EP #369] [ENG] - Importance of story telling to maximise your listings conversions - Corina Haro

EP #369] [ENG] - Importance of story telling to maximise your listings conversions - Corina Haro Unknown Speaker: Welcome to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. This is the place for everything related to Amazon private label and e-commerce. Learn exactly what you need to start or scale your business. Get insights from the top industry experts who will discuss the latest trends and best practices in the world of Amazon. From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Speaker 2: Hello, guys. Welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy, the place of air related to Amazon FBA, private label, and e-commerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of Ecomcy, and today we bring another special guest. Her name is Corina Haro and she's one of the co-founders of Salto Innovations, which I would say is one of the top, you know, agencies out there when it comes to creatives in the Amazon space. And the reason why I wanted to bring Corina is for two reasons. The first one is because she's very good at what she does, specifically content and when it comes to the You know, the strategy behind is everything around storytelling, which I think is something a lot of people doesn't do. And the second reason is because she's also from Venezuela, like myself. So there's a deeper connection even there. So, you know, two wins there. So, Corina, thank you so much for being here. I'm super excited to have you on the show. How are you doing? Speaker 1: I'm doing great. Thank you, Vincenzo, for inviting me to this podcast. I'm glad to share some insights and interesting topics about storytelling. Speaker 2: Yes, I'm super excited. Thank you so much for being here. I think today, you know, we're definitely going to go into a topic that a lot of people, I feel, not even is talking about when it comes to content. A lot of people think that content is only about making sure the image looks nice. Or is the right kind of font? Or is the right color? But what about the actual meaning behind the content? What is the story behind the brand and what you actually stand for? I feel that's where most brands on Amazon are missing. And that's why most of them are becoming commodities, to be honest with you. So I'm really keen to understand your methodology. Why do you really believe this is the way moving forward? But I guess before we go deep into that, maybe just give us a bit more introduction about yourself, your company, and then we can go from there. Speaker 1: So to give you a little bit introduction about me. So I am a brand strategist with background in engineering, but also super creative. Seven years ago, I started along my sister, this creative agency called Salto Innovation. And ever since, well, we have supported hundreds of brands creating high converting content specifically for the Amazon ecosystem. And somehow after all of these years, we came up with some conclusions in terms of what's going on with the Amazon ecosystem. And we somehow have some best practices collected in terms of how we can approach And today we're going to talk about content creation for higher conversion rates. And that's how we came up with a framework that we call Storytell, which is basically based on storytelling techniques. But, um, yeah, um, help by help by basing our framework on storytelling. We are helping brands not only create empty stories just to tell, but create stories so customers can create stories about them in their own heads. Correct. That's how it works. Speaker 2: Love it. Yeah, that's very cool, actually. I think that's something I always say to even my clients, like you need to find a way that people go deeper than only thinking about the product. They have to think about what they actually belong to when they buy a product. Maybe it's a community, maybe it's a mission, maybe it's a belief, right? And I think that all comes down to how good you can be, as you just described, like the storytelling side of things. But I think as a starting point for the topic today is most people don't know what's the story. Most people don't know, like I'm selling this product on Amazon, but I don't know what's the story behind. I don't know what makes me different. And I'm sure you experience that a lot when you have meetings with your clients. How does an Amazon seller start by answering the question, like, what's the story behind my brand? Speaker 1: To be honest, most brands are not controlling their narrative at all. They are just normally doing all the fissure dumping, benefits dumping, not creating any differentiation. So basically differentiating themselves with Their story and a lot of people also confuse the storytelling with, oh, this is about the founder story, or is this is how we created this product? Or, you know, it's like some sort of confusing at first, but what actually storytelling does is to help you I lead with clarity for the product positioning, like for instance, what is this? Who is this for? Why should I care about it? Also, through a storytelling, it helps you create a connection with your customers, engage them from the emotional perspective. I'm not saying like, hey, this is a great path and throwing all the features there. It's more like connecting with them in terms like, okay, I know you have a problem. This is your pain point and we get it. That way you connect emotionally with your customers. It makes someone feel, okay, this is for me. An additional layer to the storytelling and the way we approach it It's to remove all the objections from a potential customer, right? By providing proof, credibility, and context to the products, right? The first thing is clarity. Storytelling helps you to lead with clarity about the product, about what the product does, and if this product is for the customer, right? Speaker 2: Cool. And I think something I have as a following question, I agree, it's all about clarity and really understanding who your consumer is. It is going an extra layer deeper. And first of all, understand if, you know, we actually fulfilling that need in the first place, because a lot of times people are having, doing a brand, they're doing a product, but they're actually not fulfilling that need. And regardless of the story, the story cannot be impactful enough, or it cannot actually connect deeply enough with the type of consumers that are within that specific category or niche, right? So the reason why I ask this is because I feel before launching a product on Amazon, or even a brand overall, it seems that you should also do some homework to understand if your story is going to be a good fit or not, because sometimes it might be that the story is just not connecting with those potential consumers. What is your take on that? Speaker 1: Yeah, and the thing is that brands need to understand, well, who is their customer? Because you're not selling to everyone. You have to define a niche and based on that specific niche, you have to frame your story with that specific worldview. If you're trying to sell to everyone, you won't sell to anyone at the end of the day. So that's why the first thing is to understand who your customer is and then building that in terms of their journey and their purchase journey. And that's one of the initial pieces you use to build the story. So it flows with the customer worldview. And one other thing is that your story is not a static thing. It's not that something that you tell once and then you forget about it. You have to test different angles to it or tell it in a different way until you find the right way to tell their story that it resonates with the right customer. Speaker 2: Cool. Now, when it comes to telling this story and you say test it and try different angles, And that also means you need time for this to make it work. What I mean by this is that sometimes people think this is something that's going to take you one month to figure out or one week. And sometimes it's longer timelines to really come up with the answer to that, especially which can be a tough thing for potential sellers that don't have the time to wait that long to actually see what is the right direction the story should take. I guess the reason why I mentioned this is I want to know from your experience of storytelling, is there any way for us to actually, from a data perspective, have the highest probability of success? So in essence, Is there ways to either tools or research where I can make sure that whatever I tell my story, it can give me the highest probability to actually click with my potential consumer, right? Like, what is your take? How long does it take? Speaker 1: Of course, once you come up with, let's say, at least two or three different angles to your story or the way you will communicate your brand, you should test it. You can either use the Amazon experiments, which has the pain point that will take way longer to find out the results. But of course, there are tools that we are currently using. Out there, you can find different ones. One of them is in IntelliView, where you can And test. It's from real customers. There you can define your customer avatar, so on and so forth. I won't enter into details in that, but it's something that you can test very easily and quickly before you even go live on Amazon. Our recommendation is like, if you have a new product that you will launch, of course you will have to come up with some sort of listing content and all the credits and launch and then optimize. Based on the results you get initially, right? But then if you're an established brand and you have a legacy content that you need to or you wanted to, let's say, bring to the 2026 trends or best practices, the best way is to at least a split test the new content versus the other because you don't want to mess with what you have built so far, right? Like if you have established brand with Great KPIs and then you just want to further optimize it. You just want to make sure that the new content will come up with the right outcomes in terms of sales for your product. Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think what I'm getting out of this is clearly, first of all, testing, which is something, of course, the foundation, everything we've been discussing so far. But I think on the testing, you mentioned something there. Very interesting, which is it all comes down to the speed at which you can do testing. You gave examples how you can do with Amazon, which takes more time, especially if you're not having a lot of sales going on because you don't have a lot of data. Other ones is relying on real people that essentially is going to give you a real-time feedback and you can make decisions on the fly. I love that. And the tool that you mentioned, Telebit, is very good. I also had experience with that tool in the past, so yeah, well recommended. I think What I actually want to ask you along these lines then, does it mean when it comes to storytelling and everything, is this something that from your experience is only something that you can fix and figure out before launching? Or you had experiences of brands that they can fix it halfway? Because I'm sure there's people that they launch a brand, halfway they realize, oh, I'm becoming just generic and nobody in terms of branding, nobody identify with myself and now need to come up with a story. How does it change from having to do it from zero to somebody that's already selling and they have to fix it halfway, you know what I mean? Speaker 1: Yeah, we have been in both scenarios. Of course, the best scenario is to build something from scratch. So we have the opportunity to analyze, to build a customer avatar and then build a storytelling base on that journey, but it will end up being hypothetical, right? Whereas when you have a product that is already established, you have a goldmine there on the listing because you can basically analyze the And I'm going to talk about the performance of the reviews and read from real customers what are the main objections or pain points or what are the wins for that product and then implement it on the content. Yeah, I mean, in one case, in the case you are already established, the goal is different because you are optimizing for further improve your conversion rates and your KPIs or just building a brand identity that you may not have because you just launched the product and start selling it. You never put attention to the brand itself, but now you need to bring that brand to life in order to not only grow in terms of sales for the product, but to also launch other So, how do you translate the brand equity from the product that already won on Amazon, let's say, new brand launches? Yeah, and it's by building a brand. If you do it from scratch, of course, it makes more sense. But it doesn't mean that you will do it right just the first time. Of course, you will do the best you can, but it doesn't mean that you don't have to test and experiment. The takeaway here is that you have, this is a process, right? It's not something that you do one off. It's like you need to continuously learn from your brand and your product and the business performance and then refine. Yeah. One of the values is like it's based on continuous improvement. You're continuously improving your business, your content and your brand. Speaker 2: Cool. So now somebody, let's say somebody's watching and listening to this and they say, I want to go down the route of having a storytelling on my brand, but I want to understand how long this on average is going to take me. This again is very difficult because each industry is different, but I'm sure people would like to know, is this something that can be fixed in a month? Three months? Six months? A year? On average, how long does it take to really nurture and establish a story for a brand within a specific category, based on your experience at least, through content and other? Speaker 1: Yeah, the minimum time we recommend testing is for at least three months. It's like the minimum. And then that way, in three months, you can test different variables and hypotheses, especially the ones that has the highest impact on your listing KPA. Like, for instance, one month you can test your hero image on a different angle suite. The next month you move to the image stack. And then test, not only coming up with new creative or taking the copy, but you can also switch the order in which the images appear. So it appeals better to the customer journey. It responds to not only... It has a logical order in the back end, right? You have a hook, then you have a... The problem establishment and then you present the solution and then it's basically building trust in front of your customers. That's more or less how the GAR makes it. But then you can tell them. Speaker 2: GAR, sorry. Yeah. Speaker 1: I mean, you can test different elements. For instance, you can test different hooks. If you have ever been on social media, you don't use one hook on your videos. You are continuously testing, okay, what else can we try to see if it works? Same happened on the Amazon, I think. You have to test different ways to hook customers, to present their problem, how to present the solution and how to build trust. Speaker 2: Love it. So from your experience, which element is the most impactful? I'm assuming you will say the hero image, but I'm curious to also hear, like, what would you say is the first one? And after that, what would be the second most impactful element when it comes to conversions and KPS? Speaker 1: Well, the hero image, we all know it. If you bring tweets, you will bring conversion. It's a basic map. Of course, it's one of the elements we recommend refining and testing. But the second element, and it's in order, it's the logical order, it's the image stack, and I would say the first three images are the most critical ones for two reasons. The first reason is because the attention span of customers, it's pretty poor right now. You have to Basically communicate with clarity your product and its benefits in seconds. Because we are talking about like the last time I read, I started said like, we have an attention span of 20 seconds. Trying to communicate a full story or a full product information in just in less than 20 seconds before the person gets distracted with life with his phone, there is a notification, the baby, the kitchen is on, you know, we are distracted. So you have to, that's why you have to lead with clarity. Yeah, make it easy for customers to understand you. So the second thing, the first one, the images and the second most important thing to pass is the images tag. And then the third one that will come up in almost any conversation is the A plus content. Which basically we use to bid objections. Because if someone scroll past already your listing images and the bullet point, they will need the experience of the ramp and the A plus content. It offers a full experience to the ramp. Speaker 2: Love it. And what is your take on things such as, for example, video? Because I know a lot of people are also very big on video, on the listings and advertising. What is your experience with that in terms of how impactful it can be? Speaker 1: For me, it's critical and not for testing, in terms of testing, but if you compare a listing with a video versus a listing without one, the conversion rates will definitely be impacted. But the thing is, the basics of this is because video increases the dwell time of your listing. Increasing the time a person spends on your listing. And by increasing the time they spend, it goes a mile. It goes a mile. If they spend more time with you, they are more likely to buy from you. And the second logic thing with the video is that you use the video to tell your full story. Okay, here is like where you get more, a higher chance to tell not only the story, but to immerse the customers into your brand, to the product benefits. What will it do for them? Because at the end of the day, customers care about themselves, not about you or your brand. So you can easily communicate all those benefits of your brand to the customer. Speaker 2: Cool. Awesome. And I guess in terms of once we start implementing this, I'm curious to know from your experience, what is usually on average an uplift you see comparing a brand that has no storytelling to storytelling? Because people also want to know what is the risk reward ratio, right? Like if it's only going to give me a tiny increment, I might not invest my time. Compared to something that's going to be really impactful. So I'm very curious, like from your side, what do you see is usually the increment people can expect out of something like this? Speaker 1: That's an interesting question. It depends on the niche. OK, I tell you, it will increase 50% your conversion rates. It has happened to us, but I wouldn't say it has happened in unsaturated categories. But let's say, yeah, roughly, we have seen increments from 5% to up to 50% more in conversion rates. But it's not in the same category, we cannot compare apples with pears. Okay, but what happens here, what happens if you have an established listing, an established brand with in the supplements category? And you can see there, maybe you can consider them 1% or 5% increment low, but that 5% increment can basically make up for hundreds, thousands of dollars, if not millions per year. So the rights, it's a strike. But we have in the categories we have seen the highest conversion lift is in the less saturated ones, of course, like in the kitchens, supplies on the toys category that are less saturated in comparison to supplements. But we always seen an increment to To the conversion rate, we make sure of that, actually, because yeah, not like that. We give all the deliverables and we always are with the customers at least 90 days after we implement the new content. So we make sure that the content is performing as it should. Speaker 2: Awesome. Now to start, I guess, also bringing this full circle, right? Something I would like to also sometimes understand is that when you go into the storytelling, right? How does, and I bring this very quickly towards the end because I'm sure this is something a lot of people is being playing with, how does AI plays a role now? I would assume that now with AI, it's even faster you can research your audience, really understand what kind of tonality you need to have, what kind of elements, because you can research more data way faster. So I'm curious to know, like, do you see also AI playing a key role here in terms of being even more efficient when it comes to all of that? Speaker 1: Totally agree with you. Like we are, we love AI. Let's say that. And we're really living interesting moments here because with AI, there is no doubt execution is faster. All the research can be done faster and you can even generate visuals. You can generate copy. Okay. Which is amazing. But what hasn't become easier is knowing what to say, how to position your brand and your product, and how to make it actually convert. So yeah, you will create a full listing in a couple of clicks, but it doesn't mean that it will convert, right? That's where I think most brands are struggling, even using AI, because now it's like you have way more, like a thousand times more information now. I don't think we didn't have a lack of information problem before, but now you have way more to analyze. And now you have to bring that down in a way that you can lead with clarity. Okay. Speaker 2: Love it. Love it. Cool. So I think to be honest, Corina, I mean, I think this is a topic that we could be going for so long and I know this is kind of more An overview of what is happening because there's so much more technicality and execution when it comes to making all this happen and that's what you guys specialize on. So tell us more about, you know, how people can reach out to you because I'm sure many people want to explore how this could be a good fit for them and really understand how this could help them, you know, especially in 2026, optimize and be more scalable when it comes to the sales on Amazon. So where people can find you. Speaker 1: Yeah, well, we will leave our website here, which is like our company name, saltoinnovation.com. And then they will have a button that they can look at. Yeah, and see how we can implement StorySale in your brand. Speaker 2: Awesome. Thank you, Corina. It's been a pleasure. I invite everybody to check Corina's website. She's done a very good job when it comes to everything around content, especially this methodology of storytelling. So something that I feel most brands, to be honest, are not doing. That's why they're struggling. So definitely worth having a look. Other than that, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. And I guess I'll see you in a couple of weeks in Sofia, isn't it? Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Unknown Speaker: Thank you. Speaker 2: Have a good one. Unknown Speaker: Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. While you are at it, we would appreciate it if you could leave an honest rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That will make it easier for others to find out about the show and benefit from it. Want more? Visit our website at www.ecomcy.com where you can get your first consultation for free or find us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at Ecomcy.