Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 0:18

Happy Tuesday everyone I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, a digital strategist here at BWG Connect. We are a network and knowledge sharing group. We say on top of the newest trends, challenges, whatever it may be, that's changing that digital landscape that we all live in. 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 digital, and we are on track to do at least 100 in person small format dinners. So if you are in a tier one city, feel free to drop us an email, these dinners are typically 15 to 20 people sitting around talking about a specific digital topic. So if you're interested, we'll definitely send you an invite. Here at BWG Connect, we spend the majority of our time talking to brands to stay on top of the different trends. So I'd love to have a conversation with you feel free to send me an email at Tiffany Tiffany@BWGconnect.com. And it's from those conversations, we generate the topic ideas for future calls. And it's also where we get our resident experts such as ProductWind, who's here today, welcome. Anybody that we asked to teach the community has come highly recommended from multiple brands that we speak with within our network. So if you're an ever need of having any recommendations that are understanding service providers that are out there, always feel free to reach out to me, Tiffany@BWGConnect.com, we have a shortlist of the best of the best service providers that we can offer you so no need to do the homework, go to Google starting from scratch, we did the vetting for you. And we'd be happy to share that. So a few housekeeping items before we get started. We want this to be as educational and conversational as possible. So during the presentation, feel free to put in your comments your questions into the chat bar. If you feel more comfortable, always feel free to email me Tiffany@BWGConnect.com. And we started three to four minutes into the hour. So we will end three to four minutes before the end of the hour, which will give you enough time to get to your next meeting. So with that, let's start introductions and get rolling. And we're going to learn how to launch products on Amazon with influencers, the team of ProductWind have been great friends supporters in their network. I'm going to kick it off to Matt and Jason, if you give us a brief introduction on yourself, and then ProductWind and then we can kick it off with information you brought today. Thank you.

Jason Kowalski 2:52

Great, thanks, guys. We are super excited to be here. I have Matt Angelini with me our Head of Sales. And I'm Jason Kowalski, CEO of ProductWind. And we're very excited to go through launching products on Amazon, obviously the Game point. So I'll kind of walk through how we use craters to do so. ProductWind is one click creator marketing. And what we really try to do is there's a ton of eCommerce platforms out there to measure health measure product health, we do the same. But on top of that we use creaters to actually improve health, right, so I want to get your product page one in search, I want to get you more social sales, I want to get more buzz, I want to launch your product successfully. So what we do is we work with brands, big and small, mainly on the bid to big side. And we work with marketing teams and eCommerce teams to basically use our creators to launch your products. So I would love to dive in to the session today, it's going to be a little high level, hopefully we can do more of these and kind of focus just on social sales or just on SEO or just on conversion. But this will kind of be an overview process mainly geared towards eCommerce executives. Obviously, we do a lot of work with marketing teams, because we do run creator campaigns. But also touch on that and how we kind of fit into both the marketing and eCommerce side. So I'll run through pretty short deck about 10 slides and then after, feel free to ask any questions you want. And we'll kind of do a q&a with the remaining time. But yeah, we'll just dive in. Okay, let us learn how to move a slide forward. Great. Amazon product launches are hard. I'm preaching to the choir here, probably because you're on this webinar. But from the research we've done, the average product takes six months to launch, we've seen some products that never launched products that take a year. Some products obviously launch faster. But how we quantify it is if a product takes six months or 10 months to ramp up, that's 610 months in lost sales. So what can happen if you can launch your product in a couple of days or a couple of weeks versus three months, four months, five months, you can get a lot more sales and you get them a lot faster. Why this happens? Obviously great products are often buried in search. Amazon doesn't have a lot of data, which I'll talk about. So maybe you're on page 10 And no one's finding your product. Also detail page content. It's very hard to get those initial reviews. Vine has its own set of challenges. getting great lifestyle images, getting videos building out that detail page is very tough. So product launches are hard, but I think creators can help. And a big reason why it's so hard is Amazon doesn't have any data, right. So when you launch a brand new product, Amazon desperately wants to know if your product is going to be the next best seller next MacBook, or if it's a dud, but right now it has nothing. So the forecast curve Amazon has is extremely conservative, and there's no baseline data. So what you need to do is you need to figure out a way to signal to Amazon that your product is hot to avoid the Amazon doesn't order enough problem. So many of you guys have probably experienced the classic Amazon orders five units you sell out of the five units, and then Amazon orders 10 units. And two months later, Amazon sells those units. And then Amazon two months later orders 20 units. So what happens is often you're selling out, but Amazon is just so conservative with buys that it takes a very long time to ramp up. What we can do is if at the very beginning, you use creator's properly to create a lot of buzz and get, you know, hundreds of people buying the product, talking about the product, sharing the product, Amazon, instead of saying, hey, let's buy 10 units might say, let's buy 500 units. And that really sets you guys up for success by getting those bigger POS out of the gate. Programs like Vine are awesome, but they don't contribute to baseline, right, those are kind of backdoor units. Amazon's not counting those units in their forecasting algorithm. And then ad sales, bit of a black box, but we still see a Chinese firewall of sorts. And we see that ad sales are discounted, and Amazon's organic. So obviously, everyone's using ADS launch products, it's a great idea. But you're not getting full credit for that, which kind of takes us to the idea of a crater campaign. But first I the framework, we use a product for everything, and you guys probably use for everything, both personal and business is traffic times conversion is everything. So for me, it's all about a successful product launch means you're getting lots of traffic, and a lot of people are buying it. So just to kind of break that down just to make sure we're on the same page. I looked at traffic as there's external traffic off Amazon from, you know, Instagram, YouTube, Google. And then of course, there's Amazon traffic, which is showing up highly in Amazon search results. And then of course, we have conversion, which is you know, if 100 People hate your page, how many of them are actually buying? So we always try to do is kind of break out? How do we improve traffic? External traffic? How do we improve your ranking in Amazon search results, internal traffic? And how are we thinking about conversion and improving that. So this is the framework, we use a product when to do everything. And I'll kind of now break down how creators fit into these different buckets and driving forward,

in my opinion. Cool. So first, the piece of advice I'll give you and I recommend you kind of tell your marketing teams is run big influencer campaigns, we see time and time again, we use a lot of 5100 200 influencer campaigns to launch products, we see a lot more success, working with 100 smaller influencers. So say 10,000 followers than 10, big influencers. Ideally, for us, we'll actually kind of combine the two and say, you know, 90 smaller influencers and 10 flagship influencers, who kind of, you know, the head and the tail mix. But in general, we think in general, most brands go too small. We'll talk about why, but really having 100 influencers all at the same time, you know, buying a product, talking about a product, etc, has huge kind of returns. Also, from a budget perspective, the number one job in America right now is being an influencer. So it's, it's, it's reasonable to find really good talent, without paying too too much when you work with slightly smaller people versus people with millions of followers. So my first piece of advice is push your social teams to run those bigger campaigns, because we see a lot of success with them. And what does that campaign look like? Right? You have 100 influencers? How do you what are you thinking about when you're kind of talking through and finding craters, we kind of break it into a couple buckets. So you're not going to find one craters good at everything. But what we'll be thinking about and how we do it a product with is we actually score craters on different metrics. So one thing we score craters on is conversion. How likely is that influencer to make great content that's on brand for the brand? Are they likely to do it quickly? Are they likely to leave a review on Amazon? Right? Obviously, you can't ask for reviews. But one thing we like to do is model out review likelihood, right? So those are the things we're looking at. And the bulk of our campaigns typically are around, you know, maybe 30 influencers are really focused on the conversion, maybe 50 influencers are very focused on conversion. It's really building out that detail page with great content. The other piece is traffic and SEO experts. So we think about is again, how do we find influencers that are just going to drive a ton of traffic. So for us, what we see and I'll talk about is Amazon is still rewarding traffic from Google, from Facebook, from Instagram, from TikTok from competitors, highly. So if we have influencers who are just very good at generating traffic back to Amazon, we see really good things happen both with just you know, Amazon seeing more traffic and going oh, I think this products hot, we'll show it to more people in our internal algorithm, and also really turning that into keyword wins. So you're showing up on the first page are more big keywords. So we try to find people very good at making content. We try to find people who are both trusted by Amazon and very good at driving traffic to Amazon. And then we round out the campaign with people who we can drive social sales. So, again, I'll talk about things like Amazon attribution in the second promo codes. But it is now possible to track sales at the influencer level. And that's what you should be doing. And we kind of round out our campaign with some influencers that we think can actually move the needle from a sales perspective. So bigger campaigns, I, I think are the best deal in the space right now. And I think that's the best way to signal to Amazon, that your product is hot. That's how you get tons of traffic clicks, conversions purchases, right at product launch. And this is roughly how we kind of think about a campaign conversion, traffic and SEO

in sales. Diving into that a little bit more. Let's look at the conversion bucket. So how do you really use craters to drive conversion? Right? One thing that I don't think social teams do enough is using influencers to get product feedback, as you guys know, very rarely, but you have a product that maybe you know, isn't perfect, but obviously if you go to the product team and say that they're going to tell you what are you talking about? One nice thing is craters give you tons of feedback. So if you know there is a glare, a pretty big problem with the product, craters will tell you but a lot of people just don't take the second to say Hey, could you actually review the product, you use it, you give us your actual feedback as a work? Do you like it, um, you know, we did a product recently, that just smelled terrible. And a lot of our craters have said, it really smelled badly. But the product team didn't know that. So we were able to give that feedback relative to the sales team. And the eCommerce team brought that back. And it helped make a new formula and a better product, which is great. But getting product feedback is obviously you know, your product has to be good, high return rates punish you in Amazon search results. So product feedback is something I highly recommend you talk to traders about to a lot of people do sampling programs, what you guys should do is talk to your marketing teams and say, Hey, I know we send a lot of products in the mail to influencers or to friends and family, whatever it is, what we like to do is have the Creator buy directly on Amazon or Walmart, wherever it may be. And the main reason for that is, of course, logistics. Amazon's the best logistic company in the world. Right. So having 100 influencers when you go bigger buy from Amazon really simplifies your life versus tracking 100 different shipments, to again, Amazon doesn't have data, right. And what we've just done is had 100 influencers, all purchase a product, again, don't do anything like ask for reviews or anything, but just having those purchases come in, nothing else is gonna signal a really powerful baseline to Amazon, right? When Amazon's thinking about what do we do with our forecast? Right? So having craters purchase directly is a really hot tip to move the needle. Three, not enough people, in my opinion, are really thinking about lifestyle photos, videos from creators. A lot of people you guys know, you're experts that on a detail page, there's an upload your video section, right? Well, creators are great at doing this, they can easily take their content, their testimonial, their review, whatever it is, and upload it right to the detail page. So we asked our creators to do that for all of our campaigns. And then to lifestyle images. Sure, you still need your white background, perfect product photos. But the best way to supplement a listing is have video content. So our creators love to kind of give brands videos that they can then add to the product listing. But again, kind of building that funnel with the marketing team to say hey, I need content from craters, let's make sure we're using it is a great win. A lot of leadership teams now really want crater marketing and play. And that's a great way to say hey, look, we're kind of integrated the marketing team and eCommerce. Here's how we're working together, look at our detail page. And then of course, doing an A B test is, you know, a great way on top of that to test it. Again, by working on conversion, Amazon choice badges bestseller badges, especially new release badges. It's a timing game, if you run these big campaigns right at launch, it's pretty reasonable to get a new release badge, which is awesome. Amazon choice badge is similar as well. But again, we're always tracking we recommend is just tracking your Amazon choice. You know, a lot of people use something like Jungle Scout, but just tracking and seeing how craters affect that. That's something a lot of marketers aren't thinking about, but I love to see okay 50 craters 50 influencers, and I kind of use that term interchangeably. Creators is the new hot word. But we still use influencer sometimes too. But you know, tracking how they affect those things is great. And then of course, the review piece, we time and time again see that craters have a higher likelihood of leaving reviews in general than everyday customers. So tracking r&r, really important to see what your r&r score and rate looks like before creator campaign, and after. So again, tracking that and making sure you know when timings happening just to see what happens with reviews and ratings. But influencers can do a lot to improve the conversion of your detail page. And these are just some of the things we think about a product and

cool external traffic. So when you think about content posting for a while, the kind of thing to do is post you know a main feed post or main feed video on Instagram, say or on Tik Tok. That's great, but it's very hard to get traffic from that back to Amazon. So a big part of our campaigns are really using stories and swipe ups. So if you look over on the right here, it says classic, you know, swipe up, see more, boom from swiping up, you go right to Amazon. And that's really, really important because again, Amazon doesn't have a baseline showing them tons of traffic is super important. So we will actually go out of our way to make sure all of our creators are doing stories and swipe up links to get more Content did the Detail page, if you do kind of a static post, you then have to say, Oh, the links in my bio. And some craters don't like to do that. Or you have to say go to my comments to find the link, it's a lot more work, having a swipe up is a really good way to get clicks to the page. And if your marketing team is really thinking about impressions, still, I think clicks and social sales, like the data is now there to track it. But it should really be about clicks, it should really be about social sales, but swipe up links. Putting those links directly in bio is good, but always better to put it in a story if possible. So again, Instagram, YouTube, those are great places to kind of put links directly back to Amazon tic toc as well. Now, how do you track all this? Right? There's Bitly. There's many solutions out there. But what a lot of people don't use is Amazon's own tools. And it's kind of because of course Amazon doesn't announce anything. There's not great documentation. It's confusing. But number one tip here, use social media promo codes. Amazon has a great program where you can make one promo code per each end points in your campaign, or that's too much work. One kind of promo code for all your influencers. And what's awesome about that is it generates a landing page. So it's a great, it's a great feature, because then the influencer can put that page directly into their swipe up story. And if a follower clicks it, they go to a landing page that says with a discount automatically applied. So let's say you make a promo code for 20% off creators love promo codes, because it's like something they can give back to their followers. But even better, if a follower clicks that link, the 20% is automatically applied. So there's no code to enter. A lot of people have trouble entering codes, which is crazy, but true. So using Amazon social media promo code product gives you links that makes it way easier to drive traffic consistently to Amazon. And it gives kind of an automatically applied discount. So we do this to track influencer performance for our campaigns. And it's really effective. The second thing you can do, of course, is Amazon attribution links. This is getting some more buzz. But you can wrap all of those same product links with an attribution tag. And Amazon will track clicks Add to Cart purchases. Now the one thing is it's a little blurry because customers on the internet are clicking so many affiliate programs that you don't always get credit for them. So the nice thing about the social media code is if they get a purchase with their unique code and a unique link, you have basically 100% attribution. So you know, if the influencers are driving sales, on the Amazon attribution side, it's kind of a best guess. So it's not perfect, but you get a lot of good information like add to carts, clicks, etc. And you can kind of have all that reporting happenings, you can see if your creators are driving the traffic you want before this was kind of hard to see except checking the traffic in Seller Central or in vendor Central. But this is a great way to kind of do it on the Amazon site to see what's happening. And then if you're a seller, you actually get a 10% bonus now on any purchases through those links. So Amazon has that bonus referral program where it's giving you a refund for driving your own traffic. So using an attribution link for a seller is a no brainer just to get some extra cash, and then preventers and sellers. It's great because it gives you better reporting, which is awesome. The last tip I'll give you guys for external traffic is I would think about Google SEO. Amazon, obviously, you know, always brags about how most searches start on Amazon. That seems to be true. But what we've seen is a great way to win Google SEO. So when someone types in webcam, and Google you want to be at the top is to find YouTube creators and work with them, right? Because Google loves YouTube because they own YouTube. So if a creator with a really nice title of the video, which we kind of help them create, has, check out this x webcam that has these features review, there's a good chance you're going to show up highly in Google SEO for making that video. So we like to add 510 YouTube creators in our campaigns now to basically help you win that Google SEO to drive more clicks back to Amazon. So think about YouTube craters specifically, because they rank highly in Google. But that's a great way to also drive more traffic to the detail page using craters.

Cool, so we talked a bit about conversion. We talked a bit about external traffic. But one thing I want to touch on is external traffic is still a very good predictor of internal traffic. So if you just go to this slide, we still see Amazon heavily weighing external traffic, and its search results algorithm. So I don't know if you guys know this, but for a while. And they may even be doing it still. A lot of the top sellers and agencies and aggregators, I should say, we're basically running like a fake or a Google ad product where, you know, someone would click a Google ad and go to Amazon and Amazon would see that and go out to Google ads. We want to we want to win from Google. Let's, let's reward that traffic. Let's move up the products in the keywords. Let's move up the products and search results. That doesn't work as well anymore. But Amazon is still heavily prioritizing traffic from Instagram, Google TikTok, etc. So the one kind of actionable thing for you is just think about if you guys are doing a big email campaign, we see email kind of having less of an effect on SEO, Amazon's SEO, then, you know, TikTok, Instagram, etc. So what I recommend doing is if you're debating, hey, do we send an email blast to our customers, or do we send them a link to our Instagram store where they can swipe up to Amazon I would recommend doing the swipe up to Amazon, because we've seen that traffic comes from Instagram versus an email is actually better, more likely to increase the products ranking in search results on Amazon. So just a thought. And these can be big improvements. Here's like a graph of kind of a product was down to 200, they did a campaign with our creators, and boom, they moved up to basically, you know, the top couple slots on page one. And for a big keyword. As you guys know, if you're in the top couple slots, that can be all the sales because it's a very exponential game. But again, using craters to really go through YouTube go through Instagram to drive that traffic can really help you with internal rankings as well, especially when you do a product launch or Amazon doesn't have a lot of data, Amazon, my guess is app product launch, if it gets a signal, it's gonna in that honeymoon period really throw you up even higher, just because it doesn't want to miss out on the next product. So again, doing this at launch is super important. So that's conversion, that's external traffic, that's internal traffic. I, the one last thing I'll say is just obviously a lot of you guys have social teams, you might not be on the social team. If I had to give one piece of advice, it's probably going to be doing influencer campaigns anyway, that's fine, I would say just really push them to time it with your product launch. We see kind of crazy things when a product launches on Amazon, Amazon doesn't have a lot of data. So that literally that day is the best time to run a social influencer campaign, the data we have, which is you know, rough, but basically a campaign, a crater campaign that starts on the day of product launch is 30% more effective than a campaign starting even two weeks later. So that two weeks really matters. And again, it's because Amazon is really trying to figure out what to do, if you immediately have traffic coming, great conversion, sales coming, that really matters. So the big takeaway here is, most of our clients don't run campaigns at launch day, just cuz obviously you guys know how complicated it is, there's a million things happening. But as soon as you can run that greater campaign, run that influencer campaign, tell your marketing team to start literally day one of launch, because it's a lot more effective waiting two months, it's just not as effective as doing it in the first week or two, still effective. But it's just such an advantage to do it faster. I know it's a ton of planning, but do what you can to kick off those campaigns at product launch, that's what's gonna help your product the most even waiting a little bit really hurts you. And then lastly, with social teams, obviously, there's many, many other best practices, just a couple things to call out.

Once you thing is, you really want to make sure you're setting smart influencer and content approval SLAs if you're working at a big company right now, your Creator team is going to be gonna be like hawks, looking at the content coming in the influencers, making sure everything's on brand, you don't in any means want to go kind of off brand write a product, then we have a model that kind of looks at the brand's Instagram versus our creators Instagrams, and make sure there's like a match. But the most important thing is a lot of these enterprise marketing teams are going to insist on content approvals, where they're going to want to review each piece of content and influencer approvals. You want to make sure that SLA is pretty reasonable. Because what you don't want to happen is have a campaign where influencer one comes in, you know, five days later, they get approved and put your two comes in seven days later to get approved. I thinking about what Amazon wants, right? We think about how do we have the most successful product launch possible? What we want is an increasing curve, right? We want five creators, content creators than 20 creators, because Amazon wants to speed up an increasing curve always for things like traffic clicks, conversion, sales, everything. So what you don't want is spaced out influencers with no curve increase. So again, you just want to think about how do we make this campaign tight. Some things you can do or say, hey, let's do a story only campaign because story content disappears after 24 hours. And maybe we skipped content approvals, just get the content out there. Let's get people driving to Amazon, etc. So good SLAs product with Viva dashboard. We're marketers kind of Approve or Reject with, like predefined feedback, we have a pretty tight SLA that's been helpful for us for enterprise brands to kind of run those campaigns still quickly at launch. To ask about sales package tracking. CPM is to how a lot of companies are measured. It's a super interesting metric. But in my mind, the clicks to Amazon are super, super interesting. Or maybe super, super, super interesting. I said super, super the first time. But the point is you want clicks and you want social sales. Amazon attribution exists, Amazon promo codes exist, you should be asking your social team to wrap everything in those eCommerce based solutions, it's a great way for you to add value to them. And it's also a great way to get all of you more metrics. So you know, think about how you can kind of like step into that process to add attribution links and add promo code links to kind of better track everything and increase the effectiveness because promo codes are great and influencers love them. And then lastly, I talked about it before, but it's building that pipeline of, hey, you're getting all this content. How do I get it onto my detail page, right? Like maybe we do a pre release or something where we get content even earlier, but again, hey, can you just ask all your creators to upload a video to the Amazon detail page? It's honestly a pretty small ask. They probably already created great content anyway. But you know, maybe your social team is not asking them to do that. So it's again, just thinking from the eCommerce lens and saying, here's the content I need, can you get it for me, and I think you'll be surprised a lot of times marketers have that content. And it's a pretty quick email to get it. So obviously, social eCommerce have to work really closely on the product launch. But your KPIs are super important. You know, it's about driving sales. So anything you can do to have social help you is going to be huge, but just, you know, really think about how what the small wins are working with social teams. But that's pretty much it. I mean, in recap, on the traffic SEO perspective, we like swipe up links, we want to get traffic hitting Amazon, you can even use Bitly, or something to track clicks. If you haven't integrated with Amazon attribution or Amazon promo codes. You want to do bigger campaigns, bigger campaigns, especially if they're buying on Amazon, that's going to be a lot more benefit. A lot more traffic coming in, try to drive traffic from social media sites, not email or possible conversions. You know, again, having craters purchase directly leveraging crater content, make sure you're measuring what's happening, measure reviews and see if Hey, did this campaign lead to more sales? Which led to more reviews? Or did it not? Did the rating go up? Did it go down? You want to know how these things are effecting outputs, like r&r, which are super important to your guys's success. And then social sales, we can now track it, use Amazon's programs, and then insist the campaign start or beg them to have the campaign start out product launch, and then try to have those campaigns increasing over time. It's a tough ask. But you can have that really nice curve, it's really gonna help you have success, that product launch because Amazon wants to see this for a new product. And you can help do that with creators. But that's pretty much it kind of ran through that one. But I wanted to leave plenty of time for questions through some content. But uh, that's pretty much it. So I'll now open up the floor to you guys. And we can dive into any kind of specifics about anything in the Creator. Product Launch AI. Discussion. There's a lot there. So yeah, right. Awesome,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 26:58

awesome information. Thank you so much, Jason. And I think we're all in this world of Amazon. We've grown it, maybe you've been over indexed at the last year. Maybe you've scaling back, but maybe not. And the thing is, Amazon will always be a part of your strategy and how you keep changing with it, and stay profitable and relevant, and grow your business. So we have a lot of good questions. One is the Amazon model, is this appropriate for one p n, three P or is it a certain model to work with? And depending on the model, you know, what are those social levers that are able to be through one p versus three P? That's great question I

Jason Kowalski 27:47

honestly, our client breakdown is roughly 60% one p 40%. Three p. So everything I just talked about works for both things like Amazon attribution, promo codes, those samples support for both vendors and sellers. And we've seen the forecast models on the vendor side or you know, unique, but everything we do in both cases, like things like we need Amazon to order more is a very one P problem. But not necessarily you can sell yours today. Now these 100 Minimum caps, right where you can only bring in 100 FBA and wait. So both people are desperately trying to get Amazon to buy more or on the seller side raise their caps. So I think this is a solution for both like one P can really benefit. And three P can really benefit as well. Either way you want to get your orders or sales up. So it makes sense for both.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 28:30

Awesome. And if you are doing three P is there an opportunity instead of sending everything to FBA? Being able to own that process and ship out of your own warehouse?

Jason Kowalski 28:43

Yeah, that's a great question. So you can you can definitely like there's a process to go in FBA, take that inventory and ship it out. The downside of that, of course, is you're just moot you're losing out on a little bit of baseline setting. If you have instead, and you say like, I know, it's gonna be slightly more expensive, because Amazon's gonna take that 30% Cut, right? And you're thinking, do I want to pay that 30%? You do. Because in the first two weeks of launch, you instead have those, you know, creators as buy directly on amazon.com. That's factoring into Amazon going, Hey, let's get rid of the seller limits, let's improve your IPI score, right, which is very frustrating, you can really throw everything into chaos. So I would recommend at least for the launch campaign, to just have everyone buy directly through Amazon, because we see literally one of those sales could turn into three sales down the road. But yes, you have the capabilities to also do this through FBA. So that's definitely at your disposal. I would recommend doing it through the algorithm just out the algorithm, but both are okay.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 29:37

So, in theory, if you got a flywheel going at FBA, you sold out of that inventory that was at FBA. We all know there's delays, you know, shipping to FBA these days. You could then revert to your own warehouse to keep that flywheel going. Exactly. You're not losing that momentum. Excellent. So can you walk through the process? process of working with the influencers? And do you change up? Do you make relationships with them? So they're very knowledgeable on what your product messaging is? what the product is, they need to understand the ins and outs of what to say what not to say. Is that something that a team should be devoting resources to in their planning this out?

Jason Kowalski 30:22

That's a great question. It's a tough one, because it kind of depends how big you are. But I'll answer it a couple of ways. One, I'll say if you're small, and you're scrappy, and you say I want I need creators, I need some extra buzz, I'm spending tons of money on ads, I want to do it, I would say just do the work. Like go on Instagram, hire someone in the Philippines, like figure out, just try to contact people who are good fits your your brands, and say, Hey, like I'm trying to do this, I'm offering expert post or in this case, a story on it. It's getting harder, I'll say that. But if you have a good product, it's still definitely possible to find people who are excited to get your product, talk about it, go to Amazon, buy it, send people to Amazon, etc. So you can still DIY yourself if you're small. In our case, we have our own network. Like that's the only way to make this work. So we have our own mobile app, where our creators, the nice thing about that is we get data. And then I think for you guys, if you're running 100 influencer campaign, it's awesome. Because you can kind of separate the people who really kill it. And the people who did average right, and the people who killed it, yes, absolutely. We give those people extra bonuses, we try to make them really happy, give them gifts, and say you want to be a brand ambassador, like please. But maybe the other 80 are better fitted for other products. But one of the cool things about spreading your budget across 50 versus two is if some don't work out in some do, you can still want success, and you just got a lot more data. So for us, it's we're not just looking at one brand we're looking at, okay, did this influencer successfully do what they're supposed to and follow those brand guidelines. In five out of five campaigns they've done right. So it's hard, but you almost need to kind of run multiple campaigns just to start getting the data. But it's doable. For sure. If you are building out your own program, it's still very approachable, just with a lot of DMS. Obviously, it's easy to have your own network, but there's a lot of technologies and stacks to help with that as well.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 32:06

Excellent. A question that we have about the sample process. So if they are buying directly, Amazon, how does the reimbursement work to that influencer?

Jason Kowalski 32:16

It's good question. You can do different stuff. In our case, we have kind of a, an easy way out because we know who we can trust and who we can't. So what will literally do is like have them buy the product. And then we say, Hey, we're gonna pay you $500 in exchange for a social media post a tic tock story and an Instagram story. And in our case, maybe that 500 will just be big enough to kind of cover everything they had to do. So it kind of just like, covers it. And we don't need to worry about the specific costs, the danger there is you're kind of fronting a bit. And for those kind of opportunities, it helps to trust the influencer. But in our case, we're just using a marketing fee, in exchange for kind of work done, and it will just kind of encompass everything they had to do with their own, you know, funds as well.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 32:57

But question here is product that's in the home space? And how do they find the best influencer? Question one? And what is the typical amount of money that these 2/3 tier influencers are paid?

Jason Kowalski 33:15

That's a good question. Hard question. Um, I would say, like to start if you have a good product, you know, hashtags are great. Like, again, it sounds go on to you know, your brand, has a nascent creator program, go on Instagram, TikTok, look at hashtags and say, you know, maybe cooking or whatever it may be, and just try to find people who are really excited about those niches. And then maybe you reach out to them, or to even find competitors, and people best in class, like a lot of influencers don't have exclusive agreements, right. And if they make great content for one brand, they might be willing to make great content for you. So hashtags are kind of an easy way to think about it. There's also a million platforms to kind of search through influencers, they're all kind of the same, but that's a way to kind of say, like, losing what space. But yeah, I would say hashtags are a decent way to kind of do the work in terms of payment. It's really crazy. It's so it's so individ like, I wish I had a model that was like, if they have 10,000 you pay them, you know, $100 a day 20 pay them 200. But the truth of the matter is, like so many influencers value products differently, like sometimes you'll work with an influencer, who just loves the product, and will basically do the campaign for free in exchange for the product. Other times, you have a more niche product, and they don't need it and you need to pay $300. So I don't know maybe a random number for 10,000 kind of influencers. 10,000 followers, right might be, let's say, kind of given them the equivalent of the free product plus, you know, 50 bucks to 300 bucks, like depending really what that product is and how excited they are about it. But many of those influencers will have the rates set to 1000 or 2000. So there's a whole negotiation piece as well. But it's a tough one because you're you are going to face this cost like some people will say sure and other people are going to say No way. And it's a tough problem to kind of work through it.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 35:01

And what are some of the platforms that companies could go to to start looking for influencers? Able to

Jason Kowalski 35:08

give examples? Yeah, sure. I think one is that you want to kind of do the self service, grin. I like they have a good UI. Like I said, a lot of these clients are kind of similar. But grins UI is good. There's like Influenster, there's crater IQ, which has been around for a while. Tracker. So honestly, if you just Google top 10, influencer platforms, you'll see like a big set, the downside of those things are just that, no one's really, it's hard to know who's gonna generate like content, for example, for Amazon, or who's going to generate social sales, who's going to generate specifically traffic, they tend to be a little more focused solely on the brand match piece where you can see them and see if they're a good match. But there's a lot of platforms. And they're all pretty similar. But it's a great place to start. If you just want to go and explore totally sign up for one of those. A lot of them have free trials, to start flipping through people, you can get a sense of breaks, you can get a sense by just messaging them with you in chat features. Who's a good fit? Who's not? So it makes sense.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 36:03

So here's a quick, this is a great question, because we're all very sheepish about compliance and keeping Amazon happy. And it seems like a lot of their guidelines change frequently. So how do we keep up with this to make sure that you know, if this is an opportunity, it is in compliance with Amazon and you don't get flagged?

Jason Kowalski 36:25

It's a great question. It feels like today, we live in a quarter of Amazon, right? We're all in fear. I don't know our team, all we can do is have our lawyers constantly look at everything from forum posts to TLS and make sure everything is still compliant. I generally I don't have a better answer than just like, you know, living in like waiting for any changes to come out and checking everything over and you know, having your lawyer look at it and say, Is this still good? Because as we know, and three years from now, things could be different. But I mean, the nice thing about what we're doing like that product window at least is just the act of like sorting through influencers, having them go from Instagram to Amazon, Amazon desperately wants that to happen. The Amazon is one building out their own influencer program, as many of you know. And one thing we do is we work with the same influencers, right? So when those influencers go on Amazon and start posting content, Amazon actually rewards that content, because they're in Amazon's influencer program. And Amazon desperately wants traffic from Google and Facebook, etc. So again, if you're kind of feeding into Amazon's long term goals, I think you're in a good position. So always think about what Amazon really wants, what Amazon wants is better detail pages with better content, Amazon wants, you know, creators that really helpful to to post that. So, in general, we're always trying to just make sure our creators are super helpful as possible. Because if they're really helping other customers make buying decisions, that's kind of feeding into what Amazon wants to, but the other answer is constantly kind of staying on top of TLS. And just making sure nothing changes. Everything we do now is fully compliant, of course, but you know, in a year, two year, three year, Amazon can literally do anything at once. So it's definitely something to think about

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 37:53

currently. So, how is the timeline of this? And you have to, like you said, Keep Amazon happy. What, what is a good time? I know you said like, in the beginning, it's critical to like, start this and like day one, how long do you utilize the influencer before you say, Hey, we got this, we're gonna move on and spend our money elsewhere. Yes, good question.

Jason Kowalski 38:20

One, it's tough because like, you want to lock the influencer and get everyone excited. But if you that too far before launch, then you know the influencer can lose interest, you're gonna see breakage, right? So we get around that because we have a platform. So it's easier for us to move quickly. But I think the middle I think ideally, what you do is kind of reach out to an influencer to two weeks ish before product launch, right? That's when you're kind of working with these influencers, getting them excited, you say, Hey, by the way, this is gonna launch on April 1, let's get excited, let's get pumped. That's not too much time, or they kind of forget about it. But that kind of tells them what's happening. And then you kind of want this campaign, let's see of 100 creators all posting, trying to have some content go viral, all driving that traffic back to Amazon, for 100 influencers that may take, you know, for all that to work, especially if you kind of have a nice curve of using more influencers every week than the last week might take two months or so to kind of have that kind of scale up. So I would say you're really thinking about realistically a crater campaign happening over like a quarter. And again, starting that process to three weeks before you need it makes sense. And then you kind of go from there. In terms of evergreen, you're kind of question on that. I would say we a lot of our brands have, like we looked at the best 100 who kind of really resonated with that brand. And we kind of just keep always on and they're constantly promoting and driving traffic every quarter. But for that quarterly tends to be a decent way to do this monthly just gets tight in terms of getting the product, testing the product, getting feedback, posting about it, especially when you're kind of staggering that so they're not all necessarily doing at the same time. So a quarter seems like a good cadence for both evergreen and also product launch with you know, ideally for product launch. You're trying to move that up to a tighter window like three four weeks really like A month. But realistically, a little longer, like two months is is reasonable once you get into those 100 campaign plus numbers,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 40:07

and any guidance on how to do inventory forecasting on something like this, especially if you're dealing with, you know, transit 345 months before you're getting the product back into the country, for those that do international manufacturing.

Jason Kowalski 40:25

Yeah, it's tough. It's like any program, it's hard to forecast. And if I, you know, the one thing I can't do still say, like, I can't predict, or certainly when a post is going to go viral, I could probably be a billionaire. But you know, it happens sometimes. And sometimes it doesn't. And we don't have a good model for that. Yeah. Which makes it hard when it does happen, because like, you may have no inventory. But the good news is, what we've seen so far, is that in general, when a product stalks out in like search results, for example, Amazon tends to kind of put the product back in at the same place. So let's say you're, you're on the first page for water bottle, whatever it may be, or some big keyword, that's important, you stock out, let's say you get your inventory X amount of time later, Amazon doesn't just bury you necessarily, again, usually, you see a bit of a drop off. But recently, we've been actually seeing Amazon's been willing to kind of test people right where they left off, and Amazon's constantly testing. But that makes me feel better about being I guess, a little bit more conservative, given that, but I know forecasting is is quite hard. Our team, we kind of look at reach and past campaigns to kind of just come up with like a conservative baseline, we never assume virality because it's, it's pretty rare. And it could happen is that content really resonates. But we just kind of assume based on the reach of our of our kind of the makeup of the program, but it's a tough question forecasting, still not something we have done a product

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 41:39

in this vine play a part of this and any sort of hybrid model, or do you just put by the wayside? Um,

Jason Kowalski 41:48

because of the whole kind of hitting Amazon's algorithm. I think greater marketing is the better play. But many, many of our partners do both right, because they're just desperate for reviews and desperate for content. And I don't, there's been mixed studies on it. Some people say people don't trust, find reviews, because they're marked. Other people just think about it from the search perspective, and you see more stars, and our understanding is fine is still helpful. So if you'd have the budget, you do both. If you only did one, I focus on craters, just because you're really going to play into Amazon's algorithm, the wave buying can't. But realistically, Vine seems to be the best option a lot of brands have specifically for the review piece. So I would say doing vine plus a creator campaign makes a lot of sense. I don't see a reason not to if you had unlimited money.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 42:29

Right. And for anybody who joined later, definitely feel free to keep putting in questions, comments into the chat. We'll keep getting to them here. We do have a question about price points. And so if you have a product that is a higher price point, how to go about this program? Yeah, good question.

Jason Kowalski 42:47

Um, one negative, the higher price point product, right? Is there's an influencer trust, like where, you know, especially if you're kind of having to buy through the algorithm, then you have a price point of 500 bucks, that's a lot of money to be fronting, right. So it makes you need to be really conservative, that you might instead opt for, say, a sampling program or something, because of that high price point. Again, we kind of get around it by thinking about the trust score of all of our creators on our platform. But that is the downside, what's interesting to us is you would expect that lower ASP items, you know, get a lot more social sales and higher HD items. But we haven't necessarily Sara Lee seen that be true. For us, it's more just about popularity, like a really great beauty products, that's high end, we just went for, like $500, a couple months ago, or, you know, a really premium home product, we see actually pretty solid, especially if there's a discount code, because those items, you know, 10% goes a lot farther 20% goes a lot farther, we actually see them do really well with a social sales model, especially versus say, you know, a 1015 kind of dollar item. But I know we have success personally, with both products, we do a lot of high ASP, I'd say and like a lot of low ASP, and it's a bit of a trade off, right. Obviously, if you work with lower ASB, you don't need to worry as much kind of just find as many craters as possible. But if you work with higher, you're probably gonna need to pay all the influencers less just because those products have a lot of intrinsic worth, which is awesome, right? So you'll find a lot of people say, Yeah, I don't need much money, I just want to get one of those products. That looks awesome. So you have a bit of a trade off on the, you know, payment amount versus the product, but the model is greater. I've seen it work for both, you know, grocery snacks and also extremely 1000 diamond rings. So I think there's a play for both.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 44:26

Excellent question about the ROI going back to that and you had touched upon it. Can you give this if you need to measure ROI for your boss? What's the toolkit? What's the starter of like the tools I should be using to measure to offer something to show it's actually working?

Jason Kowalski 44:50

That's the hard part of being on the eCommerce side. Where's the marketing side sometimes role moving, more ROI? I would say how we think about it, we model it out is one there per product launch, specifically, there's the ROI of lost sales. So the case we make consistently is, you know, and one thing I don't think we do enough is like an industry is measuring product launch time, like a lot of people and I get it, like, we launch a product, everyone's just so burnt out that like, the last thing you're gonna do is think of, you know, oh, did we launch that in three weeks? Or do we want you to in six months, right, but getting that launch time down craters are not and like measuring what the launch cycle is, is something really, really important. And then the ROI, once you kind of have a baseline for a company, or we just kind of use our category specific one. For us, it's really like, hey, we get your product ramped up to the salary you're kind of expecting in month one, right? Instead of in month seven, will kind of claim back sales, the incremental sales a month to three months seven, as incremental, right. So that's like one thing we do, of course, in addition, our campaigns, we do see meaningful social sales. We're not at the point where I can say, you know, if you spent 20k, you're gonna make 20k in social sales. It's a really hard problem. And we're getting better at it every day. But we see social sales for every one of our campaigns, we've gotten to the point where we now guarantee that our influencers will generate sales from their followers, which is awesome, but we add that in as well. So obviously, if there's a product launch kind of time savings, we'll look at the social sales generate from the campaign. And then there's a lot of models that people do off clicks and impressions, right, which marketers are super familiar with things like, you know, influencer media value where you're kind of based on the impressions or based on the clicks kind of projecting. The one other thing we do on the seller side is we'll look at conversion. So we have a plug in and seller accounts that literally look at conversion before conversion during the campaign and conversion after. And based on that you can kind of project out over the next 12 months, what happened as a result of this crater campaign, you're probably going to see a big spike in the period. But our goal is you went from 5% to 20% to 14%, right. And if that kind of persists, conversion is a really good way for sellers to look at the program. It's just a lot harder for vendors given the data limitations.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 46:58

Great. So we talked about the product launch and the new item, which is exciting and fun, you're launching something new. Could this tool be used for something that launched and completely flopped? But it shouldn't have flopped? Because maybe it didn't have the tools that we spoke about today? Or those reviewers that got on early? Just didn't portray it? Right. And it needed a second chance? Could this be a revival of sorts for products?

Jason Kowalski 47:25

That's a great question. One, as I'll always tell all our brands like doing it at launch is always easier, like it's a much easier problem because Amazon has no data. Now you're talking about a situation where Amazon has data and it's not good, your conversions low. Your it already has a low forecast, and it knows you're not selling so you have an uphill battle to kind of correct Amazon, I would say. But yes, a lot of people, I would say, you know, come to us two or three or four months after kind of with the situation you're describing. And we still see a big benefit, like Amazon is always looking for the one thing you don't want as a blip, like Amazon will look if they see like a one day a great spike in sales or whatever traffic, that's great. But Amazon kind of throws that data point away. Things you guys should be thinking about are how do we show two weeks, four weeks, six weeks of really nice growth? And that's enough to really give Amazon a lot of data points and say, oh, okay, this actually is changing. So I would think about whatever program you think about think about, like a month long kind of regression period, you don't want like a day or two, it's kind of discounted by Amazon, in my experience, but you want that month of strong data. And yes, you're probably going to be 30% less effective. But as you'd imagine, many people hope that some products literally launched themselves. And that happens a lot when you have a great product, you get lucky. So a lot of people try that. And then they come to you know, companies like mine a bit later and say can you fix it? So it's a big use case for us? If yes, there's still value. I just you know, to avoid the headache, like doing it upfront, this is going to make your job easier. But you know, craters are great at driving more sales which drive you know, more reviews which can correct they're great at kind of telling Amazon it's really hot with external traffic, so maybe should be higher in search results. So yes, there's a lot of value doing an influencer campaign anytime in the product lifecycle, not just product launch, although that is the best time. Other great times as an aside or right before Prime Day, read before holiday. A lot of people make the mistake of running campaigns too late. But you don't like if you're running a campaign. At Prime Day, you're now competing with everyone already selling a billion units a day. If you had instead ran that campaign three weeks before Prime Day when there's no sales or kind of prime days pulling in all the sales right so you had a low period and your product starts to take off. If you can hit a top kind of placement in search a lot of sales right before Prime Day right like in October before peak. That's when we counselor running campaigns doing a product launch do before your busy season. It's January fitness month. You know if you can really want your campaign to be peaking like December 27 When no one's shopping at all, like that's when you want a lot of action to set you up. So you're already winning. When it comes around like Halloween cellars you don't like you want to be winning Halloween costumes in September or even August if you're doing it that You're gonna have a great Halloween doing it in October, it's gonna be so hard. So it's, it's a good fight. But the timing does matter. And you want to be a little earlier than you often think,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 50:08

totally. And it makes you think if it's inventory planning or looking at the team and what the strategy, the roadmap is, almost like you're planning now, two different holidays, you're planning your like rev up to be ready for whatever that holiday or sale period that you want to strive and be successful for is. So now it even becomes more complicated, like we don't have enough to think about, but it's the combination. That's why we're in this business.

Jason Kowalski 50:34

Yes. That's our problem. But I think you're totally right. It requires a level of thinking,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 50:39

yes, they're thinking the quarter before the big day is coming in like that next quarter. That's when you should be laying out a strategy is such, like, so hard.

Jason Kowalski 50:48

It's taking so much effort just to get your quarter, right. And now you have to think about, you know, also leading up to it, you want to be winning, so you're ready to win. And it just it's tough, right? Operationally, just everyone in eCommerce is wearing 10 hats. So adding another two is just, you know, there's only so many hats, you can fit on your head. So

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 51:06

training for game day, forget about. Yeah, we got one more here. Is it helpful for the brand to run a promo on their own to assist with the product launches?

Jason Kowalski 51:19

I think so I think a lot of people use a Lightning Deal strategy to again, what a Lightning Deal, for example, really does, in my opinion, is you're really the value of that, sure, you might get some incremental sales, but it's really about trying to give Amazon data, right. And obviously a product launch. You can't necessarily do that. But deals like that, especially before Prime Day can really help kind of bump you up in the algorithm before all the traffic starts pouring in, for example, similar with our campaigns, a product launch, running a promo is great. I think, if you think about Amazon search, you know, things like conversion really matter. And obviously, if you just give people more urgency, giving someone a 20% off code, all your existing customers, maybe you posted on Instagram and give them an Instagram looks, they go through kind of Instagram to Amazon to kind of get you a little traffic, weight improvement. But I totally recommend if you have the budget, those those extra 20 percents can go a long way and just giving you that little bump in sales that kind of gets you into the successful product launch or read before peak event period.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 52:18

Awesome. Well, Jason, thank you so much. Thank you, Matt. You guys have been awesome with the contents. You're great partners in the network. We really appreciate it. I would say anybody who's on this call, we say definitely reach out to Jason. He'd be happy to have a chat. I'd be happy to have a chat as well. So feel free to drop me an email at Tiffany@BWGconnect.com. And we can talk about this we can talk about international expansion, SMS dropshipping, whatever it is digital eCommerce, we're ready to chat about it. So again, thank you guys so much. Take care. Everybody. Stay safe. Have a great week and see you on the next call.

Jason Kowalski 52:58

Hi, Tiffany. Thanks, everybody. I'm Jason at ProductWind and Matt. Matt is Matt at ProductWind. If anyone wants to send us an email feel free but thanks, guys. Have a great

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 53:05

Will be in touch. Thank you.