Classic Marketing, Modern Amazon: Your 2025 Organic Sales Blueprint with Dan Deighton – Episode 45 of the Agency Operators Podcast

Classic Marketing, Modern Amazon: Your 2025 Organic Sales Blueprint with Dan Deighton – Episode 45 of the Agency Operators Podcast Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Agency Operators Podcast. Today, I'm joined by Dan Deighton, Ford Baker. How are you doing, Dan? Speaker 2: Hey, Pasha. I'm doing fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, doing well. Speaker 1: Thanks. Speaker 2: How about you? Speaker 1: Oh, very good. So you're calling out of the north of the UK, right? Speaker 2: That's right. I'm calling from a city called Sheffield, which is the fourth largest in the UK. And it's right in the center of the UK or the north of England, because obviously Scotland is above us and that counts as the UK. Speaker 1: Awesome, man. Well, that sounds very beautiful. I'm excited to talk to you today. Because I know that you have an interesting background and I know right now so you're working for a Ford Baker at the moment and you guys are an Amazon agency but you also do TikTok. Which is pretty cool. I think they kind of go hand in hand. We're focused mostly on Amazon but sometimes I'm like, man, you know, maybe I branch out into the TikTok world. But that's been kind of tough for me personally. So I'd love to hear your take and kind of how you guys look at Amazon versus TikTok. What's the future of it all and kind of how And I'm here to talk to you about how the year 2025 might look in the lens of, you know, how TikTok is being kind of discussed and looked at at the moment with all of the turbulence. And then, of course, on a more kind of macro level with tariffs, you know, that's, I think, something that's coming up a lot of conversation is like, how does that affect e-commerce in general? So really excited to talk to you today. Definitely want to hear your story. How did you get into the Amazon and e-commerce space? What led you here to this point in your career? Speaker 2: Yeah, such a good question. It's always fascinating where people come from and all that. So my background, obviously, there's no degree for Amazon and marketplaces that I know of anyway. Yeah, maybe there will be one day. But yeah, so my background actually is in law and Spanish. So I went to college, to university and I studied, majored in law and I minored in Spanish. I did an American style degree in the UK here. And I always preferred the Spanish side, but I went into compliance. So using that legal side, and I worked as a money laundering reporting officer for a FinTech. And it was like a startup fintech. So there was very few people. It was very hands on, lots of chaos going around, kind of like Amazon, really. And eventually, during the pandemic, I came across Helium 10 Freedom Ticket. And I did the course, I was absolutely sucked in by Bradley Sutton. And, of course, Kevin King as well, the billion dollar sellers. And I just loved it. And I started my own brand working Mainly with women's sports clothing because I was out for a run one day with my partner and she said, God, I wish we had pockets on these leggings. And I was like, there we go. We're going to have double pocketed leggings. That's going to be the first product. And then I was doing the whole thing. I was running my own brand. I had three different product lines, and then I realized I didn't know what I was doing. And it was really hard. You've got to do the cash flow, you've got to do the advertising, you've got to do the SEO, then you've got to brief people to do the creative. And so I just found Ford Baker online, the agency I now work for, and they had a position for an SEO specialist. And I thought, wow, brilliant. Okay, I'll join there and I'll learn all the skills I need to do and come back and do the brand in the future. And five years later, here I am now. Speaker 1: How's the brand? Speaker 2: The brand, so I closed the brand down. I think there was like severe holes in my business plan just starting from scratch, if I'm 100% honest. I would love to go back to that in the future and really come up with a proper business plan. And I do now, obviously, I work for an agency. I have the contacts to do that and in this space, but it's, yeah, that's a dream, but I learned so much from it that I'm able to offer in value to the brands and to my colleagues. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, they say that your learnings are more from the failures than the successes, right? And I mean, in my life, I've seen that to be the case. I've, you know, to be fully honest, I've probably crashed and burned 80% of what I've tried to build. But I feel like that 80% contributed to the 20% significantly that actually did make it. So, you know, in the last years I've launched and failed several brands. And the reason why is because there's a lot of soft skills or just different types of skills that are not very obvious or, you know, it's hard to detect. In hindsight, you even look it back and say, oh man, how could I have possibly known that that was the case? You can do everything perfectly from the marketing side, but like you said, the finances have to be on point and all the cash flow and all the planning and then what happens after and making sure that you have inventory always coming in and you're trying to get ahead of any types of curve balls that are being thrown at you. So it's a it's a hard world out there. I mean personally, you know, one of the reasons why I had a brand recently go down was patent and trademark infringement. So myself and 50 other sellers were wiped out because of a Supreme Court filing. So how could I have possibly known, right? Like I looked, I searched real hard and I couldn't find anything. And then once I listed, of course, at that moment, somebody filed a new patent. And so it's like, you get knocked down that way. It's like, go fight it. How much money do you have to fight with a lawyer? You know, you might as well go find another product. So that's one thing. And then something else, it's like, oh, you know, 3PL lost my inventory. And they're like, well, you know, go to your insurance. And it was a very expensive insurance policy because it was a children's bike. So for the first order, we're not taking out like a $10,000 a year policy for kids bikes. So we just took a risk on it. And who knew that that 3PL, it was a recommendation from somebody I trusted. They actually had several of their clients with their stuff there. And I was the first of like the five or six clients that he's recommended that place. They lost their inventory. So immediately he pulled out all his other clients. But for us, it was too late. So we lost all that inventory. So there's all kinds of circumstances where it's just like you think you're doing everything perfectly, but you don't know what you don't know, or sometimes unexpected mistakes or accidents happen. But you have to be You have to do what you can do in order to be protected from that as best as you can. So there's all kinds of reasons, but kind of back to what you were saying, having an agency and all these contacts that you can kind of lean on is so important in this world because it's really everything like, you know, who to call in certain circumstances to get something solved is really what people sign up for when they work with companies like ours is not just our expertise, but also the security of Hey, we can rely on you guys, right? Like if something happens, can we call you up and say, hey, there's a problem. I need you to help me and we'll be there to help you. I feel like that's the thing that people really feel the most value from. In addition, of course, to growing sales and everything, you have to know what you're doing, but there's so much unknown. So it's great to have that. Yeah, so speak a little bit about your position at Ford Baker. What's your role in that company and what do you engage with mostly on a day-to-day basis? Speaker 2: So my role is quite niche. It's something I really enjoy doing. We're calling it organic sales growth specialist. So if you've got two types of sale on Amazon, you've got advertising and then you've got organic. I look at anything that can increase the organic sales side. So initially when I first joined, it was SEO strategies. What can you put in the title? What can you put in the bullets? What can you put in the back end, et cetera, to rank and increase that over time so that your organic sales are increasing. But I think, and as you've already mentioned already, we're going to talk about 2025. I think search on Amazon in the last few years has changed so much. Particularly this year, that organic sales growth, there's so many opportunities for that outside of just text match relevancy in SEO. And so my job is to find new ways to increase organic sales and be doing that continuously. So that would be mainly looking at ways to increase click-through rate from the search engine results pages and conversion rate on the actual product page itself. Speaker 1: Wow, that's a hard job. I mean, honestly, that's harder than PPC, in my opinion, because PPC, you have something to work with. You have a system that's giving you data and you're just kind of going back and forth, having the benchmark to always get better with the conversion rate organically. At some point, you kind of max out the levers that you can really pull, right? So what do you think is kind of the thing that's working the most in 2025, considering that we have all of this new AI stuff coming out, considering that intent-based search and all of these other updates Amazon's ruling out are kind of happening? As we speak, they're just making it more and more prominent. Of course, they're testing, but with the tests, they are seeing good results from what I understand. So intent-based search is going to become more and more important. And the way that people are searching for things like, you know, I'll go on ChatGPT and say, give me the best five vitamin C supplements. And then ChatGPT is going to tell me what to buy and I'm just going to probably buy it, right? Instead of like, I imagine that that's kind of how people are starting to search for things now. Of course, not everybody is using that. Of course, everyone has different methods, but the way information is transferring. So, yeah, what do you see working the best given all those circumstances? Speaker 2: I think I really like that point about how search is going to change and people are going to. I'll be buying in perhaps from ChatGPT, perhaps from elsewhere. The way people search is going to change. And the prediction that I've spoken about with a few people is that something like best vitamin C supplement, that is going to become a search on Amazon, that people are just going to change the way they search. And that hasn't been something that has been on Amazon, but it has been on Google. So on previous search engines in the past, and that is the evolution in the way that Amazon will be going. So how do you set up your listing to do that? Which obviously is your question is you have to be providing as much information as possible across the listing in your SEO. Your title obviously has to be exactly what you say you are. You have to be using all of these All of these Rufus optimizing techniques which are coming out, the noun phrase optimization, semantic content building, you have to be describing the product, appealing to the emotions of customers. You have to be naming the teeth benefits, naming all of your ingredients and filling out your product attributes as well. And really, if you are a brand or you're working on behalf of a brand, You should know your products. So you should be able to do that in your content. Like, so for example, for Baker, we have a call with all of our brands when we first onboard them. And we literally go through what are your USPs, what are your ingredients, what are your unique product propositions, etc. And then we incorporate that And today I'm going to be talking about how to get into the marketing of the product, into the product page. So if you're operating creatively and from a content wise at quite a high level where you know what your product is, I don't think it should change too much. But what I do believe is happening is Amazon is raising the bar for product listings. In an attempt to attract brands and less sellers, because brands have catalogs, they have money to bring to the platform to spend on advertising. So really, it makes a lot of sense. Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I've seen in the last year significant turnover on the Amazon side for wanting brands and not just listings from random sellers. Even though that's the thing, like I see that it's still the moneymaker in many cases, but when you have a brand, it's probably per seller, the amount that they make goes up. But like what I'm trying to say is, you know, sometimes it's funny to me when we're so focused on making content beautiful and like really mapping out the unique selling points and like doing all those branding things, which I know are important, like going crazy, doing the back end fill outs of all those extra attributes and all that kind of tedious work. And then I actually find a listing in the same category that has none of that stuff, but they're selling more because they're just like the cheapest. And it's like a random brand name from like a Chinese seller. So that's kind of what we're up against. And even though Amazon is trying to support the brands and the sellers who are kind of bringing their old cold catalog, they can't help but also support those random listings from China, which are probably Chinese sellers because they're the only ones who can price that low. So still, you know, that's a dynamic that we're working with. That's why it's so interesting to me what we're going to see this year with regards to the tariffs. Whether or not it is going to just kind of stimulate domestic manufacturing or manufacturing in other places in Asia and South America, that's truly what I would like to see is more of this kind of stimulation of a global economy versus just like over-reliance on a select couple regions where it's just like the same thing over and over again. And it seems to me like consumers are more interested in that anyway. People go on Amazon for brand discovery and they want to find out about something or a different level of quality that they're willing to pay for or just something that's unique that they've never seen in their local market. At some point, we just get tired of rebranding the same old metal spoon. I'm calling it something different a hundred different times and everyone's pricing within $2 range. Who has the better deal at this time? Speaker 2: Yeah, there's definitely a sort of an interest in the origin of products is becoming very clear that customers want to know where their products are coming from. And just last year, We saw Amazon roll out the Made in Italy badge, which shows up in the amazon.it and that shows up in the search engine results pages. I don't know the results of that study, but that to me was a clear indicator. Usually they test in one marketplace, usually the US first because it's the biggest and then they roll it out to the others. But this one was being tested in Italy and there is that whole thing about Italian and quality and that stereotype isn't true. And so then an email came through last night from Kevin King from Billion Dollar Newsletters and it said about, is this the start of Made in USA appearing in the search engine results pages? And I was like, yes, it is. I think that's what's going to happen. I think you're going to have to provide more information about the source of your product And you're going to be able to leverage that in the search engine results pages, such as through like the Climate Pledge Friendly, there'll be a Made in USA badge, there'll be a Made in UK badge, there'll be etc. And that will be a way to play the Amazon system because customers will be looking for products that they're clear on the origin and source for. Speaker 1: I love that. I mean, if I saw something that had the Made in the U.S. badge, I mean, to me, what does that mean, right? Or whatever region it is. If I live in Italy and I see Made in Italy, that just means if you care about these things, like true sustainability, right? I think that's amazing that it didn't come from the other side of the planet on a cargo ship, right? That's like, there you go. There's already value in that from an environmental standpoint and probably from a cost standpoint. We're still importing raw material, of course, in many cases, but depending on what the product is. And it just has all these values that are similar to that attributed with it where you feel like you're supporting local or U.S. communities if you're in the U.S. or just like local. Maybe it'll even get to this level of like what state is it being made in because they have that like on Amazon Handmade, you can actually see what state a maker is in. So that's kind of like the buying local thing where it's like, oh, I'm going to support somebody in my region within like a couple of states. We're used to that. So it's just going to get more and more like that. But kind of back to your point, this is what I'm super focused on is how do we fill out all of the details in the back end of the listing in order for all of these algorithms and AI systems to play out in our favor? Because so many people are really focused on putting keywords in the title. That they're forgetting about, yeah, those extra sections that you have in the back end where you have to like add more, add more, you know, you get like five lines. You have to put all the information there. And furthermore, I would say there's a big gap which we're trying to solve, which is basically there are certain valid values that are given to you by Amazon through the Browse Free Guide. That you need to put in those fields for it to actually pick up and register your product within that subcategory. The problem is that you can, in many cases, type whatever you want in those fields and I feel like that's a big miss. Sometimes when you click into that field, there is a drop down that's provided and Amazon kind of like alludes to, oh, you should probably select one of these. If it's like a shampoo, it's a hypoallergenic or organic or this free, that free, right? But you don't have to type that. You can put the word duck and save it and it'll just be there. And it's like, that doesn't make sense. So there's a big disconnect there where I feel like if there were those valid values and you were kind of limited to only them, then that would be very helpful. But it's really just for the sellers that know at the moment, maybe they'll change it in the future. I think that's going to be the primary one moving forward over the next couple of years is how can you get as much information that's super accurate and relevant to your listing as possible, right? Speaker 2: Absolutely. And it's so hard to fill all of those gaps. Even if you know your product inside and out, knowing where to put and what to put in, because there's so many attributes you can fill it. It's really hard and I think you're completely right. If Amazon is indexing you and taking all of that information and Rufus, then a customer does a search in Rufus, the more information you put in, the better. It's simple, right? We have to find a way to do that as a community or some genius place-created tool that does that and share it with us because, yeah, it's hard. It's hard to do that even if you've been working on Amazon yourself for 13 years. What's the code? Speaker 1: Funny enough, that is what I'm working on with the team right now. We did have a version one that Kevin King actually published on his newsletter like a week or two ago. Speaker 2: Oh cool. Speaker 1: We had like a v1. Basically what we did was create a GPT. And we fed it some prompts and then basically made it so you can go and upload. It's kind of V1 and even this V2, I'll be honest with you, it's not the best. Because you still need to go and we'll give you instructions on how to do it, but you need to go and download a scrape tool and scrape the valid values for your subcategory based on what you see in the back end of your listing. Instead of going through the Browse Tree Guide, we just ask you to go to the back end of the listing, download the scrape tool and it kind of pulls it into a sheet. Then you have to go into Helium 10 or Jungle Scout and then do a search for your ASIN and get all of the keywords that are the most important or the highest relevance, highest volume keywords. And then you have to get the URL from your listing and you put it into this GPT and then eventually it kind of spits out for you this sheet with all of the things that you should probably upload and then you kind of have to copy paste it. So still there's a lot of manual work that goes in. This is maybe good for if you have a VA on your team that you can kind of send this over this task and then maybe it'll take them like a week to do your whole catalog which is still not bad because you're giving them a system. But we are working on future versions, which will literally just hook up, you know, MWS connection, hook up your account. And it does all of that processing in the back end for you. And you just hit the approve button and it uploads it to your listing. Like that's the dream, you know, and I think so many sellers would benefit from that. Speaker 2: I mean, we're already short for time as it is it feels like in the Amazon space anyway. So anything that saves time like that and all that fiddly technical playing around in the back end. Yeah, you have to get it right. The problem will be in getting it right first time. Once you've cracked that code, it will be gold dust. It will be amazing because you'll be able to do that per each subcategory, etc. Speaker 1: Exactly. There are so many. The catalog is enormous. So there's no way that you can make a cookie cutter system. The only way to do it is actually to connect directly to somebody's listing and pull that from there and then do all of these match comparisons and multiple different APIs for data sourcing and then just like Okay, you know, get this to the point where it works 100% of the time for every category. That's a hard job. So it'll probably take us a very long time. Maybe not that long, but it'll take us some time to get it done. But once we do, it's very exciting. I've had a lot of people who are who are interested and just can see the vision of it because it's something simple. But I swear, you know, in all of this years that I've worked On the Amazon side, I have not seen anybody focus on back-end listing optimization. It's almost like I've never seen a tool that does anything for that, which is strange because it seems so obvious. Yeah. Speaker 2: Well, I think that shows the direction that Amazon is moving in. So I remember when I joined about 2020, the community, I don't think there were that many big brands particularly over here in the UK on Amazon. I think there was a view that you could be a seller and as we've already spoken about, like the Chinese sellers particularly, there was a view you could form a brand, set up a listing, enroll in the Vine program, blah, blah, blah, and you'd be able to do it. But I think that's changing very much. And yes, now you have to be thinking at that kind of level of sophistication. How can I be if you've got 100, 200 products more, like, if I fill in the back end properly, all of the attributes, all of the section, what is the impact of that from a financial perspective, particularly now with Rufus, that's massive. Speaker 1: That's profit. Speaker 2: That's growth. Speaker 1: It really is. I mean, just like, even like the syndication process, I've seen so many large companies that all they've done is just literally taken their catalog from Shopify or whatever it is, and then just syndicate the content over. And it's like a basic listing. But because people are searching for the brand, They're getting sales on Amazon that they're not really paying for but then like once they actually start focusing on it and get somebody to come in there and make the infographics and the A-plus and yeah, all the backhand stuff for Rufus. I mean now it's just like you're operating on a totally different level. Why? Because you're not just capturing the sales of your branded searches, you're capturing market share on Amazon itself where there's already a lot of demand. So sometimes it's just surprising to me how there's just huge companies out there who are still not focused on Amazon. Like I would imagine at this point every e-commerce brand would be really paying attention just because of the amount of momentum that's already there. But it isn't the case. So that's great for For companies like us because, I mean, there's still quite a big sea out there. And just like final thought on this whole optimization thing, I think what we're also seeing is AI has the ability to scan images and pull from the infographics content. And I think that that's also super powerful. And I've, you know, just last week I had to explain to somebody why infographics are important. I was speaking to somebody and they were just like, well, nobody in my category, it was a jewelry brand. And they said, nobody in my category Has infographics and I actually did like I started looking and I and I said wow, you know That's kind of interesting that this is an entire market because people in the jewelry business I guess they're not really focused on online sales as much as it's very like, you know at the store type of transaction so they're probably not selling as much online as is but You know, I was kind of telling them like you have you have an advantage here that your competitors are not They don't have any infographics, so there's an opportunity here for you to just be like, these are the unique selling points. And they're just thinking, what kind of unique selling points can there be? But for every product, you can find it, right? If it's a gold and diamond bracelet, you can say, the diamonds have this many carats, the golds have this many carats, and it's made in this place, in this style, by this person. It's storytelling. And all of that contributes to the sale compared to just having an image of a lady wearing a bracelet. And that's it, right? So infographics are important because Amazon will scan that too and add that to the consideration when it's coming up with search results. Speaker 2: Exactly. And yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up as well because that's such a huge part of the way it's moving. I think just this morning I was on an Amazon page and there was like view in room. We can see the product in your room now. So what does Amazon value? It values you making the customer feel like they have as realistic experience with the product as they're going to get in real life. Like it's online, it's digital marketing. So what can you do to bring that into the customer's room and convince them to purchase? Make them feel the benefits of that product. Give them the ability to try it out in their room, whether it's just on their phone, playing around, whatever. With video, obviously video has become an even bigger part in premium A plus in real times. So yeah, do whatever you can to make a customer feel like they actually have that product at home. And I think your brand will do well. Speaker 1: Awesome. Dan, it was a pleasure speaking with you today. Do you have any final thoughts that you wanted to share with the audience or anything that comes to mind or maybe a way to get in touch with you if somebody from the audience had some questions for you or from Ford Baker? Speaker 2: Yeah, fantastic. I think the biggest thing is look at your organic sales. Make sure you're optimizing for them as well as your advertising ones because I think advertising is such a skill. But overall, the long-term goal has got to be to be improving your organic sales over time. So make sure that When you're looking at your sales, you're looking at that split and your products that are causing most of your organic sales. They'll be coming from your top three organic rankings. Where to get in contact with me? Contact dan4baker.com or over Gmail or find me on LinkedIn at dandeighton. And yeah, that's my final thoughts, really. Thank you so much for having me on, Pasha. I really appreciate it. It was super easy to organize this. I really appreciate you having me on. Speaker 1: Awesome. Thanks again Dan and thanks everyone for listening. We'll catch you on the next one. Bye for now. Speaker 2: Cheers guys. Cheers Pasha. Bye. Speaker 1: Bye.