We were so lucky to have Norm Farrar (The Beard Guy), Amazon and ecommerce expert, on a special webinar on how to build brand loyalty OFF Amazon. And how to drive traffic to your Amazon listings. Here are the quick high points, the replay, and the transcript for your viewing and reading pleasure.
How to Build Brand Loyalty OFF Amazon
- Norm’s website lists out all the services he offers Amazon sellers and ecommerce brands, so check it out.
- Press releases (well-done, press releases, that is) can land you in Google News, which is huge. If you choose to sponsor an event, back a charity, or if you’re launching something really cool, consider a press release to get some eyes on your…
- Well-written blog posts. Link to one of these from your press release and watch your website traffic rise.
- Social media posts that offer value are very important to create brand awareness and to build your tribe.
- QR codes as part of your product packaging (for ALL your brand’s products on every platform) can be a game-changer. Use dynamic QR codes to offer fresh value each season.
- Once you’ve collected enough emails, launch a newsletter. Norm uses paper.li for this and it takes mere minutes to create a lot of value.
- Don’t discount Shoploop (mobile for Google) as a sales channel.
- Search relevant terms to find bloggers and micro influencers (or bigger name influencers) to help you build brand awareness. You can leverage influencer at almost any budget, for (truly) pretty much any product.
- Amazon Attribution (BETA) can help you find out where your audience is, so that you can market to them effectively.
- Tune into Lunch With Norm (one of Norm’s podcasts) for other great tips.
- Check out I Know This Guy for great, fun content.
- Start a free trial of Teikametrics Flywheel to make that OFF Amazon advertising go to work for your ON Amazon ads.
Watch The Replay
Read The Transcript
Liz Downing:
Hi everybody. Thanks for coming to today’s webinar. I’m sorry we’re just a couple seconds late. But it is a Tuesday and you never know what’s going to happen on a Tuesday. I’m Liz Downing, e-commerce marketing manager at Teikametrics. I’ve got my friend Andrew Johnson with me. He is also an analyst and all around bad ass at Teikametrics. And we’ve got the one and only Norm Farrar. Norm, say “hi.”
Norm Farrar:
Hi. I don’t really… Oh, I’m red, aren’t I? I look like a tomato.
Liz Downing:
No. You look like a Norman.
Norm Farrar:
Do I?
Liz Downing:
You do. And we can see all your cool stuff behind you.
Norm Farrar:
Yeah. There you go.
Liz Downing:
So if you haven’t met Norm or haven’t seen Norm in the industry, haven’t watched one of his many podcasts, haven’t been paying any attention at all to LinkedIn, haven’t been on Clubhouse ever, ever, ever, then maybe you need to be introduced to Norm. He is an e-commerce expert. He’s got special expertise in Amazon. He understands everything about difficult marketing. He knows all about off-Amazon, on-Amazon advertising. He is just entrepreneur, coach, mentor, awesome guy, has a great beard. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.
Liz Downing:
So Norm’s here to talk to us today about how to promote brand loyalty on Amazon using off-Amazon means. So basically not using Amazon’s own stuff, not using your listings, not using… Assuming all that stuff is in place in the way it needs to be, this is how to actually promote all of your Amazon presence and your brand through other means that Norm is especially well versed in.
Liz Downing:
A couple housekeeping things first. We are recording this session. It will be emailed to all registrants. So that’s usually the first question I get and I get it about 17 times. So, yes, we are recording. This is live now but, again, we’ll send out a recording with a little bit of a recap and any relevant links to anything that Norm mentions during our talk today. So without further ado, let’s get started.
Norm Farrar:
Are you recording?
Liz Downing:
I am.
Norm Farrar:
I’m just joking.
Liz Downing:
In fact, I’ll even cc you on the email that goes out to all our registrants since you were kind enough to join us today. Also, folks in the audience, if you’ve got questions, please submit them. We want this to be an open kind of relaxed very informative but very casual conversation. That’s why we’re not doing a slide deck. That’s why we didn’t put a bunch of numbers on a screen for you to stare at. We’re just here to answer your questions and to facilitate discussion and for you to learn from Norm. So there is a question section in your go-to-webinar panel, just pop your questions there and we’ll kind of take those as we go. And we’ll leave a little bit of time at the end for Q and A as well.
Liz Downing:
So, Norm, why don’t you… I mean, I’m sure people understand that you’re a big deal because you’re a big deal. But let’s talk a little bit about you’ve got several different businesses that are all associated with e-commerce and helping e-commerce professionals succeed. Because I think that you’ve seen a space in the industry where, yes, you need help sourcing and you need help getting your listings in order, but you also need help on how to develop your brand identity and how to get that out to the world. So just tell me a little bit about that.
Norm Farrar:
About the businesses?
Liz Downing:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Norm Farrar:
Or about the brand? The businesses? Okay. So I believe in vertical integration. So the first part to this was Amazon listings. So I saw that there was an area in Amazon that if people needed help or they had a full time job, they wanted to do that. A few years ago, so we started that and we just took that over, took that stress off of people. But there’s still a huge audience out there that wanted to keep that under their own thumb and they’d rather do it themselves than have someone else manage it. So where else did we see a need? Well, sourcing and logistics. Definitely. So you need a product, every Amazon seller needs a product. So let’s take a look at doing that and doing that better than anybody else.
Norm Farrar:
How could we save them money? Or an exchange. So getting involved with Honu finance. Just getting people to understand the legal side of things. So putting together a proper PO, Chinese trademarks, a 3PL. We saw that Amazon… We decided that last year with COVID was the perfect time to leverage all these businesses going under and buy them up and get warehouse space. So now we’ve got… It’s not huge, but we went from 6,000 to 20, 25,000 square feet. And now we’re doing all the 3PL service. So that’s Honu.
Norm Farrar:
On the other side of it, communication. I love external traffic. I’ve always got it through some sort of give-away or rebate. But what more do you need? Well, you need press releases to build a brand. You need really well written blog articles. You need public relations, which nobody in Amazon does. People don’t really… This is not for a small seller. But for a mid to large seller, so many people just don’t look at public relations and earned media, getting onto TV shows, getting into magazines. So, anyways, I bought a company called prREACH and went from press releases to a communications company. Now it’s over to chat and chatbots, building… Well, buzzword today is influencer marketing. So getting into that.
Norm Farrar:
And something that nobody else was doing, getting a new system in place where people could actually launch or relaunch their product profitably instead of these maybe costly rebate strategies. So getting real people to buy the real products at a discount but these are real. It’s not through rebates. But anyways, we still have the rebate side of things. But anyways, vertical integration, so we could start to build up companies. And then also we have a social media and web design and all the other good things that come along with building a brand.
Liz Downing:
That’s awesome. So basically anything you need, Norm can do. [crosstalk 00:06:59]
Norm Farrar:
That’s [crosstalk 00:07:00]. And I’ve heard some horrible… I did belong to this chamber of commerce and people in the chamber of commerce had no idea what I was trying to do. “Oh, it’s thin ice. Oh, he spreads himself too thin.” Absolutely not. There’s some really good people that work the company for me. I just keep spreading it out so we can bring in more. We cast the net wider.
Liz Downing:
Well, and I think that’s how all smart business people do things. Right? Is that you find the resources you need in order to accomplish what you want to accomplish. We have a question that came in really early, and I think it kicks off the entire thing perfectly, which is “What opportunities do I have to promote or advertise my products if Amazon won’t let me advertise my products on their platform?” So let’s… I think that’s a really interesting question. I’d be curious to know why you’re not allowed to advertise your products. Are you in a restricted category?
Norm Farrar:
Maybe.
Liz Downing:
Or is there another problem? But pretending that if all you had in order to drive traffic to your Amazon listing was off-Amazon marketing efforts, what are the biggest power plays? What are the biggest punches that you could use that are in your toolbox, Norm, to get eyes on those Amazon listings?
Norm Farrar:
I think it was Mike McClary, back in the old ASM days, was calling this blitz marketing. Right? Blitz traffic. And I believe in that. So when you do launch something, first of all, you don’t launch the day of. You should be pre-launching weeks in advance. So you need to have, first of all, a brand or website or some social media, so when people go and they hunt you out, which they will because you’re a micro-brand, you’ve got something there. If there’s nothing there, then you’re going to probably miss out on a sale because people aren’t going to trust you. And, I say this a lot, authority equals trust equals sales. If you don’t have any of those pieces, you’re going to miss out.
Norm Farrar:
Now going back to the question, what can you do? Well, you could create a little bit of buzz with some press releases done well. Here’s just a list of things you can do. First of all, if you have sales already in existence or if you’re doing a relaunch, if you’ve got a QR code in an insert, you can drive people over to your Shopify site or WooCommerce, wherever it is. Get them over there, give them an added value product. Get them something that they want. It doesn’t even have to be a product. It could be anything of value to them. But if you don’t do that, you’re never going to get their email address. Shampoo, give away some conditioner or a sample bottle of conditioner. It could be garden shears, give away three or four packs of seeds. Whatever it is, but get that email address.
Norm Farrar:
Then what you can do is you can drive the person over, so this is just a simple upsell, down sell, cross-sell. And so you can upload them. So let’s say it’s supplements. You can ask them, “Okay, if they want the one bottle, that’s not maybe selling on Amazon, here is a three-pack. Or here is a six-pack. Or here is a 30 day subscription. Or here’s this with this.” Anyways, you can work that out any way you want. And they get a discount so now they got value there. Now they go over to their cart. Well, what do you do there? They go and they checkout. Well, you give them an Amazon coupon to go back to Amazon. So now they come from your QR code. They get their value added. They’re up, down, cross with the cross sales. Go over, if they buy anything, over to your cart. And at the end of the day, you’ve got a message saying, “Hey, would you like another 15% off or another 2-for-1 or whatever,” driving people back to Amazon. Now that’s traffic.
Norm Farrar:
Now the other part to this is emails. Can you get emails? Do you know any email addresses coming off of your website? Can you drive people from Facebook over to your website to buy product? And then you can get their email addresses. If you can get that email list, that works really well. However, you can also go over and you can get Facebook marketing, you can do Pinterest marketing. If you have a product that’s geared towards women… If you’re geared towards women and sort of… I think the age range is around 35 up on Pinterest. I think that’s the age range. They’re the highest order value on average for a group value that you can get. Pinterest is very, very inexpensive.
Norm Farrar:
You don’t have to spread too wide. You don’t have to go and do a thousand different things, different types of traffic. You want to… You might have one or two social media outlets you’re pointing to. One of the other things for traffic… This works out extremely well. Is just building a tribe or building a group. I know that my buddy Wilford and I were building a dog group. And we had 175,000 small dog owners that we could market to at any time. 175,000. We had at one point… We got banned by Facebook for this. Surprise. But we had five million Republicans that we could market to. And we had three million Democrats. They’re still up, by the way. Republicans got suspended. But anyways, yeah, they were deemed fake. But and that’s true.
Norm Farrar:
Anyways, but when you go into those groups and you have certain things that you want to sell a Republican or a Democrat, you can drill down and build other groups from that. Or if it’s a pet product, you’ve got that dog breed. Or you could break it down into small, medium, large breeds. And you build up this group without promoting adding value, value, value, value, value. And then you can promote. But the people are going to trust you. Again, authority trust equals sales. You’ll get traffic from that. All of this takes work. It all takes work. But you’ll get that traffic and keep a buzz about the brand.
Norm Farrar:
And some small things. If you have a website, add a newsletter. You can build a newsletter in five minutes. Five minutes. A high quality newsletter from a company called Paperleaf. And we do that. We have a newsletter that we put out every Monday. People wonder how when it takes so much time to do that. But people subscribe to it. And my son puts it together in five minutes. It’s what it takes. I have to provide some content. But we’re curating all the other content.
Norm Farrar:
So those are a few things that you can do just at a push of a button to get started. Build up your social media. Have a page about the brand. Be consistent. Just about that, make sure that when you do outsource this, if you’re outsourcing it, that you have somebody that knows what they’re doing. You can go and get a two dollar an hour person. But if you pay five dollars or seven dollars, you might have somebody that can do things 10 times faster. So I think that’s very important when you’re doing any type of social media. But social media and boosting posts and getting people, getting the buzz going.
Norm Farrar:
I mean, some of the other things you can do pre-launch, again if you have your product listed, you can go and apply or you can try to get editorial recommendations. So you can also, depending on what you’re doing, if you’re in a restricted category… If I was in a restricted category and I had a budget, I would go and try to either get into some magazine like Forbes, Rolling Stone, something like that which can do easily. And you would probably try to see some form of earned media, so can you get on Dr. Phil, can you get on Drew Barrymore? Stuff like that. Those are possible things to do.
Norm Farrar:
So there’s so much to do when you’re looking at trying to build an audience. I don’t know. Is that too broad?
Liz Downing:
No. I think that’s a great start. And I think that we can kind of get into the strategy of each different thing as we go along. But I think that’s a really good kind of framework for our discussion today. In terms of influencers, I just talked to somebody today who’s a specialist with mom influencers and she and I had a really interesting discussion. But we had somebody ask how early do you get into influencer marketing? So is there a pre-launch strategy for influencer marketing that’s different than an already existing selling product on Amazon or-
Norm Farrar:
Sure. Yeah. Influencer marketing is actually an area that I didn’t even mention. But that’s huge right now. If you’ve got a product… A partner of mine at The Chat Agency, he grew tons of influencers. He was able to take… This is the perfect play is if you can take your customer, get them to become an influencer, and then get them to be the brand ambassador. So they’re actually paying to play. So they’re passionate about your product, they’re still willing to pay. You’re not giving it away. And you tie them into a contract. So, “Oh, can you do this? If you post three times a month and if you do a video once every quarter and post some content, we’ll give you this plus a swag bag plus you’ll get 50 percent off or something like that.” It’s above the break even.
Norm Farrar:
So when you’re working with the brand ambassadors, they’re doing what they love. They’re pushing your product. You’re getting sales. You’re ranking. And, get this, if you’ve got this customer base, this influencer base… Let’s say it is mommy bloggers. And you’ve got this group like pulse sales on swim diapers, so you want to have a benefit or a feature, you want to show that they work. Well, we need a video showing that when you dip your child into the water that it stays dry. Or that it’s not a regular style diaper. There’s all these different benefits and features that you can show. I know he did it just recently and he got, over the weekend, he ended getting 20 to 30 videos that he could put on either live or that he can use in social media and repurpose it. And 2,000 photos. Now that was over a three month period. 2,000 photos.
Norm Farrar:
So if you think about how much a photo’s going to cost you from an influencer, whether it’s a paid platform or you’ve reached out to them, typically it’s going to cost you something. And he’s figured that over the last year, year and a half, he’s probably saved a million dollars on influencers. And he can break that all down for you. So that’s just not numbers being spewed out.
Andrew Johnson:
Wow. Hey, Norm. One of questions we got that I think is pretty good is about the Amazon contribution program. Is that something you’re familiar with and do you find it helpful?
Norm Farrar:
Yeah. Absolutely. So if you know where the traffic’s coming from, you know where to put your money. Right? So if you can track a pixel, which is really kind of cool because back in the day you had no idea where your traffic was coming from. If you can pinpoint the traffic, then you know where you’re spending your money. You can target what the ROI is, and then you know I’m getting x number of dollars back in promotion when I spend a buck. It’s ROAS. Right? Your return on your advertising investment.
Liz Downing:
So this is great. I love this question. It’s a two part, so a double hit from Barbara.
Norm Farrar:
Uh-oh.
Liz Downing:
She says-
Norm Farrar:
I got to get-
Liz Downing:
Get ready. Yeah. Take a… Wet your whistle there.
Norm Farrar:
All right.
Liz Downing:
“Why would you send the customer to Amazon instead of selling them direct on your own website? And how can you say you’re building a brand on Amazon when they own the customer? How do you get that customer to be loyal to your brand?”
Norm Farrar:
Well, first of all-
Liz Downing:
First part, why send them to Amazon to begin with? And second part-
Norm Farrar:
Because [crosstalk 00:20:18]-
Liz Downing:
When you get them to Amazon, how do you get their loyalty?
Norm Farrar:
Why send them to Amazon? Well, first of all, by sending a customer to Amazon, you’re going to be able to increase your rank. So if you’re sending them over and let’s say that they’re looking at natural soap or plastic shoe stretchers, whatever. By sending and seeing that there’s momentum going, especially during the honeymoon period, your BSR, your buyer seller rank, is going to decrease. Right? So that’s what you want. And if Amazon sees a momentum going, they’ll promote you more and more and more and more. We do a lot with linking keywords, press releases, keywords, rebates, and we’ll send that out. Now some people are for rebate, some people are not. It’s the same thing with search find buy.
Norm Farrar:
But we’ll send somebody out looking for a specific type of keyword. If I send them over to Amazon, Amazon is the largest search engine when you’re looking for shopping or buying. It’s a captivated audience. So I don’t have to go and hunt for them or find them. If my product is going up and I’ve got traffic going over there and my insert is already going to drive them back over to my website, I’m going to basically get two customers. I’m going to get the person that just wants Amazon. And then on my Shopify site, I’m going to have something that’s not available on Amazon, either a different size, a different color, a different scent. And that’s going to keep them over there and I’m going to be able to get that email address. You’re absolutely right.
Norm Farrar:
As of in two days… I don’t know if you guys know this, but Amazon is shutting down all customer contact. So no address, no name. They announced it a few days ago or a few weeks ago. And April the 8th, I believe… It was supposed to be, I thought, April 6th. But you’re not going to have access to that.
Liz Downing:
What do you do if you’re doing merchant fulfilled?
Norm Farrar:
Merchant fulfilled’s a different story.
Liz Downing:
Oh, okay.
Norm Farrar:
But, yeah, FBA is not. So, they’re really-
Liz Downing:
Well, that’s… The writing’s been on the wall there for a long time.
Norm Farrar:
Yeah. Well, they’re really trying to cut the ties. And what you’re looking at with Amazon is it is a great way for a micro-brand… So you’re not Dove, you’ve not Irish Spring, you’re a micro-brand, to get exposure. Nowhere in the history of man has there ever been a time when Bob’s Soap could go against Dove and win out. Never, ever. And if you ever wanted to launch a store, a soap store or whatever it is, you’ve got your overhead, you’ve got your inventory costs, you’ve got all these things that were against you, especially now. But it’s a fraction of what you normally would have.
Norm Farrar:
And this is one of the things, by the way, this is about promoting or marketing dollars or advertising dollars. If we were doing traditional marketing, my advertising dollars would… Right from 20 years ago, I’d always slide 20 to 25 percent into marketing. That’s what it would be. That’s not a big deal when you’re looking at the advertising that you need to put into Amazon. You have to go outside and drive traffic. Yes, it’s expensive. But your marketing is building your brand.
Norm Farrar:
And here’s another example about… And then we’ll get to part two. Hopefully I answered part one. But let’s say that I sell soap. Okay, so it’s $10 for a bar of soap. I can spend $10 on Facebook to try to get me a sale to convert on that bar of soap. So basically I spent everything on that one bar of soap, $10. Well, why would I do that? Well, it’s a recurring product. Right? So if somebody gets my bar of soap and it’s half decent, they’re probably going to reorder. So that $10 to acquire the customer was really nothing. It’s minor over the lifetime of the customer.
Norm Farrar:
Okay, now what was that second question?
Liz Downing:
How can you actually consider brand loyalty in that you’re building a brand on Amazon when the customer is actually Amazon’s customer? And how do you get them to buy from you again? How do you create that brand loyalty on a platform as big as Amazon?
Norm Farrar:
Okay. So brand loyalty, whether it’s on Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, eBay, it’s a brand. A brand is a brand is a brand. And all you’re doing is putting that brand on a platform. So it’s either a Shopify platform and there’s pros and cons. Or an Amazon platform. The ability to build the brand on Amazon has its advantages. You can grow much faster not only because it’s a captivated audience. And, yes, they own the client. However, if you build that brand and you can surround that brand with, let’s say, sponsored ads. So one of the things that we’ll do, we’ll protect our brand. Let’s say it’s Bob’s Soap. So Bob’s Soap for AMS or the sponsored brands, if it’s for display, if it’s for the Amazon sponsored ads, we try to surround. We try to own the listing. We don’t want anybody else coming onto our listing. So we surround that, and that builds the brand.
Norm Farrar:
We did and we tried to work fairly aggressively on PPC so people get to see the brand. It’s not just getting sales. I’ll run really high, especially in the beginning, PPC. Not only to, on an automatic campaign, to gather search terms or gather what’s converting and what’s not converting. But it’s to also get our brand out there so people can see it. So building out the brand on Amazon, building up your A plus page, building up your storefront, it all means that people are starting to get trust and they’re starting to create sales. Authority equals trust and that equals sales.
Norm Farrar:
Now, why keep it on Amazon? That’s what the business is if you can put up with their crap. The emails that give you a heart attack, and poor customer service and all that. If you can deal with that, great. There are lots of opportunities off of Amazon. But if you can drive over your brand over to your website and you can start nurturing it. Let’s say they come over to your website, I’ve got… You’ll love this. You’ll love this, Liz. I’ve got a… No longer a client, but a client that had 280,000 real emails, real emails, for their brand. And they never did one email. And they refused to do one email because the owner felt that it was annoying. Ask Charles Livingston if emails work for his brands.
Norm Farrar:
It’s crazy that just simple emails that can go out and if you put it onto a sequence, either a three trigger sequence, or five, or just constantly. Or texting, just doing that, you’re going to get so many extra sales. During a product launch, “Oh, you got a new scent?” “Here it is.” “A new size?” “Oh, a new gift pack.” If I had beauty products, which this guy did, and you’ve got Mother’s Day coming up, or you’ve got Valentine’s Day that just passed, you can make a fortune. But, nope, put that onto a newsletter. This is how you brand and you build your sales off of Amazon. And you don’t necessarily need to do it just on Shopify. When I’m talking about off Amazon, it’s off of Amazon that product that I was just telling you about.
Norm Farrar:
So it ended up, the company with the 280,000 emails, well, they had five times they got a hazmat warning. And it was so stupid because every time it was the same answer back, “Show the plan of action.” It was just Amazon being stupid. And anyways, it took the sales for this one product, $125,000 a month to $2600. You could not compete. You could not get it back up because of every time it got suspended. So we took it over to eBay with two other products. And with the three of them, we ended up getting sales of $150,000 a month on eBay. So you’ve got eBay.
Norm Farrar:
Look what Etsy’s doing right now. Their bounce back, it’s not just for… They’re not as strict for homemade or craft items. There’s Boxed. Who’s using Boxed? If you want to go out there and sell wholesale, sell wholesale and get your brand out there that way. Even when… Let’s go back to Amazon for a second. How many people are using B2B? Man, my camera is making me look like a tomato.
Liz Downing:
You don’t.
Norm Farrar:
Well, anyways it’s better than anything green or maybe a pumpkin. But, anyways go back to B2B. I’ve seen customers who have taken their brand who were getting… This is way before COVID. But it was wipes. These were wipes for your cell phone. And he was selling packs of 10. All right. You sell packs of 10. I said, “Why don’t we try B2B?” And we had 10-packs that you could get. So these 10-packs at 5, 10, 25, 100 10-packs ended up becoming their norm. People were buying them through business to resell and we were getting tons of business that way through the wholesale market. So sometimes…
Norm Farrar:
And we did that with refrigerator magnets, and it was schools that were buying them up. So our sales didn’t go from individuals. They were really great sales for the individual. But where it came to be the gravy was, “Oh, 25 units went to this school. 50 units went to that school.” And we were killing it that way. So that, building your brand on Amazon through those two areas, but taking it off of Amazon and just using the momentum of Amazon to build your brand and then carry over the brand.
Norm Farrar:
But your brand’s got to be consistent. It’s got to be consistent. So when you’re looking for your brand, your website has got to be your brand. Your social media… If you take a look at the social media that we do for me, it’s consistent orange, black, gray. That’s it. Orange, black, gray. Gray for the beard. But anyway, you have to be consistent. And if you are off of your brand, you’re going to tell people that you’re not consistent. If you’re… I want to even drill down… It doesn’t have to be this, but if your… The color of it is one thing, but fonts.
Norm Farrar:
So many people mess up their website and social media because they’ve got every font in… They’re not graphic artists. And the person who put their website together might not be a graphic artist, but they’re using 10 different fonts, 10 different sizes, you don’t know what it is. You don’t know what people want to do. And that’s especially with social media. But anyways, all I can say is there’s so many outlets for people. The newsletter is fantastic. I love the newsletter to keep you in front of people’s faces. Texts, email marketing. And then, of course, you’ve got your social media posts that you can post. You can boost a post. That’s fine. Anyways that’s hopefully a very long answer to that question.
Liz Downing:
She said, “Thank you.”
Norm Farrar:
Oh, and you’re welcome.
Andrew Johnson:
Question for you, Norm. I know you were earlier mentioning doing things like creating hype or possibly even pre-orders for products, one thing I’ve been noticing with my brand, I sell a very small inflatable chair brand, more just to get a feel for Amazon, which I imagine there’s a large issue with people having some manufacturing issues. Right? So right now my product is out of commission for a while. And you touched on it a little bit earlier, but what is, I guess in your opinion, the best way to start driving hype and getting pre-orders. What’s some of the best ways to do that way while your product’s kind of not able to sell at the moment?
Norm Farrar:
Well, depending on if you’re in lockdown or not, but let’s say for an inflatable chair, right, you can have a little event at a beach. I don’t know what about, but for dogs, let’s say you have bully sticks. You can create or maybe there is a rescue that you could go and work with. And there could be an event that’s around that. Not around your bully sticks, but around the event. You sponsor it and now you’re getting hype. Now you can take that information, let’s say it’s in Fort Lauderdale. So you can take that information, you can write a press release. People don’t realize the power of a press release. If you put the keywords in the front and you just say that you’re having this event, or whatever it is, and then you put Fort Lauderdale or preferably 325,000 or less, but you geo-target that event, you’re going to rank everywhere for regional keywords overnight. Overnight.
Norm Farrar:
And if you can pull in the best areas where you’re selling, you could start geo-targeting. So anyways, going back to what you were saying, create an event is great. If you can create a national event, better. So events are probably the best way. Or you can just talk about research or the benefits. Hope I don’t confuse people on this one. It takes two or three different elements. If you write an incredible blog, I mean, good blog. Okay? And you set it up properly and you answer questions so you can get into Google’s answer box, you take that and you do a very simple video that’s on YouTube. And you embed that video so people will watch the video and stay on the page longer. You publish it.
Norm Farrar:
So it’s five reasons why elderly dogs love bully sticks or should have bully sticks. Then you have your press release written as a newsworthy product like, “Grassfed odorless bully sticks are proven to be a healthy snack for elderly dogs.” So you have to twist it around. You write it and you link that to your content and then both of those link back to Amazon, you’re going to get two, three, 400 links from really good quality sites from the press release that’s linked over to your content. And now you’re going to get not tons of traffic, but you’re going to get Google looking at your information differently. You’ll be in Google news. That’s one way to get exposure.
Norm Farrar:
The other way is just to create some hype. We’re doing a contest right now. You can go to KingSumo, create an app, and just do a contest. We’re doing one for the podcast. You’ll see it tomorrow. But we’re just announcing it and it’s very simple to do. You can do it with any product. And you create a contest around your product. People have to tag you. So you’ve got a pre-launch going on with bully sticks, you can get people to buy the product and tag you with the images. Or, yeah, just have some sort of contest going where you’re getting tagged with them and the small dogs which is building out your social media, so when people come to the social media site, they can see that you’re real.
Norm Farrar:
Anyways there’s lots of different things you can do there. Hopefully I answered that.
Andrew Johnson:
Yeah.
Norm Farrar:
Good.
Liz Downing:
So this is a good one. What if you’re interested in influencer marketing, you’ve got a budget for influencer marketing, however your product doesn’t really mess that well with influencer marketing. This person says they sell fence hardware. So social media influencer content doesn’t really match their market. [crosstalk 00:38:22]
Norm Farrar:
[crosstalk 00:38:23] influencers?
Liz Downing:
I mean, are there?
Norm Farrar:
You know what? There’s influencers for everything. So if… I can think of influencers right now, the celebrity influencers that have TV shows about handyman. Right? If you can get them to influence, they’ll probably cost you a good buck. But if you go down to the micro or to the nano influencers, $10,000 to $100,000, you could probably find… I mean, it would be simple to do. Go onto Google and just you can start looking for handyman blogs. And then you can see who they are. Or go hashtag handyman in… Or figure out what the hashtags are, the best ones for that. And if it’s fence parts or fencing companies or… Somebody’s got to have a blog talking about how to do something, how to build a deck, how to build… Things that are relevant. If you know-
Liz Downing:
But it’s usually people that are trying to sell fencing or… That’s kind of the problem with that type of marketing and looking for blogs like that. A lot of time the blog owner themselves is trying to sell something of their own. Right? When you get that [crosstalk 00:39:37]-
Norm Farrar:
Usually they have sponsorship. Just like with us, you come to ours and you’re not seeing anything being sold. Nothing. But we could. We don’t. Same thing with… One of my products is soap. We don’t go out and sell any… If somebody’s on our blog, we’re talking about the community and we’re talking about how to better the community. That’s the same thing with this person with the fencing. If they’re looking at a really great handyman, and the handyman’s got 10,000 followers and you can start following the person, commenting, sending them a direct message saying, “Hey, I’ve got this new product. Would you take a look at it? I’d be interested in you sending out this product.” Now that’s a tougher one. It’s a tougher go.
Liz Downing:
Also another attendee actually said DIY, that would be another good… You could find DIY because he said the DIY world is gold right now because of quarantine. So people are still locked down, they’re still doing stuff at home. So another good one for you to find for fence parts is the DIY community, too.
Norm Farrar:
Very good.
Liz Downing:
Norm can help you, too. So back to inserts, as you know or may not know, I come from a product review background and now I’m not in that any more. But I know that you weren’t… There were a lot of rules with Amazon around what you were allowed to say around product reviews on product inserts. Are there similar rules about driving traffic away from Amazon via a QR code? Are those against policy?
Norm Farrar:
No. Here’s the deal on that. If you have something in your package or on the outside of your package, if it’s unique to Amazon then it’s a problem. So if you’re driving… If you’ve got a package that is different going to Walmart or different going to these other retailers and the only insert is for going over to Amazon and you’re driving it over specifically, then you’re breaking TOS. So if it’s all in the same box-
Liz Downing:
But if you just got inserts in all your package, yeah, inside your actual product box. And what do you see the response rate on those? Do you see a good response from that?
Norm Farrar:
You’ll either see really horrible responses if somebody’s just saying, “Join our VIP club and get special discounts, blah, blah.” Back in 2013, that might have worked. People want added value. And people are really guarded when it comes to giving up their email. So if it’s a warranty, that will get a better response.
Norm Farrar:
Here’s a trick to this question, by the way, is get a dynamic QR code. Don’t get a static QR code. QR codes that are static, just remain the same at all times, so if you change your website or your landing page or wherever you’re driving them to, it’s always going to be the same. A dynamic one, you can change that. This is cool. You can change it where it’s seasonal. So when people go to… When they hit your QR code, oh, here’s your Valentine’s Day landing page. Oh, here’s your Mother’s Day landing page, Father’s Day landing page. And it can reflect the season rather than static. So that’s cool.
Norm Farrar:
So the added value there maybe for soap would be let’s give a spring, tropical scents. In the fall, give cranberries and different types of pumpkin and scents like that. But you can change it up so easy just using a dynamic QR code. And it’s 100 percent no problems TOS. Amazon hasn’t got to the point to tell us what we can put in the box.
Liz Downing:
Right. It’s just that if you put it just for your Amazon-
Norm Farrar:
Yes, if you put it for just Amazon then, yeah, if they catch… And they are catching. They had, I forget, how many people that they’ve hired to buy your product to see what’s in the box. And they do compare it. I read an article that I forget how many people that they hired just to do that.
Liz Downing:
So it’s just got to be consistent across marketplaces.
Norm Farrar:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Liz Downing:
We did have a question about reviews. They’re amazing to receive when someone purchases. What’s the best way to drive up reviews? How much of an impact do reviews have on Amazon besides, of course, letting other purchasers know that your product is good? Now we know that reviews impact your seller health and they also impact your organic ranking. Right?
Norm Farrar:
Yeah.
Liz Downing:
But there are a lot of rules.
Norm Farrar:
Yeah-
Liz Downing:
So within Amazon TOS, what are your top tips for getting reviews on Amazon?
Norm Farrar:
Okay. You could go in to manage orders and request review. There’s automated programs that go in and do that. You can go and you can go and use these more automated mailing tools that still allow you… You can’t do them both. So you have to either do the one or the other, which gives you a better looking email than the standard one that goes out.
Norm Farrar:
I don’t… I haven’t been targeting emails. We used to have the typically three sequence emails in the past. We stopped using them years ago. Most of our reviews now are driven organically. Here’s the secret, have a great listing. Have incredible customer service and you’ll get probably between four and seven percent. That’s what we find. You can… There’s no problem requesting a review. You can just say, “Hey, you’ve received our product,” give them a week to try it out, and “We’d love it if you could give us a review.” Not positive or negative or click here if negative.
Norm Farrar:
And I have been… I got a ring light here. Right? And this is about my third or fourth ring light because I hated the other three that came in. I sent them back. But they sent me reviews. They wanted and they said, “If it’s good, click here. If it’s bad, click here.” And tons of spelling mistakes. It was horrible. So anyways, reviews strategy is just have it come organically. There’s all sorts of ways that you can… If you’re passionate about your product or if you’ve got people that are talking about your product, you can definitely get them to leave you a review. The trick is can you get them to leave a review on Facebook or on Google or… And that’s when you come over to your website and you can start targeting with emails about Facebook or Google or wherever you want. And usually you can just send them a link, “Click here to my Google My Business page.”
Liz Downing:
Because I think it is important to have social proof more places than Amazon. Obviously reviews are part of the sauce in terms of how often you get seen and that impacts everything about your success on Amazon. But having the social proof on Facebook, having it on Google, having it on your own site where you’re free to use those reviews, too. Right? Facebook’s never going to tell you that you can’t post something that somebody said about you on Facebook somewhere else. But, Amazon, the reviews belong to the reviewer and you need the reviewer’s permission to post them anywhere else. So your widespread social proof off of Amazon is also important because that’s social proof you can leverage.
Norm Farrar:
[crosstalk 00:48:08]
Liz Downing:
You can’t leverage your reviews for anything but increased success on Amazon.
Norm Farrar:
And don’t forget, you can also get a pretty good following in Amazon Live and posts. Now that you can get followers, every time you go live, boom, these followers are getting a notification, which is kind of cool.
Liz Downing:
Are you working with Amazon profiles at all?
Norm Farrar:
No.
Liz Downing:
Because isn’t that the spot where you can put your website? They let you put your website there?
Norm Farrar:
Yeah. That’s the new feature. Yeah. It’s still in beta, I believe.
Liz Downing:
Yeah. It is. It is. But I just wondered-
Norm Farrar:
And that’s brand story so its… Yeah. That’ll be that one so you can see where they’re going. They absolutely want to sell brands.
Liz Downing:
So let’s talk about Amazon Live for a second and then I want Andy to talk a little bit about once you get your off-Amazon ad strategy in place, then what is the quickest lever to success with your on-Amazon advertising, since he works in that world every single day. So get ready, Andy, you’re next.
Andrew Johnson:
Okay.
Liz Downing:
But let’s talk about Amazon Live for a second because I’ve heard mixed reviews. Right? I’ve heard some people say… I was talking to Rachel from Cascadia and they’re doing that for their clients. And they’re seeing good success. But it’s got to be kind of the Billy Mays repetitious infographic or infomercial kind of format. There’s a strategy to when you should do it. If you can get somebody who’s already ranked up to do it for you instead. I mean, so if you’re just getting started with Amazon Live, what is the greatest way to see early success?
Norm Farrar:
Pick up your camera, turn on Live Creator, start talking. That is the first step. So a lot of people have a problem going live. I have a problem going live. It took me forever to kind of even get half comfortable with it. And I’m talking about just in general. But you can practice. Just go on there. If you don’t mess it up, I don’t think you’ll be that successful. People want to see natural people talking. And it doesn’t have to be an infomercial. Yeah, you can go and get the infomercial style. But people are still… I’m finding with posts, my best posts are my worst photos. These are the unboxing ones that people give in. These are people that sent in images from work using the product, not professionally or polished images.
Norm Farrar:
And that’s the same thing with Amazon Live. Live is live is the best. So if you can go live. But if you’ve got pre-records from your influencers, too, and you get their permissions. Which by the way if you are getting into this market and you’re building up influencer marketing, who owns the content? Get that up front. Because you could pay $100, you could pay… Ask Paul. You could pay $7,500 and who owns the video or the content? And you’ll be surprised. If you don’t ask, the influencer will own it and it’ll be on this channel or this, this, and this channel and you can’t use it on Amazon or you can’t use it here, here, or here. And you will get that email saying, “What the heck are you doing with my content? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” So just be careful about that too.
Norm Farrar:
Because reposting, especially with Amazon Live using influencers to pre-record it up on their… It’s great. The other little tool that you can use that nobody uses is Shoploop, which is Google’s platform for individual influencer marketing.
Liz Downing:
Shoploop.
Norm Farrar:
Shoploop.
Liz Downing:
We’ll link to that in the show notes. We had one question and that is, “Wait, I thought you couldn’t point users to an external site in an Amazon review request.” You cannot. Do not ever, ever. If you’ve got an insert, don’t ask for a review on it. Just period. Don’t ask for a review on an insert because it’s pretty much just not okay.
Norm Farrar:
Yeah.
Liz Downing:
Just don’t do it. Follow Amazon’s policies and procedures regarding reviews at all times because they will suspend you for reviews abuse even without you breaking the rules. Even if you just sniff of breaking the rules, you can get suspended. So just don’t break the rules at all.
Liz Downing:
So we’ve had a great crash course on the different things you can do, press releases, influencer marketing, emails, newsletters, blog posts. Once you’re driving… And all of that is considered organic traffic on Amazon because that’s not the traffic that you’re driving with the ads that you’re buying on Amazon. Right? So what we specialize in at Teikametrics is your on-Amazon advertising. So, Andy, what do you tell somebody day one, how much… I guess is what I’m asking. How much does that organic rank that we’re building from off-Amazon, how much does that matter when you’re starting your on-Amazon advertising?
Andrew Johnson:
So, it’s huge. Right? The more organic traffic you have your product on Amazon is just going to, just mean better and better things for your brand. So the more eyeballs you can bring externally, all the things that we’re talking about here with what Norm’s saying is amazing. So the more you can do that, just the better it’s going to help. And, of course, with your advertising as well, the way it works on Amazon is the more you advertise, as long as you’re doing an effective job, you’re going to see Amazon they’re interested in having happy customers. Right?
Andrew Johnson:
So the more actions you’re driving to your page through Amazon, so things like impressions, clicks, ideally positive reviews, and conversions. The more of those things that are happening on your page, the happier Amazon’s going to be. And they’re going to start driving you more traffic organically just because they want to have more success. So all these things, definitely all the external stuff, the advertising too, name of the game is always getting as much organic sales as possible because those are, of course, the great sales that you’re not paying the extra fees for, at least on the Amazon side. So definitely that’s always what you want to be shooting for.
Liz Downing:
That’s awesome. So Norm has two podcasts. Is it two or is it three now?
Norm Farrar:
No. It’s two.
Liz Downing:
It’s two. So there’s Lunch with Norm-
Norm Farrar:
Yeah.
Liz Downing:
That is… Which days per week?
Norm Farrar:
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Liz Downing:
So three of those bad boys. And I’m going to put a link to LunchwithNorm.com, which is not hard to remember, but I’m going to put that in the show notes. I really encourage everybody on this… Those of you that have questions about product inserts. Those of you that have questions about other channels we didn’t mention, like Tik Tok, Norm is covering all of this stuff on these three times a week podcasts with industry professionals. He’s got Kevin King all of the time, that guy knows what he’s talking about, too. It’s a tremendously helpful podcast. And then he’s also got… I know this guy and I’m going to link to that too because that is super fun and it’s my favorite.
Liz Downing:
So, Norm, thank you so much. It’s always such a pleasure. You’re one of my favorites to have on. Andy, thank you for coming, too, and helping me out. Thank you everybody for attending our webinar today. Stay tuned later next week, we’re going to be talking Yael Cabilly and Michal Baumwald Oron about all of this frenzy to buy up FBA businesses. They’ve got a company called FortuNet, so that’s this Thursday. So y’all can go to the webinar’s page on Teikametrics.com and sign up for that. And, Norm, we’re going to have you back soon.
Norm Farrar:
[crosstalk 00:56:14]
Liz Downing:
Thanks everybody.
Norm Farrar:
See you later.
Andrew Johnson:
See you guys.
