Aaron Conant  0:18  

Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder Managing Director at BWG Connect networking and knowledge sharing group with 1000s of brands. I like to talk to 20 or 30 a week to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be that shaping the digital space. And when the same topics come up over and over again, that's how we get the topics for these calls. You know, a couple of things as we get started here, we're going to wrap this up right at 1230. Eastern time. So if you're looking at your watch, just know we're going to have a hard stop right there. And the other thing is, we want it to be as educational and informational as possible. So if you have questions along the way, drop them into the chat dropping them into the q&a. And we'll get them answered in real time. With that, I want to kind of go ahead and kick it off. But Tim, if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and ProductWind we can kick it over to Nancy from the iwi side. And let's kick it off there. And then we'll jump into the conversation sound

Tim Wilson  1:10  

good? Sure. Yeah. Happy to So hello, everyone. My name is Tim, Tim Wilson. I lead revenue for a company named ProductWind. And what ProductWind does is really for enterprise brands or any consumer brand that's launching new products online product. Wind is the only influencer marketing platform that drives social content, SEO ratings, reviews, and really trains the flywheel into loving your product. So you can pull a lot of revenue forward and make sure that launch is acts as successful as possible. We work with brands of all sizes and categories, because the algorithm doesn't really care what your product is. It's always looking for the same signals. And I'm just thrilled to be here and happy to share the call with Nancy, one of our customers today. Awesome. Then

Aaron Conant  2:04  

Nancy you on here, Ben? Sure.

Nancy Eichler  2:06  

So Nancy Eichler I am with a company called iwi life. I am the head of our marketing and eCommerce teams. And I've been there since August, the company is dedicated to unlocking I would say the secrets of algae as they relate to improving our health and also improving our planet. And I would say my eCommerce background goes back, dare I say out loud to 1996 where I was with AOL in their early days. And then eventually moved into more CPG related with brownie brittle, then on to mega food which is in the supplement space. And so now I'm still in supplement space with iwi life but but working with what I consider to be a revolutionary ingredient that is 1.9 billion years old. And I'm thrilled to be here to talk to you guys about my experience with product wind, all things digital. And whatever else you guys, Hamilton das awesome.

Aaron Conant  3:13  

And so everybody give me kind of the background of the call is this, I'm talking with brands on a weekly basis, this idea of new product launch. So it's kind of stayed at the beginning, new product launch is harder than ever before. Because Amazon is not issuing POS like it did you know 10 years ago when you upload a new product. But also if you have existing products that are moving in then what's happening with influencer and all of these things were coming up over and over again. And we met the team at ProductWind, but also Nancy, who's an old friend for a while now even back to the time that you've been at Mega foods where we would chat regularly. And, you know, this was so relevant to what a lot of people are dealing with right now that you know, Tim and Nancy, you know, who are actually working together, which is awesome. agreed to kind of jump on and explain, you know, how do you win in this? I would say the new product launch category if I kind of start to isolate it, but then I want to go to other places as well. So I don't know, like, what's the best place to kick it off? Whether it's Tim or Nancy, but you know, how do you, Tim maybe I'll kick it over to you first, like how does it brand approach? A new item launch? Like on Amazon, per se? 

Tim Wilson  4:32  

Well, I think actually, you know, maybe maybe Nancy is best suited to talk about it. But what I would say is this is it. Whether it's a new item launch or a product that's been around for a while. The fundamental belief that we have is that yesterday, the key to your success was really the retail buyer in taking them out, making sure they really liked you and your products had great placement. Today. The key here is Success is not the retail buyer. It's the retail algorithm. And so an algorithm by nature is looking for data and signals. So the name of the game, whether wherever you're using whatever your Strategy is, is to think of all those different elements that you need to be able to drive and then orchestrate sending those signals and inappropriate manner, you know, increasing it over time to help that algorithm love your product. You can use wherever you want, but there's a certain list of things you need to do, we can get into that I think anybody who's familiar with a nine would know those things. But we can we can certainly talk through it today. But you know, as far as what brands typically do, maybe Nancy, maybe a good place to start would be you left mega food joined iwi. And you had walked into a certain environment, right? Because we ended up connecting not too long after you started there. So maybe you can kind of share what your current what their context was that made you want to reach out to us to begin with? Yeah, well, um,

Nancy Eichler  5:59  

you know, I think most of our relationship has been specifically surrounding Amazon and launching items on Amazon, or, or helping, you know, items succeed. And when when we first exchanged contact information, and started talking about the journey for us, what I found was, anytime I'm launching a new product, I have to have justification for that product launch. And that justification content and revenue format, right? So we look at, you know, any new product that we might be creating, we look and say, what's the opportunity? Is the juice worth the squeeze? So we look across, and we say, well, retail, of course, they're gonna be loan ends. And then on the e-comm, side, it's always a build. And when I look at that bill, the question inevitably is, can we get it to build faster? And when you look at what seems like a 12 to 18 month journey to get to any point of possibly sustaining a product, let alone having it the you know, a hit, I look and say, Well, if I can't get there faster, the risk always is, is that juice worth the squeeze? If I can't fail fast, then is it worth bringing this product to market? And so the conversation with you and I really became around? Well, we had a series of new products that we were going to launch. And I thought that seemed exciting, but they weren't quite ready, would there be an opportunity for us to test something else earlier on? That would just give me a sense, because I come from a world of heavy test and learn very, very open to a variety of techniques. But I want to know, quickly do they work? Do they not work? And that really kind of set up our first test together? Just to find out while I knew it wasn't in the new product arena, we had a product that we thought to be should be more successful than it is. And we thought, Well, maybe if we took it through this, there weren't guarantees and performance. But let's just see if if this works, or could work. And now would give us a good sense for would this be the right platform for us to try scaling faster with, you know, with Amazon and any new products? And that's kind of where we can things off?

Aaron Conant  8:32  

So you I mean, the traditional right, is we go and we hit all the content first, right? Make sure we have the right images, the video, the bullet points, the product descriptions, everything's with a variety of tools to make sure it's SEO optimized, we're gonna hit all the right words for the nine algorithm. And then the missing point, though, right is the traffic piece. Right? That's the number one missing point because everybody can do everything else. And you can do paid media. But if you've not done any sales, and there's been no conversions, then even on the the algorithm that controls what ads being displayed, it gets deprioritize. So you can, you know, have a massive budget for a new item launch. But literally the ads are never getting shown, right.

Nancy Eichler  9:16  

So, one, you also have the complication of, you know, if you don't yet have any consumer reviews against the item, then a consumer who might walk into a storefront if you are launching simultaneously on a retail shelf, that the consumer oftentimes is looking at up to see what are other people saying and you're not helping them make their purchase decision, because you don't have any momentum behind it showing what people even think about it or a retailer who might be vetting the product and say, Okay, well let me turn to the consumer because that's now part of their own due diligence process is what are people saying about the product and if you don't have reviews, because you didn't get Sales yet, you know, and it's gonna take you months to get there. It just slows the entire process down.

Aaron Conant  10:08  

So you though, because a lot of times in the I even kick this off, because the most common question is around how do we accelerate new product launch. But you're talking to product launch?

Nancy Eichler  10:21  

Yeah, I think sometimes impatient Aaron. And so I wanted to know sooner whether this thing would work because I needed to build, you know, I had just joined iwi life, and I needed to build a marketing plan surrounding, you know, these new products launching, and there were aggressive sales goals laid out for these products. And I needed to know, the only way that I saw we could get there was if we got into that flywheel faster. And how do you do that? And so it's through this conversation with Tim, that I thought, okay, I actually, you know, believe this could work. It made sense. It was very logical, but can I test it now, so that, if there is opportunity, I can make sure that I budgeted for this program. And if I'm not sure that it works, that I have other things, you know, in in, you know, other arrows in the quiver to be able to, you know, turn to if I'm not sure that this thing can succeed. And so we picked a product, and both Tim and I believed that, you know, I think he he was very cautious with with over promising, and, you know, because that wasn't necessarily what the program was designed to do was support, I wouldn't say it was that he really had approached me about new products that really could catapult them into, you know, some some velocity sooner. But you know, what it could do for an existing product that had been around around for a couple of years? Yeah, could do something. But I think he was concerned how I was going to measure performance. And go ahead.

Aaron Conant  12:08  

No, use really quick, because this is where this is where I think a lot of people get stuck, is they've done everything, they've got the product, maybe they even looked at ratings and reviews and previous products, competitors products, they've got a product, they've done everything, right. And they just needed to kick to take off. And it can't, and it doesn't, and there's no reason. And then it comes down to this. Like, it's a velocity, but it's a traffic play. But it's a traffic of the right people, which then gets into this influencer space, which we built into the title as well. So people to understand but Tim, do you want to explain to us like how people should be thinking about? I mean, obviously, they can use, you know, ProductWind as a service, right, obviously, but like, how do you guys think about this to get that traffic lever

Tim Wilson  12:59  

in place? Yeah. So there's, there's really, I mean, there's really three things you need for your product to be successful on Amazon. And it's, there's obviously subcategories below. But it's got to be visible, it has to be credible, and it has to be available, right? We can not help you make the product available. That's there's a whole we all learned about supply chains more intimately than we probably wanted to back in COVID times, right. But in terms of visibility and credibility, there's a lot of levers that you can actually pull, right? It's not just about retail media and into your point, Nancy, and our Aaron about you know, you can advertise but your your ads will never really be shown and you want to make sure your your PDP is retail ready. What we're doing is simply, what you want to do is simply drive traffic that the algorithm loves. So external traffic, external traffic from a competitor, highly qualified traffic to boost immediate sales, show the algorithm, a high sales velocity, a high conversion rate, which is really two of the most important things, right, that conversion rate and sales velocity. And what happens is it it starts to take notice of your products, Nancy, going back to our conversation, right? If something is algorithmic, it relies on data. And so depending on how long the product has been around, there's already a bunch of data on it. So the algorithm has kind of made up its mind on what this thing is. What's why we like launched for new customers the best because there is no history there is no data so we know we can have our biggest impact there. But by no means does that mean we're this is one of our busiest times a year because customers will use us to promote products leading into Prime Day. So that the flop that the algorithm is really buzzing. Your product is extremely well positioned and has high visibility, your A cos is down because your ads are more efficient. And then when Prime Day comes, you just ride the wave, right so there's a lot of different ways is to like apply what we're doing here. But fundamentally, it comes down to not just driving traffic but driving the right kind of traffic. Right, with all those different signals to help get the flywheel going

Aaron Conant  15:13  

in your driving traffic, the influencers is that is it just because it's so targeted at the right person? Is it Yeah. influencers?

Tim Wilson  15:22  

Yeah. So we use primarily micro influencers. We have influencers of all size, right? The network is massive, but it's primarily micro. And what we're doing that maybe I can speak to so what we're doing that might be a little bit different is we're looking beyond demographic and psychographic behaviors, right? For for the case of iwi, who's got this killer product, you know, this algae based Omega three and these other vitamins and supplements that they have. It's not just about is this a healthy mom or you know, some some demographic and psychographic type of component? It's okay, great. Let's look at their behavioral tendencies and understanding to what degree each influencer has the ability to drive different things that matter to the algorithm. So when we're looking in, we're assembling a team of influencers for a program with with iwi, we were going to look to understand to what degree are these people great at driving traffic or clicks? Or sales? or to what degree are they great at driving ratings and reviews? Right? So Aaron, we might look at this influencer named Aaron, who can't sell anything, and has a super low engagement rate. But he's really good at, you know, driving ratings and reviews or writing ratings and reviews, or here's somebody who's doesn't drive sales, but they have beautiful content, right, that we see is constantly downloaded and repurposed. The idea is that there's a lot of different things you need to do in order to make this be successful. And let's just find those people who have the ability to do one of those things and build a team that collectively can do them all.

Aaron Conant  17:08  

What is it? What are the results, then? Nancy? I think that's the so I was shocked when we first started chatting, right? Yeah,

Nancy Eichler  17:15  

so the very first campaign just so you know, we launched I think it was September October timeframe, with the very first campaign, that product which had been around, as I said, for a couple of years, we put it into ProductWind hands. And just so you know, as a purist with the direct response world, I don't like to change any other variables, because I wanted to make sure that I was truly evaluating product when so we did nothing on content, we didn't change our ads, support, nothing, we've kind of kept everything else static. So the PDPs were the same, our approach was the same, the only thing that was changed was now product when was participating. And I can say that, even our CFO actually called me within 30 days, saying I can't even believe what's happening to that product right now. And fast forward, you know, six months later, and after that, we are now averaging on a daily basis, and we have one item that has remained out of stock on that listing. But the other items are sitting at 300% what they were back then, and the only difference was ProductWind we again, still have changed nothing on these PDPs, which that'll be the next thing, you know, to just sort of, you know, push philosophy even further, but that so it really was an isolated test, it was phenomenally successful. And I think that, you know, I've shared with this team, there are only a few products in my history that I've gotten super excited about. When I see those early results that just show you right out of the gate that they're there, their home runs. And this is one of them, you know, kudos to Tim and his team, then what we did to We then went to another existing product because we were so overwhelmed with the results. And that product, what I did was I pulled my paid social budget there to justify this and it really I see it as a combination. It's, it's, you know, it's social, ace. It's Amazon support. It's a variety. It's it's advertising, it's awareness. It's like just hit so many checkboxes, and then to watch the sales velocity move in our rank improvement through the process. And even months later, the fact that we were getting these Amazon choice badges on products that and probably had never seen them before. And we've maintained that You know, months later, and now we're actually stepping into not only supporting on new products, but also looking to products that we would call evergreen that they should be that we're working with, with Tim and ProductWind on these campaigns that sort of on a lower level, every month that we're doing, we're putting a little bit of gas on them. Because we do think that, that it's helping across the board. So yeah, I

Tim Wilson  20:29  

mean, without a doubt, we can, you know, we tell people, we're instant product momentum online, like you've got a product online and you need momentum, we can drive that. The trick is, the trick is, how do you then sustain it? Alright, and we can we can help sustain. But there's also going to be, you know, effort on on your side as well to continue to promote the product and things of that nature. But yeah, I was happy to hear you talk about some Amazon batches, right? Because that's another thing that we find, helps with conversion quite a bit. And so we're always pretty excited when we, when we deliver an Amazon batch. I'm just kind of curious, Nancy, is that something? Did you if you'd notice anything with your ad spend or not? Not yet?

Nancy Eichler  21:14  

Yeah, well, I think we're digging it. I mean, efficiency is improved whenever these campaigns are running. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of good and anybody, you know, if you have any of these third party programs to look at rank, you can look across our series of products. And you can see which products were being tested through this system. And, and you can watch, I mean, the rank just improvement is is phenomenal. So that then coupled with the ads that we were running, yeah, proved to be more efficient in the process. And and we did start pulling in, we continue to pull out of paid social, which, I mean, I love the people on here, if they're having success with paid social, we found that, that we have moments of struggle with it. So I was all too happy to pull that budget.

Aaron Conant  22:08  

Well, I mean, that's where I was gonna say is, where does it get funded from? Because I can think of usually, there's a new item launch, there's a budget that's applied to it usually gets dumped into AMS, or paid search or social to drive traffic, but our users reappropriating those initial funds. Yeah, yeah, what we did is that's where we want to spend more money right now, necessarily, but they will reap re oppression funds, if that's more meaningful, okay.

Nancy Eichler  22:35  

That's what I'm doing is we're pulling, you know, we're looking at row as we're looking at CAC, and we're sort of evaluating where's the best way to spend this money. And we have shifted more of it over under ProductWind and and we have also ended up shifting even more dollars, probably over to Amazon, because we've seen this efficacy off of the spam that we have there when these programs are running. So it's really interesting how it's stacking up for us. And you know, and consequently, it's it's not hurting our other business either. So sometimes you might see, for example, a share ship that is not occurring. In our case.

Aaron Conant  23:19  

You're growing net now we are growing. Yeah,

Nancy Eichler  23:22  

it's a creative. ask

Tim Wilson  23:27  

you, how did you just I'm just curious, Nancy, I've never asked you this. Oh, going back to our the first campaign that we did together, you talked about how did you justify the spend for that initial campaign?

Nancy Eichler  23:39  

The first campaign, I will say that I was, you know, when I first looked at our budget and our performance numbers, I was disappointed with the the paid social role as a cos whatever acronym you want to use for it, but I was disappointed in performance, and said that these numbers were too low, we needed to find something to do with it. That was that felt better. And I was, I've always been open to testing, I love testing. So long as you know, you're, you're gonna learn something off of it. And I like to, as I said, fail fast. So I like to learn quickly off of it. And so I thought, well, if we divert, you know, a little bit of money over this direction, you know, what, what's the worst thing that will happen? So we sort of went through a failure modes analysis to say, if we don't run this month, this budget here, how much in sales? Could we potentially be losing if we shifted over here, right, worst case scenario. So um, yeah. So that that was our analysis, but I thought it was, again, logically, it all made sense that this should work and playing into the algorithm. Absolutely. You know, made sense. So

Aaron Conant  24:59  

But I find it really interesting is, you know, there's this thought that the product you have is at where it's at. And if it's been on the platform for over like six months, it's at where it's at. And you had the first 10 weeks, 12 weeks, 14 weeks to, to hopefully get it to take off. But that's not the case, if you've got a good product, kind of what you're saying Tim like you if you've got all of it. And you've got ratings reviews, and now it's obviously not a one star review on there, you can drastically affect individual items that have been on the platform for a period of time. I always a lot of times people think of new item launch, because in their mindset that's been on the platform for a year, like there's nothing we can do about it. And that's wrong.

Nancy Eichler  25:45  

Yeah, well, that's, that's what we figured out I think that was sort of the the byproduct is byproduct. And all of this was finding out that it really, if you have a solid product that you do believe should be doing better performance than it is super interesting, winning, just test and say, okay, right audience right influencers, you know, right, right and momentum behind it. But if it's, you know, in the mid four stars, which is where this product was, it felt like okay, well, the people who are taking it really love, I love it. And I will tell you this too, which was very strange for us. We do attend Expo West, this item was our most stolen item and Expo West. So you know, I mean, we never we know it's a good item. I don't know, maybe I could credit Tim for that. But we know it's a good item. The fact of the matter was that it just didn't have that the algorithm wasn't working in its favor, and we sort of tilted the playing

Tim Wilson  26:46  

field. We all need, we all need a little help every now and then. That's really what it is, we all need a little boost.

Nancy Eichler  26:52  

So that's why that's why I'm in the supplement business.

Aaron Conant  26:54  

And if we're so we're getting closer, we got about a minute left or so Tim? Like what is how long does a campaign take to get set up and running? I think that's yeah, so normally a question that pops up, you know, is this a six month endeavor? Or is it a one month endeavor? And, you know, for everybody on the line today, more than happy to connect you with Nancy or Tim, both great resources to the network as a whole. But Tim, what how long does a campaign take to get up and running?

Tim Wilson  27:25  

From once we have a contract signature, we can move as fast as one week, we ideally like two weeks, and then you will keep results, you'll see results within your first 10 days working with us. And results will be really peaking around weeks three and four, and then also staying so you know, for people that are trying to impact Prime Day, we have a lot of customers right now we'll be kicking off a ton of campaigns right around June 1 June 10. Assuming that Prime Day is officially July 11 and 12. Awesome. Great. I just feel like it's important because I want to give a shout out to our client success team. We didn't talk much about them today. But and Nancy can tell you, it's a full like you really there's no tax on your team. There's very minimal tax, we need to understand why you made the product. And what's so great about it. And are there any restrictions with what we can or cannot say we work with a lot of regulated industries as well. But it's a full it's it's a white glove approach that we have. And I think that's helpful for smaller companies.

Nancy Eichler  28:26  

Yeah, yeah. And let me echo that, because I can tell you that sometimes I deal with a bit of a revolving agency door, because you know, you have somebody set who sells to you lots of promises, lots of lots of high expectations. And the next thing you now you're being handed off to, you know, a more junior person that may not, you know, may have less experience and seems to fumble quite a bit. The reality is that the entire team that we have worked with our product wins since day one. You know, there was I mean, Tim still checks in is still involved. You know, we'll jump on calls every once in a while. But this team, absolutely, I mean, we really, we didn't have to do hardly anything except for provide him the ASINs No. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  29:15  

With that. I think we're gonna wrap it up again and look for a follow up email from us. I'd love to have a conversation with anybody on the line today. We'll make sure that we connect him with everybody on the line today as well, if anybody wants a follow up conversation with Nancy, she's fantastic. And they're both great friends, partners and supporters of the network. So with that, we're going to wrap up this call today once again. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Nancy. And I look forward to having you on a future event.

Nancy Eichler  29:43  

Thank you guys. It's

Aaron Conant  29:44  

so much fun. Take care