Aaron Conant  0:18

Happy Wednesday, everybody, my name is Aaron Conant, I'm the co founder and managing director here at BWG Connect. We're a giant networking knowledge sharing group with 1000s of brands to do exactly that we network and now chair together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be, that's shaping digital. Today, I spend a good portion of my time just advising brands. So I would love to have a conversation with anybody on the line today. You know, if you just want to chat digital, more than happy to kind of give you a rundown what we're seeing across all the different topics like this one today, but also a variety of stuff, including on the direct consumer side, international expansion, whatever it might be. It's from those conversations that we get the topics for the events like this. And so love those conversations, don't hesitate to reach out a couple housekeeping items. As we get started. We are kicking this off a few minutes after the hour. And we're gonna wrap up a few minutes early as well give you plenty of time again to your next meeting without being late. The other thing is we want it to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time you have questions, comments, whatever it might be dropped into the chat the q&a or you can always email me Aaron Aaron@BWGconnect.com. We'll feel those questions as many as we can in the time that we have allotted. Again, more than happy to connect anybody after the call. So really interesting spot here. In regards to reviews, I don't know if anybody saw that, you know, Amazon was going after a lot of these fake review platforms. And just you know, coincidentally had this call, you know, on the calendar with some great friends and partners supporters the network over a ProductWind, Tim here is kind of walk through with what they do in this space and help getting momentum out of the gate with new product launches, we all know how difficult they can be on these different platforms when you don't have, you know, any movement on the inventory side, or the sales or conversion side, or ratings or reviews or whatever it might be. So anyways, Tim, I'll kind of kick it over to you. I know we only got you know till 2pm Eastern time today. But if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and ProductWind, that'd be awesome. And then we can kind of jump into the content. So I'm good.

Tim Wilson  2:18

Yeah, sounds great. And plenty of time to jump in. Hello, everyone. Glad Glad you're able to make it today. So my background, my name is Tim Wilson, I joined ProductWind about four months ago, leading all revenue for the company. So anything associated with sales or client success, ultimately would be something that I'm involved with the thrilled to come here because it's a pain point that I've been aware of for quite some time, where I've been working with the heads of eCommerce now for 1213 years, and how you launch a product is such a cross functional effort. And it's a big effort by a lot of companies. And I'm not sure that I've ever seen anyone really always do it. Well. Product wins solves that by providing instant momentum on any product. And the more I dove into the company, the more excited I got. And we'll share a little bit about why I was so excited through this conversation today.

Aaron Conant  3:13

Awesome. So again, if anybody has any questions, drop them in the chat the q&a or email them to me. But yeah, Tim. Let's jump into it. And we'll just feel questions as they roll in. Sound good?

Tim Wilson  3:23

Yeah, that sounds great. So I've got just a few slides here. Not too many slides at all, I'm hoping that we can have some questions come in and have a dialogue and when the slides are over, we can certainly open it up to much more of a an open forum. But please, if anyone has any questions at all about ProductWind, about product launch, about the influencer and creator space, we'd love to have those dialogues. So about about that. So the the like I'm having a hard time here controlling my Holy Lord. You know, I'm gonna take this out of Give me one second here. Yeah, sure. I'm just gonna take this out of this mode because I am having a hard time controlling this. And we'll just go down this way. It's flying through networks doesn't look as pretty, but hopefully the information is still the same. So, look, eCommerce today is getting extremely difficult. Every day. There's more and more competition. You know this already. I would also argue that many of you on the phone would agree with me if I were to say, eCommerce today is becoming more and more algorithmic more and more machine driven. And a friend of mine guru over a commerce IQ famously said, you know, you can't take an algorithm out to dinner. So what are you going to do? One of the things that we've found is that when you're training an algorithm when you're training any dataset how that algorithm are how that data first begins to receive signals on that, on that product or on that data really sets it up for future success. It's like anything else that you have in your life, whether it's a personal goal, a health goal, a business goal, you name it, the sooner you start on something, the earlier intervention you have, the bigger impact you can have down the line. And when you start your product off, kind of on the right foot, if you will, it really has massive impact downstream. Because if something is truly algorithmic, by its very definition than ever, all these improvements that you make, are going to be improvements that have a logarithmic or an algorithm, logarithmic impact, meaning they're exponential, right, they multiply. And so for all of you who are out there, you're launching products, oftentimes, they never even get their day in the sun, they're buried in search, they're down on page 10. And you have no real option other than to, you know, drive a lot of dollars towards retail media. And do a lot of what I would consider to be traditional methods. I think a lot of us when we launch products, even though things have changed so much, we're still launching them in very much the same way. Right, we're still running a lot of the same plays, we've run for the last however many, right, you've got 3050 100 product launches this year, my guess is that for all those products are probably gonna be launched in a pretty similar way, with the exception of maybe a little more ad spend here and a little less there, right, so maybe changing, moving your chips from one channel to the other. So it's really difficult. What ProductWind does is we work with hundreds of creators to generate momentum. And we do this right at the start. So whatever product you're launching, whether it's on chewy, Walmart, Amazon, doesn't matter, Total Wine and more, right, like we've we've done these across almost any website out there, what we're able to do is work with, get your product out to hundreds of influencers or creators, get them excited about the product and sharing that excitement online generating word of mouth driving buzz. And that what that what that does, ultimately, is yes, it gets you the reach and the engagement that is traditional with with influencer activity that makes a lot of the brand building efforts satisfied. But really what this does is well as we direct things towards a specific product and asin is it drives immediate interest in that asin, or that product depending on website we're talking about. And when you do that, from the get go. The algorithms especially on Amazon, where they prioritize external traffic, especially external traffic from their competitors, like an Instagram like someone else, they really love that external traffic. So as this gets out into the audience's hands, it comes in, it really boosts that products discoverability dramatically, I have countless examples we can share. So the first thing that happens is traffic goes up. Because the discoverability is up to the algorithm saying wow, there's a lot of interest in this thing. I should show it to more people. And we're also going to drive a lot of sales as a result. So we're one of the few programs out there. I think that drives sales. But ultimately what we're trying to do here is provide your product and opportunity, but stay in the sun. A lot of products never actually fully get launched. What does that tell your launch, right that Adam Sandler movie, right? Like you never we don't want you don't want your product, wanting to go down that path. Right. So if it's algorithmic, like we discussed, you can't just optimize one thing, you got to look at everything that's associated with the product that's placed point, its price point, its placement. It's obviously all the PDP attributes. But you also want to look at things like optimizing the traffic and the conversion, and things of that nature. Your job, everybody on the phone, your job, ultimately, really is to make sure that that products destiny is to be on page one slot one, that's that's what you're trying to do. But we all know, that's not possible with every single product, and as a lot harder with some than others. ProductWind's job is to be your secret weapon. And first of all, to be insurance to make sure that at least has an opportunity. And then secondly, you know, anchor the public on very positive light of that product, right. And we do this by using and by that I mean driving a lot of buzz and driving a lot of excitement. Anchoring is a very strong psychological thing. Where if somebody sees speaks really highly of Aaron and talks about how amazing a guy Aaron is, you're naturally going to likely like Aaron a little more than if everyone talks about Aaron in some maybe disparaging or not great light, like people get anchored on things. And in the digital world. There's an echo effect that's out there. So we're really working with our creators To create a positive echo effect for your product and your Asin. And we do this by launching these massive campaigns where the creators generate all this buzz, drive discoverability on that product. And ultimately, that leads to really positive ratings, really positive reviews, and which adds to more credibility. And when you add all of these things up, that's what sets your product up for a lot healthier sales a lot more quickly. So very good to you.

Aaron Conant  10:36

So a couple of questions come in one is around timing. Is this, are you doing this before you've actually taken the product live? Which I'm guessing it would be? Probably not right? Or how much your prep? Are you doing ahead of time, I guess is if I rephrase the question, how much prep are you doing ahead of time, so as soon as it goes live, you can start driving traffic? The other question that comes in is, you know, how do you identify the right influencers?

Tim Wilson  10:59

Two great questions. So first, the timing, our preference is always to start driving the buzz, and the first week that the product is launched. So if you know you, you know, you're this ASINs gonna go live likely on Monday or Tuesday, we'd want to, we want to start working on things, you know, Wednesday or Thursday. Typically, what happens is, customers come to us after the products already been out in wild for a month or two. And we can certainly still impact that. And I have plenty of data, I could share, it was interested. But the sooner you start, the better, it's really all about. I don't want to say gaming the algorithm, because that's not really kind of the right way to say it. But it's like just giving it the signals right away, that the market is interested in this thing. And that will really buoy and pull the the product up for high discoverability. So ideally, the first week, and certainly within the first 30 days are the best case scenarios. And as far

Aaron Conant  12:06

as answered another question that came in to us around the timing, what if my product has been on the market for an extended period of time? A lot of people like hey, how do I boost it? And are you just saying that, you know, for the older product maybe has been out there for eight, nine months a year? The algorithm has already built up so much additional information on it. It's hard to hard to adjust.

Tim Wilson  12:27

Yeah, I mean, we can we we do do this on existing products, products that just we call our product health campaign, hey, this thing isn't quite where I need it, can you give it some boost ahead of the holidays? And we can certainly do that. It? It? It depends on Honestly, how much visibility that asin has already had. Right? So, you know, we're in conversations with arguably the number two tech company in the world on products right now. And they saying, Hey, can you help me with this thing launched in January? We're looking at it, it already has. I don't know, you know, several 1000 reviews. And I suddenly, alright, well, listen, this thing has been out in the wild now for nine months. And the market is already determined that this is a 3.1 star product, like it's going to take a lot of inertia to change that trajectory of that product. You know, how do you launch those from the beginning, you know, you might be in a different space. But if the product has already launched, and it's been around for a while, but doesn't have a ton of velocity hasn't had a ton of sales doesn't have a ton of reviews, we can likely still help you, it's just going to be harder. It's really just a mathematical equation. And, you know, I'm happy to pull up a Google Sheet with you on the phone and kind of just go through the math with that person.

Aaron Conant  13:44

Cool. So we have a few questions that come in here. Do you also get the rights to use the content outside of the social media platform? So for instance, I can use influencers image on our website or marketing materials.

Tim Wilson  13:57

Yeah, absolutely. So we have a platform that allows us to one automatically identify who we think all the right influencers would be if you want to you can have total control over almost like a tinder style and say yes or no, of which creator you want to have based on the data. But then we're gonna run it the point is almost like one click influencer, advertising will run it all. And when you get in that platform, not only do you have a bunch of data that comes in and real time do you have all of these assets, if you look in the lower right part of your screen, those are examples of real assets that we generated for this particular campaign. They're all downloadable, you own the asset? Where for you to then be able to go repurpose in whatever way you want. Yes, awesome.

Aaron Conant  14:44

Would you suggest to scale reviews and a budget friendly way for items with a high MSRP? You know, think, you know, $2,000 Plus, you know, seems like the challenge here. Each item has to essentially be free.

Tim Wilson  14:57

So what's the way that we would Scale reviews on a product that is extremely expensive. Yeah. So if you mean scale reviews, meaning how do I just get more and more of them? You know, the best way to drive more reviews, it sounds simple, but is the best way to drive it is to, is to just drive more buzz and more word of mouth. You know, we're working with a company today, that campaign is going on right now. And they have a $2,000 lawnmower. Right. So it's a pretty, pretty niche product, it's a pretty high price point. And we've put together a program where we've gone through and identified who are really the right creators with the right kind of audience for this, one of the things that we're doing is, you know, my background, and Jason our founders background are we're very, have a heavy analytical background, I used to work for cantar. Those of you know, cantar, from WPP came in through TNS and whatnot, in over a 1010 data. And we are tracking everything that our creators do, every result that they drive. And what's ultimately happening as a result of this is our our mission is to make it so that doing an influencer campaign is almost like baking a cake. And today, it feels like it's just kind of peanut butter for a lot of companies, oh my God, these influencers, I'll assume everything is equal and even with them, and I'll just apply them to my world. Well, that's not true. Some influencers may create beautiful content, but don't drive great sales or vice versa, right drive great sales, but they their picture, you know, they're on an iPhone, too. And the pictures are terrible. So we're measuring everything that our creators do. And so when we find them, and we recommend them, we're trying to provide a much more analytical approach to how the campaign should go with a dream of one day having kind of like baseball card stats on everyone out there. Awesome. I don't know if I answered that question. So if I didn't answer the question, please ask more than

Aaron Conant  17:02

happy connect everybody afterwards as well. I'm not sure if we're gonna get, you know, through all of these. But there's Chiba? What was the top three parameters that qualify for identifying the best influencers? Is there a number of followers or content? Or is it the platform they

Tim Wilson  17:17

use? Yeah, so it depends. But I'll give you the three that are the primary ones for 80% of the use cases, right. So first of all, we like micro influencers, the best micro influencers are typically people that have between at least more than 5000, less than 100,000. Really, our sweet spot we found are those people that have 25 30,000 followers, that's what we really like, we find that they have great blend of reach and engagement. Right? We look for things like understanding their response rate, when they post, we want to make sure that these followers are real and not bots, there's always gonna be some level of a bot. But if they're not able to have a high engagement with their audience, if they're not getting at least one and a half 2% engagement with each post, they're not going to work for us. When we also look for a good cross section of like psychographic kind of behavior open or behavioral based profiling, this person is an outdoor enthusiast, this person is eCommerce nerd, right? And just kind of creating that psychographic profile on our followers, making sure they have the right amount of followers and making sure that they're real, that there's minimal bot impact. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  18:36

Platforms, what platforms do your influencers work on?

Tim Wilson  18:41

So any platform really, because all we're doing is we're instructing these creators to go promote this specific product, and then we encourage people to go explore that product on a specific retail channel. So it does not matter.

Aaron Conant  18:57

And does that include your direct consumer site as well?

Tim Wilson  19:00

100%? Absolutely, we do a lot of work with direct to consumer, the biggest impact that we've seen that we have for a lot of companies is really around typically. Amazon, it just is because number one, obviously the reach of Amazon, but number two, Amazon is much more algorithmically driven. So the signals that we can give it earlier in the process have outweighed you know, outsized impact, if you will. Yeah, it makes

Aaron Conant  19:28

sense to write I mean, you have your own direct consumer site, maybe you did launch the product five months ago, there's just no traffic you just driving traffic to it,

Tim Wilson  19:36

you know, traffic and then you're gonna get good reviews, which you get to syndicate out to some places, but not every place. Yeah, I would love to just have a conversation about DTC sometime, but it's, there's so many pros and cons to it, you know, it's such a complicated space.

Aaron Conant  19:52

So a couple others, is there an optimal MSRP for a product launch, you know, in this case that you've seen, you know, My name is Dawn and on the direct to consumer site, and then another one about

Tim Wilson  20:04

search visibility. Okay, so optimal MSRP. You know, I mentioned earlier about this $2,000 product that we're working on. You know, I think that it can play in any arena. However, my opinion is and, you know, based on what we've seen with our, with our campaigns, those products that are really kind of more than $10, less than less than, you know, 150, or 200, is the sweet spot. And if I had to pick like a specific MSRP, you'd be much more in that kind of 20 to 20 to $60 range. Those work extremely well. But we've also seen a ton of really good success right around 100 150 bucks, so $10 to 200. If your products in there, I think that we can really generate a lot of momentum for it. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  21:00

Next one that pops in here, we have a portfolio of products that are all top 10 in their category, however, search visibility is extremely low compared to competitors. You know, how can we use influencers to boost our search visibility?

Tim Wilson  21:15

Yeah, so that's a that's a great question. It's one of the impacts that we're we're actually really good at. You can here's an example of one right here, what we do is we have, what we'll do is we'll go out, we'll take a look at the product, identify different ways that people are searching for or that are relevant for your product, how should your product be thought about? I'm trying to think of something right now we want so Logitech launched headphones, right, which, you know, electronics category, headphones, arguably, maybe the most competitive category on Amazon are one of the top 10 most competitive categories on Amazon. And these were like these wireless earbuds, and we were able to go out, identify, and we realized, listen, there's a ton of people talk about whether or not not just that they're wireless earbuds, but are these truly wireless earbuds. So we instruct our creators to promote and talk about the product in a way that we know is likely to drive the audience's search behavior when they go look for it. So as a result, people are searching Amazon for true wireless earbuds, which by the way, there's like 3000 of them, unbelievable. And it was just like 3000 of them. And were able to boost that product from I think it was originally ranked 159 up to the number four spot organically, just by driving and talking about true wireless earbuds in essentially coaching or encouraging our audiences to look in that way on Amazon for the product. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  22:52

I mean, I want to make sure I don't know how many slides you have left here. I want to make sure if we if we need to get through those, we can and then we'll just keep handling questions as they come in.

Tim Wilson  23:01

Well, I'll just go through these two, and I'll stop just to help quantify for people and we can send it out. But what we found we looked at 120 different products. And it's not just up into the right, it's like, you know, people, they take steps or these major step functions. So you can see, for most organizations, we found, it's right around month five, we start to get that big boost, and then a dip in your first 12 months, right. And this is what happens because it just takes so long to generate that momentum and credibility behind your, your Asin. But when you jump right into it from the start, all that we're doing is moving that curve that you see around month, five, six, we just move it right up to month two and three. This is again, our typical campaign that, you know, this is based on this is not the best case, this is not the worst case, this is the typical. And so what this does is well when you just think about the algorithms and the discoverability, that leads to things like your first 12 months of product has on average 12% More traffic when it launches with Amazon. So just take 12% more traffic, add that to your clicks, we're not even getting into conversion, but you can start to see how it really pays off in the long run to jump right into it. Awesome. Yeah. For a typical

Aaron Conant  24:18

critical product launch. Is there a number of influencers that has recommended for the best impact on

Tim Wilson  24:25

Amazon? Yeah, so it depends on the space and the category you're in the more generic the space, the more creators you need. Right? So think of the headphones I just mentioned before, right? You need you need to have a couple 100 They're not a problem. Another customer of ours is a company named Frida. If you anyone in that maternity or baby space, you might know Frida, they play in a very niche category. You know, this little thing that will suck the boogers out of your child when they're a newborn. Infant nasal aspirator it's like there's so niche does not amount you know, you can get away with 20 or 30 And that thing is all set up and ready to go. So previous products are typically much more niche. So it doesn't require as much. The bigger the category, the bigger the more competitive the spaces, the more the bigger you need to go. And again, we have math, we can go behind this to show you what kind of impact you can expect if you went with 100 versus 500, or 1000. Awesome. Love it. Yeah, this was a quick half hour, I appreciate the time. Is there one more question we should jump into? Or shall we wrap up?

Aaron Conant  25:29

If anybody has any last ones here? You know, again, you know, I encourage everybody have a follow up conversation with Tim, they have they come highly recommended from a ton of people in the network as a whole, it's worth the follow up conversation. This is kind of you saw what to do with that shift. That's what I've been seeing with brands that are winning and accelerating is they're employing new things, new tech tactics and partners and technologies. It's just the reality of playing in the space today. And moving that up by four to five months that that curve, I think, way back in the day, that curve used to be like, you know, 12 to 15 months that it would take to ramp and now you know, for people who really understand Amazon, they can they get that down to five and then using different technologies or strategies like this, you can get it down to the first one or two months. So again, you know, you know, is there a category? So last question, tell me, is there a category that responds better to influencer campaigns a category that doesn't respond all at all, you know, doesn't respond as well.

Tim Wilson  26:28

I haven't seen a category that doesn't really respond to it. I can tell you that. All that I can tell you is this is that, from what we've seen in our data, a lot of our customers reside in consumer electronics and in CPG. You know, I don't know what that says about apparel or toys or others. I think what it just really means is right now, that's where we have the majority of our customers in what we think, yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

Aaron Conant  26:56

So what is the typical timeframe for the entire campaign? Like, what is your typical timeframe for a campaign?

Tim Wilson  27:02

Eight to 12 weeks? Okay. You know, it's pretty much done at about eight weeks, but there might be another few weeks. So just kind of some things filtering and depending on what you want to do, I would say you're you're you're realizing optimum impact at about week, week, six through eight. Okay, awesome.

Aaron Conant  27:19

Well, hey, Tim, thanks so much for your time today. We're going to wrap up here, just one minute early. Again, thanks to everybody who dialed in. Thanks for all the great questions. We'll send a follow up email, connect you with Tim. Like I said, we're setting some time on the calendar and just picking their brain and what they're doing in the space. They're helping a ton of brands out on the network. Look for a follow up email for me. I'd love to have a conversation with you as well. If you're in the New York City area, let us know we're having a happy hour next month. Just get together and hang out and have some cocktails. It'd be a blast. With that. We're gonna wrap up everybody take care of stay safe. Look forward to having you at a future event. All right. Thanks again, Tim. It's been fun.