Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 0:18

Happy Tuesday, everybody. I'm Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, a digital strategist with BWG Connect and we are a network of knowledge sharing group we stay on top the latest trends challenges whatever shaping the digital landscape we want to know and talk about it. We are on track to do at least 500 of these virtual events this year due to the increase in demand to better understand everything in the digital space. And we'll also be doing at least 100 in person small format dinners. So if you happen to live in a tier one city in the US, feel free to shoot us an email, we'd love to send you an invite these dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a discussion on a certain digital topic and it's always a fantastic time, we spend the majority of our time talking to brands so we stay on top of the latest trends challenges, but love to have a conversation with you. So feel free to send me an email at tiffany@bwgconnect.com. We can get some time on the calendar. It's from these conversations we generate the topic ideas we know people want to know and learn about. And it's also where we gain our resident experts such as product when who's with us today, anybody that we asked to teach the collective community has come highly recommended from multiple brands within the network. So if you ever need any recommendations within the digital space, please don't hesitate to reach out we have a short list of the best of the best. And we'd love to provide that information to you. Also note we do partner with a talent agency Hawkeye Search formerly BWG Talent that we'd love to put you in contact with as well. So with that few housekeeping items, this is going to be fast and furious. We have a 30 minute session we're gonna be running through a lot of information. And we want this to be fun, educational, conversational, questions, comments, anything you got put it into the chat the q&a or you can email me at Sydney bwgconnect.com and we will be sure to get to them. So with that let's rock and roll. And so talking about doubling success mastering eCommerce and marketing for both customers, you got to to deal with the users and the algorithms. The team of ProductWind have always been fantastic brands partners of the network's I'm gonna kick it over to you, Tim. Thank you so much.

Tim Wilson 2:15

Thanks, Tiffany. So my name is Tim, I work for a company named ProductWind. And what we do is we worked with at this point, we've done over a thousand campaigns helping companies as large as Church & White, Unilever to small startup companies as well. And what we do for these companies is we help deliver instant momentum for any product online, whether it's a product launch and ramping the product and call it 30 days. Or if it's you know, helping existing product that just needs a little boost to kind of get to the next level in terms of sales velocity. What we want to talk about today is the way that you can do this, you don't have to use ProductWind at all, this is definitely something every one of you on the phone could potentially do yourself. So I love this to be as interactive as possible, feel free to ask any questions you'd like. Nothing is off limits. And before I do that, though, I have just a few slides that I would love to share with everyone. So I'm going to share my screen here and walk through a couple of quick slides. And again, please any questions chime in this? These first few slides, you'll look at the bottom of the slide there. There's a summit in Chicago, in May, the end of May called the Digital Grocery Summit. And this was a great show, there was a lot of very tactical, realistic information that was shared. And one of the companies I presented is named Church and Dwight, who is a house of brands if you're not familiar with them, and they talked about how digital acceleration is a key priority for them. Everybody on the phone doesn't matter what industry you're in electronics, health, you know, health, household, etc. It's all a strategy and an key part for all of us. We're also probably all familiar with these stats that they have here, right to one version or one flavor of these or another. But the thing that's undeniable is the fact that digital is no longer a thing or a channel. It's a touchpoint along the consumer journey, right? The traditional sales funnel is no longer existent, where every consumer in every purchase has so many different touch points and twists and turns along the way. And along those long that journey digital is woven throughout. And so if that's the case, and digital's woven throughout the other thing to really just acknowledge or some people say put the duck on the table here is like the traditional shelf is very different than the digital shelf. And the digital shelf has a lot of different core fundamentals that people need to, to be successful need to be to optimize or focus on in order to be successful. And of course, in this context, the digital shelf, we're talking about everything from your DTC and your product detail page to really what I think is the most important aspect of the digital shelf, which is the search result page, right that when people go to Amazon, or they go to walmart.com, most people search for products, that's how they navigate the website. And so the bigger your share of voice, the bigger your presence is on that search result page, the more likely you are to get sales and as your digital shelf in terms of the SERPs. As your digital shelf strengthens, you get better placement. So to do your sales and your share your share, you know, the or your digital shelf, or your share of voice, excuse me, is a leading indicator of your future sales. So if your share of voices dropping on the search result page, if your digital shelf is weakening, so too will your sales and your share. I'm happy to dive into that if anybody wants to debate that that's a great conversation to have. But that's a foundational element to this. And so if that's the case, the question is Who controls the digital shelf? So if there are millions of searches, category searches happening for your product on Walmart on Amazon, or BestBuy, or whoever, who's controlling those search results? How do I get how do I drive more traffic and clicks and visits to my product detail page controls it? I mean, I think we all know, but we don't really think about this person or this thing when we're marketing. And this is what the best marketers are doing that I see. It's not just about having a great image to help our strong image stack to help convert the sale on the product detail page. It's for the end user. It's also about the algorithm and the retailer's algorithm, because that's what's determining your placement on all the search result pages. So I love memes. I put this one together. And this is what we want to talk about today. Because the retailer's algorithm is something that you should be thinking about, for your q4 success, and for 2024. How can you best market not just to the end user of the thing that you make? But how can you market to the algorithm so that you have a strong Share of Voice so that you have great visibility, your products have great visibility and great credibility, to help close the sale and drive it get an unfair market share. This is also if I'm being honest, I showed Tiffany, this is my second meme. Because I was afraid my first meme was going to be potentially inappropriate. So assuming everybody on the phone here is over the age of 21. I'll show my second one. I just love these classic memes. This is the other one I put together. It's a classic meme. Some of you may know or may not know. But I do feel like many people when we talk about how can you drive better sales on these retailer websites? Our minds go to retail media, and how can I optimize my ad spend and make sure that I'm doing hourly bidding and all of these things? And how can I upgrade my image stack and change my title? All of those things are important. I'm not saying they're not. I'm just saying there's somebody else you should be paying attention to. Right? And it's right there with you. It's been with you the whole way. That's the retailer's algorithm. And the reason this meme doesn't work is because really, to do it the right way. We need these two worlds to come together. And so that's why I get uncomfortable and I need to go back to the previous previous meme. This one's a little more wholesome. But this is this is the context I want to talk through is how algorithms are also your customer and to keep that in mind as you develop your holiday plans and 2024 plans. So before I go on a little bit of a tangent, I just want to pause and see if there are any initial questions that I can talk through and explain how people are doing this.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 9:39

Yes, put them into the chat the q&a email me at tiffany@bwgconnect.com and we will start piling through them. And as we're waiting for people to put in their questions, you're looking at like a ProductWind or service provider like ProductWind I mean what are or what can they do? Or what should you be looking for when you're looking for a service provider to appease these algorithm gods per se?

Tim Wilson 10:10

Yeah, I'm an old boss, I helped start a company named CommerceIQ, if any of you know that in the retail media space, and my boss was the founder of this guy named Guru, and he used to always say, you can't take an algorithm out for dinner. So what can you do, and this is where you don't have to use you can use you can do it yourself. But the algorithm is, Walmart and Amazon are essentially the exact same thing. Right? Suresh Kumar left, you know, joined Walmart from a background of Amazon and Google and Microsoft, and he implemented the same strategies. So Walmart, Amazon's algorithm are looking for the same thing, you need to develop a way to do the following things, right. Um, the the foundational element to all this is you obviously you have a product detail page that it that is well representative of your product, you have a good image stack, you have a you know, a great hero image with the white background, you've got a title, I consider that to be just basic table stakes. If any of you are still learning how to optimize a PDP I'm sure Tiffany has and a teeny bit of EG have many, many resources for you to connect with to really optimize your product detail page. But let's just assume that's something you know how to do already. So now it's like, I got that 10. But how do I? How do I want an unfair share? What are we doing the algorithms looking for the following things? The ones external traffic wants, especially external traffic from a competitor. There's nothing that Amazon would rather do than cannibalize someone else's sale, especially if that someone else is TikTok or Meta to have their biggest arch nemesis at this point, you want to have, you're gonna build to drive clicks, click through rate, certainly ratings and reviews help a little bit as well. And then the two of the most important things are sales velocity and conversion rate. So if you can drive those seven things, and do it consistently, week, over week, you are sending the algorithm signals or inputs, data that informs the algorithm, this product is highly relevant, this is the thing people are most likely to buy. And when the algorithm thinks your product is the thing people are most likely to buy, it boosts your visibility, your SEO goes straight up. Your ad spend becomes more efficient, because even when you're doing retail media efforts, you know, you get your sponsored product, right, it was talking to Amazon lingo, it's easier, but your sponsored product rank. Your sponsored products, bidding, excuse me gets ranked, sometimes you might win the sponsored products rank of 27, which isn't very helpful. But when the algorithm views you as relevant in your bidding is appropriate. You you get higher sponsored product visibility, your sponsored and your organic positions strengthen because your product is nothing people want to buy. So you need to send all of those signals week over week for an extended period of time. And when you do that, you really train the algorithm, you've given it a training set for any any math nerds on here, right? That makes it love your product. And conversely, if you have a product that has not performed well, for a long period of time, that is also a training set that is really hard to overcome. The good news is you can overcome it. It's just like any other problem that you solve later in life, it becomes more expensive versus if you would just solve it at the beginning. So those are the things you need to do.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 13:55

And we do have a question about the retailer algorithms. So what are some resources you would recommend for the analysis and strategy building around the said algorithms?

Tim Wilson 14:05

So there's a couple of different things that are in there. First, what are the resources you would I would go to is that the question and then what was the second part?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 14:16

And your resources for the analysis.

Tim Wilson 14:20

And now how do you analyze. Yeah. So in terms of resources to figure out what to do, I would go to I find that the digital shelf companies have phenomenal resources in terms of blogs, articles, newsletters, so companies like Profitero companies like Stackline, they all have certain you know, you're going to need to go to a vendor and read up on research that they've done, Nielsen and IRI to a certain extent to a lesser extent we'll have some of this information as well. If you want to whoever sent this if you want to send me an email, I'm happy to send you multiple links to different articles and research that has been done. My Amazon Guy also puts out a lot of research, if you know him, it's another big Amazon, third party seller. Pattern will put out some information that is the largest third party seller out there. So all of these companies are great resources for you. In terms of then measuring and how do you know that this thing worked versus something else, that's a lot more tricky. Because in order to really tease out the impact of any individual touchpoint, the right way to do this is a market mix model. And as you all know, or if you don't know, a market mix modeling exercise takes four to six months and costs significant, significant six figures. So it's not something you can do all the time, the thing that I would recommend you do is very simple, you all have a catalogue. That is, has more than one product in it. If you have a catalog that has more than one product in it do this AB test is the best way it is the cheapest way to understand what's really working, have one prod have two products that are fairly identical, right? They don't have to be exactly they need to, you know, keep them within 20% of the same price point, similar sales velocity and in a similar category. And do all those things I mentioned before about driving external traffic, increasing sales, velocity and conversion rate, etc. Do all that on one product. And don't do anything different on the second product, keep everything else the same. Just do an AB test. And I think within three or four weeks, you're gonna see some pretty surprising differences in the only thing that would be different would be wow, I changed my tactics on this one ASIN. Actually on a previous BWG webinar, we had a product when the customer in the VMA space talk about that exact process that they did. And she talks about the differences that resulted, and I'm happy to send you like a 62nd video clip from the BWG interview. If anybody would like to see that.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 17:08

Yeah, we can definitely send that with follow up for sure. I think that'd be great.

Tim Wilson 17:13

Yeah, that was with Nancy Eichler.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 17:16

Very cool. I was thinking to from an operational standpoint is appeasing the algorithms. Also, the idea of not going out of stock, you have that experience of you've done everything right on the marketing side. But logistically, maybe you don't have prime badging. So you don't have one or two days shipping, which algorithm loves. And the same with auto stock can just really kill your momentum there. So making sure you properly forecasting for that lift.

Tim Wilson 17:46

Yes, it's super important. Inventory management is very difficult, like I said, so one of the things a product wind can do, or really, all those other things I mentioned, we can drive visibility and credibility to your product, make your product highly visible and highly credible. And as soon as that if those two factors increase, so too will your sales. We can't make your products more available. Like the availability is arguably the most important component to it. And we can't help help you help you there.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 18:16

Yeah, that's a piece to never forget that part.

Tim Wilson 18:19

On the flipside, if you're especially if you're doing Born to Run, though, like we've talked to a couple of customers, and I don't want to be dramatic, right? But like the worst case scenario is you apply to Born to Run, you get it, and then you actually don't hit your sales numbers. If you do that. I mean, I don't think it's me anybody on the phone here, but I would love to know what your experience was like the next time you tried to do a BTR program. Amazon probably looked not so favorably on it impacts your POS. Yeah, absolutely. When you run program, and you do all these things I mentioned before, I can almost guarantee you're gonna knock it out of the park. And you're gonna see, you know, bigger POS coming your way, in the future.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 19:00

If anybody has been born to run program, if you want to share, you can put into the chat that q&a Or email me, that'd be awesome to hear. So look at that. I've heard this out multiple times from you, during these webinars and from other providers and research that we do is that outside traffic. Yeah, Amazon wants that traffic from Instagram and Facebook. And so who better to drive it? So then it comes to the influencers that were to how does this play into this puzzle that we're speaking of?

Tim Wilson 19:30

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for this while you're professional, so thank you. Thank you for teeing that up. So the way what we have found, what we've learned, is that the best way to train the algorithm, the best way to send in those signals, or data is through social. So what we do and again, if you want to try to do it yourself, I'm happy to walk you through what you need to do. The devils in the details of course, but what you You need, what we found is that if you launch these social campaigns across Instagram and Tiktok, and have those creators direct traffic back into the product detail page and orchestrate this kind of a week over week assault on the algorithm in terms of increasing the intensity in the traffic and whatnot, that is the best way to, to show the algorithm what it's looking for. And you get that nice kind of organic growth curve that that everyone's looking to achieve. So social, it allows you to be so much more than a form of awareness, social, yes, the social campaigns are good to drive awareness reach engagement, those traditional social metrics, it's just we think it's best to use social to drive eCommerce KPIs. So for our customers. What we're delivering is when we're showing them things like page one, SEO wins, right? Top 10 placements, an increase in advertising efficiency or row as for talking about Amazon, Amazon choice badges, you get Amazon badges, which helped with more credibility, right, or showing an increase in sales, velocity and ratings and reviews. And that's what helps get the flywheel going, which is really what we're talking about. Anybody lives in a state that has snow or mud, every now and then your car gets stuck, everyone goes to the back, and you kind of lean into it to give it a big push. I grew up in New Hampshire, you know, I've done this 100 times in my life. And sometimes we all have a product that that's just stuck, and you just gotta give it that push. And that's what a lot of these programs can do. If you can orchestrate this assault on the algorithm, it sends in all these signals of like you mentioned, increasing traffic, increasing conversion, sales rate, velocity clicks, your glance views really increased dramatically. And you can show that over not a day or a week or two weeks, but four or 567 weeks, the algorithm now says this thing is relevant, this is what people want, this is the thing people are interested in. And that's when you pop the car out the the tire hits. It's something other than mud or snow, it's branch or something that can take off. And you know, that's what we're looking for. That's what we're looking to do.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 22:32

And you're off to the races or getting a speeding ticket or something. Put him into the chat the q&a. Talking about influencers reminds me of home shopping, my background originally was in home shopping, live television, and just looking at the host. Now the person who's on the social media platform is driving that traffic because of their personality and because of their followers and people trust them, and what they promote. So how does a brand find the right fit when it comes to an influencer to promote their product?

Tim Wilson 23:06

That is a smart question. So I don't know if that was your question or from the audience. But the finding the right influencers is one of the reasons honestly, why you go to an agency, it just is. Because so for us, what we look at is yes, there's traditional demographic, psychographic data that is important, right? You don't want to have some body building, fit, ripped dude promoting a, you know, prenatal product for mom, right? So you have to have the proper demographics and psychographics. Here's a female 25 to 35, who's a health enthusiast you know, this person can promote this supplement, or whatever the case is, that's important. But I believe you need to do so much more than that. And so what we're doing is, everyone in our community has to integrate first party data, we have a direct connection into their Tiktok. And their Instagram accounts set up and anything else if their Amazon numbers their prime if their Walmart connect, or Walmart plus, like we have sort of a mountain of this first party data. And what allows us to do is understand your behavioral tendencies. So what you really want to have for an influencer is the demographic and psychographic Of course, like that's table stakes. But beyond that, to what degree does this person follow brand guidelines? We're really orchestrating things over a six week window here. So if we ask or if you need somebody to publish content, and you know, publish a TikTok video for you, on Tuesday, do they publish it on Tuesday? Or do they publish it like the following Sunday? In which case, this is a dance we're doing? And if you have someone who can't follow the guidelines and can't do these things, they're it's like they're stepping on your toes in your algorithm. So, you know, to what degree to today, are they able to drive clicks and traffic or reviews or what have you, right? So we're looking at all these different things. Behavioral metrics, because they are people. So it's not software, right? It's not a guaranteed one or zero, you're still dealing with the human element. The idea is try to understand the humans behavioral likelihood and tendencies, and build a team of people that collectively, their actions are likely to deliver the results you want.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 25:21

And these will be products that are not only new product launches, but like the ones that you refer to that maybe are stuck in the mud, or maybe we're out of stock. They had momentum. We're out of stock now. Yeah, we're starting back to get momentum.

Tim Wilson 25:33

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to share a few examples of that. And honestly, the most, the busiest time of year for us is usually June. And then middle of October, because what we're doing fundamentally for you are product and related products, because there's all the relevancy. So your product in any related products is we boost your your share voice, we make your ad spend more efficient, and we make your SEO go way up. So you have a much stronger visible presence on the search result page. And so what our customers will do is they'll start working with us in the middle of June, so that on Prime Day, they already own the search result page. So same thing for the holidays over cyber five, Turkey five, whatever you want to call it, we kick off campaigns. So that come Thanksgiving week, their products are already positioned to capture the surge in demand. So it's really every company has got some cycle to their life, right? If you're in the VMAs space, January, February, New Year new you, right, like you really want to hype it then. It just depends.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 26:42

Awesome. Question here. I like this question. Everyone stresses about creating helpful content, what are the top five actionable steps you recommend in creating helpful content in terms of product descriptions for an eCommerce site?

Tim Wilson 26:59

In terms of whether fraught top things that I can say in terms of product descriptions for eCommerce? So my opinion, my opinion, is I'm coming from this from just like Tim Wilson Inc, my two cents on this is number one, in terms of product descriptions, I still default first and foremost, to the image stack. Because there's, I'll find that if you want to email me, I'll find I'll dig up some research I've seen but essentially, the image stack is the most important thing on your product detail page. It's what people look at, not everyone reads product descriptions. Product Descriptions, are typically in my opinion, best used to handle specific size weights fits those types of things and and to offer keywords in terms of helping you index for different search terms. The what you really want to optimize is the image stack and within the image stack, I would argue and I we have some data on this as well. UGC converts better than the professional images. When somebody sees someone like themselves using your product that resonates so much more than the professional photo shoot that you've had. That's pretty easily mocked up. So I have seen collages and image stacks I can you share with you. We're up against the clock, but I can share with you some examples that I think are really good. If you would like to see that. I'm happy to send you some examples.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 28:26

Awesome. And what about video when it comes into that image stack?

Tim Wilson 28:30

Absolutely. So best practices for video to be in the seventh slot down at the bottom. It's absolutely impacts your conversion rate pattern has done some great research on this if you want to read some patterns, resources. And on that video, you want to really be able to show the product in use. Because one of the things that if you're not in, you know, it's not a consumable products, one of the things that everyone loses the sense of is scale. And how would this thing actually work or fit or function? So being able to show that in the videos is super helpful?

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 29:06

Awesome. Yeah, we are at a time already. I knew this was gonna move fast. It always does. Tim, thank you so much. For the Intel the content always so helpful. I would definitely encourage follow up conversations with the product winning team will be doing some follow up as well with a conversation with you. That's how we get the topic ideas for our future events. So feel free to reach out at tiffany@bwgconnect.com And we can get some time on the calendar. So Tim, thank you so much till next time and safe travels next week.

Tim Wilson 29:32

Thanks, Tiff. Bye, everyone.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 29:35

Thank you all for joining everybody.