Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18  

Happy Thursday. I'm Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson and digital strategist with BWG Connect. And for those that don't know, we are a network of knowledge sharing group we stay on top of latest trends challenges whatever is shaping the digital landscape we want to know and talk about it. We are on track to do at least 500 of these webinars. This year due to the increase in demand to better understand the digital space. We'll also be doing at least 100 in-person small format dinner so if you happen to live in a tier one city in the US feel free to shoot us an email we'd love to send you an invite the dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a certain discussion around a digital topic and as always a fantastic time scuze me we spend the majority of our time talking to brands is how we stay on top of the latest trends. We'd love to have a conversation with you can feel free to drop me a line at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we can get some time on the calendar. It's from these conversations we generate the topic ideas we know that people want to learn about and it's also where we gain our resident experts such as ProductWind who's with us today. So anybody that we eat, we asked to teach the collective team has come highly recommended from multiple brands within the network. So if you ever need to have any recommendations within the digital space, please don't hesitate to reach out we have a shortlist of the best of the best and would love to provide that information to you. Also note if you have any hiring needs. We do partner with a talent agency Hawkeye Search formally BWG talent that we can put you in contact with as well. A few housekeeping items. We want this to be fun, educational, conversational, put as many questions comments you have into the chat the q&a or you can email me at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com and we will be sure to get to them. And we'll be moving on pretty fast. It's a 30 minute session. So we will formally wrap up at the 30 minute mark. So with that let's roll and talk about how to use influencers to make your product retail ready for that upcoming holiday season can't believe Summer is almost over the team of ProductWind have been awesome friends and the network's I'm gonna kick it over to you Tim, if you can introduce yourself and we'll dive right into the information that would be lovely. Thank you.

Tim Wilson  2:17  

Or thanks, Tiffany. So hello everyone. My name is Tim, Tim Wilson and I lead the revenue efforts here ProductWind and ProductWin what we are is we are a company that works with brands to help them drive instant momentum for really any product online. Most commonly this is used that product launch since a lot of companies have a hard time ramping new products making them retail ready, getting them ready for the holidays. And we use we use social media to ramp products in weeks instead of months making them retail ready and in typically three, four or five weeks. So I have a few slides here today. I'm happy to share them with you after anyone who wants them. But the purpose of these slides are I'm gonna go through them pretty quickly there to just level set on what we're talking about today in terms of what is digital shelf, what is Share of Voice and there's nothing about our product in here it's more about the problem that I see that exists in the market and some ways that you can go about solving them and then at the end of the slides we can have plenty of time for a conversation so if you have questions please you know send them into Tiffany and happy to talk about anything in going any direction you want to go with the dialogue today. So with that and by the way Tiffany if you have questions about the coming up please chime in if you if I'm not explaining something clearly new percent love it. Thank you. Cool. So skip that was just who we are a full disclosure right ProductWind we do retail influencer marketing, and we use it to help enterprise brands not just drive social content but drive eCommerce KPIs, right, really focus on improving your digital shelf through SEO, share voice, ratings, reviews, etc. So first, I'm fascinated I've been in eCommerce for a long time now. And there's they're just no or very few accepted norms and definitions of what things are. So digital shelf mean a lot of different things. As you can see, I just did a Google search. This is the Featured Snippet within Google. I just grab that and you can see it's really technically the digital shelf is anywhere that the consumers might interact with your product to find or learn about or compare your products. So it could be your DTC can be social channels can be anything. However, for the purpose of our conversation today, we're going to refer to the retailer search results page right the search If you're a more old school, the retailer serve as the digital shelf. So I go to Walmart and go on Amazon, I searched for flower hats, what shows up? We're going to call that the digital shelf for today. And then secondly, we're going to talk about Share of Voice. And there's no clear definition of Share of Voice either. I don't know if anybody follows Mike black on LinkedIn. If you don't, this guy is a prolific LinkedIn poster. And they are all about how to drive and improve eCommerce. So he's a great follow if you don't follow him already. He ran a poll just a few weeks ago asking how do you determine how do you define share voice there were 84 votes. And you can see over over half said share voice to me is my paid search in organic search. So my SEO and my SEM, combined, that's how so when we talk about Share of Voice Today, I'm going to talk about it through the lens of your paid and organic search results. And when we talk about digital shelf, today, we're going to talk about it in terms of your retailers search result page, just to level set. If if somebody you know violently disagrees with these definitions, I think it'd be a fun debate. I'm happy to have it with you. But with that as the backdrop what the challenges that I see that exists it that's different than just a few years ago, is that retailers are really aggressively monetizing the real estate of their website, there are so many different ad types and ad formats that exist, this doesn't even get into, you know, other more advanced advertising opportunities that exist within Amazon, Walmart, they all have any video backed or enabled. Retail media networks gonna have versions of these things on the left, right. And what happens is the digital shelf has moved from a place where it's all about which products are performing the best to a lot of which products have paid to be in front of me. And as a result, pattern who is I believe the largest three P, Amazon seller in the world did analysis in December of 22, they shared or they said, listen on Amazon 30 to 35% of your ad spend now as drives incremental revenue of less than one, which basically means up for a third of your dollars right now you're almost just paying for your own customers. So there's this difficulty. If you're a brand, this conundrum where you're in, where are the digital shelf, we can think of our definition within the Digital shelf, how do you really improve it? Because I guess an inherent bias of this is that I believe and that the strength of your digital shelf is a leading indicator of the strength of your future sales and your future market share. If your digital shelf weakens, so too will likely your sales and your share. So, go ahead, Tiffany.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  8:08  

Yeah, as I say it reminds me of when I used to manage Amazon business in this like portion of our spin that was literally just like protecting our turf. This is where we're at. You're protecting yourself at this point.

Tim Wilson  8:23  

Yeah. Just yeah. There's a lot there. And hey, look, it's a capitalistic country. God bless them, because you know, they're monetizing. Ads advertising is the most profitable part of Amazon's business today, it's more profitable than AWS, which has been the darling of the Amazon portfolio for decades now. But look, this word is the difficulty I'm trying to paint here is simply the digital shelf today is a lot more complex. There's a lot more chaos in it now depending on what's what brands are out there advertising at. So if this is the case, and if your digital shelf, if you believe me or believe me, if you have the same belief I do that your the strength of your digital shelf indicates the strength of your future performance in terms of sales and share. Then there's a question of how do I it's not a question to ask is not necessarily how do I improve my digital shelf? But how do I get to Amazon ultimately what that what the digital shelf is trying to do is just be irrelevant. That's all they really trying to drive. Sorry, Amazon and Walmart. All they want to know is, is this product, what somebody is likely to buy. So the name of the game here is relevancy. You can dress it up with trust visibility. The availability. But it's really about driving relevancy to your product, and making sure that these retailers, and the retailer algorithms specifically believe your product is relevant to whoever is searching. That's the game. It's super complicated. And there's some complexities to it. But the name of the game is make the algorithm believe your product is relevant. If they believe your product is relevant, your digital shelf will improve. And social. I don't know. I'm sure no one else finds is as funny as I do. But I loved doing this slide last night, I laughed so hard. Social is an excellent way to drive your share of voice and strengthen your digital shelf. These are all things here that Amazon and Walmart openly talk about as things that weigh heavily on their algorithm. And the search results that we all see the most important of which are really sales velocity and conversion rate, that external traffic, especially external traffic from a competitor, where the Amazon can feel like they're potentially taking a sale from somebody else, you know, strong click through rates, having strong ratings and reviews for credibility. These are all things and guess what social is a great way to deliver all this to the platform to I'll just talk about Amazon, I guess Amazon or Walmart, whatever. But it's a great way to send in signals to Amazon that says, hey, guess what this product is irrelevant. This is what people like. So therefore, social delivers the relevance we're all looking for. And this is how you make your product retail ready, and how you drive your digital shelf. Right, you can read through this. But essentially, your success from a paid point of view is really has couple of constraints. It's around your product visibility, how relevant the algorithm thinks your product is. And you can use social to send signals and saying, Hey, listen, my product is relevant. And when you do that, a couple of things happen. The first thing that happens is you see a lot of upward pressure on your SEO, your products, organic rankings go up, they buoy, so your visibility goes up. The other thing that happens is just because your your paid media performance improves, because you might win a sponsored rank for a specific search term. But it's not necessarily in the 123 or four slot, right you might have you have many products right now, when you look in your advertising console, where you are paying for the sponsored rank. And it's coming in as the sloth, as you know, 58 or 74. When Amazon or Walmart views you as relevant, and your product visibility goes up, so does your sponsored placement. And what happens is instead of being ranked 58th, maybe you become option 12. On the SERP that dramatically improves your visibility drives a ton more clicks. Assuming your PDP is optimized, it drives a lot more conversion and sales, which improves your row as so you have a boost to your paid media performance and you have a boost to your SEO, those two things together. If you go back to our definition of share voice, it's paid and organic. Those two things together really strengthen your, your digital shelf. And the great thing about social is you can do all of this in less than 30 days. So your product can be ramped and running or if it's an existing product that you're looking to boost to position ahead of a surge in demand like Black Friday, and you want your products better positioned to capitalize on that demand. Social is a wonderful way for you to really drive that. I'll stop sharing now. And I'm open it up to conversations but that's my point of view. 

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  14:23  

Awesome questions, comments, put them in the chat that q&a and we will get to them curious with the brands that you're working with? Like what is best practice outside of let's say the holidays like an everyday kind of sale? Are they scaling back on their budget for sponsored ads on Amazon and devoting more to that external traffic and working with the influencers and social media or are they going all in and ramping up sponsored ad in conjunction with working with influencers?

Tim Wilson  14:53  

I really it's the I don't see them ramping down there. They retail media I'd say the biggest trend that we see is that if we're partnering with the brand, they still are investing heavily in retail media, they maintain their traditional strategy and their approach, wherever you're working with any of those ad ad agencies that are out there, it's just that you don't have to increase your ad spend as much. Because if you're working with if you're able to drive those things we mentioned before, that, if it's Amazon, your a cost drops or your will as goes up because your ad spend become so much more efficient. So you just don't have to add incremental budget would be a better way to say it.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  15:39  

Okay, sounds good. And then for, let's say, the holidays, what are you seeing brands doing as best practice?

Tim Wilson  15:46  

So for holidays, what we see with a lot of our customers, and, and our customer base is really a strong mix of global 2000, and SMB, when you think of it in terms of like an absolute count of number of customers. And each bucket, the dollar spent is might be a little bit different. But it's really about people, number of customers, there are really more it's for them, there's two things that we see, we see a lot more of people having us do kind of evergreen efforts to just sustain Because don't forget, part of this is still social, you're still getting all the benefits of a social campaign around reaching engagement and things of that nature. So that exists, but we're just directing all those efforts into a retailer's platform. So we're seeing a lot of evergreen efforts. And specifically, we're seeing customers run a lot of efforts. 30 days before leading up to big events, like we saw with Prime Day in July, June was a bananas time here as we positioned products ahead of time to capture that surge in demand. So they would just already have a strong digital sell heavy, strong Share of Voice going into Prime Day. And so if you're more visible, the idea is hopefully you can capture that demand. And I would do this we'll be doing the same thing again for Black Friday, Cyber five,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  17:07  

about 30 days before.

Tim Wilson  17:11  

Yeah, depending on the product could be could be three weeks before, it kind of depends. And have you

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  17:18  

noticed that algorithm prefers a certain platform over another when it comes to social media?

Tim Wilson  17:24  

You know, that's a great question. We have we have not I you know, we don't do as much with YouTube and YouTube shorts, we focus primarily with Tik Tok and Instagram. So I can only speak to those two channels. You know, like Reddit and whatever else we don't, we're not so I mean, technically we do them. But within Tiktok and Instagram, I have not really noticed what I've noticed, really, more than anything else is just this notion of short form video that performs well. And especially for those products that require any type of education. You know, typical static content, like images and overlays are fine. The benefit of Instagram or Tiktok is just directing traffic and Amazon's a little bit easier. Tik Tok doesn't really have any any. It's harder on Tik Tok to put your links in and direct the traffic over. So, we have a slight preference for the brand these days. But it's, you know, it doesn't matter. Yeah,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  18:25  

based on that demographic and where your customers are, that doesn't care. The algorithm is loving the external traffic which is so of course,

Tim Wilson  18:35  

that's that's the name of the game right now. Totally, totally algorithm. Your product is something people are really interested in. And it will make and it will, it will provide the visibility you you're looking

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  18:46  

to get questions, comments, put them in the chat the q&a and we will get to them. How does Amazon live play with this? Doing Amazon live in conjunction?

Tim Wilson  18:59  

So I still see i It's interesting. I haven't seen any stats on the adoption of Amazon live i to hear anecdotally that it's growing. I read an Amazon released that over Prime Day Amazon Bly was viewed, I forget if it was 100 million times or I think over Prime Day, but that number combined, I thought was interesting. It was for the combination of India and the United States. I didn't see just the US carve out. So if anybody knows the number I would love, I would be super interested in it. Amazon live is I think a great way to show off products. You know, I can't think of many any products that need any extra explanation on how to use or direct I think Amazon still doesn't charge much for it used to be free. I don't know for sure if it still is free. But it's I think it's the future of selling is gonna be much more democratized and social and interactive. I don't think we're going to the A China is, but I would be surprised if you know eCommerce tend to become more immersive and collaborative.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  20:07  

Yeah, absolutely. I came from home shopping world early. So to see like back then you had your hopes. And that's what they they sold product to you. And now everybody can sell anything that that's fascinating to watch it. So, questions, comments from the chat bear up five, six minutes left. Interesting question here from email was, is this new items only that you should be focusing on? Or can you be focusing on legacy items?

Tim Wilson  20:36  

Now, you can absolutely be focusing on legacy items. For sure. Right? The difference is simply the more data that an algorithm has on your product, the harder it is to change the algorithms mind, right? If there's already an established data set that's years old, you have to really give it a bunch of, quote, better data to for for there to be a shift or a change in its opinion on you for long term success. For short term success, the algorithm is just looking at I don't know what the number is, but it seems to they seem to be, you know, looking at sales over the last week, 30 days, etc. And so you can get an immediate uplift, for sure. The question is, then how long does it sustain? If you use it at launch, this becomes the base data set that the algorithm is using to determine your product success. So you're more likely to have sustained long term success if you use that launch. But if you're looking for a boost, you know, you've got one more holiday for products that you're trying that you're not going to renew next year, like you could it would work really well.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  21:47  

Do you see brands doing the vine review program or a some sort of review program before going in and using an influencer to drive traffic?

Tim Wilson  21:56  

But most people do both right? The vine program is super cheap. It's not as cheap as it used to be. But it's still a fairly inexpensive way to drive reviews. I would if I were running a brand, I would absolutely do vine. But I would use it as a sub. I mean, Amazon is pretty good at monetizing themselves. And your back that the vine program, I guess they say it's going to lead to better sales because of conversion. But I think there's a reason why it's not super expensive. So I would use the vine, because I think it's gonna help drive reviews to help drive credibility, which will drive trust and sales. And then you would also want to do your own thing in terms of figuring out a way to drive in that external traffic, external traffic competitor, sales, velocity, conversion rate, etc, to get the flywheel spinning and strengthen your your share of voice. And could

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  22:55  

this also be a lever for auto stock? So if you've had a key item that's been on a stock for a while, use this to juice it back up and get that

Tim Wilson  23:03  

doing that? I mean, we are actually doing that right now for a CPG. You know, they have a couple of key products that go out of stock. There's also they're in a category where some search terms are, you know, they can't say certain words. Because regulatory issues, so it makes it difficult for them, you know, especially in the world of like testosterone and whatnot to, they can't buy certain words, and then they go out of stock. And so they don't know, they can't really buy their way back up. So, you know, they're able to use social as a way to get their way back up and prove their relevancy to the algorithm. Interesting. I mean, and that, you know, it's interesting, because I also, I just want to comment, one more thing, another thing that social can do for you, is not just improve your share of voice, but you talked about being retail ready and thinking about your product detail page. There are, you know, I've seen, first of all you mail to drive, accelerate ratings and reviews and coming in which we know that credibility is important to help boost sales and drive conversion rates. But you're also going to get a ton of great content, authentic real life content that you can use. And we know there's plenty of articles out there, consumers respond best to an authentic piece of content versus a professionally taken photograph. The professional studios don't deliver the same trust that influencer does. And so we see a lot of the content. Sometimes people will take 3040 pictures and created a big collage and put it their image stack and say, you know, a product that's gone viral which communicates in a strong way to the customer, this product can be trusted. And it can give them great ideas on how to use the product. They can see themselves on one of those people using a product right? That's the whole point. I'm like this person. Therefore I can also expect this will work for me Yeah, just like the good old home shopping days, love.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  25:05  

Question comments, put them into the chat. Okay, so let's make that assumption, the product, detail pages, optimize the stock is in the warehouse and ready to roll. You have the pricing refined looks great. How do you get your influencers to help you drive traffic before that 3045 day mark before the holiday

Tim Wilson  25:25  

season? Well, I think an important thing to think about when you're selecting influencers is to look beyond the demographic and psychographic. So here's a female health enthusiast, and to understand their behavioral tendencies as well. You know, depending on your brand new your category, things you'll want to look out for are things like, to what degree do they follow brand guidelines, you know, in your when you if you want to try and kind of train the algorithm, those who said, you know, product, when you train the algorithm for us, you're going to train it, an important thing is orchestrating it, and synchronizing it. So we've looked for things like if we asked you to post your content on Tuesday, you posted on Tuesday, or do you post it on Saturday, right? Because this whole thing we're trying to is like a band, and we need to make sure everyone is playing together in a nice way to deliver the results that we're looking for. So do they post on time? Do they have strong engagement? Are they able to drive traffic and clicks? So it's really about understanding how well their behavioral tendencies line up with that slide that said, all the reasons why an algorithm loves social and just measure their behavioral likelihood to deliver those different KPIs.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  26:40  

How do you make sure that they adhere to that brand? Messaging, per se? Or maybe it's like something like the the using of the item and making sure that they're using it properly? I mean, can you interject there without, you know, being

Tim Wilson  26:55  

so that's easy. We work with a ton of companies and that are in regulated industries, where you, it's not okay to have a mistake. So within products, when just for us, what we do is a couple of things. One, the customer themselves can go in through the platform and approve or decline each individual influencer and their piece of content. Maybe you approve the influencer, but then the content came in, you can see it before it gets posted, approve it, edit it, hey, it looks great. We just got to change this one thing, or just throw it out decline it, or what most people do is we do that on their behalf. And we just have multiple checks along the way to make sure that it's, it's accurate. It's probably our biggest strength.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  27:37  

Candidly, yeah. And to confirm, do you have to ask permission to use user generated content for a plus Amazon pages?

Tim Wilson  27:49  

Depends on which social agency you're working with, with ProductWind it's part of our contract already. So you know, our customers use it automatically. There's licensing terms in there, they get it for a pretty generous amount of time. And if you want to buy it outright, it's not expensive at all. Few 100 bucks. Awesome. We're

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  28:12  

at time, final thoughts, takeaways, things to think about as we roll into the holidays?

Tim Wilson  28:18  

I just see. Yeah, it just my eye. I'm just what I would one thing I would impress upon everyone is simply, from my point of view, it seems to me that social is primarily lives over in this world of marketing, where it's almost like a different form of PR. And everyone seems to think of social in terms of how many people did you reach? What kind of engagement did you get? What was my CPM? And if you want to use it that way, I think it's proven to be very effective in those brand building exercises. The only thing I would invite you to think about as social can be more than that. Social is actually the best way I have seen to drive eCommerce, KPIs, the social people and your head of eCommerce, head of Amazon, head of Amazon should be best friends. Because I properly orchestrated social campaign will without a doubt, drive your digital shelf and make your products retail ready. In literally days, 30 days, this thing should be absolutely humming. If you two are collaborating correctly.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  29:27  

Yeah, break down the walls collaborate. That's what it comes

Tim Wilson  29:31  

down. It's it's so much more than reach and engagement. And really,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  29:35  

that's a great takeaway. Tim, thank you. As always, you always bring fantastic content to the community. We greatly appreciate it. We definitely encourage follow up conversation with the ProductWind team would love to have a conversation with you. That's how we get the content for a future event. So feel free to reach out at Tiffany@BWGconnect.com. And we can get some time on the calendar. So with that it's a wrap. Happy Thursday. Y'all have a lovely almost weekend and we'll see you on another events. Take care