Name: Amazon Prime(r): Insider tips to successfully sell on Amazon
Uploaded: 2025-09-24T18:31:27.155Z
Duration: 1 h 20 s
Description: Amazon Prime(r): Insider tips to successfully sell on Amazon

Transcript for "Amazon Prime(r): Insider tips to successfully sell on Amazon": Hey, everyone. Welcome. I'm Monica. Some people call me Momo from Saltbox. And I'm gonna be your host today on this session about Amazon Prime insider tips to successfully sell on Amazon. We designed this session to cut through the noise. I know there's a lot of information out there about selling on Amazon, but we have two expert speakers here today who, are gonna walk you through some known strategies. So this is all about what actually works when building on Amazon, and you'll leave a strategies you can actually use tomorrow. Before we get started, I would love to hear where everyone is tuning in from. So if you drop your location in the chat, maybe a little blurb about what your business is, what you're selling, would love to hear that, as we move through the slides. So here's our road map for the next hour. We're gonna be starting by setting expectations and then diving into Amazon as both an opportunity and an obstacle. That's important to know. From there, our experts, Jovan and Harriet, are gonna take you through their frameworks, followed by a live panel and q and a. So we'll close with some resources and ways you can keep the conversation going. But in the meantime, if you have any questions throughout the event, drop that in the chat or the q and a tab, in the right hand corner, and we'll answer that at the end. Before we dive in, I do wanna introduce us. So who we are and what we offer. Here at Saltbox, we provide the flexible infrastructure and support that helps entrepreneurs start, grow, and scale their business. We're home to more than 900 businesses across The United States. So mainly ecommerce, but we also cater to, folks like to call project pros. So any interior designers out there or, logistics experts, we cater to them as well. And we make it easy to run your operations. So we have three core categories that help you do that. Storage solutions for every stage. We have on-site carrier pickups. So if you are shipping, that is gonna be crucial for your business as well as pallet and package receiving, so you can spend less time managing those logistics and more time building your business. So while we're here, I wanna level set a little bit. This session is all about real talk on Amazon success. Like I said, we're gonna mention those actionable strategies, the realities of selling through, Fulfilled by Amazon or FBA as we call it, and those proven growth levers you can actually use. I do wanna mention what this session is not because I think that's equally as important. There's not gonna be any theory, fluff, or, you know, little hacks that are just kind of thrown out there that everybody's using. The best way you're gonna get the most out of this session is to engage. So make sure you're jumping into the polls that we'll be launching. Like I mentioned, drop your questions in the q and a, and you can chat with us along the way. Ashley, our community manager, is live in the chat to answer any questions while we go along. Alright. So we all know we're all here for the same reason. Amazon is the world's biggest marketplace. It's also one of the trickiest to crack. So we're about to hear from two experts who live this every day. And first, let's get a pulse. What's your biggest Amazon headache? Ashley is gonna be launching a poll very quickly. Just wanna hear from you guys. If you are selling on the platform currently, what is the most complex thing that you're facing right now? Oh, and there's the poll. So Ashley just launched that. Go ahead and let us know, and we'll share the results right on the screen. K. We have optimized listings coming in. That's been a challenge. Branding and identity, close second, running ads, logistics and fulfillment. So it seems that's pretty even, across optimizing listings and running ads. And thankfully, those are two things Harriet and Jovan will be talking about today, as well as the other two items on this list as well. Let me get my slides back here. Alright. So now we're gonna go ahead and meet our experts. First up, we have Jovan. He is, from ShopHowell, which is an ecommerce agency complete with comprehensive services. They have bespoke consulting, curated, educational courses, which are really great, to amplify your ecommerce footprint and drive tangible results for your brand. So I'm gonna pass it over to Jovan to tell you a little bit about himself and Shahao. Let me just bring him up on the stage here. Oh, there he is. Hey, Jovan. Hey, guys. I'm doing fantastic. And it's good to meet all of you. I see all the amazing people putting in where they're coming from. I see, I think, Ashley Wright, I think she's also in Miami. I'm currently in West Palm Beach. I'm calling in, and honestly, you know, for me, ecommerce has been a passion. This put it up about nine years ago, but didn't really get into business up until 2020. Decided to slowly start into the agency space back in 2022. And so it's really exciting to be here and seeing all these amazing different brands. For us at ShopHowell, our passion is helping and empowering businesses because at the end of the day, I think this is an amazing opportunity for those of us who grew up. And you were essentially too late to take advantage of Bitcoin. You were probably thinking to myself, man, I miss this whole investing in Tesla. Well, ecommerce is the thing where you still have the opportunity to make something of it, and I'm gonna tell you why. So by 2040, Nasdaq estimates that 95% of all sales will be online. Let me repeat that. By 2040, Nasdaq estimates that 95% of sales will be online. Right now, it's roughly about 2022, 23, and it's grown exponentially since COVID, which really accelerated that push. And so if you think about ecommerce being, you know, a slice of the pie, there's a lot of ways to go where it's gonna eventually become the whole pie. Right? And so being here and being able to get this insight, I think that's incredible. One for two things. One, you might be thinking I'm a small company. How can I take advantage of this? I'll tell you, and I think, even Harry can probably get some some credence to this, is that, surprisingly, a lot of the big companies actually struggle with Amazon even more. Why? Because they have, in some cases, hundreds, if not thousands of items in their catalog. They are probably trying to hire people and there's not enough of them, frankly, because ecom is relatively new. And so they often struggle even more so than a smaller brand who can be more nimble, more precise, and frankly, at the time to be more authentic and communicate to customers. How many times have you scrolled on Amazon and seen the top sellers being some nobody brand with a name you've never even heard of beating out big name companies? So just putting it out there. You're in the right room today. But, yeah, that's a bit about me. A fun fact, I've circumnavigated the globe relatively early in my life. I did semester at sea. It's an amazing study abroad program where you're able to travel around the world on a ship and take classes and literally have the world be your classroom. That was an amazing opportunity for me to understand more about the world, more about its people, and more about the geography because I think a lot of times, especially in these days, we all think people are so different. But when you really go out, you see people in other countries and you really get to sit down and talk to them. And frankly, sometimes literally just use your phones, just swipe messages, and then you're back because it looks like the same thing. You get to learn that we're all so different and we're all so curious about each other. So that's one little fun fact. But do you want me to jump into anything or you're gonna I'm gonna introduce Harriet first, and then we will jump into your section. I know you're eager because you got a lot of good stuff. Okay. Thank you so much. That is a very fun fact. And also, the staff that you mentioned about ecommerce being what you said 95% online, by 2040, that's a huge jump. So I'm curious to see how that pans out. And next, I'm gonna introduce Harriet. She is the VP of advertising at Nectar, which is a premier fully managed ecommerce services agency, which helps brands grow not only on Amazon, but other platforms like Walmart and Shopify as well. Harriet, I'm gonna pass it to you to introduce yourself. Oh, I think you're on mute, Harriet. Thanks, Monica, for the introduction. Hey, everyone. I'm Harriet Carson. I'm the VP of advertising at Nectar. Nectar is a full service advertising agency with a focus on retail media, specifically Amazon. Nectar actually acquired a company called iDrive back in January, which I was a cofounder of. It's an analytics tool, and it's been really cool to just see Nectar employees as well as the brands that we work with adopt it. What it does is it really focuses on combining ads data, sales, p and l or profit and loss data, and really customer data from Amazon Marketing Cloud. It's also omnichannel, so you can pull in other retail platform data as well as your d two c. Essentially, the platform gives you really all the data you need for smart ecommerce decision making, gives you actionable insights to ensure your spend is efficient. Over the past about ten years, I've worked with brands of all sizes from emerging start ups to really established household names, really just helping them scale in the ecommerce space profitably by using the right levers to build long term momentum. Before I was in the advertising space, I actually used to be on the fulfillment side at a three p l that was focused, on Amazon FBA and really focusing on launching brands on Amazon before Amazon was what it is today. And I've been really impressed with the work that Saltbox has done. So was very, very grateful to be invited to speak here, and I'm looking forward to talking with you all about advertising strategy and the challenges that you're seeing. Awesome. Yeah. I didn't know you were at a fulfillment provider, so that's a really cool fun fact. I love it. So we talked about Amazon, as both an opportunity and opt and an obstacle as I mentioned. But how do you actually turn the chaos into success? That's where Jovan comes in. He's built a framework that takes you from strategy to sales without the guesswork. Jovan, will you please come back on and walk us through your shop method? Awesome. Yes. I will. And so one of the key things about understanding what the SHOP method is is we built it to kind of be a simplified way of understanding the order of operations. Right? I think we've all been to math class and, you know, PEMDAS. That's a typical one we all do. Please excuse my beer on salary. So for us, we created the shop method because we were seeing a lot of brands making the same mistakes over and over and over again. They were doing things out of order. One, some of them didn't do any research. They were just posting their products because they believe that age old mantra that is not true or if they build it, they will come. Unless you have a cure for cancer, that's the only thing where I'm thinking if you're gonna go to market, people will literally hunt you down and try to find you. But unless you have the cure for cancer, you need to basically start off with just doing some market research. Seeing how big your market is, seeing all of those things, and then piecing it all together. And then I'll go on the rest of it later. But the point is, this is something that we've been integrating for several years now, and it's been instrumental in helping to help many of the brands we work with understand, frankly, that this is something critical. You need to move in an order not just to basically achieve success, but to avoid those common pitfalls that often leads people to make mistakes, promote ads before they even have their listings optimized, and ultimately, they are not because they have a bad product, but simply because they didn't do things correctly. So the pro tip that I have in here, and this is something that I believe Harriet will touch on greatly, and I'll touch on a bit in my strategize. So the pro tip is basically, even when you strategize, even if you hone correctly, even if you optimize and promote, this won't help if you don't even understand the unit of economics. This is something that people need to understand because revenue is vanity. We talk to people that were making sometimes a million dollars, but they could have literally sales that are not even 6 figures, much less than that. And so you need to understand your profitability, understand, that ads amplify, and they do not fix bad margins. I'll leave Harry to touch on that a little bit later, but I'll kick things off with strategize. Right? This is the first step in the shop method. And this is mainly because you need to understand what's going on in the market first. You need to understand your product. You need to understand what your competitors are doing. You need to understand your market size. Right? These are all things that will dictate not just if you should go online, but how you're gonna compete and how you're gonna win. I'll give you a perfect example. One of the first brands that we had did a discovery call with, this was back in 2022. I still remember they were selling Zodiac keychains. And so one of the tools that we use when we help to understand even the many of our clients, we use a tool called Helium 10. Right? It's one of the main tools, Helium 10, Jungle Scout. We use Helium 10 because it's awesome. But when we quickly checked and we looked at how many people are in the space for Zodiac keychains, it was an astonishing and astounding, of tremendous $20,000 per month. Right? Meaning, if they controlled a 100% of the market, they would make a whopping $20,000. Now let me let me be real. Right? Whoever owns a 100% of any market, Right? No one. You're gonna likely start out owning maybe a fraction of a percent. But if a market that is that small, they were simply in a niche that was probably unable to grow. Because think of it this way. If the success is there, people are gonna start selling those products. And so that doesn't necessarily mean though I wanna make sure I'm clear about this. A market that is very small doesn't mean that you can't compete. It just means you have to put up a lot of capital to advertise and to make it literally successful. You have to literally pay to drive traffic. And so because the client didn't have that type of money and we explained, frankly, this is the situation, she made the wise decision of saying, okay. Well, I don't think this is gonna be the right decision. And this wasn't a situation where we were like, you know, yeah. You'll be fine with giving your money. We had to kind of just be clear with her. And I think a lot of times people make this small mistake. They go into a market that is not mature. They go into a market that is supersaturated, and they have very little differentiation. And so as a result, they get lost in the weeds. So the key thing about the strategy is you need to understand what the marketplace is looking like, And, frankly, you can learn a lot that you can then bring into the next sections that I'm gonna go talk about, like, home. Because if you even do some basic work, right, looking into your top, competitors and look at their reviews. What are people complaining about? What are the things that you can basically capture, like and see, hey. Maybe the people don't like that this product does x y z. Well, guess what? You can then in your listing, when you launch your page, you can dote on that aspect. And I'll actually even give you guys an expression of that in a moment. But these are the things what what strategize can do to help you stand out because it gives you a sense of what's happening, gets you a pulse to the market, and help you to inform and define your strategy. But let's say you get past this part this part. Right? And you're done strategizing, you got the research, you understand everything. Now is where you hone. Hone is about building your brand. And this is the part where I've seen personally brands struggle with the most. Why? Because a lot of times people think that they're expressing something, but nothing is really communicated the way that you think it is. And that's usually because they don't understand even how they're targeting their market. And I'll give you an example. Many brands, especially the big ones, and this is why I say sometimes they falter, they have built their entire systems around retail. They understand the retail market. They know how retail works. But the thing is, ecom is a whole wild wild west to them. Right? So the thing is, you have basically an advantage there. They're so calibrated and, frankly, they're like a giant tanker ship. It could take them sometimes miles to slow down, metaphorically speaking, these big companies. But you as a company, you're small, you're nimble more than likely. Right? So you have the ability to shift, change. And so when you understand your brand and you can better connect with them, you can create a brand that really stands for something, that's what's gonna give you the ability to stand out. And so by having your brand being fully formed, having a story that resonates with that target audience, that's how you're gonna make an impact. Now a simple way that you can even think about this, right, from, you know, we're talking about, the home. Do you have a brand book? Right? Do you have, brand colors? Are they consistent? Is it something where people see it? They can go, oh, yeah. That's this person. Does it have a voice or tone? What I mean by voice or tone is when your brand communicates, is it very jovial? Is it very funny? Is it very serious? Are you coming across as an expert guiding and coaching people? These are all things that sometimes brands don't fully understand. And the truth is that's okay. Right? Your brand is an ongoing work in progress. But this is one of the key things that we often have to help our customers with because they have an idea. They wanna succeed, but sometimes that means slowing down and figuring out what is your brand's promise? What is a gift to the world? And after we get all of that, then we can start to craft how that means because branding is all about basically intentionally shaping the way people see you. And you want them to see you in the way that's gonna help get you sales. Right? It can't just be just posting a picture that you just stick with their smartphone. It's being very intentional, in how you communicate that point. But after you got your own and you basically built out your brand, you got the idea, the next step is to optimize your listings. Now optimization can come in many forms. And I'll give you some examples. Right? I mean, it's 30 on the page, but it's SEO. It's under someone where to place your keywords. It's making sure that the hierarchy is set, and you're tackling things in a proper order and understand how they fit into helping you to, make a perfect image. Right? So I'll actually take a moment to share that with you. Give me a second to share. How do I get back to that, miss Monica? It was saying stop sharing for a second. I wanna make sure I can do that. Am I there? Oh, can you see my screen? No? Okay. Let me see. Monica, how can I jump to that oh, I see it? I think I see it. There we go. I found it. Just my screen and it'll share for you. Awesome. So here is an example of optimization. And I'm actually gonna be sharing with you a product that we're actually working on right now. So I think it's sometimes better to see it. So this is a product that is already on the market. This is the as it is right now. Right? So Amelie is an oil company. They're actually based in Tampa. And so one of the things that this company has, is a long history of helping people to purchase oil and lubricants. They're amazing company. But the thing is they've always sold primarily in retail. They've always primarily sold, to, you know, people who are mechanics. So one of the things that we have to point out to them is that, you know, now that you're trying to sell to customers that could be someone who's a DIYer, you know, someone who's just trying to do maybe oil breaks that change your oil brake fluid at home, you have to kinda break a lot of this stuff down. And so as you can see here, their listings also, they were doing the best that they could at the time. It doesn't really tell you much. You're seeing the bottle. You're seeing a box. So for us, we've had to go go through several different iterations, and we're still not done yet. Because even for us, we're trying to basically dissect down what does this product do, what is the main value. But for the sake of time, I'll only go through the main image. Right? This is the first thing that I think most people don't understand. Your main image, if it's not something that's gonna stop you when you're scrolling, it's not gonna get you sales. Right? And so we kept looking at what this product looks like, and we tried to look and understand at what is this product about. Right? It's a Dopplery brake fluid. It's something that has to be to regulation. And I'm like, this doesn't look good. There's too much stuff on this bottle. It's not communicating anything that I get. I see caution, Percasion, Lolito. I'm like, look. We're selling this in The US market. Let's get something that's gonna look and be impactful. We did another iteration. I see this one, and I'm like, first of all, that's not good enough. Motor vehicle people aren't putting in their coffee or I hope people aren't crazy enough to do that. Let's keep going. And so we just keep iterating. We keep playing with it. And I'm like, I think we're getting into a good place here, but we need to really highlight the fact that this is a 12 count case. And so this is gonna be likely the near final version of what we're going at. But as you can kind of see, this success isn't something that is it happens all at once. It's something where we're kind of going through this over and over and over again as a team internally before we even post it because we're trying to see what is the main thing, what is this product about, and even doing our own research along with talking to the experts on their team to finalize what we think is gonna be this one right here. Right? But even aside from that, we are still working on adapting multiple different areas of what their images are. But the point is we're trying to find the best thing. Or I'll give you another small one before I I cut to the next page, but, you know, protect and preserve your braking system. Right? We're trying to give people the understanding. What the heck does this thing do? Because most people probably didn't understand what brake fluid does. I really didn't. So I was like, okay. This looks great. This looks cool, but protection preserves, that should be coming across rather visually. So I said, let's put a shield in there. So we we got a shield in there. And the second to last one that's not done yet that we're gonna be implementing is putting a brake panel or a brake caliper that you see here behind the bottle. And what's that gonna do is this is how I think about it personally. It shouldn't matter if I speak English, Chinese, French. This picture should speak for me. And that's why I think everyone should look at their pages, look at their content. Even if I don't even know what this is, when you see the shield, when you see the product, when you see the break, it should almost come together in a way of, I think I know what this thing does. Right? It's small little bits like this. Even this one over here because frankly, this is not even the scale if you can tell. But the point is we're trying to send a message. This is the next leading competitor. We use their brand color. That's like a bit of us, you know, throwing shade at them. But the point is to say, yeah. We're still better. Right? So I kinda wanted to give you guys this visual representation of, like, even how we try to do things. So I think it's important to understand that, you know, who you're selling to in retail, you're selling to online. They're different people, and so you have to figure out how do you break things down. Even something as complex and difficult as in this case, it's brake fluid. How do you make it something where people can understand? It's confidence in every stop. It's having the highest dry and boiling point. It's that it preserves and protects your braking system. Even if you don't know what brake fluid was, by us even putting these messages out there, you're already getting the picture. And that's the idea behind, putting the SHOP method, together. So back to the presentation, Monica, and I'll try to close out relatively quick just to give some time for y'all. But, I also have a before and after. This is one that we did a couple years ago, but I still think it's super relevant. Right? This is the pre optimized listing, and I wanted to show this one because I still remember what the conversion rates were before and after. This was converting at about 8%, meaning if a 100 people went on the page, eight people were purchasing. But when we converted it and these are just some of the changes that we made. But you can see the difference. Right? It's putting in, you know, that kind of big splash of heat. We showcase pictures of the Scotch bonnet peppers. We showcase that. It's just made with five simple ingredients and just showing them. It's making it as obvious, as sensible as possible. This is how we were able to bring it up from 8% to 23%. Now think about if you're paying money on ads. Where would you rather convert at? 8% or 23%? That is the difference between having something where you have a strategy, you hone, and you optimize. And now in this last part, now is when you promote. Now is when you do the ads because now everything is coming together. Everything is humming. It's in harmony, and that's the point where you start bringing your success, to the forefront. So in the shop method, I would say even a simple way that, you can think about it is the s, the shop sorry. Sorry. S in strategize. Think of it as the blueprint if you're thinking about a home. Right? You wanna get the blueprints ready. You wanna get the idea, the concept, everything of what you're building. Tone is the foundation. You're building that foundation that everything is gonna rest on. What is my branding? What is my brand about? What do I do? What's how does my brand make a dent in the universe? Then the o, the optimization, that's where you kinda think about the structure, the what's gonna hold up the roof and everything. Then promotion, basically, think of it like electricity. Right? It's the thing that keeps everything going. It keeps everything flowing. But ads are the last stage because it amplifies everything else. If you don't have good optimization, you're wasting your ad spend. If you're targeting the wrong person, you're wasting your ad spend. If you don't have a brand identity that really sells, you are wasting your ad spend. That is why key is last. If you follow these steps, I think you'll have a very strong chance of being successful in your Amazon journey. Thank you. Thanks, Sean. Super great insights. I'm curious, people in the chat, what is the one area of the shop method that you're gonna focus on after this? Let us know whether it's strategize, hone, optimize, or promote. Let us know in the chat. Awesome. So now once you've got your foundation set, we talked through the shop method. So your brand identity, your optimized listings, your smart PPCs. The next question is, how do you scale? That's Harriet's specialty. So she's gonna be here to show us how to layer in those advanced ad strategies, some event planning, and even data tools that take your Amazon game to the next level. So, Harriet, I will pass it to you. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Monica. So yeah. Now once you've nailed down the basics with it, which I think Javon did a really great job covering, you know, your brand identity, Optimus product listings, and, you know, some sort of ad exposure, the big question becomes then, how do you scale? And beyond that, how do I track how incremental my ads are? That's my specialty. Scaling isn't just about increasing ad spend. It's about layering in advanced strategies. Today, I'm gonna walk you through how to use tentpole event planning, a diversified advertising portfolio, and really data tools like Amazon Marketing Cloud and Brand Analytics to take your game to the next level. These are, the same levers I use with clients to move them from stagnant growth to incremental growth and breakthrough results. So starting with scaling with strategy and data. So the truth of success on Amazon, it doesn't start with advanced tactics. It starts with the basics. As, Jevon said, you need a strong foundation. Things like brand defense, core keyword coverage, and really disciplined budget pacing, that's what keeps your performance stable. And just as important, your product detail pages and brand store have to be built out for conversions. If shoppers land on a page that isn't optimized, no amount of advertising is going to deliver you the results that you want. Once that base is set, advanced strategies that's really going to accelerate your growth, that's where you layer in conquesting, temple event planning, and insights from Amazon Marketing Cloud. It's about balancing new to brand customers, and acquisition with retaining them over time through campaigns and also tracking the customer lifetime value so you can see where your investments are really compounding over time. You know, of course, the mix is gonna look different for every brand. It depends on your category that you're playing in, your market position in that category, the category dynamics, whether it's up and down, you know, your price point. They all shape how you lean into advanced tactics versus reinforcing the basics. So what I wanna walk through today is how these pieces connect. Foundation creates stability. Advanced strategies really creates acceleration. And when they work together, from optimized PDPs in stores to customer lifetime value tracking and new to brand versus retention balance, that's how you unlock sustainable profitable growth, not just, you know, short term spikes, but momentum that's gonna compound over time. So winning temple events. So let's start with temple events like Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. These can be massive traffic drivers, but it's just gonna act as a spike if you treat them if you don't treat them like a full scale campaign. They're not just, you know, dates on a calendar. That means, you know, locking in inventory, pricing, and creative well in advance, ideally weeks, if not months ahead of the event. You need to know exactly which products are going to go on promotion, how much inventory to send in, and what your ad spend, promotion price is gonna be, and what your units forecast is gonna look like. The earlier you align on those pieces, the better positioned you are to capture that demand when the event hits, really maximize your growth potential and attract new brand customers and not run into stock issues. I've also found for tentpole events, a lot of brands tend to really crush their margins by having a really large promo and then throwing a lot of spend at it where they're essentially in the red, where I think people don't realize is there is something on these temple events like Prime Day where you can be overspending and you're still cannibalizing your organic, so it's finding that right balance. You know, your ads, promos, and even off Amazon messaging, they should all be coordinated. And here's where most brands really leave money on the table. The real win isn't just the spike during the event. It's what you do after. By retargeting the surge of new category shoppers that are browsing your your product detail pages and just your category in general during these events, you can extend that traffic into repeat purchases and long term customer growth. With recent Amazon Marketing Cloud paid subscriptions, there is a lot of niche retargeting options that we'll walk through in a couple of slides. However, the capabilities that Amazon has given us through AMC or Amazon Marketing Cloud, the past few months really allow you to not only see the full picture of how your ads are performing, but get really, really granular with the audiences you can target. So it's great for retargeting. There's use cases pretty much in every scenario. You can target lapsed customers. You can target, cross you can try and, like, cross promote, your products if someone tried one. Say you're, like, a CPG brand and you have, like, different flavors. Someone tried one flavor, hit them with, you know, a different flavor or a larger pack size. There's there's a lot that you can unlock there. And then Amazon ads that actually work. So I like to think of Amazon ads as an investment portfolio where each type kind of has a role. So there's your sponsored product ads. Those are kind of your conversion workers. They, they're the ads that most shoppers click when they're ready to buy. So they're gonna drive the bulk of media sales and conversion. Foster brands and spot screen video. And then sponsored just it keeps you top of mind and helps you bring shoppers back if they didn't convert the first time. It's also a great tool for awareness, same with DSP. But it's not just about ad types. Your keyword strategy matters just as much. You need a mix of branded terms, which are gonna drive a high ROAS, but and are great for efficiency and brand defense. There's category terms or non branded, search, which is to drive incremental share of voice and market growth. And then there's competitor terms, which are gonna help capture share directly from your competitors, but are also a little bit less incremental than category terms just because it's really hard to rank organically on page one for competitor search terms, and they're typically a little bit expensive because they're doing what you're doing is they're paying additional to protect their brand. When we're thinking about spend allocation on Amazon, not ad dollars, or not all ad dollars are created equally, I would say. Branded terms are really the easiest to capture and typically yield a pretty high ROAS, but they can actually be the least incremental. If you're overspending on branded, what often happens is you're simply paying for sales that you would have captured organically anyway. Someone searching for your brand, specifically, they're likely gonna buy from you. The real growth comes from category terms. That's where you're reaching shoppers who might not already know who your brand is. They can discover you, and, really, they represent the most incremental opportunity. So knowing that, this is where brand analytics come in, specifically the search query performance report on Amazon. This is a newer report, But search query performance, what it does is it actually shows your total share of impressions, your total click share, your total add to cart share, and your total purchase share. This is organic and paid. It's both. So on a search term level, a brand level, and a product level. So the use case is pretty simple. You can see if you're converting on your branded terms, how much share you're winning, on your category terms, and whether ad spend is incremental or just cannibalizing organic sales. For example, if your branded purchase share stays high even after cutting branded spend, those dollars weren't incremental. Say, one week you spent a $100,000 on on your branded search terms and your purchase share was 98%, then you cut spend to $20,000 for branded terms the next week and your branded spend is, let's say, like, 97.5%, you were clearly cannibalizing your sales and you can shift that spend, that branded spend into more incremental terms to, reach those net new customers. And, you know, to to the other key is, like, pacing. Too often, I see brands blow through budgets way too early. Instead, scale spend strategically ramp up before and during temple events, then taper after to capture long tail conversions. And finally, the golden rule, just test, measure, and refine. Amazon is pay to play. It's an algorithm at the end of the day. It rewards constant optimization. The brands that win are always adjusting spend, refining keywords, and testing creatives to really maximize efficiency and growth. That's how you make Amazon ads actually work. And then leaning into Amazon Marketing Cloud. So let's talk about Amazon Marketing Cloud or AMC. I think to some people, it can sound a little bit intimidating, but, really, it's Amazon's way of showing how your ads work across the funnel. It is a, essentially, clean rim of data. So with AMC, you can see which ads introduce shoppers to your brand, which drive conversions, and really where budgets wasted. It tracks the full journey. So through AMC, you can see if a customer starts their buying journey, seeing a streaming TV ad on Prime Video, and then they go to espn.com and see a display or online video ad, and then they go into the Amazon search console and find you through a branded search. That's all trackable with Amazon Marketing Cloud. You can also run non endemic ads to your d to c site, and that's trackable too. Even Even if you're not selling on Amazon, you can use Amazon's DSP first party audiences to serve ads, which no other DSP really offers. There's also a new paid AMC subscription. I won't go too deep into this, but, they're called Amazon Insights and Amazon Retail Purchases. They really unlock organic customer data Amazon has never shared before. It's a it's a huge win, for one p and three p sellers on Amazon, but it shows you, it breaks down data by organic and paid over the past five years. And you now can get what percentage of customers are new to brand versus repeat, coming in organically or from brand, how that mix shifts over time, and what's driven by ads and organically. For one pre brand, this is the first real access to customer data, so it's huge. There is a sixty day trial for everyone. So if you aren't paying, you aren't paying right away either. I think it's, like, a $150 a month after that. With AMC subscriptions, you also get more depth. So you get, again, up to five years history plus granular subscribe and save data. So if you're a CPG brand, you can really create audiences off of these, lists. That means that you can build strategies to reengage, like, lap subscribe and save customers. Or during tentpole events, that's a great time to target those customers who were in the subscribe and save program and dropped off because you know that their audiences, they're looking for a deal. So we'd wanna retarget those. You know, not every brand does have bandwidth to dig into AMC, but with the right partner, these insights become very actionable. You can really prove the long tail impact of not just Prime Day, but you can also relocate wasted spend and tie ads directly to sustainable growth and understand what keywords are driving you to brand customers. Even smaller brands benefit. You don't need to be running DSP. Sponsored ads alone can leverage these insights. One last thought is just one thing you can now do with AMC Insights is you can create audiences, and you can actually create bid adjustments for your sponsored product ads. So say you typically are paying, like, $8 CPCs to get your top, you know, non branded term at the top of search placement on Amazon. What you can do now is you can create an audience where someone has not bought from your brand over the past one year, two year, three year, four year, five years, whatever you wanna do, and you can set you can adopt a low bid strategy, and then you can put a bid booster or a bid adjustment for just new to brand customers. So you're willing to pay, let's say, $2 to target the term coffee, which you probably won't get top of search placements for. But if you overlay a, new to brand audience, you're willing to pay up to $8 to reach users who have never been exposed to your brand before. So that's a way to, you you know, ensure that you're reaching the right customers and you're not wasting ad dollars on users who are already familiar with your brand. So AMC really shifts the conversation from we think ads are working to here's exactly how ads feel growth, and it really gives you the playbook. Feel free to ask me about AMC in the q and a or about, you know, brand analytics and search query reports. I have a lot of deep expertise here, and I know the conversation can get a little bit more complex when we get into those subjects. Thank you so much. Yeah. I I certainly know that, as a marketer, I know all of those terms, but I'm sure there's some that some of the businesses on here might not be familiar with, like CPC. So if you guys have any questions related to what Harriet just walked through, please remember we're gonna be doing a q and we'll get those questions in right away. Alright. So now I wanna bring both of our experts back on the stage for a little conversation about how foundation and advanced strategy work hand in hand. So I'm curious whoever wants to take it first, Harriet or Juwan, you can battle it out for who goes first. But, how would you, do foundation and advanced strategy saying they work hand in hand in your area? I can take it. I think of the foundation of the baseline. It's the consistent. It's the always on strategy that really keeps you stable. Things like brand defense or PDP optimization, creative, product offering, reviews, core keyword coverage, and just making sure budgets are aligned to proven performance. Advanced strategy is really where we layer in more sophistication, like incremental growth campaigns, advanced audience targeting, and seasonal event planning, and in some cases, DSP or Amazon DSP, which is Amazon's essentially, their own programmatic, advertising solution. So there are situations where brands are not ready for more advanced strategy. One example is DSP. It's extremely powerful when you have the right strategy in place and when a brand has reached the stage of seeing an impact from DSP. Again, really powerful tool and has many, many use cases before launching, like, streaming TV or awareness campaigns through DSP. You really wanna make sure that you've maxed out for search first. There's cases where brands aren't ready for DSP, and that's okay. It's okay to start with the basics and and build the foundation first. It's actually preferred in order for really optimal performance. The two have to work together, though. Without a solid foundation, advanced tactics won't sale, won't scale, really sustainably. And without advanced tactics, a brand stays stagnant and misses incremental growth. So it's really the combination that drives both stability and long term gains. I think, what Devon was saying is, again, if your PDPs aren't optimized correctly, you're at and you're sending users to an up unoptimized product detail page or to a brand store, you know, the conversion rate's gonna be lower. So you wanna make sure you're optimizing your content for conversion so then ads can, work and it's really a cohesive strategy there. Yeah. I I think literally, Harriet, you know, put the nail on the head there because, like she said, like, with the shot map and everything, advanced strategy, you know, that's literally, like, post promotion. Everything is building on on top of that. Like, for example, advanced strategy, even in our side of things, when it comes to design and even, we have 100 tests. It's all about doing more a b testing. It's doing more changes. So even for the product that I shared with you guys, the brake fluid, that's just before we even get them relaunched. We're testing out different things. And so an advanced version of that can be, for example, using tools like Pixoo or Amazon a b testing and just trying to even post different versions of the same content and seeing what actually gets the higher sales point. Because it's not about us being happy with the pictures looking great. It's what's actually getting more sales. So if we see, for example, we could already have an idea that maybe the shield with the break and all of that would work better, we can test those hypotheses and then adjust them and place them on depending on whichever one gets the most, sales or conversions. Right? Because at the end of the day, right, think of it like my personal perspective with the branding side. It's like imagine if I gave someone a gift in a brown paper bag. Right? Doesn't have the same effect as if I give, you know, a gift inside of something nice that I got from, you know, like, those nice, you know, pretty ones, like, from Walgreens that got a gift section. It's like it's small little details like that that can shape your brand's perception. And so we always say the key thing is, you know and this is what I forgot to say before. It's like, you wanna, you know, start with a a smart plan, then you wanna look premium. That's the whole point of the home. Then you want to not optimize to one, then you can then amplify everything. But if you don't have that foundation set, you're basically building on sand, you know, and everything else will fall apart. So you have to really kind of build methodically, And don't try to think of it as a race. I know it's very hard and many times we think that we're competing and we're struggling, but, you know, I can think of brands like, even like Liquid Death. Right? It's a lot of brand. And I love that brand because people are saying, oh my gosh. Sometimes, like, this is so hard. How can I sell this? Liquid Death literally reinvented water, and all they did was basically call it something that will basically kill you. But the thing is they have it's all branding. It's all about a joke of saying, you know, their whole stick is, you know, murder your thirst. Right? You know, severed lime is the name of one of their lime flavors. Like, they're all about the whole kill you philosophy, and it's funny. It's a joke. But they have literally, created something that I think people would kill for. Like, I think they made 300, million dollars in sales last year, and I think the brand is no more than five years old. Selling water, h two o, the thing that comes out of your tap. Right? But they turned it premium. Why? Because they found a way of communicating it in a way that no one else was doing. No one was brave enough to do that. Right? But that's their defensive moat and their strength because who's gonna try to compete with that? We already told you it'll kill you. Are you gonna beat that? Right? So that that that's what I'm saying. Like, you know, if you can master those basic fundamentals, everything else that Harriet mentioned is layered on, that'll just take you to the Yeah. Those are all really great points, and I love the liquid death example because I agree they definitely have a very, true audience. Like, their audience is all about their product, and they've done that, through their advertising. So great brand example. Alright. So we've had several questions come in, but I do wanna reiterate. If you do have a question, go to the q and a tab, drop it in there. We're gonna start running through some of the questions you already have. So first question being, how can you begin learning a small percentage of what Harriet knows? Yeah. It takes a while. I've been in the industry for about ten years. It's it's a lot about just educating yourself or working with, a consultant or a brand, but, a lot of it's about digging into the console and seeing what is actually available. Right? Like, I'm sure a lot of you guys on this call probably had no idea what I was talking about when I said search query performance. It it is a newer feature, but Amazon is always evolving. So it's keeping up to date with trends. And then it's really being able to, understand every single part of Amazon because it is so complex and there's so many moving needles. I mean, it's it's overwhelming even for me still, and that's being in working, like, every day on Amazon for ten years. So, I think that there's there are some classes you can take. Like, one class that I recommend, it's called the Amazon Ads Masterclass. It's, like, I think it's $47. It's a week training, and it kind of walks you through, pretty much the the foundations, but then it goes into advanced strategies. And they give you, like, homework, and, I've had some people on my team take it, and it works really well. If you're feeling like, you know, you wanna learn more about Amazon ads and, you know, dig deeper into all of the capabilities, that's probably where I would start. You can also take Amazon, foundations courses through, amazon.com if you have a, just a login, you can get, certified in, you know, basic DSP training, basic sponsored ads training. I think they have one for brand analytics now. They have one for AMC. So really just educating yourself, or taking classes, that are gonna help you learn. Yeah. That's a good point. And I think to working with a partner like Harriet here at Nectar or Jovan at ShopHowell, I think having a partner in your corner to kind of break down those complex concepts, that's an upload, makes it that much easier to just kind of answer questions you may have and make sure that your brand is on the right track. Next question is, what is the most crucial type of PPC to start with for a smallish business just getting started on Amazon? Let's also maybe level set with what PPC is because I know somebody had that question in the chat. So we can kinda kill two birds with one stone. Yeah. I could touch that one a bit. PPC is pay per click advertising. It's pretty much the ads. If you were to look on Amazon, you see something pop up when you see a search that says sponsored or whatever, that's an ad. I mean, Amazon's a search engine. I'll even put it that way. I think that's a good way to even break it down. You go to Google. We all know Google. Google's a search engine. Amazon.com is a search engine where you find products. Right? So PPC, when you wanna start off, it should be automatic campaigns because that's gonna be the consistent one that's gonna be always running. That's gonna help you find new search terms that is run basically by Amazon's algorithm. It's not fantastic, though. So it's it's basically a start, and it can be a way that you can do ongoing research. Because even for our team, that's one thing that we always do. Automatic campaigns while doing smaller you could call them, let's say, feeler campaigns to try to see what's working. And in those initial days and weeks, our goal is to basically just start to see what works and just get a lay of the land. Sometimes if we already have a product in that category, it makes it a whole lot easier to then refine and then update more quickly. But I would say always start off with an automatic campaign. And if you understand the ins and outs of PPC, from there you can start doing small tweaks. For example, if you see some some campaigns or certain words that aren't converting, start filtering them out, you know, putting that this is not something you want. It's somewhat like and I'll give you a real example. Right? We had this issue a couple years back. One of our customers had a product called the silk mail a silk milk conditioner. Right? But for those who, you know, drink dairy, you might know that silk is also the name of a milk brand. So their shampoo and conditioner kept getting a whole lot of clicks, but weren't getting a lot of sales because people are just probably looking for some milk to drink, put in their serum, and then like, oh, shampoo. They click it, but then they're obviously like, yeah. Yeah. I'm not gonna buy this, and they go back to that milk. And so they're wasting assets. So first thing we have to do was start removing that reference because it's not like you can just go change your brand name. But one thing that we could do, for example, in the PPC was, putting negative keywords. If someone looks for vanilla, chocolate, like, the most basic things. Right? Like, people are looking for notes. Let's start this negatively starting to make that association so we can start to basically get the right customers, not the wrong ones. And that's a small way of improving your campaigns. It's very simple. It's very basic, but I'll let Harriet handle the more complex way if I should probably think about this. Yeah. I think that, Jovan hit on a good point. If you're new to selling on Amazon, yeah, start with auto, but be be really meticulous in the optimizations that you're making. Auto is great for, net new term harvesting, and understanding what's gonna convert. But I'm gonna be really honest with you guys. Auto campaigns, in my opinion, are not incremental. They're typically, like, being served to people who have already seen your products. So make sure you're using that negative match type and you're creating exact match campaigns for what's working and phrase match campaigns. But I think the biggest thing is segmentation. Make sure you are segmenting out all of your campaigns by targeting type. I don't usually put more than one product in a campaign. And by match type, because that's gonna give you the most control. And I would I would look at that search query performance report because it's gonna tell you on a product level what are the top terms that are driving conversions, and that's also a great word a great, solution for, keyword harvesting and and understanding where you should start. That report will give you the, your impression share, your click share, your purchase share, and you can look at what's drive what is the highest purchase rate or, click through rate, and then you can start with those terms for that specific product. Awesome. Thank you, guys. So the next question we have is from David. He says, I'm wary of selling on Amazon due to concerns with copycats. How do you think about the risks and rewards of Amazon exposure? Can I, ask when you say copycats, do you mean, like, do you have a unique product that you're launching on Amazon and you're you're nervous that, like, Chinese resellers will come on and and copy that product? Or is it, is it people, like, creating like, claiming to be, like, your brand? David, if you're still on, if you could drop that in the chat, that would be helpful. Thank you. More Chinese CapEx. Yeah. It's it's something that brands deal with all the time, and I I deal I work with, you know, I work with Epson, for example. They have a lot of Chinese, sellers that create, ink that's great for their printers, and they're, like, a third of the price. And it's it's a part of the share that they give up, but it's still worth being on Amazon, I would say. If you're not on Amazon, you're missing a lot of opportunity. In some cases, you can get those, like, Chinese sellers shut down if they're breaking guidelines, but it's it's hard to get around. But but there's ways in terms of creating the foundation, making sure that your PDPs are good, your, you have the foundations and the basics that even if you're a little bit of a higher price in these Chinese copycats, like, you're presenting yourself as the premium product as the real deal where people are gonna wanna buy that. There is a space for I I don't know if you're a premium product, but there's a space for premium products on Amazon. And there's always gonna be competition. There's only gonna that's only gonna get worse, but I wouldn't be like, I wouldn't not go on Amazon because of the fear of the Chinese copycats. That likely will happen. It's happening to everyone today. Amazon's been shifting those out more recently, but, there are ways to get around it. Jovan, anything you wanna add? Oh, hell yeah. Like, this is all about brand positioning. That's the whole part of home because there's always gonna be those copycats. And the key thing about the copycats is they're usually just going in from my experience and they're doing, like, a quick, usually just a lower price version of your product. They're coming from China. And so usually their listings don't really have any type of differentiation, no type of story. So I'll show you a quick example. We did a presentation, a couple like, a month ago. And this is literally, like, two products that you can say are really the same. These are actually come from the same company. Right? We designed this one. And so this is literally from another presentation, a workshop we did, but we had worked with this brand, Electory, to help them launch, and we designed their packaging. This is back in March when we launched them. It's a much smaller space, but notice. Right? Like, we took a lot of pains to make this brand look premium. The average sale of the other items is about $9.99. They're selling at basically 50% higher, actually more. Right? But the key thing is they were selling, like, really well because of margins. Right? You're making $5 more. Even if you're selling less in terms of units, if you can make for it by literally charging an extra $4, why not? And so we made this whole thing about looking premium. We highlighted that this product is from Guatemala. You know, we made up some differentiation that was real. Right? Most part of them, because we understood the market, is from India. So we have to say, okay. They're coming in with this different product. Let's edify that different market. So we showcase pictures of Guatemala, you know, origin. We put the idea of where it's where it's where it's grown, the unique taste profile, how it's different. So, you know, it's it's finding ways of understanding what the product is and understanding what people are buying it for and really making a point of distinguishing it from others in the market. And so in this case, I think this is a perfect example of, you know, copycats don't necessarily have to be a markup. Oh my god. Honestly, it's a badge of honor. People are copying. It means they're doing something right. The key thing is, do you, get that initial success and do you build on it to refine and keep working at it, or do you just kind of build it, set it, and forget it? That's typically where I've seen people who come in as an original fall off because in some products where you can easily find another version of it, like in this case, you can find a a grower of cardamom, different parts of the world, but it's how do you build a brand that people know, love, and trust. That comes from your marketing, your branding, and trying to build that connection. So, yeah, that's my 2¢ there. And I think we have time for one more question. Sandra asked, what is CPC? That's a great question. It's cost per click. So, essentially, the way Amazon, for most of their ads for sponsored products and most of sponsored brands, you set a bid, but you're you're not paying it for an impression. So if your ad serves and someone doesn't click your ad, there's no fee. But if someone clicks on your ad, you're paying for that click. And then the bid that you set is the highest cost per the highest amount you're willing to pay for that click. Essentially, that's, like, kind of the basics of it. But if someone doesn't click on it, you're not charged. Awesome. Thanks, David. Thank you guys for sharing your questions. We had a lot of good questions. If yours was not answered, we'll be sure to follow-up after, the presentation. So I just want to level set a little bit about what we learned. So we learned that Amazon is a gold mine and a grind. So you're offering, a huge opportunity, but only if you have the right strategy, which Javonne talked about. And then foundation first, success starts with your foundation. So Jovan's shop method, again, provides that proven framework for you. Scaling smart means leveraging Harriet's playbook, so planning for those tentpole events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, which is coming up, as well as, Prime Day, which just happened back in June, and using AMC, so, Amazon Marketing Cloud to sharpen your insights. And then lastly, logistics do matter. So they're not just the back end operations. We have FBA prep and fulfillment here at Saltbox to, give you those powerful growth levers, to manage strategically. And lastly, I just wanna say thank you all for joining us. The replay of the session. So if you missed any insights and you wanna watch back, that's gonna be available as well as some resources like a consultation with Jovan and Harriet that you can book. Those are gonna be shared right after the event. And then also, if you wanna see how Saltbox can support your Amazon operations, just book a tour with us, and we'd be happy to show you around. Thank you guys so much, and hope you have a great rest of your day.