Episode 159
On today’s episode we have the privilege to interview Ryan Flannagan. Ryan Flannagan is the CEO and Founder of Nuanced Media, an international eCommerce marketing agency. Ryan has over 15 years of experience in eCommerce, multi-channel digital marketing, and third party marketing. As Founder and CEO of Nuanced Media, he has worked with hundreds of companies to establish best practices, focusing on the 20 percent of effort that produces 80 percent of revenue.
How can the guests contact? website, email, social?
Email: ryanflannagan@nuancedmedia.com
Website: https://nuancedmedia.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NuancedMedia/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanflannagan/
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🤔 What Is Firing The Man Podcast? 😃
Serial Entrepreneur’s David Schomer and Ken Wilson share tips, advice, and insider knowledge about all things Amazon FBA and E-Commerce.
Discover how you can create multiple passive income streams by selling physical products online so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love – whether that is spending more time with family or traveling the world.
Ken and David have successfully created several six and seven figure online business ventures.
During the journey, they have had major wins, losses, and lessons learned.
This podcast will teach you about selling physical products online through platforms such as Fulfillment by Amazon, building a team, outsourcing, listing optimization, pay per click (PPC) advertising, driving traffic to your listings, and productivity tips / life hacks that will provide a path to be successful in building your online business.
Website ► https://firingtheman.com/
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00:00:00:00 – 00:00:29:16
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Firing the Man Podcast Episode 158 On today’s episode, we have the privilege to interview Ryan Flanagan. Ryan Flanagan is the CEO and founder of Nuanced Media, an international e-commerce marketing agency. Ryan has over 15 years of experience in e-commerce, multi-channel digital marketing and third party marketing. As founder and CEO of Nuance Media. Ryan has worked with hundreds of companies to establish best practices, focusing on the 20% of effort that produces 80% of the revenue.
00:00:30:03 – 00:00:34:07
Speaker 1
We’re really excited to get to share Ryan’s story and knowledge with the listeners today. Welcome to the show, Ryan.
00:00:34:20 – 00:00:36:17
Speaker 2
Hey, Ken, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
00:00:36:24 – 00:00:44:00
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. So let’s give the audience a little bit of background about you, maybe some prior job experiences, life story.
00:00:44:13 – 00:01:10:05
Speaker 2
Sure. Okay. Nuance has been around 12 years now, so I’ll kind of start out there before I worked out of office, another venture that burned in a haze of fire. So. So we’ll just start with nuance, right? So founded Nuance in 2010. Been doing e-commerce marketing for a long time. We’re doing more of a generalist marketing as well as e-commerce.
And in about 2017, we help the client sell on the Amazon platform about $18 million in six weeks. And we said, Hey, there’s something to this. While we really continue to dove more into Amazon compared to general e-commerce, which we still play with General e-commerce quite a bit, but said, hey, there’s something to this one. We focus on that and we then dove in hard and Amazon ever since with that got boutique agency got about 20 full time throughout the United States and I have a number of contractors international as well.
So so that’s kind of where we play in what we do. You know, I’m at Nuance where we really kind of found ourselves on is creating win win scenarios for us and our partners. We’re not really a churn and burn agency. Unfortunate. There are a lot of Turner brands out there, so we won’t really work with anybody unless we do assessment and we make sure we can make your money and really have a long term partnership because I don’t really want to burn out my employees working on people that are gonna win in the first place.
And I want to make sure that I can sleep at night. So those are some of the things that we do. And if everybody is winning, it’s a significantly better relation.
00:02:23:05 – 00:02:36:04
Speaker 1
Absolutely. I totally agree. When wins are always the best case for for everyone. So sounds like a decent size agency then. Been going for quite a long time and focusing primarily on Amazon.
00:02:36:06 – 00:02:56:16
Speaker 2
So yeah. And we do we primarily focus on growth driven advertising, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit later. But we do also listen optimization and usage videos and all that type of stuff because as you know, Amazon getting a lot more holistic in nature, just like e-commerce is in general, right? We can dove in a lot of that stuff later, but I did want to.
00:02:57:05 – 00:03:18:05
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. And you know, if you don’t have you’re just like a house. If you don’t have a solid foundation, you’re not going to have anything on top of that. And so ads, ads are not going to work unless your listing is optimized. And so but as as we’re talking about optimizing listings, you know, what are what are the what are the top five ways to increase an Amazon conversion rate?
00:03:18:20 – 00:03:45:21
Speaker 2
So the first and foremost thing is make sure your listings optimized. I mean, this is kind of everybody has heard this 50 million times, but it’s worth repeating. Good content, good images, spend extra money on images because it’s going to what is ROI with this plan and what makes that it’s going to be what makes you add or remove thanks is really going to be what makes you stand out as having an optimized listing.
This is how I can analyze this or use an analogy for is back when you used to go to Dillard’s or the mall or anything before you picked up or purchased a product, you could pick it up and hold it and feel it, right? You can’t do that anymore online. And that’s where the big pivot is. So what you want to do with your image listings is really optimize them the most, the highest level so people can almost feel it virtually as much as possible, if it was a style of that novel, you’d say, I can smell it.
That’s the type of literature you have. So you want to do the same thing with your listings, make it, as you know, close to somebody picking it up and touching as possible. There’s also obviously the brand story that that helps with a variety of different things for cross-selling, upsell, for your catalog. A lot of people are leveraging the brand story as of yet, and then there’s obviously optimized Amazon A-plus or ECB content.
The other thing this is just kind of rolled out pretty recently is if you have a plus content on 15 different listings and it’s varied a bunch, you can actually apply for premium A-plus content and that means you get video featured in your A-plus content and some other things or if you go through the launchpad capability. So those are all the type of things of really how do you build out what you’re doing on, on your platform on that listing and then really focusing on that kind of conversion rate from a standpoint of when people fall there or land there, the next thing that you’re going to really do for increasing your conversion rate is advertise on the right words are going to that are relevant to your listing. You know, one thing that we do, people don’t talk about that is just all traffic is equal, equal, right. But if I’m selling yoga mats and people are coming there for fire men helmets, I’m probably not going to sell a whole bunch of yoga mats.
00:05:43:08 – 00:06:05:20
Speaker 2
Right. So one thing that we do through our process is we analyze all the data and we’re kind of managing the paperclip campaigns through the growth driven advertising line, and we find out what’s actually converting for you and then we update your listings based on that content. So you’ll rank more organically and we’ll really lean into those keywords, right?
00:06:05:20 – 00:06:29:01
Speaker 2
So that’s the other thing is what type of traffic are you driving? How are you driving it? So it’s not again, kind of going back to that holistic model, it’s not just the listing, you know, that’s like, Hey, I’m going and I’m eating, right, right? And then your ad spend is working out, right? So if you’re working at a time and you’re eating pizza every day, you’re not going to lose weight or get healthy.
00:06:29:16 – 00:06:51:01
Speaker 2
And if you’re eating right but you’re never working out or you’re not gonna hit the ultimate sales that you can do on that site, right? So that’s the way that I kind of like to look at it. We do some things with the Amazon DSP and then we can kind of get into some multichannel things later. But listing optimization, how you’re driving traffic and they’re really looking at that.
00:06:51:01 – 00:07:14:03
Speaker 2
And then split testing is another key thing. And I have some stats for doing split testing. Split testing was rolled out on Amazon and I’d say about six months ago or so as actually if you have brand registry, then you can actually get access through your brand on the back end of seller and then you can start writing split tests and it’s pretty impressive with what you can do.
00:07:14:11 – 00:07:34:07
Speaker 1
Okay. So I want to back up a little bit before we get into split testing, because I think split testing is a whole other deep conversation, too. So you had mentioned so this this podcast on the air, like I said, probably in January. And so if you if you’re listening to this, Ryan just just spit out a bunch of gold nuggets on hey, start the year, right?
00:07:34:07 – 00:07:53:07
Speaker 1
Go and do an audit on your listing. Make sure you have all this stuff dialed in, you know, and if you don’t have it even created, just just get something created. And I wanted to ask you about the is it premium ABC? I remember seeing that we we had applied for one of our brands on there and it got approved.
00:07:53:07 – 00:08:00:07
Speaker 1
But we’ve we haven’t uploaded anything to it yet. So you’re saying that the premium one, you can put a video inside the ABC?
00:08:00:20 – 00:08:27:00
Speaker 2
Yeah, you get a few more modules. So like typically you’re limited to five and don’t quote me on those, I think you get seven. So you get two more controls and you also can put a video in there. Right. And video Amazon’s leaning heavy in into video if we see any indicator of what’s working and social media channels and just kind of brand in general videos God you know user generated content in particular.
00:08:27:00 – 00:08:39:24
Speaker 2
So Amazon’s realizing this is a hey, if we have more video on here, how do we we can actually increase our conversion rates more and then we can make more money ourselves. So, so how do we do that? So that’s why they’re slowly kind of rolling itself.
00:08:40:10 – 00:08:55:21
Speaker 1
Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. So I think it’s kind of it’s kind of interesting how Amazon they they only at least for now, I’ve heard whispers that they’re going to start charging for EBC and things like that. But for now it’s free and for the, for the.
00:08:56:13 – 00:08:58:16
Speaker 2
Amazon with monetize somewhere. Right, right.
00:08:59:04 – 00:09:21:01
Speaker 1
We will go down we’ll go down that rabbit hole. But for now it’s free use it. But the piece where I think it was 15 approved e-books or something to unlock it and so they’re they’re kind of trying to incentivize sellers to use to utilize ABC because they know it’s going to convert better. And then they’re giving you a kind of a bonus if you’re if you’re doing that at a high level.
00:09:21:01 – 00:09:50:00
Speaker 2
So which is the irony, too, because what we see with a lot of the partners that we work with is I call it the Prado principle on steroids. The Prado principle being like 20% makes 80% of revenue on Amazon. We typically see that it’s, you know, 2% makes 98% of your revenue, right? So like if you’re a seller that’s making 100000 to 1000000, sometimes that’s two new listings that are making 100,000 a million.
00:09:50:10 – 00:10:14:11
Speaker 2
Right, right. And you got ten other ones are doing 30,000 a year or something like that. Right. So how do you when you got the winners and your know the winners, how do you take the time and the logic? Particularly because Amazon’s getting more competitive to make sure that they continue to win and you own that like top three organic position or whatnot, right?
00:10:14:16 – 00:10:42:08
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. And one one thing to add to that is, like you mentioned the 8020 Pareto principle, it’s like and especially for, let’s say, the solo solopreneur that are listening to this, if you have ten listings and like Ryan mentioned, you’re going to have a couple, couple like leaders, right, in that revenue category. And if you have a limited amount of time to work on your business, go optimize those those two that are that are bringing in the 80% and increase your conversion rate.
00:10:42:24 – 00:10:54:03
Speaker 1
You know, go into your business reports, pull up your conversion rates, optimize those and split test them and you’ll you’ll gain, you know, that that 8020 you’ll be on the right side of that 820 instead of spending.
00:10:54:13 – 00:11:15:06
Speaker 2
Can something that we do to speak to this is like before we engage with an existing seller, particularly sellers that have a larger catalog is we can do what we call Amazon Action Plan. That’s a big catalog analysis to identify which ones are your top sellers. And sometimes it’s not just about your top sellers, but it’s aggregating things in the right product fits right.
00:11:15:06 – 00:11:50:22
Speaker 2
So most categories on Amazon, if you take five variants and all those five variants have 20 reviews, when you aggregate them, that parent list and we’ll have 100 reviews, right? So there is some strategy behind this of looking at your existing catalog and saying what actually fits into this? Can we make a you know, if there are two variations, let’s say you’re selling shoes and you have five different product families or shoes and you have a sneaker, a flip flop and three other variations, which is from A, B and C.
00:11:51:03 – 00:12:13:10
Speaker 2
Well, while you may be able to do if they’re in the right category, in the same category is make those styles and then color variations underneath. Right. So if those five product families had a thousand reviews each, now your panelist in has 5000 reviews. Right? So there’s some calculation and some analysis you want to look at on that because one of the other key is, okay.
00:12:13:10 – 00:12:36:05
Speaker 2
And going back to that conversion rate analysis question that you’re saying is reviews are can, right? And if you don’t have reviews on there, you’re never going to make sales. And you really need to be looking at your pay per click competition based on who has reviews and who doesn’t. Right. You’re never going to knock off the person that’s got 30,000 reviews if you only have 100 reviews unless you’re basically giving your product away.
00:12:36:15 – 00:12:57:15
Speaker 1
Right? So let’s get down in the weeds a little bit. I’ve got a follow up question on that. Let’s say we have let’s let’s do that. The tennis shoes or the shoes listing, for example, we have a couple of listings in one of our portfolio companies that has like over a well over 100 variations. And so we’ve tried it a couple of different ways.
- Matthew, Scott (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 266 Pages - 08/10/2019 (Publication Date) - Platinum Press LLC (Publisher)
00:12:57:15 – 00:13:25:14
Speaker 1
I want to see if you what your experience is. And let’s say we have a listing of the tennis shoes. Let’s say there’s flip flops, casual shoes, tennis shoes, and let’s say there’s five different styles, if you will. And then each of the styles have different sizes and colors. And so it makes up, let’s say, 150. Now, would you want would you rather have that listing with 150 and say, you know, 3000 reviews on it?
00:13:25:14 – 00:13:37:09
Speaker 1
Or would you rather have those broken out into, you know, flip flops, tennis shoes, casual, five separate listings with like 30? What can you speak to that? Like have you seen.
00:13:37:09 – 00:13:58:14
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s tested in those too. So the one thing that you have to really realize is if people search for your brand, for example, if you have 150 variants in one product listing, one variant will show up in organic search, right? So you have to realize that. So you’re going to lose a lot brand like self brand defense on that.
00:13:59:03 – 00:14:28:23
Speaker 2
But there is a bigger argument for what’s across on the upsell. That’s right. And if you aggregate those reviews, how much is that going to increase your conversion rate overall? The thing is, typically with Amazon, too, you get to variations, right? So your second variation there was color and size. So that means when you do them, if you have a black offer of a black, a size nine, size, ten side and all that, you won’t be able to do that selection on that.
00:14:28:23 – 00:14:50:03
Speaker 2
Right? And you don’t want those tiles to get too busy or anything like that as well. Right. So you really have to kind of do that assessment and say, what do I think the price on the upsell opportunity is here by doing this? Is this going to affect my search results? Because I’m showing up? But is it really about the conversion rate?
00:14:50:16 – 00:15:08:09
Speaker 2
Right, and what’s happening on this level? So there’s some internal like kind of soul searching you have to do with this. At the end of the day, what I always recommend and this can be a nightmare on Amazon, but split testing and particularly when you’re doing a product, family split testing, that can be really difficult. That has to be a manual thing that you do.
00:15:08:09 – 00:15:12:19
Speaker 2
Right. But you want to look at those product families that overall sales and what they’re doing.
00:15:13:11 – 00:15:14:15
Speaker 1
Okay. Yeah, fair enough.
00:15:15:03 – 00:15:33:07
Speaker 2
Oh, and then one other caveat. They do all have to be in the same category, right? So you can’t put if shoes, casual shoes and sandals are different categories on Amazon, you can not put them in the same product family unless you start calling the sandal a shoe and change the category, right?
00:15:34:01 – 00:15:50:01
Speaker 1
Sure. Yeah, that yeah. That’s something that we’re going to be testing in the New Year. A couple of different ways to see my my take on it as I think splitting them up might do better in terms of revenue and sales because your cover and like you said, more real estate on the bottom, you know, you kind of cover up more spots.
00:15:50:08 – 00:16:06:20
Speaker 1
The other piece is we ran into issues split testing on Amazon. There’s a maximum variation of 84. So if you have more than 84, you can’t split test. And so you’re kind of locked in. Like if you’re if you’re optimizing your listing, then yeah, you’re going to have to keep it under that.
00:16:07:08 – 00:16:38:16
Speaker 2
Well, and then the real question is what’s going on your heroes here? Because each listing has its own organic rank and Amazon right for different keywords and those type of things. Right? So if you have five different heroes, those, each one of those will show up organically as the top one in the search result. Right. But if you have two products that one’s ranking number two and one’s number ten organically, then you probably don’t want those in the same product family because then you’re only going to have the two there and not the ten.
00:16:39:10 – 00:16:51:22
Speaker 2
Yeah, right. But if you find that your black eight foot eight size eight shoe is the one that’s ranking for everything and nothing else is really ranking, then this makes more sense from a strategic level.
00:16:52:00 – 00:17:17:16
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, I think there’s more research and definitely have to look at it from a couple different angles before, before deciding. But yeah, testing is key. So let’s, let’s get right into split testing then you mentioned it earlier, so how can you run split test and which split test do you prefer? Which ones have the highest increase in conversion rate that from your.
00:17:17:21 – 00:17:39:12
Speaker 2
So it’s not just conversion rate here, it’s also click through rate, right? So you want to be able to assess like standard marketer, right? Like, hey, let’s talk about CPR, right? You know, sure. But but there is the levels because I’m an entrepreneur too, right? So what we find when we’ve had the best results with so far is really testing the main image.
00:17:39:24 – 00:18:03:09
Speaker 2
So Amazon and their kiosks, everybody knows it’s a white background that’s very and pretty quickly. I think Amazon has realized that they may have shot themselves in the foot with that test. And you’re seeing in different categories that people are trying to put somebody holding it or like, you know, doing these other almost lifestyle images in the main image.
00:18:03:15 – 00:18:24:12
Speaker 2
Right. I may not be on a white background. There’s some other things that stand out and we’ve done this test for a number of clients here and we’ve gotten some pretty incredible results. So for a toy company that has a sword, toy sword, we got 102% increase in click through rate by playing a hand, holding the sword compared to just the sword.
00:18:25:04 – 00:18:51:06
Speaker 2
Right. Or a kind of personal alarm. One, by doing what we did on that, we got a 678% increase, right, by showing the alarm being pulled and kind of doing those type of things. But the interesting thing, right, we saw almost a 700% increase in click through rate, but then we saw a 10% drop in conversion. Right. So you go, hey, it’s six x top.
00:18:51:15 – 00:19:22:02
Speaker 2
It’s ten here. Then you have to kind of do the calculations that do not make any ground here, right? Like where is this? And then on the other side for the make up line, you know, what we did was compared to just having a lip liner there doing that, it actually showed it being applied to lips. And by doing that, because somebody can imagine themselves through, we got a 64% increase in sales overall just by doing that one split test.
00:19:22:02 – 00:19:23:22
Speaker 1
Wow. Right. And those who remain images.
00:19:24:08 – 00:19:48:09
Speaker 2
Yeah, those were main images. Okay. All right. Now, Amazon automates this in the background so you can run split test. You can put those up and they’ll tell you the winner and all those things. Right. So this is stuff that Amazon, you know, my conspiracy theories is Amazon essentially wants to be the hub for e-commerce online, right? No Shopify, no website, but they want to own it all.
00:19:48:09 – 00:20:13:09
Speaker 2
It’s why they’re pushing hard on the brand referral programs that you can get 10% back for most categories that a referral fee and those type of things because they know they have a higher conversion rate than the standard Shopify store. Amazon normally converts about five X what your typical Shopify store is their primary e-commerce. So they’re like, Hey, we have better conversion rate.
00:20:13:09 – 00:20:33:12
Speaker 2
We want to keep driving the flywheel because we can monetize and 5% of all e-commerce is just as good as 15% of all e-commerce out there. So how do we do that? So they’ve done that with a brand referral level because they know they have a higher conversion rate. The other major thing that’s going on in Amazon right now, too, is that they’re going to be more and more brands.
00:20:34:11 – 00:21:01:02
Speaker 2
Right. And what they’re seeing with the brand centric side of things is Amazon. Three or four years ago was literally a department store. You would come in there, you had search for white towels, could buy from white towels. And then that’s all you do, right? What they’re focusing on with the brand story, the Amazon store front, the following level and they’re going to be launching and this is actually in beta for some people capability is the email people have purchased from you before.
00:21:01:11 – 00:21:17:15
Speaker 2
You know they’re really becoming more of a mall, if you will, on the focus with those things. So those are all the things that you want to start thinking about while driving, while building or doing these type of things and building out your brand on Amazon. Sure.
00:21:17:23 – 00:21:29:06
Speaker 1
Yeah, I know. Those are great. And those statistics for the main image split testing are pretty impressive. So I um, we have not tried to use lifestyle images in our main images yet.
00:21:29:13 – 00:21:50:19
Speaker 2
Look at, look at your category. Like the easiest way to do this is look at your category. See if anybody else is doing it. If somebody else is doing it, you probably can get away. Yeah. Right now you have to check to see if you get suppression or anything like that. Right. So Amazon’s always a little risky with those things like don’t poke the bear real same for year, right?
00:21:51:12 – 00:22:08:20
Speaker 2
But we’ve had some pretty good success with that. The other two areas that you can split test is the product title on that. I don’t really like messing with that because it just seems like a mainly as well and that’s what that’s all right and that type of thing. And then you can split test that A-plus content area.
00:22:09:07 – 00:22:34:19
Speaker 2
The A-plus content area, though, is I think you’re doing real money on a listing before you go to the A plus content area. Just because thinking through A-plus content is a lot of work and you have to really put together a high level to do that, to find out if is going to make a difference. Right. So testing like low hanging fruit, split asset image, you can pretty much turn that pretty quick and get that up.
00:22:35:04 – 00:22:51:21
Speaker 2
A-plus content. You want to think about messaging one thing about the modules, there’s so many different variables you could do with that. But if you have a listing that’s making half a million a year, well, it probably makes sense to really start looking at that and see if you can increase the conversion rate by one 2%.
00:22:52:11 – 00:23:13:14
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If if you have if you have volume, then it’s definitely worth it. And what we’re seeing similar, like our main images is where low lowest hanging fruit most opportunity. ABC And then I agree with you, we don’t we don’t split tests or titles. To me it doesn’t even make sense to do that.
00:23:14:10 – 00:23:22:21
Speaker 2
You should have a that’s a big presumption that Americans read, right. And we know we’re image driven culture. I’ll just leave. Yeah, yeah.
00:23:23:08 – 00:23:40:14
Speaker 1
Yeah. Although I know also we haven’t test. We haven’t tested it either. So if you’re listening and you’ve tested split testing on title and you’ve crushed it, email us, let us know. But I have not heard of that from anyone yet. So I was kind of I’ve kind of laughed that when I seen the option to split test the title.
00:23:41:05 – 00:23:52:21
Speaker 1
I’m not sure he’s doing that, but maybe I need to find somebody that’s doing awesome. So can you share some of the do’s and don’ts of a successful Amazon advertising strategy?
00:23:53:19 – 00:24:23:20
Speaker 2
Sure. When we’re looking like Amazon advertising strategy, first thing is look at holistically, right? When we do the Amazon action plan, we do the analysis, we identify the top winners. What’s making the largest percentage of that? What are your margins like? First thing on Amazon, know your freakin margins, right? It’s really easy to go in there and, you know, be making a 20% margin and going, hey, that’s great after the fee and the shipping.
00:24:24:00 – 00:24:53:18
Speaker 2
But then you find out that you have a, you know, 40% cost on something right now that’s not looking at tacos. And I’ll have the conversation about tacos a second level, but no, you’re unit economics because you have to understand where you are here. Here’s the, you know, kind of take home normally depending on how competitive your market is, your tacos, which is your total advertising costs, the sale is anywhere from 5%.
00:24:53:18 – 00:25:14:05
Speaker 2
And I’ve seen as low as 1% to 20%. Right. So you basically just take 1 to 20% off your margin and say, this is what I want to use for advertising as a whole for my brand. Right? So if that’s going on, then if you have a 20% margin as 20%, you’re doing all this work for another, right?
00:25:14:07 – 00:25:36:23
Speaker 2
If you have a 45% margin, well, that makes more sense. And we typically see that higher tacos number and more premium brand categories, more expensive items, or there’s a lot of competition. Right. That’s not the norm. I’d say the norm. Once you’re established, you’re up and running. You’ve got good velocity is, you know, tacos of 5 to 10% across the board.
00:25:37:14 – 00:26:01:20
Speaker 2
So the second thing that’s really the big do’s and don’ts of advertising on Amazon is having the Acres conversation without having the tacos conversation, right? Because they’re in the Amazon and their dashboard, they lead you to that. You go and you look at your acres for this, but there’s no way to easily source what your total revenue is based on that.
00:26:01:20 – 00:26:30:11
Speaker 2
So now you know acres or return on ads been in the normal world makes sense right? Because if you’re running a Facebook campaign to e-commerce website or anything like that, I spend five bucks, I sell $20 worth of product. Right? I got a four ROAS or in this case a 25% across. Right. And that works great for Facebook or Google or any of those type of things.
00:26:30:18 – 00:26:54:23
Speaker 2
But how Amazon is different is Amazon’s flywheel. The more sales you make, the higher you rank organically, right? So what happens on Amazon is I spent five bucks, I made $20 based on that ad spend, but then I actually sold 100 because of organic, right? So now with our 80, right. So we’ll keep it even number. So 20 based on ads, but 80 organically.
00:26:55:05 – 00:27:27:11
Speaker 2
So that means that your tacos is 5%, right? Of the whole thing. It’s not 25%, it’s 5% because your fueling your organic rank with that and that’s a major difference between the two platforms. So on on occasion we’ll run campaigns that we’re at a particularly with brands that are subscription brands or higher long time lifetime value brands like this, we’ll sometimes run across that, you know, above 50% because a cost is not the thing we’re looking at is tacos.
00:27:28:10 – 00:27:39:02
Speaker 2
And what percentage of that is of your overall spend is and how much is fending off competition from your list in gaining these additional areas, doing those type of things? Sure.
00:27:39:09 – 00:28:10:15
Speaker 1
So to dig into that a little bit, because I think it’s crucial, especially as we’re hopefully we’re not, but as we’re kind of heading into a recession and entrepreneurs and business, we’re actually like trying to squeeze out as much profit as we can. Right. And so tacos is a really large conversation if you’re running a full time business and relying on that, because I’ve been in a situation before where selling everything at a 30% increase or 35% equals and not monitoring organic will run you into the ground.
00:28:10:15 – 00:28:44:17
Speaker 1
And so to your point of tacos, let’s let’s take so two questions here. First one is when you launch a product, let’s say we’re selling, it’s a $100 product and we’re sourcing it for 25. So we have a pretty and we’re selling it for 100 pretty good margins. And how long do you do you ramp that up to like a higher cost for, let’s say, a launch period until you get it ranking, until you pull back into us into a maintenance.
00:28:44:24 – 00:28:48:19
Speaker 1
So what is your your standard one that you’re saying for your clients?
00:28:48:19 – 00:29:10:22
Speaker 2
Where we find the organic side is how sticky is it, right? So I can rank I can spend a ton of money and rank from a sponsor position for number one for White Sox on a Black Sox. Right. That Black Sox listing is never going to organically rank for that track because it’s not relative. It’s not the right fit.
00:29:10:22 – 00:29:33:18
Speaker 2
It’s a variety of. That’s right. So what we typically do is run the paperclip campaign is run the auto campaign and then, you know, do the overall strategy, run auto. And then based on finding the winners, then you make, you know, kind time, broad modified and then you take it down to phrase and exact, that kind of general strategy of mining and building out from there.
00:29:34:01 – 00:30:07:14
Speaker 2
But once you find those winners that you’re actually getting a good conversion rate on pay per click, then we go really hard at ranking for those, right? The key with that is not to just run the pay per click side of this, but run it and the keywords and update the keywords on your listing too. And the priority with that, as I’m sure you know and majority of your listeners now can is title is one of the main keywords are right and then you have the body of the copy and only the first thousand words are indexed, right?
00:30:07:14 – 00:30:33:02
Speaker 2
So if you’re building out stuff that’s past 2000 words, you’re wasting time and money on that. Don’t do that. And then you have the back end terms, right? So you look at the priority, you look at keywords, and a lot of people miss this with the keywords is if I have white hat, best white hat, best white hat to buy now and I’m ranking for all those keywords, you don’t have to worry about ranking white hat if you already have white hat and best white hat to buy now.
00:30:33:13 – 00:31:07:18
Speaker 2
Right. So how do you stack those keywords in a way that makes a lot of sense with the frequency and some of these other things, but without identifying the product for what’s actually converting for you and what’s happy in that and then integrating and not the text you’re never going to rank once you get to that level when you go aggressively, there’s a lot of variables going on that, but we typically recommend going aggressively on it for a minimum of a month until you get up there stuck and you’re sticking up there and then once you’re sticking up there, you know, go for another month or six weeks, right?
00:31:07:18 – 00:31:16:14
Speaker 2
Because Amazon likes continuity and you don’t want to spend all this money to get there, then drop down because of that.
00:31:16:14 – 00:31:28:14
Speaker 1
Okay. So you’re seeing with a lot of your clients, you’re seeing between that that eight, ten week range of ramping up, making sure it sticks and then kind of backing down after eight or ten weeks.
00:31:28:23 – 00:31:56:22
Speaker 2
And, you know, as in split testing, as in all these type of things, the things that really change are that you have to test your conversion rate and run that auto campaign and run some of these things almost every time you hit the next review rate model, right? So like if you go from 60 reviews to 100 reviews, you’re going to be converting significantly more at 100 reviews.
00:31:57:04 – 00:32:10:08
Speaker 2
If you go from 100 reviews, a thousand reviews, you’re going to be converting a lot more on that. So you have to rerun the analysis as every so often to find out what’s actually converting now compared to yesterday.
00:32:11:15 – 00:32:33:20
Speaker 1
Yeah, that is crucial. I agree. And if you’re if you’re listening and you have listings that are two or three years old or five years old, and you haven’t done anything to go back and and refresh them and rerun them. Because you’re right, Ryan, like conversion rates will be different. Lots of things will be different. And that’s something that we’ve been adding in to our own portfolio companies.
00:32:33:20 – 00:33:02:13
Speaker 1
This year was like really refreshing the listings on like a quarterly or at least a biannual basis on going back through seeing if there’s a new keyword, you know, seeing see what’s out there because the ecosystem and environment change, you know, competitors change, Amazon changes. So everything changes. Yeah. And it’s, it’s, yeah, it always changes. So one more follow up question because I think it’s it’s an interesting one and very relevant is the tacos model.
00:33:02:19 – 00:33:22:05
Speaker 1
And so you had mentioned, you know, seeing 5 to 10% tacos there. I think 5% tacos is amazing. And so what levers and so let’s say so we just did the 8 to 10 week launch, right? So we launched this product 8 to 10 weeks, got it ranking. And so we’re kind of going to go into a little bit of a maintenance mode now or so.
00:33:22:05 – 00:33:41:07
Speaker 1
We’re going to back off, lower the ACOs and that now how do you how are you measuring and what levers are you pulling for the tacos in terms of are you measuring like short ranking for certain keywords, that word that you’re going after and then measuring those organic sales like what’s the process there?
00:33:42:03 – 00:34:07:11
Speaker 2
Yeah, so tacos, I mean, it’s a simple the hard thing, right, is looking at it under a microscope compared to the macro level. Right. Because anybody can say, here’s the product line. Right here is the black SOC we’re talking about. We’ll go with the black shoe. The concept, stay true to our early shoe conversation. Right. But you have that one and you’re looking at that.
00:34:07:11 – 00:34:29:06
Speaker 2
You say, well, what is ad spend? What does total sales divide that up? What’s the number right now? What you need to look at with that is you can kind of do that general level. The hard thing is you don’t get the keyword data on the organic side. So I could tell you the conversion rate and all those type of things based on keyword, based on the pay per click in the advertising side.
00:34:29:06 – 00:34:56:24
Speaker 2
But organically, I don’t know what you’re converting, right? So you can’t really close that loop. Some different things have been coming out and brand analytics. Yeah, but that’s typical brand analytics that’s not necessarily isolated to the the product that you’re looking at. Right. But there are I’m hoping there’s more movement on that in the future, but you know that that’s where you kind of want to be able to identify what’s happening and those type of things.
00:34:57:09 – 00:35:31:06
Speaker 2
There’s also the other big factor of multi-channel, right? So we represent some brands that have like a 1% tacos, right? Nice. But they have huge brand exposure right there. And CVS nationally, they have all these type of things or, you know, there are big influence or whatnot. People are just already have brand fairly. So they’re coming there. Now with that, there’s capabilities to go in and really put up your dukes and defend your brand because you just don’t want people doing that in that happens all the time.
00:35:31:16 – 00:35:59:16
Speaker 2
But the other side of it is you can start doing conquest, right? Based on that, what you can do through, you know, the Amazon card sold to some levels. But what you really can do with your Amazon DSP and some of those things is really do aggressive conquest in on your competitors to of the like mind of that premium that right so that’s kind of the argument for the multi-channel self and can I’m kind of going away from your original question, so I apologize that.
00:35:59:18 – 00:36:00:03
Speaker 1
I don’t know.
00:36:00:09 – 00:36:16:08
Speaker 2
I feel like a politician here. What I’m saying is you can track that. You can look at the conversion rate based on some data to find out what is that converting. And you can look at your key metrics based on your paper, click and then draw some assumptions from that per campaign that you’re about, that that’s essentially what you do.
00:36:16:11 – 00:36:52:24
Speaker 2
But you always look at the macro level for that one less name, what are the tacos and what’s going on and world, right? So you’re tracking the keywords on this individual list and you’re tracking the conversion rate based on your pay per click campaigns. You’re slowly minimizing how much you’re bidding on those campaigns and on those keywords. So it’s kind of all of them now, the answer, your initial question, the bigger question here is, particularly as Amazon matures, as we go into more of a recession, as these things is really brand and what are you not just doing on Amazon, but why are you doing multichannel?
00:36:53:15 – 00:37:18:22
Speaker 2
So when we work with clients, you know, a lot of people want to do Tik Tok and Facebook and Insta like immediately, right? As soon as they got listed. And you can do that. Tick tock, tick tock is a great venue for you, but you’re selling yourself short. If you don’t at least put up a Shopify website, use Amazon and see if you can use Amazon to fulfill all your orders on your Shopify site so you don’t have to worry about that headache, right?
00:37:19:06 – 00:37:40:09
Speaker 2
You can do those things. And Amazon has multichannel fulfillment. You can Google at Amazon multichannel fulfillment, you can think that way. But before you start doing all the big social media pushes or any of those type of things, get up a website. Because when you do those, what you’re going to see is your Amazon sales are going to go up and your Shopify website sales are going up.
00:37:40:14 – 00:38:13:03
Speaker 2
Or and I typically say Shopify because that’s what we work in. We did WooCommerce for a number of years. Do yourself a favor. Shopify, in our opinion, is by far the best shopping platform because they’re launching marketplaces. They easily integrate to distribute to Etsy. They do a ton of things that just make your life a little easier. In fact, YouTube just launched shopping through YouTube on a Shopify platform there, where Amazon’s making their play within their ecosystem.
00:38:13:03 – 00:38:41:02
Speaker 2
Shopify is making the website we integrate with all the other solutions, the best ability play on the market. Right, right. So on the multichannel side, if you’re going to do the big brand push, social media doing those type of things, stand up a Shopify website because you’ll see that your sales will increase on your Shopify. You’re not giving that 15% to Amazon even if they’re doing the fulfillment to you and your organic sales on Amazon will go up.
00:38:41:16 – 00:39:14:12
Speaker 2
And when your organic sales on Amazon go up or sales are attributed to people searching for your brand and you advertising that go up, that increases your sales velocity on there as well. Right. And the real buyer journey that we see at this point is the litmus test. To give you a quick example, I love this example, but I saw a Facebook ad for this mosquitoes zapper that was developed out by a 13 year old kid and got $25 million of funding and was supposed to kill mosquitoes for, you know, a mile.
00:39:14:13 – 00:39:36:12
Speaker 2
Wow. I’m like, oh, I need this. I hate mosquitoes like everybody would. Right? And then I go look at the Amazon reviews and it has like two and a half stars and I’m like, Oh, not violence, right? And that’s the journey that happens. So as the marketplaces mature and they go through this, you really have to start thinking of your multichannel strategy and what you’re doing across the board.
00:39:37:04 – 00:40:13:22
Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s interesting. I was reading a stat, I think it was a couple of weeks ago about customer and how Amazon is becoming more and more the place where instead of Google, where, where shoppers are just research, researching, price testing and they’re bouncing around. And so, yeah, I think there’s to your point, multichannel is having a presence. You know, if you’re building a brand, which you should be having a presence on, on Shopify, you know, Amazon and and so shoppers can find you, you know, more places and more sales so well.
And you’ve already done more than half the work. If you have optimized listings on Amazon for those over to your Shopify, you know, get those up and you already have a good looking website that has great graphic attached images. You can pull the reviews over, you can do a variety of things like that. The parcel in the city, right?
00:40:33:08 – 00:40:39:07
Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. It’s it’s low hanging fruit. If you don’t have a Shopify store and you’re building a brand, you should you definitely should have one.
00:40:39:08 – 00:40:48:23
Speaker 2
Yeah. Amazon’s 48% of e-commerce in the United States and Shopify is about 35% of product search. Right. So between the two, you got 90% of product search.
00:40:49:05 – 00:41:01:18
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s a pretty staggering statistic. And I think we have a a lot more opportunity out there in terms of overall retail. So the next decade it’ll be fun for sure.
00:41:02:23 – 00:41:03:18
Speaker 2
It did. Yeah.
00:41:04:02 – 00:41:14:11
Speaker 1
Yeah. All right. Um, so let’s see here. Let’s can you explain what is growth driven advertising one on one and where does someone begin?
00:41:15:01 – 00:41:36:06
Speaker 2
Yeah, so growth driven advertising is something that we practice here. It only works for kind of those hero listings, right? Because it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort and essentially first takes. The first step is what we do is the Amazon action plan. The analysis of your overall catalog, identify what are your top sellers?
00:41:36:15 – 00:41:59:22
Speaker 2
What are the best opportunities of those top sellers? We typically identify three or four when we go through this level, what’s going on in Amazon, right? So the best thing about Amazon, there’s a whole bunch of data. So you can actually do segment analysis based on the top search items for the keywords that you’re looking at, the best performing ones out there, what’s the market’s growth rate?
00:41:59:22 – 00:42:20:23
Speaker 2
What are all these other things that are out there? And more importantly, what’s your market share in that area for your top sellers? Right. So you can analyze where do you do, what are you doing and where do you perform compared to everybody else on that price area, all those things. You can potentially aggregate some product families to increase your reviews on those levels.
00:42:20:23 – 00:42:49:20
Speaker 2
And then what we do is start running the paper, click campaigns, start mining the highest keyword, relevant information from that, and then we say, hey, we recommend that you have great things in your listings because these are the keywords they’re converting here to our best practices on how to do it. You integrated into your listings on that, then we start looking at split testing and say Hey again, like we really want lip liner with somebody putting the lips on there, can you get me that image?
00:42:50:01 – 00:43:16:15
Speaker 2
You can provide that imagery and start split testing it. And then what we do through this process is you don’t focus on 500 listings at a time. With this, you focus on your winning, listing the listings are actually funding what you’re doing with your brand and then you basically increase the sales for that. And then the biggest thing that we do is we do the litmus test of how are we increasing compared to the market, right?
00:43:16:15 – 00:43:36:03
Speaker 2
So particularly in a recession, Amazon’s been growing on our plus year over year for a very long time, not the case depending on the category. Now it’s getting more competitive. There are still some of those categories out there, don’t get me wrong, but it is getting more compete. So what you need to pace yourself is what is the competition doing and how are we doing?
00:43:36:21 – 00:44:00:23
Speaker 2
Like, you know, maybe our tacos went up by 5%, but we gain 30% market share over the competition, right? So we’re slowly and getting out the competition. They’re going to go out eventually. Right. So because it’s very easy if you’re not looking at the segment that you’re actually playing and say, hey, we’re growing 20% month over month, we’re kicking ass.
00:44:00:23 – 00:44:23:13
Speaker 2
I’m really happy about this compared to looking at the segments and the segments actually growing a 200% year over year, we only got a 10th of that. We’re actually losing a ton of market share because we’re not doing something right or vice versa. We’re down 20%. Oh my God, this is horrible everything is not working to find out that your market is down 50%.
00:44:24:06 – 00:44:34:13
Speaker 2
Right. So you have to understand what that’s doing. The fact that to be able to make really data driven decisions on how you’re doing based on the competition, what’s going on in the market and how you really build it.
00:44:35:21 – 00:44:59:24
Speaker 1
Okay. Yeah, I like that. That’s a solid plan. And one thing that I would definitely urge listeners to have is a solid plan instead of just, you know, throwing a bunch of stuff at a wall and see and see what sticks is, have a have a plan and have it go out over six months or 12 months and and slowly get that flywheel going and build on to it using that 80, 20 as well, focusing on the top listing.
00:44:59:24 – 00:45:01:02
Speaker 1
So I like that.
00:45:01:02 – 00:45:22:17
Speaker 2
How we’ve formed long term relationships is we work closest to the wallet the way out because that’s how we find people working with us to write letters. So that is a really bad conversation to have your charging people thousands a month and six months later haven’t seen the needle move. Right. You want to got to have really good results within the first three months.
00:45:23:01 – 00:45:41:06
Speaker 1
Okay? Yeah, yeah. Grab the lowest hanging fruit early and make the biggest impact. So I like that call. I definitely want to be respectful of your time. Ryan So let’s, let’s talk a little bit about new nuanced media. You know, what are your specialty is and what kind of customer is a good fit for you and your team?
00:45:41:12 – 00:46:07:17
Speaker 2
Yeah. So we really work on. So the major thing that nuance does is growth advertising. We do have full service agency as well if you need listings built and done, all of those type of things. But where we typically come in for most of our partners is during the growth driven advertising and really, Ryan, that if you have the capabilities to do good graphic design and implement and all those things, if you don’t, then it’s more of a full service play, right?
00:46:08:09 – 00:46:30:02
Speaker 2
But with that being said, the clients that we typically and partners that we typically like to work with are established clients that are either kind of stagnant on their growth or really looking to grow attractively. We’re getting a ton of people right now that have been using abuse by other agencies because they’re not really looking at the multi faceted areas of like everything that’s going on.
00:46:30:12 – 00:46:54:12
Speaker 2
And you have people that are losing market share and maybe they haven’t looked at their segment as completely normal or it’s not right. So our ideal client that we work with is an established brand that, you know, at least on an annual basis, in basis they have a list and doing over 100, 200,000 a year on that because that’s when you start saying, well, can we increase sales by three or four acts?
00:46:54:12 – 00:47:09:00
Speaker 2
And what does that look like right. And you have to be that the lower level ones. We can work with you on those things, but you have to have a certain amount of data and sales before you can even turn on split testing. And Amazon.
00:47:09:00 – 00:47:21:06
Speaker 1
Sure, absolutely. Well, awesome. Um, so we we have a fire around for every guest we put them through through the ringer and we’ve named it the fire rounds. So are you ready?
00:47:21:16 – 00:47:22:20
Speaker 2
Sure. Yeah.
00:47:23:06 – 00:47:24:09
Speaker 1
What is your favorite book?
00:47:25:05 – 00:47:27:08
Speaker 2
The Power of One by Bryce Conroy.
No products found.
00:47:28:10 – 00:47:30:01
Speaker 1
Excellent. What are your hobbies?
00:47:30:20 – 00:47:51:13
Speaker 2
Um, I like to read books and play with my three year old, so I’m going back into that and I’m teaching her how to game and do all that. But I’m a big strategic gamer as well, so I’m a dandy nerd from like way back when, like second edition. But I do a whole bunch of gaming. I do a Sunday gaming thing with my girlfriend, so it’s fun.
00:47:51:23 – 00:47:54:09
Speaker 1
Okay? Like video games or like like the.
00:47:54:09 – 00:47:57:21
Speaker 2
Board gets more strategic for like, Dune, for example. I’m like.
00:47:57:21 – 00:47:58:13
Speaker 1
Okay, I’m.
00:47:58:14 – 00:48:06:12
Speaker 2
Like, it’s a great game if you haven’t played it, man, it’s phenomenal and okay, awesome. Even squirrel games out there, they don’t have to be as scary as Dune, right? Sure.
00:48:07:21 – 00:48:12:16
Speaker 1
Awesome. What is one thing that you do not miss about working for the man?
00:48:13:04 – 00:48:20:16
Speaker 2
Oh, being accountable to one person. Right. Basically, you have kind of the fate of your life in somebody else’s hands. So that can keep you up at night.
00:48:21:07 – 00:48:29:21
Speaker 1
Sure. Absolutely. Agree. Last one. What do you think sets apart successful ecommerce entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail or never get started?
00:48:31:02 – 00:48:48:19
Speaker 2
Dedication, a bit of insanity or delusion of grandeur. I know I’m delusional myself with some of the things that I’ve done or gotten cast out there. And then honestly, having a fiscal mine, like looking at your margins, understand what the real revenue is, having a real good sense of that.
00:48:49:12 – 00:48:55:14
Speaker 1
Okay. Excellent. Excellent advice. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Ryan. How can guests contact you?
00:48:56:04 – 00:49:19:23
Speaker 2
Yeah, so I’m on LinkedIn. If you want to reach out to me that way, you can also contact me through Nuance Media dot com. We also have a Amazon growth strategy guide. If you go to Nuance Media dot com, it’s a pop up. So if you wait, you know, 3 seconds or so, they’ll pop up and kind of give you ally the growth driven advertising things that we were talking about today and get on an email list and all those type of things.
00:49:20:04 – 00:49:21:23
Speaker 2
And then I’m I’m also on Twitter.
00:49:22:22 – 00:49:23:13
Speaker 1
Awesome.
00:49:23:13 – 00:49:31:06
Speaker 2
And it’s all at Ryan Flanagan. My look in the show notes, Mike Flanagan is spelled with three N’s. So like no one has it stolen it.
00:49:32:09 – 00:49:47:22
Speaker 1
Yeah, I’m going to fix that one. So yeah. If, if, if you’re listening and you’re in need of advertising for Amazon, reach out to Ryan and his team and they’ll hook you up. Really appreciate you coming on the show today, Ryan, and sharing all your knowledge. It was it was awesome. And I’m looking forward to staying in touch.
00:49:48:09 – 00:49:51:15
Speaker 2
Yeah. Ken It was great. Looking forward. We’d love to hop on again at some point.
00:49:52:04 – 00:49:52:19
Speaker 1
Absolutely.