stuff for PNG this is their image on the left you can see the image we changed it to on the right just little slight things what we do is we look in the reviews to see what people are looking for they wanted to know how well it was good at removing stains so without actually changing the package just doing some image manipulation if you can increase the clickthrough rate even .1% it makes a big deal when it comes to revenue so we do a lot of image manipulation then for a few of our clients we have one client genexa it's a kids medicine company and they learned so much from the image manipulation that they're actually changing their actual packaging so you

18:23can use Amazon as kind of a really good testing ground to see what works [Music] and brand stories and A+ content all that kind of stuff are important and then just overall strategy subscriptions brand tailor promos you got to leverage deals it's a way to kind of get other traction on on Amazon virtual bundles are a thing no one really talks about but on the product page of Amazon basically competitors can purchase ads on your page and you can block them if you have virtual bundles which is a free space for you so creating virtual bundles is kind of like a little trick and and then make sure you execute all the prime days extremely well and also doing post Amazon post and social is getting to be a bigger factor and Logistics something no one really talks about on Amazon too much but making sure you have proper inventory planning getting trucks in in time right now with prime Day 2 coming up it's taking two to three weeks to get

19:20anything checked into Amazon so if you don't properly plan you will run out and selling out on Amazon is a death sentence because you lose your kind of your bestseller rankings you lose your overall organic rankings basically never want to sell out wish we had more Breeze to send in more often yeah this has been the biggest issue right now it's like the planning your inventory strategy and then also looking at reimbursements I'll mention something that's super important here Amazon does not give you money back for stuff that they screw up unless you ask for it and almost run into a cut off October 1 they're changing it right now you can go backwards of up to 4 years to try to get reimbursements we just had a client get 4 $100,000 back that never looked at it before they're changing that policy in about 10 days so if you have an Amazon account and you haven't done this I would do it today wow that's about that's that open

Q&A Session

20:09up to questions Nick yeah let's go right into Q&A Brandon thank you bu well done hi thank you Brandon I have a question regarding the keywords like ranking and what are you seeing in terms of the weight of a conversion for a particular keyword from an ad sale versus an organic sale so the organic rankings unlike Google are exactly tied to how paid performs so if I search mushroom drink for Breeze and I have a paid ad that's up there for mushroom drink and I have a high conversion rate the Amazon algorithm will see that as effective for organic and push it up like on an equal basis that's why for a lot of even a lot of people were doing doesn't really work much anymore but people are doing this thing called search find buy for a while where they would actually pay people to do a search on a SP keyword and make sure they buy on it another reason why it's important to actually have single keyword campaign structure when you're

21:10using AI because you can isolate which campaigns are working better for search thank you [Music] yeah any other questions thank thank you thank you so when did you work with CTI on the project like how long ago was that so we actively work with cortile they're our ad partner for majority of my clients in my agency because I think too many agencies try to do too many things well I know that we're extremely good at kind of the Amazon strategy and listing side and the ad strategy and we bring them in to run all the ads worked with them for seven years is it recent where a lot of like more campaigns or the strategy to go about it is it more segmented because now we have tools that can kind of do it cuz I know before that that amount of campaigns was not normal yeah it's more of a recent strategy shift and as Amazon gets more expensive right we have to be as efficient as possible and look for every

22:18way to to win yeah I believe that Brandon oh I got another one coming up excuse me hey I don't know have a lot of experience on setting campaigns on Amazon but does Amazon try and push you in a certain direction in terms of like what campaign and Search terms to use because like Google does that to us but is Amazon trying to push everyone in the same direction and you guys are like yeah that's the right way or you thinking like you should probably not follow their advice they're very similar to The Meta people and that they have no idea what they're doing so if you've ever talked to a meta ad rep or like how did you get the job there why do you work there I have no idea what you you don't even know what meta means Amazon's kind of the same way and they're really if you if you get in touch with Amazon rep they're really pushing their streaming TV right now it doesn't really work spent a lot of money

23:10testing it they they still haven't figured it out so I would not use their advice it's weird how that is almost every platform I've heard actually some good like so you can get some good Google reps but then but they only have their job for three months and then they leave so yeah then they go start their own Google agency thank you question we have an Amazon brand for jewelry we do pretty well almost 10 million a year but we don't have any presence as in outside of Amazon like a separate website do you recommend us starting like an e-commerce website with the same name and what will be the benefit of doing that and how can we boost our Amazon through that what is your average cart size three about $250 okay for you it makes sense basically my answer would be if you're under 80 then no DC makes sense if you have a card over 75 or 80 and what we see right now is kind of the way it

24:08works Al together is you want to give people a choice right if you're spending all that money to drive traffic somewhere give them a choice and the best way to give them a choice is using the buy with prime button on your website so if you're driving traffic there they can either Buy on your website or they can use the buy with prime button and buy on Amazon and now that meta and Amazon have that immigration just like Tik Tok does as well that integration you can do the tracking on those ads as well to see what works so I would definitely set up the site and then send traffic to there and they can buy from the site or Amazon we have a small site I mean we do have some sort of presence but we don't spend any money on it we get about 7,000 people visiting in a month all organically so you're saying that if we establish some sort of presence on the website we can start utilizing that with

24:55the meta and Prime integration to push them to Amazon and the other thing I would do even more than the website is I would do Tik Tok shop it's still really in its infancy we're seeing a lot of success there and I mean the great thing about is it kind of changed the influencer world you used to have to pay influencers all these flat fees now there's thousands of influencers in Tik Tok shop you just send them the product for free give them 10 or 20% of the order and you can get hundreds of videos made and when we do that we see a huge crossover to people that actually just buy on Amazon after seeing the video so if anyone's not leveraging Tik Tok shop this is like meta in 2014 like you have to be there got it thank you yeah also on the back of that you can just do simple retargeting on almost all the platforms if you have that much organic and then on the email Flow side that's just free

25:40money I think so yeah normally normally if you're winning that hard on Amazon everything else would just start to spill over because we we want that we're trying to get that way on Amazon which is why we're having to push it hard so good for you you started Amazon Ah that's kind of that's a good situation to go the other way it's good one more in the back brand last question brother Yep this may actually be a question for the both of you but something that I noticed when someone has an e-commerce store on Shopify and then they merge their e-commerce into Amazon it almost seems like it's a double-edged sword where Shopify Revenue decreases when Amazon increases and it's really hard to understand the incrementality of the performance from the add-on of Amazon is that something similar that y'all saw when yall launched the breeze so Breeze is a rocket ship that keeps going up so I your your point makes a lot of sense for most examples they're still growing on D Toc so this I

26:45think sure you get a little bit of cannibalization but it was still people that maybe saw it and and weren't you have over half people that see a meta at us now over 50% that will go searching on Amazon so people were seeing their brand they already had a lot of brand search purch on Amazon and they weren't there so other people were winning that so now we're just converting those people smaller brands that you you have you do have some cannibalization but you have to give the customer what they want right they want to buy on Amazon that's why everyone has four Amazon packages a week at their house like you just have to be there yeah I'll cover that we this is a product that we couldn't it wasn't a COR skew but it's a skew that we know we had to launch just to be on the other places that people are buying at and like you said it was actually more of like a like a defensive play it was almost more of like people are trying to

27:28bid on our terms Brandon is like dude you're just losing all this Revenue so it was more of yes we know we can win yes people are looking for us but I needed to stop other people Brandon thank you brother well done guys we are going to transition into

Conclusion and Transition

27:45another of our first thank you of our first live podcasts with the operators jumping on stage we're going to transition give me two minutes we're back on stage here we go