#733 - Go-To-Market Strategy for Amazon Brands

#733 - Go-To-Market Strategy for Amazon Brands Speaker 2: Elizabeth has been responsible for tens of millions of dollars of sales over the years online and she talks in this episode about some of her unique go-to-market strategies for product launch, advertising and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. It's a completely BS-free, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we've got coming in from, I believe, Canada still, Elizabeth, a serious seller for years now. How's it going, Elizabeth? Welcome back. Speaker 1: Very good, Bradley. Nice to be back on the show. Speaker 2: Yes. And we changed the format a little bit of our podcast For those listeners who are just tuning in or haven't tuned in for a while, Elizabeth has been on before, but the angle we have now is we're trying to bring in people who are the actual brand or people who have worked or are working for brands, the actual people in it, not necessarily the educators and things like that of the world. That has moved to the AMPM podcast. Now, Elizabeth actually, because of her knowledge, she could actually qualify for either part here. She's worked for a lot of brands that have sold millions of dollars online. She's a thought leader in the space. You guys should follow her on LinkedIn. We'll definitely give you the link to that. But specifically today, I wanted to talk to you about a lot of your best practices. You have been responsible for selling millions of dollars on online and so I know you have a good point of view about what brands out there, either brand owners or people who work for, you know, running brands, you know, can learn from you. So first of all, are you still in, I believe you were in Quebec before or? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Where were you? Speaker 1: So yes, I was in the, well, I was, I am still in Quebec, province of Quebec, so eastern part of Canada, about an hour north of Montreal. Yeah. So a lot of snow here at the moment. Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't know nothing about that in Southern California here. Where were you born and raised? Speaker 1: Born and raised. So I was born in New York, Long Island, but I came in Quebec. I was like 18 months. So basically a full Canadian. That said, all of my family's either in New York or in El Salvador, Central America. So my parents come from there, yeah. Speaker 2: So you grew up speaking English, French and Spanish? Speaker 1: So yeah, so native Spanish, French school and English school. Actually in Quebec, you need to speak French and it's a bilingual province. So you learn since the first grade, you start learning English. And then I did my bachelor degree in three languages, which only the first semester I had French, then everything was like in English and Spanish. Got to study... Speaker 2: It was in Spanish in Canada? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: I didn't know that was a thing. Speaker 1: Yeah. So basically taking marketing, which is Mercado Tecnia, marketing in Spanish. I also went abroad to Monterrey in Mexico and Mexico City also for a semester, which Which was great. But again, I've never studied Spanish like written, you know, or I write it as I speak it. So part of the university where I went, most of them come from France, and they were all very good to write it. I was good, you know, speaking it. So we complement ourselves there and we helped each other. Speaker 2: Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Now, how many years have you been involved in e-commerce? Speaker 1: So, in business in general, it's 15 years now that I've, you know, been working. More e-commerce, I would say since 2017. So in 2017, I was working for a company called Pelican International. So basically, they do a lot of nauticals, water sports, you know, the kayaks, paddle boats, you know, fishing kayaks, and they wanted to launch this beast called Amazon. So, you know, they gave me that as a project. I didn't know anything about e-commerce or Amazon, you know, that was like, what is that, Amazon? And how does it work? So yeah, so five years in that company really building out, you know, their category, which grow to over 10 million in sales at that time. Now they're, you know, managing much more different brands also that they acquire with the time on Amazon. So I was very happy, you know, to be part of that launch. So that that is where I really, really put my hands into Amazon. And since then, I'm just loving it, like every time. Every week something changes. Bradley is incredible. It's just like rapid pace and you cannot stop. In the last couple of years, I was in a company more in the supplement space. So that is like the make of the categories for sellers on Amazon. Very difficult, very competitive. But even there, you know, managed to really grow a very nice business for that particular brand. And, you know, now I'm just like, cautiously like, we can call it a sabbatical or Whatever we want is just like I'm reflecting a little bit on what I want next. Consultancy is do I want to work for an agency, a new brand, and if it is a new brand, I really want to make sure that they are aligned with my values, with what I want for my next chapter in life. Honestly, I still want to keep doing e-commerce. Speaker 2: I see you have the open to work thing on your LinkedIn profile there. So hey, if anybody gets inspired, you know, any brands or agencies or companies out there like, wow, Elizabeth really knows what she's talking about. Go to her LinkedIn. She is open to work as of the recording of this. So here we go. Speaker 1: Exactly. Thank you. Speaker 2: What would you say is like your specialty? You know, everybody has their secret sauce. Like mine is probably like launch and things like that. Other people are strictly advertising. What about you? And that's how we'll steer the conversation today. What is your superpower online? Speaker 1: I think my superpower is storytelling data. I feel like, and I'm pretty sure you remember Bradley, like two years ago, the amount of data that we have today is just like zero to too much. There's like so much data now that is available for sellers or for brands that I feel like you can get a lot like overwhelmed. Um, and my specialty is really making this data aligned with what I want to be, um, answering. So there's no point of having data if you're not answering your question. Um, so I've been able to, uh, also push to senior leaders that don't understand, but mostly don't understand Amazon. Uh, In simple ways, why we should invest, why we should be launching products on Amazon, and why it's a channel that needs to be growing. And that is really my forte is really like storytelling that data, those reports, or even like creating reports. So like I used to work with an ad agency, which they're very technical, very good. And sometimes I was like, I want to see this data, but in this way. And they were like, Oh my God, this doesn't exist. So they went back, you know, to their developer and we need to put this in place. So I question a lot. I'm very, very creative with data. And based on that data, I'll be utilizing to either make better decisions for the products that exist or for go-to-market for new product launches, which I know is going to be part of the discussion today. Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah, I know you've preached before that, and I absolutely agree with this first part. I preach it too. It's like, Too many sellers just figure out what's their first or next product to sell based on their gut feeling or intuition or something like that. Definitely not the way to go. And the second part, you're like, hey, some people just think about keywords. Now, obviously, I love keywords, but yeah, I kind of agree with this part too. You can't just look at the numbers and say, hey, there's 10 keywords and they have a million search forms, so this must be a great starting point. What is the right way then? Or how do you decide what new niche to get into? What new product to launch in a certain niche you're already in? What are you looking at, if not your gut or just keyword searches and things like that? Speaker 1: Yeah, so let me just go back on what you just said. So yes, intuition is good. And I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs have that, which is great. You spot a trend. And you want to test it out on Amazon. Great. Then you have keyword search, like key search volume. That is basically just letting you know what is the demand for that specific. But the thing is, I think the biggest difference is that Go-To-Markets has like shifts from more like intuition driven to question driven and behavior audiences. Who's actually going to purchase that product like and you know, the tools that I'm going to speak about today. They're not like replacing judgments. I think they're just like raising the bar. They're just making us more efficient in how we are going to launch. So I think like the go-to-market process that I've come to use now for multiple launches is, and it always change on by the way, because every time Amazon either gives a tool or removes a tool. For instance, I used to work with that tool that Helium 10 had, downloading all the reviews. Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Amazon made us take it away. So annoying. Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: We're working on a replacement for that. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Speaker 2: Please. Speaker 1: Because, you know, I used to use that tool, you know, to make these reviews analysis with the help of ChatGPT, let's say, and just querying it, you know, and into like, what are like the likes, the dislikes of the products of the competition that is already, well, the future competition that you will have, you know, the market. And it was just like a goldmine. And there was also like ways to, how can I say, There were a lot of cues for product development as well because sometimes something was wrong for a specific product. Well, you can go at your R&D department or anyone that is into the conception of the product and letting them know, you know, customers really like this product. They are buying it, but they're complaining about this. Like, how can we make sure we don't have that? There was also a lot of cues for copywriting. So we used to even extract like short snippets. Like of real customer language, and we use those ones on the listings and creatives. And I think that is very important, because I strongly believe that products that perform better, they really speak to the customer. So the way they are describing themselves, the products, and sometimes brands comes with this big idea, like, this is my product, this is my customer, but sometimes It's not true and it's with Amazon that you're able to see those trends. Speaker 2: You talked about Amazon removing things and also adding things. I think something that wasn't added but it was more like democratized meaning that the average brands can now have access to this would be AMC last year. How before that was a kind of like exclusive exclusive thing like man you had to be really advanced to be using AMC. Now almost anybody can use AMC. So how have you leveraged that in the past? How do you think in 2026 other brands out there should be should be leveraging AMC? Speaker 1: Yeah, of course. So I'll go through like the process. I think I mapped it out like into like five steps about So the first one, I think we already spoke about it, you know, keyword search, obviously very important. It confirms demand. You know what our shoppers, it also can, I really like the long tail keywords because they're telling a story. They're telling what color, what dimensions, what they are actually looking for. So always start with that using what, in our case, we were using a lot of Cerebro and, you know, Magnet from Helium 10. Then the second one, before we move into AMC and all of that, because that is more for me the third step, I would say what I really, really liked as a tool, Bradley, is actually Market360. Market360 is, I feel like, an underutilized product that Helium 10 has. More for, I would say, mid to large brands. I don't feel like everybody should be having that, but maybe you can just, you know, talk a little bit about it and where they can find it. Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's Market Tracker 360 is available, at least on the diamond planet, like everybody gets maybe a couple markets there. For more power users, like that, you know, the companies that are doing like maybe, you know, mid, mid seven figures or more, I highly recommend getting like one of the custom enterprise plans because they have a lot more markets and a lot more segments they need to be looking at the data and like me myself, you know, I'm only like just barely sub million dollars. I don't even use Market Tracker 360 too much because my products are so small. I just sell a lot of smaller products as opposed to these very competitive niches. But if you're in a really competitive niche or you've got some big-time, high six-figure, seven-figure hero products, Market Tracker 360. Guys, you'll probably see on the screen if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll be able to see where it's at in Helium 10. So is Market Tracker 360 for you something that you use to discover new You know, categories are new niches to get into. And it's something that you're like, hey, monitoring what's going on with your existing competition and things, or is it more one or the other? Speaker 1: Neither. I use it really at the beginning. So what I was trying to really answer with that is like, who is the real competitive competition for this new product launch? What is the prices and the maturity of the products that are already in that market? And what we're trying to do, what like the goal is mainly to define the market, I'm actually going to be entering. So instead of saying I'm entering the water bottle category, which is huge, I want to use filters to remove noise. Like what is the price range? If my water bottle has certain specifics and I am selling at $39, I don't want to be comparing it with a product that is selling at $10 and it's plastic. I want to be comparing myself with maybe a little bit more mature products. So we can filter with minimum revenues, units per month. We can also exclude in titles, you know, when there's an exclusion. Maybe we don't want to have like kids bottles, so we want to exclude kids, but we want to make sure that stainless steel is there. So we want to include that keyword. So it's all about like really defining your market properly. So every decision after don't get like shaggy because you want to make sure that you go to your senior leaders and you say like, this is the market I'm entering. You know, I'm entering, I don't know, $3 million market and I want to be able to take 1% of that market in the next 12 months. But that $3 million market is maybe part of a $55 million market. But that is not your market, you know, so you really want to be, how can I say, scaling it and really be more cautious of what is the real market, defining it really to have specific keywords around 10 to 15, you know, really And I'm here to talk to you about how you can create aces that really are aligned with what you are going to be selling. So, you know, again, the objective here is not to have the big category, you want to have your category. I've been in the market 360 in the past, making sure you know that all of these filters really are going to create, how can I say, the sandbox where I am going to be playing. And when I do have these, I know there's a couple of views also that are more granular where you can actually see like advertising, like where are, what type of advertising they're doing. Can't remember if it is at the ASIN level or brand, but you're able to also see, you know, if they are selling on sponsor, on sponsor brands, DSP. And you can also like, you know, there's maybe opportunities there because if you see that your main So if your main competitor is only doing sponsor, well, maybe you should be at lounge already preparing your campaigns for sponsor brand and sponsor videos because they are just not doing it, you know, so that's that's like on. All of that information is available on Market360. But yes, afterwards, of course, you can still go in your market quarter after quarter. I used to go in and analyze also, okay, now with this market, what is my share now after a quarter? Am I 1%? 0.5%? And how you are growing? And how is the market growing as well? But again, your market, not the whole category. That is way too much noise. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Good stuff. So guys, Market Tracker 360 is definitely A lot of you have the diamond plan. You've probably never even gotten into it. So go in there and create your first market. Now, what else are you doing? I know you're really good at advertising. So we've talked a little bit about Amazon advertising, but what are some other things that you're doing on the advertising side that you think has helped you have the success you've had? Speaker 1: Yeah. So if you are a brand that has the privilege to have an account exec, As assigned to you, you need to be looking at those category level data reports that they have. You can actually ask them to do it on specific ASINs. So for instance, if I'm launching a product, I will tell them these, after all my research, step one and two, these are my 10, 15 ASINs I'll be targeting. And they will give you a report, which it's basically, this becomes like the peers that you are going to compare. And they will give you a report on what are their spendings per month, what types of ads they're doing, and all of that is like real data. So you're able also to budgetize, like how much do I actually need? You have their spend as well, like how much they're spending on a particular type of I'm going to talk a little bit about advertising strategy. So advertising strategy is a way of ad. So you're able to plan because all of this again, go-to-market success is about planning. So your advertising strategy comes into play in that go-to-market to see like how much do I need to spend? Where am I going to spend that money? Is it on DSP? Is it on sponsored products? What types? To have that information again, in terms of planning for your ad spend and the month as well, you know, on where you need to be spending more. So yeah, so that that would be part of the advertising part. But talking about, we talked about, you know, AMC, and AMC, my god, there's so much to say about it. But I think I'm just going to focus on One part of the AMC, which is it comes with DSP access data that really, really helped us for product launches in the past. And I think they're very good for any brand that is launching product and it's overlap reports. I don't know if you heard about Overlap Reports. Overlap Reports answers questions like who is actually buying products like this on Amazon, what segments over-index, what behavior suggests intent, or maybe they're just ready to buy. Once you know your market, The next step is basically having these reports and you can ask these, if I'm not mistaken, it's, I don't know if you can do it yourself. Again, we were working with an agency. So the agency actually pulled these for us. But basically, these reports reveal who is buying similar products by identifying the most relevant demographic, lifestyle and behavior segments. So what does that data do? Again, like I told at the beginning, there's no point of having data if you don't know what you're trying to do with it. So what are we trying to do with it? We're trying to write messaging and copy that will resonate to that specific customer. It will guide all of our DSP creatives, all of our video creatives. Rather than guessing, we're actually using Amazon first-party data to understand the buyer that is already buying those products that you have identified, which, again, is your market. And the way these report work is basically by affinity score. So an affinity score you'll see on the report. I don't have one to show you at the moment, but it's basically it could be it's numerical. So let's say one is your baseline. So there's no there's no difference. Basically, it's telling us. How much more likely a segment is to interact with competitor products compared to the average Amazon shopper? So when you have over index, so let's say you have 1.46, let's say, what it's saying is that 46% more are likely to be in that competitor audience. I don't know if you understand what I'm saying, but basically, I can give you an example. For instance, you can get information like demographics, so age. In that segment, those customers, the range would be maybe 18 to 30 is actually scoring three. That means that there are three times more of those shoppers that are within that segment. So that is your main category, your main demographic. It would not maybe be, I don't know, 55 plus scored 0.8. Okay, so this product is clearly not for 55 plus. So let's make sure to have imagery, to have content that is appealing for that specific age range. And it gives you, you know, demographic information, gender, income, education, property, you can even know, you know, if they have a house. So for any product that is actually more specific to householders, well, you know that that is you need to be scoring a very high affinity, making sure that that's your category, you can know if they are married, What does married mean? Well, maybe put some couple photos as lifestyle. You can know if they have children. If yes, what age? You can even know what age of their children have. So make sure you have that in your lifestyles. There's also behavior. Are they buy-in at Whole Foods? Are they part of the top 2% spenders? Maybe that is going to realign your pricing. So yeah, so a lot, a lot of information within these overlap reports. Speaker 2: Going back to Amazon advertising, when you launch a new product, what is your campaign structure like? Are you only launching on auto campaigns? Are you only doing exact campaigns just for a special one for launch? Are you having research campaigns with broad? Are you doing product targeting from day one? Are you doing sponsor display from day one? What is your campaign structure look like in the first week or so? Speaker 1: Okay, for that one, I think it really depends on what we have uncovered. So for instance, if I uncovered that my, with these reports that my account exec gave me, you know, for these peers, if I uncovered that they are not doing DSP, well, that's an opportunity for me, maybe I just want to go and get that demand, you know, and get customers to know about my product. But at the base, auto campaigns, I feel like they're always a must just to seed keywords. Obviously, you want to make sure you want to keep an eye on those. I'm not saying that needs to be your strategy, not at all. But we tend to really make sure that we have sponsor products and sponsor products on very specific keywords. So let's say, again, water bottle. We would not go into the go into the product launch with water bottle. It could be water bottle two liters stainless. So longer, you know, because it's going to be very costly, you know, to gain that water bottle at first and be relevant. So we were making sure that we had that those 10 to 15 Keywords that were our must. We must be organically ranking for these in the first three months, and then we would expand. But we would really be, again, very narrow into what we were trying to do in terms of campaigns and in terms of targeting. Most of the time, because I work with more mid-range brands, we always launch DSP at the same time. It was sponsored DSP and now with the AMC. While we were doing like any customer who has seen our DSP ads that are shopping on marketplaces, let's retarget them, you know, on the sponsor, on the marketplace and the same the other way. So it was like really like a 360 degree type of strategy. Speaker 2: You're very active in the community online and offline. I see you at events. You travel for events. I see you active on LinkedIn. With all the tens, hundreds of sellers you've met, what do you think separates a serious seller just like Serious Sellers Podcast with everybody else? I mean, everybody is sellers that you interact with, but obviously, people are on different levels and thus, they experience different levels of success. So, what makes you a serious seller or advanced seller? Speaker 1: Um, so like, let's separate seller, like own founder that is launching a product and a brand. So on the founder side, I feel like the ones that really are able to pierce this, you know, beast that is Amazon, are the ones that are actually asking the right questions. And also, Getting the support of the community and also agencies, you know, that can maybe help them. And I totally understand that maybe sometimes you don't have, you know, the budget to work with agencies. But there is so much information out there. And I feel like Amazon community is so open. Also, just sharing insights. There is no reason why you're not able to get answers or to just be very creative, you know, with what you hear. So for that segment, I think that creativity Being very versatile, you know, being able to take the data or take the information, the podcast and just ask question, how can I implement this? Should I be testing this? Who can help me? You know, there's a lot of people that underestimate just sending a message and asking for help. Asking for help is okay. And people will be happy to help you. So that is on the founder side. On the brand side, what I've learned a lot is it's And what I love about Amazon is channels. If it's a customer that is D2C first, have never done Amazon, it's like, why should I have Amazon? Like, it's like, basically, they don't see the value on it. Or they do retail. And then it's like, what is this e-commerce? Like, or if they're doing both, or trying to do it, they're not giving the same focus to Amazon. Honestly, I think I cannot name one that is really focused only on very, very focused on Amazon. And I think Amazon is where you can actually grow, utilize that That channel as a like seeding brand awareness, you know to bring new customers in. Speaker 2: All right. Um, I'm gonna ask you one more question But just again if you want to reach out to LinkedIn probably the best place to find you Elizabeth Rivas With a Z and let's move the Z right there Elizabeth Rivas on LinkedIn and hit her up on there. She's always a very happy to engage So, you know you you've worked for For eight-figure brands, high seven-figure brands, you obviously have pretty hefty budgets behind that. Maybe some of the stuff you've talked about absolutely resonates with a lot of our listeners who are on that level. There might be some stuff like, hey, I'm not ready. I'm not there yet. For people without a big budget, what's one quick-hitting thing that they can do that can move the needle for them? Speaker 1: I think it's honestly the go-to-market that I've presented, there's a couple of things that can be done with a smaller budget. So if you're already utilizing Helium 10, which I'm thinking all the listeners are, well, you know, they're certainly doing, you know, Cerebro, Magnet, but the thing is, Market360, you did mention there is another I think one that is actually when you're a diamond, which is not the 360 one, but still the regular market, the regular market tracker. You can still do it by keywords. You can still map here. Speaker 2: Even on our lowest plan. Speaker 1: Exactly. So you can you can still market your more niche, let's say, market. And then it's a lot. That's the only thing. It's going to be more manual. I feel like everything needs to be based on data and have a I have also, how can I say, a focus on like, you need to test a lot of things and you need to learn a lot. And I feel like sometimes we are testing but we are not documenting also. That's another thing. When you test something, document. Like, what worked, what didn't work? Because, and I did it by the way. I think everybody does it. You test something and after it was like, oh yeah, six months ago, but why didn't it work? Okay, I can't remember. So you want to avoid those things. So keep a log. Keep a log, you know, of like all of the testing that you're doing and what worked, what iterations you did, what other tests you performed. It's all about being curious. Speaker 2: I like it. All right, Elizabeth, thank you so much for coming on. You have a lot of knowledge, a lot of experience and look forward to bringing you on next year. Maybe you'll be working for another seven, eight figure brand or who knows, maybe start, I think you should start some brands on the side. Speaker 1: I know. I've been thinking about that. Speaker 2: Everybody used to always say that to me before I started because I would always just work for big brands and things like that. And I was like, it is fun. It is funny. I do it sometimes. Not just for making money, which is not really making money, but for the experiments. So it allows me to do stuff in a sandbox so that for the real stuff I do, then I have more confidence. But anyways, we'll see where you're at next year and it'll be great to have you on. Look forward to seeing you at the next conference. Speaker 1: Thank you, Bradley, for having me.