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Know
– people need to know you/your product exist. On Amazon, this means ranking well (within top 6 slots, preferably top 3) for specific keywords. Which implies smart keyword targeting.
Which also implies knowing your consumer.
Information is not short online.
What is lacking is attention.
To get this, you need to be relevant and you need to appear as often as possible.
“Visibility=Credibility”
On Amazon, this means ranking organically for many relevant keywords (often long tail to start with); sponsored ads; branded/headline ads; appearing on other listings etc.
Off Amazon, Visual media are good.
You may choose to do FaceBook ads and even Google retargeting or Youtube ads. Instagram ads are great value at the moment for the right kind of products.
It has to be affordable and produce an ROI – so on Amazon is the best place to start – but it doesn’t have to be where you finish.
Your product is your best advertising
In the end, the best way to get more visibility is to get your products into the hands of as many consumers as possible.
The more you can persuade those consumers to share the product/knowledge of it with others, the more you leverage that to getting known by others.
”Brand Ambassadors” can be very helpful here.
Like
People (consumers) need to like your brand and your product.
On Amazon this means good main image, average review, good price to get click.
On listing (to get the actual sale): great images, including infographics and attractive lifestyle shots (including models!) and well written text.
But a big percentage these days will google your brand too.
So you want a nice social presence (Instagram is huge in younger demographics) – and probably a decent-looking website.
Trust
Promotion is epidemic online, as are big promises.
What is lacking the most is trust.
This is the genius of Amazon – they created a system of reviews by consumers that is trusted (sometimes wrongly) more than what merchants say (probably rightly!)
“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”
Consumers – or would-be consumers – need to get the feeling you have their best interests at heart.
Saying it is not enough. You need to show it.
Show don’t say
Here are some ways to show that you care:
- By understanding their needs
- articulating their needs;
- taking the trouble to create beautiful images
- Above all, making wonderful products
- With giftable packaging
- and great customer service, should this be needed.
The best way is to start is to “articulate” their issues very clearly – thus showing you understand them. “Articulate” in this case including images as well as (in fact more importantly than) words.
Understanding is a huge emotional “deposit” in the emotional “bank balance”.
After that, people are more willing to listen to what you have to say.
Transcript
Michael Veazey 1:19
Hey there, welcome to amazing FBA. This is your host, Michael vz, and welcome to the show. I’ve got a fairly simple overarching concept to talk about today. But which is, like a lot of things simple in theory. But the question is simply, are you doing it? And if not, what could you do to implement this is a strategic level marketing thought, is based on a simple concept called k lt. And I’ll explain what that is in a second. That’s created by Dan Kennedy, or at least articulated by him. not new. But a very neat way of putting it k lt is not like a sort of sandwich or Kentucky Fried Chicken or something like that. It sounds will know like and trust. And I want to talk about it in the context of our there’s the context I’m talking about this in is, having been working with the client is pretty new to Amazon is not even got a product live yet. But we’re working on getting his first product live. And I think he’s approaching an extremely positive way. And he’s really, really getting to know his consumers and users before he even goes and finalizes the product itself, which is super smart. I’ll talk about that properly in another episode, but I wanted to talk about low life trust today. So the know like trust thing is as simple as that progression. Though consumers or clients in this case consumers go through before they’re going to really buy from you. The first thing is, they need to know you, rather, your product exists. And on Amazon, this is about ranking for specific keywords, and which implies smart keyword targeting right, which also implies knowing your consumer. So you got to immediately reverse engineer from any keywords put in to note, you know, who is using these keywords, and what is their search intent. So they said, intent buying some keywords. For example, if you’re looking for a keyword that says silicon, spatula black, and then it’s more of a specific intended and cookware, for example, Kitchen, where people are probably researching what kind of thing they could buy in the form case, in the case of a black silicon spatula, they know what they want, so they’re probably more likely to be buying one immediately. And there’s lots of other things that go into that. But broadly speaking, needs to understand the consumer need to understand the keyword market supply and demand for certain things. For example, black silicon spatula, is incredibly saturated with cheap goods. So that would be a really lousy bit of keyword taxing famously, okay, so inflammation is not short online, what you’re trying to do is get attention. And to get this you need to be relevant. And first of all, and you need to appear as often as possible. There’s a phrase in marketing visibility equals credibility, right. So that means the more often people see your name around, the more they’re going to start to feel this as a, quote, legitimate brand, or a good product or something like that. It’s a basic psychological thing where we’re pattern recognition creatures, right? human beings, as are many animals. And if you keep burning a pattern into somebody’s head of this equals a good thing for this particular area, otherwise known as branding, or positioning, then eventually it’s very, very powerful that we keep showing people adverts of people in a social setting who want a soft drink drinking Coca Cola, eventually, people will go into a bar and order a coke rather than say, Sprite or seven hours or some other fun, soft drink, right? It’s very effective. So how does this work on Amazon? Well, it’s much simpler in a way on Amazon. This means ranking organically for many relevant keywords often longtail one. So if you’re trying to sell for example, what have you gotten in front of us here? multivitamins, you want to have multivitamins for women women multivitamins, multivitamins with minerals, General well being which means etc, right? So you get the idea. And also you want to be a pagan sponsored ads, even if you are organically ranking for the keyword, why on earth would you want to pay for that? wealth, visibility, that’s why the more often you appear, yes, there are more sales opportunities, but also you are more likely to buy it in future. Or today, having scroll down the page to look through your organic rankings, have you seen it appear in the sponsored results, because visibility equals credibility, it’s kind of a basic psychological wall that’s fairly robust. You might also want to appear and branded and headline ads or whatever they call, they keep changing the name every two months, time behind the times with that, but, you know, basically, you can appear on other people’s listings as well, lots of those things. So all of the above really is desirable. In my opinion, of course, you’ve got to look at the cash flow and the return on investment. This is a big picture overview. But broadly speaking, all things being equal, you want to be visible, your bought your products to be visible, as frequently as possible
to relevant users, right? You What you don’t want to be doing, of course, is targeting broad keywords that are no used to anyone. So if I’m, for example, pregnant woman and I’m putting in multivitamins for pregnant women, what I definitely do not definitively need to see is vitamins or some kind of supplements designed for people who are going through the menopause because I’m pregnant by definition, biologically, I ain’t going through the metaphors, so definitively the wrong thing to show me and if you go plastering ads out on a broad match or the word multivitamins or something or even multivitamins, four minute metaphors, I have no idea by the way, whether that’s a market but I’m sure it’s huge. And obviously, I’m not pregnant guys, just to tell you I’m a guy so it can’t happen. For anyone gets their keyboard, this being the internet and all there’s some special person on Facebook group will one day come back to judging by the response, we get most of the people in there, this would be by the way, so very intelligent things. If you want to be part of that conversation, amazing fba.com forward slash FB amazing fb a.com forward slash f ready before Bertie. But I digress a bit, but the point being do not plus Amazon with a broad match sponsored ads, because that’s just a stupid idea of you broad match stuff, you’re going to end up showing your product to people who will never in a million years buy your product and that is wasted money. So I’m not talking about general and and targeted by I’m talking about targeted but in multiple places right? off Amazon is another place where you want to be thinking about, not necessarily if you’re in the early stages, but if you’re developing your brand and your business, you can afford to take up a little bit of Amazon in the sense only of driving traffic back to Amazon. So I’m not talking about anything complicated Shopify store, which I think is an entirely different business model from an Amazon base or a marketplace business, whether it’s based on eBay, or Amazon, or whatever, Etsy, but visually, they’re really good. So you may choose to be Facebook ads, or even Google retargeting YouTube ads, Instagram ads, a great value at the moment for the right kind of products, there’s lots of different approaches has to be affordable and producing the ROI. And definitely Amazon is 100% the best place to start and to focus. But it doesn’t have to be where you finish. I mean, a lot of people find that Facebook ads are great to raise awareness took about know like and trust, getting known before you have any Amazon ranking on Facebook through ads can be a very effective launch mechanism, although it’s not normally affordable to keep doing that in most cases.
Unknown Speaker 8:25
And the final kind of visibility,
Michael Veazey 8:27
getting known thing is simply that your product is your best advertising. So getting your product out into the hands of as many consumers as possible is really smart marketing. And the one way you can see things is to reduce your price of your product to the floor, particularly with it have reviews, and just see that as a marketing spend, rather than a profit center, see it as a cost center. So marketing, rather than product development, or whatever, however you do, you organize the silos and then the Department of your business. And let’s face it, if you’re in the early stages, you don’t have real departments. But even if you’re launching a ton of products, when you have a very established business, I still would argue that instead of it being belong in the product area, I think you should see low product pricing as a marketing spend. Because the best thing you can do assuming your product is good, and looks good and function as well is get it into the hands of as many consumers as possible. And then the other thing to do is this, that you just want to get more consumers to share the knowledge or the love of their product with others. And the more you can leverage that to getting known by others. And obviously brand ambassadors can be really, really helpful here. And that’s an approach that one of the collective mind this has been taking the last few months with a Facebook group, quite deliberately creating what they call brand ambassadors. And that seems to be a great success in helping to get their brand out there. But in a way that produces some kind of cash flow, it may not be profitable yet. But if you’re getting fairly inexpensive products out there, and consciously asking people to share that with others, that means your product gets known by product, which is a great sort of self reinforcing feedback loop. If you think about it, the more your product gets out there, the more gets known. If you can make that viral, the more it gets known more people buy your product. And this is how products really take off. that’s helped by the Amazon organic algorithm, of course, but you can do your own contribution to that yourself. So the next thing that we’ve done the know like and trust the thing we talked about know, the next thing is like people need to actually like your brand and your product. on Amazon. This means that if you’re going to get ranked for a keyword you made it better make sure that the image is good. That the I mean the first instance we’ve got to get the click. So I’m just means good, mean image. It means good average review, which you can’t control. But you can influence by you know, again, trying to make sure you’re very careful. And you you target and all the other stuff that goes into that I’m not going to get into the nutty, the nuts and bolts and SUSE, the nitty gritty, and I’m trying to say, and you need a good price, right. So and again, if you have a good day, and no reviews, make sure your prices low. Don’t be short term about this, because the best thing you can do, we’ve already said to get your product known is to get the product out into the hands of consumers and hope to get them talking about it. So when I was in, you’ve got to get the click by good good main image, average review and a good price relative to the market, but relative to the numbers of reviews as well, and then get people to like the product enough to actually buy it. On the listing itself. You gotta have rate images, not really good images, fantastic images, including infographics and attractive lifestyle shots, including models, guys like this is 2019 is no good. sticking your products from five different angles on a white background. Everybody in Shenzhen or in China, it’s a sort of mini industry. Not many, like anything in China is huge. But it’s an industry in and of itself doing fairly high standard clean product photography. Now it’s not 2014 that is not enough photoshopping your your you know getting into for example into bathroom, or a gym is a start. But in the end, you need at least to have people in there. And if you’re going to Photoshop, make sure it’s done well. So don’t mess about stuff. But broadly speaking, people need to like your brand and your products, that’s really critical. In some areas, it’s more important than others, it’s a very functionally driven, then the trust piece is more important, we’ll come to that in a second. It’s more of a fashion or appearance lead thing for example, fashion products, anything from handbags, to to clothing, to jewelry, obviously the liking piece is even more critical. Don’t forget a big percentage of people these days are going to Google your brand as well. A lot of people will particularly the younger demographics will really want to see a nice Instagram presence. And a lot of people do a horrible job of this. I’m terrible with Instagram personally. So I don’t claim to be the person who knows about this. But again, another member of the 10 k collective mastermind in London has been working for four months on fantastic Instagram marketing, and they are seeing that you can not only get a better conversion percentage, but also maintain higher price point, making sure your Instagram presence is absolutely fantastic. And again, this depends on the market, but for younger demographic, and particularly its appearance or fashion lead, then that’s can be very, very powerful. So overall, you need to get people liking. Right, then we come to the trust thing. Promotion online is
epidemic, right? It’s not just big, it’s just that it’s just the viral disease and Amazon is worse than anywhere else. And they make lots and lots of big promises. What is lacking is trust, particularly on online these days, but online plus e commerce equals very low trust, in some cases, depending on people’s experience with, you know, widgets from China, to put a clean shower, I’m not saying all widgets from China are bad. There are some amazing things made in China like my iPhone. This is made in China, famously. But there is a lack of trust, right. So the genius of Amazon is that they created a system of review by consumers that is trusted, sometimes wrongly, by consumers more than what merchants say. And that’s probably rightly so because of course I’m wanting to sell my widget. That’s why I say stuff, right? Obviously, there is a degree of I want to help the consumer as well. Now, this brings me to the next point, there’s a there’s another cliche and so I’m trotting out the T shirts today, but they’re true. So they useful ways for remembering things. People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. So in other words, a consumer doesn’t really care if you’re are actually a legitimate expert in producing a certain type of product. If they get the feeling that you’re just out to rip them off every penny they have, they actually need to get the feeling that you know, you care about them. Now a lot of people say it. But saying is not enough, I think you need to show not say and the best way is to articulate the issues very, very clearly showing you understand, right, and there’s very limited space for this Amazon listing, you can do this you can call that particular user, for example, if you’re targeting is a 50. with arthritis with with some kind of supplement, you can clearly articulate that you understand them that you after those people not only by the words you use, but the infographics can be geared to their particular problems and show the solutions and why your product helps them in a way other products are better than other products. And you can show the target person if it’s a lady over 50. For example, in your photographs, if you’re trying to sell to a lady over 50 don’t have a picture of a man in her 20s. It sounds obvious, but there’s a great deal of people getting this really wrong. And I must and I think this is a huge marketing opportunity. So which brings us to another message to market match thing which is slightly different. It’s all related. I mean, the best thing you’ve got to do before you do any of this stuff is decide who you helping with what particular problems and then you keyword targeting. So you get that right, then you just follow that through and your listing. And you will build more rapport with people than if you just show them something that’s not really good to them. And in the end, you cannot void the building of trusting has to come from rate products that really solve a particular problem really well. And that should eventually be reflected in the reviews. And the best way to do that is to co develop your products with consumers. And the more I talked to the really smart people in this game, and also the more I see, and I’m very grateful to my mentoring clients who are the early stages, but who are willing to do this, they’re getting great results. I mean, they’re not necessarily at the taste of selling yet. But I can already tell you that the research they’ve done and the response they’ve got from potential users, it puts them streets ahead of people who just whacking a plastic widget out there. And there’s all the world difference in the world between a plastic widget that you’re using your product focus that you just want to shove it out the door and say whatever you need to sell people pick up on that you can see was a highly, highly sophisticated now in certain ways. Right? Even if their Amazon review reviews would not kind of imply that they’re great intellectuals, exactly. They’re sophisticated consumers, they may not be able to articulate things, or they might misuse products, and all the rest of the stuff we experience as Amazon sellers, right, let’s be honest, but they are attuned, they smell that self interest, if you all you want to do is flood widgets, they smell it. And the only way to get around that is to be cheap. And if you’re cheap, you’re not going to be profitable. And you normally produce a crap widget and guess what people will still complain about it, they will still say this is bad. This is a rubbish widget and give you one star review it there is no particular relationship between how cheap a product is on Amazon an expectation that it will not fall apart. Even though logic says that people should think that way. That isn’t the case, just know that going in, right. So if you actually take the trouble to understand the consumer really understand their needs, and develop a product. And I do mean develop these days, not just private label. But this can be so affordable. Sometimes I had a quote for one of my clients is working on something had a quote from Ryan Chaffetz, the Sq manufacturing guy who we had on the left podcast, which is geared to more advanced sellers, but actually, you can recruit for something that you could potentially be selling for 30 $40, quite realistically about $300 setup costs plus about four or $5 a unit, which is a really fantastic over
would you call it not overhead, the opposite is a fantastic multiplier of the cost. In other words, there’s a great profit margin in there. And that’s not necessarily always typical. I’m not saying you should approach right expecting him to do magic all the time. But it often is the case that if you really look deeply into something and you co develop something that can be very affordable for you as the seller, but you’ve got to be willing to co develop it with your users. And the way to do that is simply ask them what the problem is. articulate the problems to a product designer, or figure that out yourself, and then get the widget made in a prototype, go and try it out with the user, they give you feedback, go back to the second version, do a third version, by the time you got a third there, it’s going to be a way better widget and guess what it’s going to take time, money and effort. But it’s way, way, way more likely to pay off and be defensible than pure private labeling. And I’m not saying your private labeling is dead, but it is kind of on the way out. So it’s a great starting point for a lot of people. But what I’m discovering with working with clients who have no products, and I was in right from scratch is that actually the way into customizable products is not as scary as it looks, it’s actually proving easier and and more affordable for my clients than I had anticipated. And that’s a great thing. So whether you go that route, or whether you purely private label, in the end, you have to think about the consumer. And you have to make sure they know who you are, like you and trust you. But I would start my process the opposite end and go, first of all get to know the consumer, then develop a product that is perfect for their needs. And then you will automatically gain their trust once they have the product in action because it will do what it says. So all you got to do that in marketing and product is make the promises and deliver on the promises. When you understand the consumer, you know what promises to make you know what matters to them, what doesn’t matter to them. And when you’re good at the product side, when you develop the right products, along with a great sourcing partner, or partners, then you will have a product that delivers consistently on that promise. And that is when you get great reviews, you win the trust through the Amazon review mechanism which for all its flaws, and its manipulations that happened to it is in essence, a great thing for winning trust, by actually delivering on promises. In general, right? There are lots of exceptions. But then if you reverse engineer from the trust, and liking you can you can go into the marketing launch to start getting known because nobody knows you exist. Knowing that the people who have used your product, maybe five people have really given it a thumbs up and that it really does a job for a particular kind of consumer really, really well. And you can go into the new marketing launch with a great feeling about yourself and your mission. Because you know that you’re going to do great job for people. It’s just such a different feeling from just sticking a label on some plastic crappy widget, which is how I started with private labeling, not really particularly caring about it, I did my best to get good quality products, I kind of fiddled around with things that didn’t matter that much to the consumers. But I didn’t know at the time I did my best. But the fact is that the the method I was taught was just not very customer centric, it was product centric. And I just cannot say enough about how much better it feels for you how much better it feels for the consumer, and how much better your business will be if you just focus on the end user experience and reverse engineer everything from that place. So in the end, earning trust is the rare thing online, which is the foundation of great business and it always has been right. The Great. Think of great Quaker business people I think of those because I used to be a Quaker teller many years ago. I’m not a Christian or religiously affiliated guy, but they were very, very good business people partly because they couldn’t become doctors and lawyers and stuff because I refuse to swear in the Bible not I’m not getting involved, whether it’s good, bad or indifferent paper. The fact is, therefore they had to find a way to make a living. And one of the reasons that I understand that they were good business people in successful like Cadbury’s Rountree is the chocolate makers or Quaker Oats or various other businesses like that is simply that they had this tradition, they didn’t swear in the Bible, they said my word is my bond it when they said they would do something, they did it. And if they said they’d done something, it was true. So honesty and integrity, build trust, like that’s flipping obvious, but it’s easy to say. But how many people don’t do that how many people break that online. And if you don’t, if you do the opposite, you will get something’s actually a very businesslike saleable commodity trust, it’s actually quite rare online. So really, the most important part of this, everyone wants to be known. They want to be liked. But actually, I’m telling you trust is the absolute most important thing you can have. And if you have that, you have a solid basis for business, and you’ll do well. So in the end,
I think a lot of business good business boils down to some pretty simple, robust things that are not based on technology or the algorithm on the country, the better the Amazon algorithm gets sussing this stuff out, and serving consumers. And given what they really want, the more relevant This is going to be relative to the technical skills are trying to fool the algorithm. And I’m not saying you should be quixotic and overly puritanical I mean, do do what you need to do to get known and ranked in, in an area where there are quite a lot of black hat sellers. I mean, sure, do do white hat, gray hat or black hat as you see fit. But I’m telling you that in the end, whatever your relationship with the Amazon algorithm is one thing that the relationship, the consumers that matters is trust. That is it. So if you take nothing else from the last few podcast, I hope this is valuable because this is not an idealistic run. This is actually good business. And guess what, being the good guy and good business long term, they absolutely go together. There’s another conflict. And if you think there is, that’s because you’re being lived in by anxiety and short term thinking, in my humble opinion. Thanks for listening.
Watch my discussion of Know, Like, Trust for Amazon Sellers
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