Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Show Notes

Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast today’s guest is Jeff Cohen from cellular Labs welcome to the podcast Jeff. Hey, thank you Robert. Thanks for having me on so if you can just tell us what you do up seller labs, and what’s your history with selling products online sure thank you sell it Labs is a software provider providing different software applications for sellers on the Amazon platform.We provide. Software that helps you optimize your listing generate reviews analyze your data manage your sponsored product ads and other you know functions of owning your product on the Amazon platform, and all of our products are sass based meaning that their monthly service applications that you can you know try different try different applications, and you know use the one that works best for your business in terms of myself and.Selling physical products, you know we we started selling physical products. I Amazon back in around 2011-2012. We were buying most of our products at that point in time from USPS auction. That’s where you would go, and you would find all the products that you know fell off the truck, and we were selling all types of products back.Then mainly electronics and books, and we really kind of transitioned our business from that too. The software business, and then as of lately we’ve been you know individually kind of working on different physical products private-label owning the brand managing our own our main businesses really selling software, but a few of us do dabble in the physical products business, okay, so he does sound that you do have experience within selling as far as dealing with the software and also selling the different physical products so before you got into.Software digital like create and customize your own application, and that’s when you decided to start selling it or how did you transition from cell into a developing software? Yeah, that’s a really good question, and you know Robert. I think that really good software solves problems that you have and then once you’ve solved the problem that you have you can then expand that to solve other people’s problems, and so that’s why we still.All and that’s why we still have active seller account. It’s not our main business. We’re not trying to grow multimillion-dollar physical product businesses, but we do sell so that we can keep a pulse unkind of the changes that are going on in the marketplace and kind of how our tools and Technologies can help a seller what we really started off trying to solve a problem that we had so we were selling textbooks and books and what was happening was every time.We would sell a book we would get a bad seller rating. Not from the book, and we would give a proper description of how the book was, but we would still get you know people complaining that our books had water damage even though they bought a book with water damage, and so we were looking for a tool that would allow us to Target messages to people that were buying good books and asking them for reviews, and we would be able to use that to kind of combat the people that were writing.I’m batter reviews for us and so that really is really that is really where our business started in our first product feedback genius. It was really developed as an internal tool to help us solve a problem after we launched that tool we had an opportunity to see what else was in the marketplace and when we realized that our tool was something that could help a lot of other people.We really look to expand the software side of what we did okay, and talking about problems one of the main problem. Was that a lot of businesses struggle and always try to solve is how to get customers and how to Market themselves since you you stay on on the pulse of marketing and what’s happening in the marketplace.I wanted us today to talk about some of the top strategies and changes and different tricks that businesses actually using right now to grow and get customers, so what are. With this strategy is that you’ve seen currently in the marketplace. Yes, sir, you’re talking specifically about Amazon. Let’s talk about Amazon first, and then we’ll kind of expand outward from there.If you’re talking specifically about Amazon. It really comes down to making sure you have a properly optimized listing, and that’s something that a lot of sellers here, but they don’t actually take the time to do, and if you don’t have a proper. Properly optimized listing then you’re not going to show up in Amazon search and in general you’re not going to show up in search whether it’s Amazon or Google if this if the search engines cannot properly index your listing and so on Amazon you want to make sure you have a very clear title that describes.What you do you want to make sure that you have bullet points, and you want to make sure that you’re also filling in what they call the backend keywords and the backend keywords are where? To sellers on Amazon Miss, and it’s an opportunity to pick up a lot of additional search for your products.That is one of the biggest things that we’ve seen sellers lately missing and a big opportunity for improvement when it comes to General marketing and promotion. We’re seeing a lot of movement towards influencer marketing and the ability for. Sellers to put their products in front of people who have an audience and so you know back five six years ago.You used to just go find a blogger that could potentially blog about your product, but today, you’re actually going out, and you’re looking for a mom a sister a brother an aunt and uncle somebody who has an audience on Instagram Facebook Pinterest, and you’re looking for them to interact with your product and to share your.In your brand with you, and it’s pretty amazing and quite cool. If you really stop and think about what you can do today that you weren’t able to do you had to you know go after the top bloggers to get momentum on your product before but now you know a kid who likes playing video games can have a really big channel that everybody’s following on YouTube.I mean heck. There’s a whole website called twitch where we just follow people playing video games, and we watch them. And I found out the other day these guys are all paid to actually play video games all day. It’s quite amazing to me, and so it’s really about finding what your product is and where your audience is and then determining how you can actually build a story to engage with your audience, and that’s what I think is most important for sellers today.Who are looking to put their product and to get it out and marketed. Okay, so you’ve mentioned, too. Strategies, and we’ll kind of break them down into more details the fast one knows their Amazon listing, and how you need to optimize it, and then the second one was the influence of marketing and irritants are outraged so since you just last mentioned the influencer Outreach and marketing.Let’s deal with that one fast are there any other tips as far as how to find this influences. What’s the best Outreach method for getting too? Them and how do you convince them that they should be pushing your product yeah, that’s a great question, so there’s a couple of websites that you can use to kind of find influencers, so you can do it the old-fashioned way right you can go in to YouTube or Instagram or Pinterest and you can just start kind of digging through and you can.Start to message these guys and gals and you can start asking them. You can just flat out ask them like hey if I send you my product. Would you be you know be interested in highlighting it on your show, and there’s a really good chance that you’ll get some momentum from doing that, but you know it’s a game of ask a hundred people get one response.There are some other websites that are out there. One’s called Jen Dodd video one’s called content Blvd. Boulevard I think its content Boulevard or content Blvd at something like that. I don’t remember. There’s another one called Fame bet and what these sites do is they actually index influencers, and then based on how much influence somebody has so influences the size of Their audience or something like that you actually pay them to highlight your product in this could be as inexpensive as $250 or it could be several thousand dollars.Just depending on. And what you’re looking for them to do and how big of an audience they have and that’s what’s cool about today, man. It’s so it’s such an amazing world because if I want to be an influencer and I have people who will watch my channel I can get paid to try things and to show them and Brands.You know are paying people left and right to do this. I mean you see a lot of these companies that are sitting you boxes with you know different samples of products in it, so you can try. And things and then they ask them to go online and to read and to write about it blog about it and put pictures up and hashtag it and everything else that you’re supposed to do to kind of share things socially and so if you have a beauty product a fitness product a home health.A home kitchen product something like that these Avenues work great because there’s a lot of people who can highlight your product and part of what you’re looking for is the access to Their audience for the driving of sales and part of what you’re looking for is just somebody to generate content for you because having the content allows you to then use the content to run Facebook ads posted in LinkedIn and.To talk about your brand hashtag it put it on you know on to Instagram and as you start to expand each of these channels with your message in with your brand. You’re going to start engaging with your audience more and more okay, and how much time does this marketing strategy campaign take and how costly is it compared to other marketing strategies, so if you’re just looking at it on a single basis.I could set up. And run an ad for a video and probably less than 10 minutes, and then it’s probably going to take me another maybe hour or so to find the right person to promote my video. It’s going to cost me somewhere 250 dollars and up to pay them to do my video, and then I’m going to have to ship them my product.So I’ll be able to give them some bullet points like these are the features of my product that I want you to highlight, but I’m really going to leave the creative juices if you will up to the individuals that I end up talking to because I want their authenticity of excitement for my product. I don’t want it to be a very scripted type of thing and so for me personally the less scripted.It is the less it looks like a commercial the better quality of content that I’ve generated. Them that way it seems more it’s more authentic, and it doesn’t seem like it’s pushy the audience ready trust that around saw and they’ll be able to better receive it, and you know they won’t raise their eyebrows and just be like okay.Yeah, this is just an obvious ad and some of these influences. Do always say whether they doing an ad or not exactly they have their own rules that they need to follow, and so you know you just have to kind of let them kind of. Manage those things that they need to manage okay, and now let’s go back to the Amazon listings and optimizing Philistines other than the title the description and the keywords.What are some other ways too. Optimize your list in so that you can get more eyeballs and get more customers when they’re searching for your product. Yeah, so one tip that we that we recommend, and we actually have a tool that helps you do this hour tool is called scope SC ope. It’s part of you know one of the seller Labs tools, and it’s the ability to actually look at your competitors listing and determine.What keywords are driving sales for your competitor, and so what happens is that a lot of times you have a product and you call it a widget, but. Somebody else is actually calling it a doohickey right and so a great example of this and we like to use this as the Apple slicer and so if you have an apple slicer, but you’re calling it a fruit wedge, Ur a fruit wedge, or does the same thing as an apple slicer, but you’re actually using the wrong terminology for your product.So you thought that it’s a fruit Ledger, but as you start to look at all of your competitors products you realize that the top keyword that their ranking for is actually an. Apple slicer you can then go change your title and your listing to include the word Apple slicer because if you don’t tell Amazon or any search engine that you’re an apple slicer you’re never going to show up for Apple slicer and while that example might seem a little bit silly and everyone’s like well.Of course you’re an apple slicer of your fruit wedge a lot of times people don’t put the right keywords into their product, and so if you have a product that works for wine does it also. Work for red wine and white wine does it also work for other types of Liquors. You know you have to think about these things, and it’s hard for us as business owners to think about every thing that our product can be used for and therefore we actually want to start looking at our competitors and by determining what keywords are competitors rank for is going to show us what keywords are important to the audience, and then I can use those keywords to improve my list.Things on Amazon if you another way to drive sales as through their sponsored product ads and it’s very critical when you’re doing sponsor product ads if you want and to have an efficiency of your dollar app of your advertising dollar cost you want to use your competitors keywords to build your sponsored ads so if you go through Amazon’s normal channel of doing what they call Auto targeting and using.Amazon’s system to generate ads you spend a lot of money for Amazon to eventually tell you what keywords are important if you bypass that whole process and you actually use your competitors key words they words that their ranking for that are driving sales you actually can start your advertising and bring your advertising cost down significantly and you know I use an example that we had a customer who was running sponsored ads on their own.They were at what what’s caught a. 8% advertising costs the sale on Amazon they stopped doing the advanced targeting they used our tool to generate the keywords, and they were able to run a campaign at 7% advertising cost of sale it generated more sales in the first three days than the previous campaign had generated in 60 days at a tenth of the cost and so if you’re smarter about what you’re doing and you’re feeding the.What you know will drive sales you get better sales results from it, and how long do you think when you make changes with the list in with the title keywords Etc? How long does it take to indexing Amazon so that you start showing up for such as like is it a two-month period is it immediate how long does it take Amazon to index those changes, so we are a customer who had a product and.We were very early on with our products, so I walked him through how to do all of this process and this was at five o’clock at night by 10 o’clock the next morning. He had started generating sales on a product by only updating his keywords that had had no sales for the previous four weeks, so he had a product that had.Very little activity and activity and Amazon’s is called page sessions. That’s views to the page so it had very little activity all he did was update his keywords and his activity Rose and sales were generated in less than 24 hours now if you’re doing sponsored product ads you might start generating sales within that same 24 hour time period but because of the way Amazon reports their data for sponsored product ads it.Lee takes you two to three days to see whether sponsored product ads are making an impact because there’s an automatic 48-hour delay in all of the reporting, okay, if listeners wanted to reach you what’s the best method of getting in touch with you yeah, the best way to get in touch with me is seller Labs com s ller La BS com you can also reach me on LinkedIn you can do a search for Jeff Cohen.I am I’m pretty easily found within LinkedIn a lot of people find me. I encourage you to kind of reach out to me. Tell me that you heard me on the podcast ask me a question about you know Amazon or what you’re trying to do and love to love to try to help the last question. I have and I usually ask all the guests is.What is the one thing an e-commerce business can do right now so in your case. What is the one thing I sell on Amazon can do. To gamble customers and also from Outreach. Yeah, I mean I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but it’s been so amazing the results our customers have seen by spending 15 to 20 minutes updating their listing and sometimes.You know I used to run a multimillion-dollar retail website called textbooks com and I’ve been in the retail e-commerce game for a number of years, and I think that what we have to realize is sellers in the space is it sometimes making the little changes are the ones that can drive us the biggest results and so we sometimes get a little bit too in-depth into what we’re trying to do and to Scientific of what we’re trying to do, and we don’t just kind of we miss the obvious right so.We missed the obvious and so in the in the web World missing the obvious is are you updating your title tags your metadata your H1 tags on your website, it’s amazing. How many times. I see websites that still have these basic fundamental problems that is really SEO 101 on Amazon. It’s updating your product listing and making sure you have all of your Fields filled in and those are something that a seller can do today by spending.You know an hour on their product and going. Through and looking at this whether it be their own website. Whether it be on Amazon whether it be on somebody else’s Marketplace. It’s a great kind of check and balance to see have you done everything that’s necessary to give yourself the best chance for success.Thank you for being on the podcast yeah, thanks Robert. I appreciate it and I look forward to catching up with you again in the future. Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing Partners join the e-commerce marketing podcast Facebook group. Lawn connect collaborate and grow with other e-commerce marketers at e-commerce marketing podcast for FB e-commerce marketing podcast for FB subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for e-commerce marketing podcast and please leave a rating and review.Thank you for listening. See you next time.