Aaron Conant  0:18

Happy Thursday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder, Managing Director here at BWG Connect, connect. We're a giant networking and knowledge sharing group, I spend the majority of my time just, you know, chatting with brands, trying to stay on top of Digital Trends, strategies, what's working, what's not when the same topics come up over and over again, we host an event like this. You know, we have a lot of upcoming events, a lot of upcoming in person events. Just ping us when give you that full list, more than happy to have anybody here attend any of those. You know, as we kind of kick off this topic is we get to this next level of digital strategy as a whole. More and more people, I wouldn't say are realizing, but they finally have the bandwidth to start analyzing. How do I blend together a direct consumer and Amazon strategy? I think it's something people is like, hey, that would be amazing. It's just with so many things to do is rapidly direct to consumer and Amazon are changing. It's just, it's been hard to tackle both until now it seems like we have a little bit of a breather, and able to tackle some new strategies that I think are real winning strategies. We've got some great friends, partners, supporters, the network, actually, to that, that came together, which is really, which is really fun for us to see. So Retail Bloom and Blue Wheel Media are now together as one. And it's just super great because they were two is recommended Amazon service providers, they both had a unique set of capabilities that literally marriage up perfectly. And so like we're actually at this point where we can have a dreaded consumer at Amazon, you know, webinar like this. But anyways, Nicole, I'll kind of kick it over to you if you want to do you know an intro on yourself and we have Tayler on as well. But if you want to do a brief intro, that'd be awesome. And then kind of jump into it.

Nicole Reich  2:06

So I'm good. Absolutely. Thanks, Aaron. Hi, everyone. I'm Nicole Reich, previous co founder of Retail Bloom. Now leading our marketing efforts at our new full omni channel digital services company Blue Wheel. This is actually the first official webinar that we've done over the with the numerous very exciting hopefully I don't mess up the intro in a second but we'll get into our capabilities in the agenda but before I do that, I wanted to pass it over to one of my new favorite colleagues and expert in all things digital advertising Tayler Carpenter,

Tayler Carpenter  2:38

thanks to call just remind me to Venmo you after for saying that? Your favorite colleagues but Hi everyone, my name is Tayler Carpenter. I'm the Vice President of advertising at the new Blue Wheel as we will call it and I oversee all advertising marketplace DTC retail. And it's been to say that we are excited to talk about this as honestly an under it's an understatement. We have been working on this, I think kind of separately now jointly for the last year, I'd say between both teams and both companies. And now that we are you know, one of the if not the only but one of the only, you know, Omni commerce agencies, this is going to be a lot of fun to go over and we're excited to talk about this

Nicole Reich  3:18

today. Cool. So before we get into the agenda and the purpose for today's call, I just want to do a quick overview of Blue Wheel. Blue Wheel is an omni channel providers supporting brands through marketplace management and performance advertising. We help our brands scale efforts across the entire cars customer lifecycle journey on DTC and on marketplaces, such as Amazon Walmart, in the US and globally. I'm not sure if many of you have been on the previous webinars, I've been doing these with Aaron for a little too long. But if you look to the right of the Wheel, you'll see what we brought in as our traditional Retail Bloom services, which represents the bottom of the Wheel, and then have since merge those capabilities with the legacy Blue Wheel efforts on the top. So traditional Retail Bloom included front end and back end management, including brand protection. So think seller removal by box expansion. Many of our clients started on Amazon and then moved to other marketplaces with us. We also do fulfillment which we have warehouses in Metro Detroit and across the country through FBA and Walmart fulfillment services. We do content management, so product detail pages, eight plus pages, stores, and then still keep a portion of our business on the three P side which is where we really started out and have since moved to full managed services. So that's where on this wholesale capability side, we become a preferred or exclusive reseller for the brand. Instead of the brands selling directly to Amazon or Walmart or to other three peers, they sell it to us, they still get all of the same etc efforts, but we are their exclusive provider. So that is the bottom portion. portion you can see the Blue Wheel legacy efforts, which represented the first one being omni channel advertising so Basically anywhere that an online website allows you to advertise Blue Wheel is on it. From there they we do organic social across several platforms, one of them being TikTok, which is the focus for today. One of the focuses for today, influencer marketing, again across both b2c and marketplaces, SEO lifetime lifecycle, making up SMS and email, followed up with full creative production studios, which is now helps us create specific content across channels, from production to editing to launch. Now that we have officially merged, we manage over a billion dollars in online revenue, and truly provide back end and front end services from a true click to ship experience. Aaron, how was how was that that was the first time

Aaron Conant  5:47

it's a lot but it's great. It's great. I don't, you know, it's such a complicated space that we're in now. And we're talking about blending, we'll get into a true omni channel, unit channel, Amazon direct consumer retail media, there's no way to capture that in 30 Minutes

Nicole Reich  6:06

or Less five seconds. For paragraphs. This will be more simplified. So today's agenda, we're going to be focusing on four key points. First, we're interested in a quick step back and talk about a background timeline around Amazon versus everyone and what we think should be. And everyone you know, we typically see that Amazon fights all other econ channels. And we just believe that isn't the best way to do that. So we want to give you some data and background on why we think that these two should cohesively meet together. And then from there, we'll get into some specifics around Amazon and your D to see efforts Amazon and TikTok, and then finish it up with Amazon and buy with prime which I would consider that portion and to be very much a tease, because I'll be at prosper in a couple of weeks with the buyer with prime team and get into that a little bit more. So with that, I will hand it over to you, Tayler, to talk on Amazon and everyone and not Amazon first everyone if anyone is from the Detroit area and gets the

Tayler Carpenter  7:05

the Detroit versus everyone. That is Yeah. Thanks, Nicole. All right, so let's talk about how Amazon its Amazon and everyone not versus everyone. So we're gonna we're gonna go back to high school a little bit, we're gonna do a quick history lesson. So let's take a look at you know, started 1995 Which if you can believe it was almost 30 years ago. Hard to believe. But if we go back to 1995, this is when Amazon launched as a bookseller. So they weren't always the behemoth that they are today where you can literally buy anything that you can think of. But when they started, they were just booksellers, then let's go to 1999. This is when they started to go into multiple countries. They've gone past books, they've into CDs, or an additional categories. And then in 2000, this is when Google AdWords has becomes available. So you can actually start running, Pay Per Click ads. 2006 This is when Shopify enters the eCommerce market. This, you know, one could say is almost the, you know, the birth of DTC, if you will, 2007 we have Facebook ads, they start to become available to you know, 2012, Amazon launched their first ad units as a program of Amazon Media Group. And then in 2016, this is when TikTok is born released to the public. So this is just a quick, brief superduper high level history lesson because it's important to note because, you know, Amazon was kind of always seen as Amazon you had Google was always kind of seen as your DTC efforts Facebook DTC. And so this kind of leads us to our next the next point, which is historically there's been this great digital divide between Amazon and DTC, right. Obviously, this is not for scale, but really, there is so much space with a lot of brands, they view marketplace and then DTC just in two different silos, two different vacuums, you know, you don't really touch either one. Sometimes there's teams that are specific to DTC team or a marketplace team. Sometimes they have two different budgets, goals, different promotions running at different times, their performance reports. There's so many everything's inventory, I can't even name all of them. Influencers, you name it, it's always been this divide. It's always been how is Amazon performing versus our DTC efforts? Let's look at, you know, our Amazon ads versus Google ads. Oh, well, we have a higher row as on Amazon, DTC is nothing we should not even be looking at that. And that's not really how it should be viewed that brands have a digital ecosystem. And that's really what you know, what we found to be successful. And instead of it being this great divide, what we then see is this wonderful little Venn diagram where it's really to becoming one, not just to reference Spice Girls here, but also looking at really this is how your brand is going to be able to grow. We found that instead of looking at inventory from only on Amazon and only marketplace. If you say we have inventory. This is how much is on these different retailers. And let's say you run out of inventory on Amazon, what do I do next? Oh, well, we know we have budget that was going towards maybe pushing some of the inventory that is now on DTC, we can push that budget towards D to C, for example, same thing could be for a retail partner. If we have promotions calendar, instead of having one for DTC and one for Amazon, you have one promotion calendar. So that way you can start overlapping see, Oh, are we doing the same promo on these days? What are the chances support? Do we have influencers posting, etc. Same thing with launch calendars. And we know launches are can be a little bit different on marketplace and Amazon than they are would be to see if we can prep for this, we can make sure that there's going to be some overlap between the two. So then that way, it helps our our rankings on Amazon, get some reviews from Amazon. And we also are, you know, pushing this on our DTC channels or the traditional DTC channels, if you will. And so then as you start evaluating ad budgets, ad performance, your influence your lifecycle. And as a reminder, like Nicole said, lifecycle is considered email, your email and your SMS efforts, when these really start overlapping each other, that is where brands grow. And we have some wonderful data to really kind of show this that we'll get to in a little bit. But this is the future of marketing. This is where Omni commerce really comes in. And, you know, if you continue, and if brands continue to look at kind of everything in a silo, with the, you know, iOS fourteens, and all the privacy regulations and IDFA, this is going to become hindering to your brand growth. So want to throw that out there.

Nicole Reich  11:39

Yep, adding just a little bit of color, I guess from the things that we've traditionally seen, going back several years is that there's always this kind of competition within the org, where you've got your EECOM team and your marketing team running this DTC branding side, and then a lot of times, you've got the Amazon piece of the business under sales. And it's almost like they fight against each other when they don't really have to. And when that as an example stockouts happen on the Amazon side? Well, there's dedicated Amazon ad budget, and when we recommend to our brands, maybe we should probably just bring that back, because we don't want to waste dollars that aren't gonna go anywhere, because you're out of stock. At that point, those dollars just aren't even spent. They're not communicating to the other side of the business saying, Hey, we're going to stock on Amazon, we've got some extra Can you reallocate that to your DSP efforts? Or can we go more of a funnel, of course, we can do that with DSP. But you've got these two sets of data points, two sets of content, two sets of teams, kind of working a lot of the times against each other instead of working with each other. So that is kind of the one of the challenges that I think is more common than we'd like to admit. And that we are looking to overcome and just kind of supporting exactly what kind of Tayler mentioned there. The last thing that I would kind of tie this up from is is thinking about the Amazon customers. And I just wanted to provide some data from one of our partners that is doing a lot of work with us to help us understand last touch related to where are Amazon customers going to begin with? And then where do they end up. So what this represents is that on the left side, you'll see all of the external sources. And then on the right side, all of the internal sources of ways that Amazon customers are finding products. What we're seeing over the last six months is that 36% of the Amazon users going to product detail pages actually come from offline sources, meaning that they're not going to amazon.com and just shopping 47% of the time, yes, they're doing that, or that's the dark blue on the right 36% of the time, they're coming from search on Google on other sites, they're coming from social, which is driven sometimes by the brands and retailers, but also by Amazon. They're coming from direct links from influencers, right? So it's not like the Amazon customer is always starting on Amazon and shopping there. They're looking for products on other channels, and then always and then end up back on Amazon. So I think we'll continue to see the shift. And it speaks to the importance of thinking about all of this together instead of again, within silos. If we already know that customers are going to be on Amazon or they're going to be on social they're going to be on your website. It doesn't really matter from a customer perspective where the product is and it's our jobs as brands as providers to those brands. To help them provide get the best customer experience wherever they are, regardless if it's on a website on social or on Amazon. Awesome.

Tayler Carpenter  14:59

So now we're gonna go Get the relationship between Amazon and DTC and how, again, it's not a competition. It's, it's, you know, we're all working on the same team. So over the last few months, we have been closely monitoring and charting, the impact DTC ads been has when it comes to Amazon revenue for the same clients. And we've actually found a direct correlation. There's always been this, this theory that this has been going on, you know, the more you invest on, let's say, TikTok or Snapchat or whatever, you know, there's always been this theory that, you know, we know that there had been people are gonna go to Amazon and purchase but we actually have seen with our DTC spent a direct correlation to also Amazon revenue, increasing, decreasing, there's just this, it's this nice, it's data that we that we want to see. And that's just kind of proving this theory. So for example, you know, when when we increase spend on new customer acquisition efforts, think of prospecting, awareness, just really trying to get new customers into the funnel and learn about your brand, we can see an increase in Amazon sales, we might not see them on DTC, and just like Nicole showed a few slides ago, 36%, of Amazon purchases start off of Amazon. So whether they see an ad on Facebook, they go to a brand site, and then they go to Amazon, or maybe they get they read an article on refinery 29, or on Vogue, they go to Amazon, this is huge. Because again, if you look at them as competition, you're not really going to be able to get an understanding of well, how is everything affecting everything. And so this is just one of those things, that's, you know, that is so important when you're looking at growing your brand to look at things as not competition, but again, as friends, essentially. And one of the most important things we can go back real quick, Nicole, is, I want to know, you know, on Amazon, we have a cost is typically our performance metric for ads, we have row as for D to C, and one of the things that's important is that it's not really something that you should be focusing on row as one to one or a cost one to one, we know that if you see a prospecting ad, for example, on Facebook, it's not going to have the same return on adspend that you would see on a Google ad, especially in the wake of iOS 14. If we see that we're getting new customers to our site, and we're seeing their Amazon revenue is going up and we can look at new to brand cells and all the other reports we have available. This shows us that we should be looking at a different metric besides a direct ROA s or a direct ROI. And we'll get to this in a little bit. But it's one of the things that we like to call out and work with brands on because if you're expecting to see the same return on Amazon as you aren't on DSC and vice versa. That's that's kind of the old way again, when we start thinking about how they've always been viewed kind of not together. That's the old way of thinking and we have a solution for how we view it. And then in this new reality, they're really quick. And we

Aaron Conant  17:50

got a question that comes in that I think is really relevant. And I just want to make sure we check tackle these and others. If you have questions, drop them in the chat, drop them into q&a, or you can always email me, how do you think Amazon's new by with prime direct consumer site initiative will affect this Amazon versus DTC sites

Nicole Reich  18:06

equation? So speaking with my vida, Vida prime hat, I think one and we'll talk about this later on about the benefits, I think the hope is on the brand side, that actually will keep more customers on the website, versus then searching for the same product on Amazon, right. And when that happens, then the brand or the merchant, whoever's owning the website will get that customer data. So I would hope and we'll see shifts will continue to monitor this. But it'll be interesting to see how many customers end up bouncing from the website, once prime is the buyer with pride badges on there versus how many ended up staying. And the whole intent behind by with prime is that when you have that badge in there, it increases conversion, you're still getting the customer data, and you're keeping them they're on your website. So that more to come. But I think that would be hopefully the assumption in the wind that those that come to your website are more likely to convert, they stay on your website, those that find your products through other channels or end up on Amazon purchase there. And either way you're you know, you're providing a superior customer journey for them.

Aaron Conant  19:16

Awesome, love it. Others you have questions drop in the chat of the q&a, we'll get them answered.

Tayler Carpenter  19:20

I think that's also a really good segue into, you know, speaking of first party data and lifecycle and how it's so important, so we don't have the same visibility on Amazon with you know, with first party data and customers data as we deal with it's your own DTC, right. We can see addresses names, what they've purchased all of this, all of this information. And as we go further into a cookie list, a more private world, you want to have as much first party and really even zero party data as possible. And this is where you can utilize lifecycle so we can always build up utilizing, you know, some different traditional DTC channels, getting people to go to a DTC signing up for your email list, and then you can use that email list To go back to your Amazon. So if you're having a new product launch, you can talk about that in a lifecycle in terms of an email or an SMS, Prime Day prime days a huge one, right? We know everyone is always anticipating when Prime Day will be, you can send a list to your to your customers and saying, hey, you've either purchased this or guess what we're running a very exclusive sale on Amazon, go over there, XY and Z. Talk about you know, we were talking about inventory earlier, back in stock. If something has been out of stock on Amazon, and it's now restocked, you can send an email for that. And this, this just kind of goes into again, we talked about having one large macro marketing calendar, one large macro budget marketing initiatives, we can start making and putting together the pieces that will make up that larger plan that will allow you as the brand to have more control or have an understanding of what your what what is going on in the realm of your your marketing and your business, your Omni commerce, but your Omni commerce world, this is where we can really start looking at, you know, first party data and lifecycle. If you have any sort of Lightning Deals or any ad hoc promotions that are running, you can send an email for that you can send SMS for that any sort of inventory that you need to sell through, this is another one that we have some brands have, they need to sell through some inventory, whether it's because expiration is coming up, or whatever that looks like you can send an email saying, Hey, we have this offer, you can you know, get this inventory, it's on Amazon, blah, blah,

Nicole Reich  21:27

blah. It's all added up. Because this is the I think our last webinar was actually on fulfillment related to Amazon one p three P so as everyone on the call probably knows, right restock limits on Seller Central side inventory space, on the one P side, basically Amazon definitely incentivizes sellers and brands who have quicker sell through metrics, right? And without thinking, we're thinking in silos, when you need to move through inventory at Amazon, whether it be one pier three P, you're typically isolated to the levers, you can only pull within that channel, right? So hey, I've got stale inventory, okay, I'm gonna look at Amazon to do coupons to do advertising, to maybe do some hero images to some extent, right, a lot of those things you have to pay for as a brand on Amazon. Whereas when you can leverage your existing marketing efforts, and send out emails or text or whatever it might be, that is another lever that you could pull that would help you fix the problem within Amazon and vice versa, right? Like there are times where on the Amazon side, especially with by with prime, we can lean into our Amazon efforts by then coming back to our DDC side and improving that. So it goes together both ways. I know right now we're talking about, you know, DSD, DSD capabilities are levers getting improved on the Amazon side, but it does go back and forth each way. Awesome.

Tayler Carpenter  23:00

So going in, and we just have a few slides on here that I think it's important for every brand to know. And according to Klaviyo 73% of eCommerce sales are happening on mobile, which is huge. One in three shoppers prefer getting texts to emails, and 73% have made a purchase as a result of attack. So when we talk about the importance of lifecycle, we talked about how you're able to send people to either your Amazon storefront or, or a specific PDP there, there are ways to communicate with them off of Amazon, we've talked about this, we just talked about lifecycle, some, you know, some brands were able to participate in NYC E, which was a beta and I think it was released for general public, there are limitations on that. Which was if you don't know Amazon's, basically your, their their answer to email opportunities. It was very limited. You could only send I think, three emails a month, very limited anyways, and then so looking at the stats that shows you you can send a text people are on their phone, so if they can literally open it up on their phone, go to the Amazon App Add to Cart, that's going to be that's taking a lot of barriers out versus if you know, they have to open up you know, go to the DTC site started up a new account, anything like that all these DTC efforts or traditional DTC efforts are ways that you can grow your brand on Amazon and like Nicole said, you know, with buy with prime, there's ways that that can also be beneficial and go both ways. And so one of the things that we kind of want to close this section out with is really you know, rising tide lifts all ships we've all been hearing this for a while, but it's true and I kind of just want to go through this so we've been working with one of our brands bloom for the last three years in the last 12 to 16 months we've we've really been integrating ourselves in partner with them and into their business so not just you know, hey, we have ads or this you know, what we're working with them on is DTC and Amazon Marketing we have email and SMS we have influencer we're working with them on a consult like a fractional seat I'm a CML person, like level even. And one of the things that we have historically looked at was channel specific row as what is our email row as what is our Amazon row as what is our DTC row as well as our Facebook row. And once we started making the shift to looking at M er as a whole, so Mar stands for marketing efficiency ratio, which also you could use the term return on investment. So what was our total revenue across the board for our brand, divided by our total investment to get what that number is, when we made that shift, what we saw is a falling we've seen 102% increase in top line growth across the board for the brand, already year to date. So not really increasing spend nothing crazy happening, we've already seen just by shifting our focus from looking at Channel specific row as to mar we're already seeing this, we see almost a four m Er So for every dollar we're spending, we're essentially getting $4 back as a brand. This is taking a look at the last 12 months across marketplace, retail and.com. We've also been able to scale our paid media 40% Over the last 12 months. So we haven't had to, you know necessarily pull back from you know, because Google return on adspend was low or not go after non brand terms on Amazon or DSP because DSP won't have as high of a return as brand. For example, we've been able to take a look and say, Okay, we know what our M er is, we're seeing success on Amazon, we're going to put a little bit more there, we might see that we're getting more success right now, when it comes to paid social or Google put a little bit more there. And our budgets are becoming fluid, which is so important. Because if we have rigid budgets, and we can't ever overlap, or if we're specifically looking at again, the return on adspend per channel per non brand versus brand versus DSP, this would and was hindering us for a while this Mar metric this looking at this tacos, even if you want, this has really helped the brand grow. And it's so important. When you stop looking at DTC and Amazon in the vacuum, you start looking at as one whole channel, this is where you are able to see results.

Aaron Conant  27:07

Really quick a question that comes in? And it's a common one? I think so management doesn't like to drive customers to Amazon because of the lower margins? How do you speak to that?

Nicole Reich  27:18

That's a great question. Great question. I think those two pieces, one piece is diving into the profitability on Amazon. What are things that you can do to improve the profitability as examples? On the one P side or on the three P side? Are you losing margin because you're not reconciling your shipments, your chargebacks? Your returns? Whatever it might be? Right are the points that you can be picking up from that. Second, are you losing margin on on Amazon? Because the retail price isn't as high as what you think it should be? If you weren't able to get that up? Are you picking up points there? Right? So the first question and of course, if you're one key on Amazon, and three and direct to consumer on your website, of course, that website is going to have a higher margin. Like, I totally get that. But I would just say that make sure that you're you're looking at your Amazon expenses as a percentage of the revenue and making that as efficient as possible. The second thing I would say, regardless of that, is that based on the data, you know, even to the example that Tayler just shared. Yes, you can drive customers to your to your website. But the Amazon, the the customer in general is going to purchase products wherever they want, no matter what. So you might be limiting your growth long term, if you are siloing the way the way that you're directing customers. So maybe it's not all the time, maybe 95% of the time you drive customers to your website, because you get better margin there. It's worth testing what happens in that 5%. Not to say that it always has to happen. But it'd be interesting to see very much similar to these results. Let's take a promotion time period, let's take the back half of December when we know that we're not going to be able to ship products as quickly as Amazon can. And let's test that to see when we drive our customers, a segment of our customers a sample of our customers to Amazon instead of our website, what are the results? What happens to conversion? What happens to our halo effect or the best seller ranking on Amazon? And then does that customer end up coming back somewhere down the road? So those are all things to test? I wouldn't say that, you know, we obviously have amazing results with the customer on this page. But it doesn't have to be an all or nothing. So if if someone internally is pushing back, I would say Could we do a pilot program could we do a test program and then show them the results and then you can make some long term decisions about how it could impact your your business in the future. Awesome love it.

Aaron Conant  30:00

Great though Amazon TikTok. Yeah, on here. Yeah.

Tayler Carpenter  30:06

So this is one of the sections I think I'm most excited to talk about. Before we get into I have a big number here. So the amount of views hashtag Amazon must have on TikTok is currently at 17 Point 1 billion. That is how many views have happened for the hashtag, and all the videos that are contributing to it, which is just, it's unfathomable to a certain extent. It's yeah, it's

Aaron Conant  30:32

great. Actually, there's just a post on the Amazon vendor central group. Somebody had, you know, a friend of ours had a product go viral on TikTok, and under that hashtag. And now they're dealing with the backside. Well, yeah, back out, and then they're flooded with, you know, copycats, anyway.

Nicole Reich  30:55

Well, when they went out of stock, I hope that they repurpose their Amazon budget for their DTC efforts.

Aaron Conant  30:59

Right, exactly. Nicely played nicely. I love what I mean, just the point is, it's real, it happens all the time now. And there's no magic code where you can do it, it's a numbers game, you're playing it until it hits. And when it does, though, you got to be ready for it. It's

Tayler Carpenter  31:17

almost like reliving through when everyone was trying to go viral on YouTube. And you know, like the early 2000s Everyone was trying to make the videos and I think one of the the one viral video, I remember was the one of the the wedding party dancing down the aisle. It's the same thing now with TikTok except not in the form of you know, it's still short form content. But now it's things I got, or showing a hack or anything like that. And it's, it's fascinating. And so the if you are not on TikTok as a brand, you should 100% be on TikTok, and like Aaron said, it's really a numbers game. So brands want to go viral and TikTok, people want to go viral on TikTok. There's pros and cons, you could stack out of inventory. But then you if you have a DTCC like backup, you have your inventory right there too, right. So there's pros and cons to it. But the goal is really to get on as many for you pages as possible in the for you pages is TikTok’s algorithm for each person and each user of of the channel, then it's curated. It's going to be completely random. Sometimes it's people you're following, but it's all based on what you're engaging. So if you're engaging with people who do like the Sunday restocks, and their pantry, which is something that I love, I love Condon about that I'm also I'm booktalk. So I'm finding what the you know, the up and coming books are, this is such a huge, I would say just this needs to be a core channel for any brand when it comes to your organic social strategy. There is a whole ads component, which we can talk about, potentially a different session. But really, it's such a powerful discovery tool. And what we've been hearing is that Gen Z is going to TikTok and that's where they're actually searching first. So if they're going to TikTok they're looking for maybe it's a hair tool, or if it's, you know, a toothbrush or let's clean beauty products, they're able to go to TikTok search this in the search bar, and then they're gonna start getting videos are populating using any of those hashtags, or have been categorized by TikTok as being relevant to that. So it should be your mission to make sure you are getting on as many for you pages as possible. And as you can see here, this is just a handful of the amaz the you know, the Amazon hashtag videos that I was able to find. It's all look at all the views on these, we have one, the bottom left, it's 11 point 6 million views of just cool stuff I bought on Amazon. There's also one that 66 point 2 million of just 10 Amazon Home finds I used every day. This is the one thing I love about these is that they're not editorial, they're not edited and sort of like this, you know, they're not shot in a warehouse. It's all raw and authentic and people like that because they can see that in their lives. It's so it's just one of those things that again, if TikTok is not if you learn one thing from this, at least from what I'm talking because Nicole has given you so many great insights. You should be on TikTok and if you are not you should definitely be considering it because it is the thing that you should be on.

Aaron Conant  34:10

So question rolls in is TikTok, aging up.

Tayler Carpenter  34:14

That's such a wonderful time. Thanks, Rich. Wonderful timing. Yeah. So yes, it is absolutely. So from TikTok. And this is probably even changed since the last time we were given this data. 35% of users in the US are over the age of 35. I actually think that number When I talked to our tech talk last, our rep last was probably closer to 40 45%. But 100% I went to a Detroit Pistons game, so if you're familiar with Detroit sports, their basketball team, the the person sitting next to me was in his 50s Creating TikToks of his time at the game. So yes, it is absolutely aging up. You hear a lot about TikTok being Gen Z, Gen Z, Gen Z, but in the reality of the situation. These are there are people over the age of we'll say 20 On TikTok, it is such a wonderful tool. And every day it's going to be getting more and more and more, I would say age diverse, as opposed to just being Gen Z. And I think, you know, if we want to talk about when this started happening, the pandemic, everyone was just kind of going to TikTok. And now we're starting to see that there's maybe older creators than there used to be. We're just seeing so many more people getting on the platform. And in terms of the split between female and male, it does skew to be slightly more female. But we're talking like, I think it's, it's 45% male, and it was, what is that 55% Female was the last that I saw. So really, you should be on it. It is getting older, I promise you. It's not all just like 18 year olds, we have brands who have abs in the three digit category, who are making a lot of success and they're being very successful on TikTok.

Nicole Reich  35:57

I think what I would add to this is just from a purchase perspective, right? So the reason that lower ages 18 to 24, may, you may look at that and think, Okay, it's not going to be a good fit for our target demographic. Well, why not? Well, because they're not early enough in their careers where they have money to make purchases, right? 35% is over the age of 35. But if you add in 25 to 34, who are a great target market, for use to purchasing online who are entering their professional careers and have Castro byproducts that ends up being about 62% of the users are older than 24 on TikTok. And that is where the purchasing power comes from. Right. So it'll be interesting to watch this here, like you said, of where does it tend to skew but it's kind of like the I would say like the new Facebook where all of us as young millennials are in Facebook, and then our parents are always on your phone. What is it social media. Now when I'm with my dad, I can't even have a conversation with him because he's just on Facebook. TikTok is the second Facebook where it started with younger generation and as outgoing upwards. And those people that are coming on the platform are looking to purchase online.

Tayler Carpenter  37:12

Yes. And on that note, like you just said Nicole, too. So if someone would have told you 10 years ago, that you could get followers you could grow your Instagram for like, you know, we'll say like $1 per follower, you would want to know that information right? Because everyone has always lived to like Instagram for followers. TikTok is at that moment right now. So just kind of going into this we're seeing cost per followers anywhere from like 75 cents to like $1.75. And as you know, as ourselves as Blue Wheel we grew, we invest in TikTok, not just putting out content just about marketing, but ours has a lot of behind the scenes information, we grew our following from zero to 100,000 followers in less than like six months, it's there, we've gone viral. Some of the one of them was just a photoshoot that we've done with a brand I love the comments on it, you know, people are saying it's like ASMR people are also saying that it looks like nacho cheese and every time I see that ad now I can't stop thinking about that. But it's definitely something that you should be talking to all of your leadership on your team on. Just know that you can get a lot of followers right now on TikTok qualified followers for very inexpensive compared to Instagram. So quickly, I want to touch on Prime Day in 2022 will do the first Prime Day not the prime early access sale that happened in October. But looking at Prime Day 2022 One of the things that was interesting is that Amazon sent PR packages for Prime Day to creators. So you can see here some of these videos they have a lot of views on them. But some of them were actually sent products about what was going to be on sale and so then that would that was able to do is then get people excited because they're like oh I know primaries coming up. I can't wait to you know everyone is always like getting their baskets ready for Prime Day. So they could see what was going to be on sale ahead of time. If anyone follows house Chris She is known for walking while she works essentially she has like a little walk pad. She's known for that she's also known for her caffeinated greens and her literally her ice machine. All of those things were found on Amazon and she was promoting them just organically without any sort of sponsorship or anything just saying like hey these are going to be on sale for Prime Day I talked to the brand like they're not paying me whatever. And then they ended up selling out so like it is such a valuable tool. And if you look at these numbers here we go back into the to the views, Amazon Prime Day hashtag Amazon Prime they had 2035 point 2 million views. Prime Day itself had 685 million views. So there are the this is such an important tool to have in your marketing arsenal and that being TikTok there's so many different things that you can do and it can benefit both your DTC and your Amazon because people are going to want to go to TikTok see short form video say hey, oh, this is something I get an AMA John gets prime and today, they go to Amazon, they buy it, if you're sold on Amazon, then they will go to your DTC. And vice versa. If you have products on DC that you don't have on Amazon, it can work both ways. It is such a great way to build your brand.

Nicole Reich  40:10

So before I get into the violent crime section, just to close it out, I have a couple of slides there. Any other questions Aaron that might have come in? Or I just want to take a quick pause before I shift gears back to the the five prime side? No, no other

Aaron Conant  40:29

stuff come in. But if others have them, drop them to the q&a or the chat or email them to me. And we'll we'll get them answered. Awesome.

Nicole Reich  40:37

Cool. Well, a couple months ago, I believe right before the end of the year, we did a webinar by with prime. And what I would say to start out this now is that the program is is changing, evolving, improving very quickly. So I wanted to provide just a couple of updates on some of the new releases that are coming out related to buy with prime. So just to begin to give like a really quick overview with you, if you're not already hearing about it. Basically what buy with prime is is that on your website, you can put on the Buy with prime badge, and it looks a mobile examples right on the right of the screen. When a customer comes to your website, they can check out their the typical way that you have available. But you can also now provide a buyer with prime experience. When this happens, you get the badge, the inventory is coming out of Amazon's fulfillment centers, they're able to purchase the product with their Amazon customer information. And what this is doing is a couple of things. from a customer perspective. It's a it's an easy checkout, it's trustworthy, it's credible, right? They're very familiar with already shopping on Amazon with prime and now they get that same type of experience on your website, they get free two day shipping. And from overall, right what the number one indicator why this is important is that the early results show that there could be an increase of up to 25% conversion, just by having this buy with prime badge on the website. From a brand or merchant perspective, the way that you that the way that it works is that you are now able to use Amazon fulfillment centers to fulfill the orders for your DTC side. So from your perspective, it allows you to potentially consolidate your three peat provide three PL providers. And if you're on the seller central side, it helps you significantly increase your IPI score. So this is a little bit of what can speak to but we can't put in documents necessarily is that in q4 of last year, what was happening was second week of October and Amazon released that they were not going to improve, give you more space within Seller Central, they reduced the orders on the vendor Central. And what we were able to do with a lot of the brands that we worked with is that when they were going by with prime and already close to being there, they got on by with prime and then Amazon increased their storage on the seller central side to accommodate for the Buy with prime on the website doing is one place for inventory that then can fill orders for your DTC Amazon side. The intent or the push from Amazon is that it drives more traffic and new customers, you're able to increase your conversion, boost your traffic. And the benefit is record that new customer data. When a prime customer ends up on your site, maybe they were a previous customer, maybe they weren't when they purchased, they get this ease of the Buy with prime checkout process. And you also get that customer so that anything at the time when this was really a big aha because Amazon has always been so protective of their prime customer data. And in this scenario, you were able to get those people into your website, you own that data, you then can retarget them and do all the things honestly that Tayler has mentioned in the rest of this deck to then drive them again back to your to your mark that if you'd like the bit of a mic drop, at least in the last couple of weeks I'm not even sure if this has come out publicly a whole time yet is that Amazon is allowing by with prime motion to sync their reviews from Amazon to the DTC site. So this is one of the big updates that I just wanted to make sure that I pointed out here so here's what it looks like. This is a company called go buy biotech. And you can see on the left side is their product detail page within their website. And you can now see that there are two places you have their standard reviews. And then you also have the reviews coming in from Amazon. So as you scroll down on the Detail page on the website, you see these Amazon reviews thinking and then you have right next to that there Trustpilot reviews that were also there. They have not yet released where you can sync reviews from website to Amazon. So it's not going that way yet. Oh, but the benefit, you know, this is probably one of the biggest questions that we've gotten over the last several years, probably six years, Hey, can I have my reviews go from Amazon to my website, or from my website to Amazon, the answer has always been no. And again, now you've got two big things that Amazon typically in the past was not allowing merchants brands to do. And now they're going through the so very early stages, I don't have any data on how this further improves conversion or anything like that. It's, we're still in testing on it. But I wanted to make sure I pull this out, because we find this to be a really cool opportunity. For example, with product launches, where you may launch a product on Amazon, it takes a little bit longer than last on your website, you now can get the benefit of those reviews on Amazon. Truly quick, a

Aaron Conant  45:51

question comes in, are there eligibility requirements, either volume or technically to participate in buyer with prime under Seller Central? So a couple of things here is, I don't believe it's available on vendor central side, just because they haven't quite figured out how to transfer inventory one by one back to the vendor to make it a seller central side.

Nicole Reich  46:16

So vendor Central is coming soon, very soon. It's they're testing it right now. On the seller central side, though, there isn't any minimum. No. So let's just say that you want to buy buy with prime on your on your website, and you don't have any units look just for sake of the example. There isn't any limitation, you can launch it for whatever product that you want on your Amazon, your website, and there isn't a minimum volume requirement. That's awesome.

Aaron Conant  46:44

One other quick note that you know, we did a dinner with a buyer was prime team right outside of unboxed in and just talking with that team over that conversation around the fulfillment side, where if you're using buy with prime as you get past, you know, into December where a lot of the carriers stopped shipping all the bribe with prime products because they're coming out of the prime warehouses, you can still get two day shipping. Right up till Christmas. It's pretty crazy.

Nicole Reich  47:15

Yeah, absolutely. That I think Aaron mentioned it very early on. If anyone is attending, prosper, I'm speaking with the buyer with prime teen at the show. And then we are doing another event, a happy hour event on the night of the 14th I believe Aaron right. Yep. And I believe there are Derek, who's our been our partner, he's been absolutely fantastic. He will be there. I believe with several other Amazon reps. If you have questions about this, I actually have it kind of in the key takeaways. But I know that Amazon buy with prime isn't a fit for everyone right away. totally get that. But it's continuously improving. They're they're continuously rolling out new features. And I would just continue, I would think about keeping it on your radar if not evaluating what it would mean for your business.

Aaron Conant  48:01

Two more quick questions here and by with prime are the standard referral fees staying in place? And if not, what will change?

Nicole Reich  48:09

So there? When I hear referral fees, it's not the same referral fees that it has on Seller Central. So for example, a lot of that most of the referral fees on amazon seller central is 15%. Right. apparel and clothing is 17%. Those types of referral fees do not apply. There are fees related like as a percentage, but they're much much less than that.

Aaron Conant  48:34

Awesome. Second, what will this due to Amazon FC capacity when they're already failing?

Nicole Reich  48:46

I, I think that one of the reasons that by with Prime was rolled out was that they were building up the capacity in their fulfillment centers to be able to do both to be able to support the DTC side and their Amazon orders. I think that at the same time, though Amazon much more now than they ever have, are making sure that the products that are in their warehouse are moving. Sometimes I'm not really sure if it's a capacity issue versus them making sure that the center's are efficient. And I know that's not that doesn't help necessarily but you know, Amazon just released yesterday, the new capacity or the way that they are doing restock limits and we found those to be very beneficial more so than it has been in the last couple of years. So I would continue to watch that and hopefully that improves. Awesome. And then

Aaron Conant  49:38

Jacob dropped in here 3% or $1 for TA per order minimum. Yeah,

Nicole Reich  49:43

it really depends on the size of the of the item so we have some other like if anyone has any questions about the pie with prime pricing, I can send you a blog that is pretty it narrows it down to the size of the product. Love it.

Aaron Conant  49:56

So a couple minutes left here. Key takeaways perfect Yeah, we know you're always smooth as it could possibly go.

Nicole Reich  50:03

Alright, so the first key takeaway is that, again, it's Amazon and everyone, not Amazon first everyone staying in silos creates redundancy and consistent customer experiences and inefficiencies and bringing those together. Though it also relies on teams sometimes coming together as well, it's definitely more efficient. And we've seen the results of that where you can then lead into the second one be a bit more fluid and you're out budgets, right. So build those budgets together across all AECOM channels, not just here's my one person in my company does my B to C efforts, that's their budget, here's my Amazon budget over here, bring those together so that you can analyze the results and then optimize those cohesively to TikTok should be a part of every marketing strategy, top Discovery Channel for customers, I will say that the attribution is still a bit limited, but the cost per growth is low. So that is the, again, the new Instagram, the new Facebook, the new be there before it becomes way more expensive, like the other platforms. And then lastly, I would just say is explore buy with prime, evaluate, evaluate if it's right for your business, and then just continuously keep it on your radar. Even if it's not a fit today, for example, maybe your one p and it just doesn't work. Doesn't mean that six months down the road, it can't work for you at that time, if they paid adjust.

Aaron Conant  51:28

I'm gonna check here really quick. I don't have any other questions that came in. And we're pretty much right at time. So if anybody has any last minute questions, you can drop them in right now. Other than that, Nicole Tayler, you guys are great. Really appreciate you jumping on today helping educate the community as a whole. The right friends, partners, supporters, if anybody has follow up questions on anything on Amazon, one p three P bi with prime, direct consumer paid search social Amazon advertising, they pretty much handle it. I think everybody saw that the beginning more than happy to put you in touch with them. If anybody just needs random strategic conversation around what's going on across the digital landscape more than happy to set up time with you as well. On my side, that's where I spend most of my time was just helping people with digital strategy and partner selection. So don't hesitate to reach out. You know, we'll shoot over an email, great to set 30 minutes aside and just networking knowledge share. And with that, I think it's perfect time to to wrap it up. And yes, the webinar will be available, we'll let people know. So Colin, if you'll just ping me. You can do that. And we'll make sure you get to a copy. And I think that's it. I think we're gonna wrap it up. Thanks again, everybody for your time today.

Nicole Reich  52:42

See you soon, Aaron. Thank you, everyone. Bye