Inside a $3M Amazon Launch

Inside a $3M Amazon Launch Speaker 2: Welcome back to Better Advertising with BTR Media. Today, I'm incredibly excited to have one of our very own on the podcast. Zach and I actually just made it back from Miami, where Zach and his brand Simmons were nominated for a Drum Award. So for one, congratulations on that, Zach. Speaker 1: Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. Speaker 2: Not only that, I'm underselling it a bit. It wasn't just an award. You were nominated for Most Effective Commerce Media Campaign, which is pretty dang impressive in itself. But I think the part that's really cool is this specific brand went from $0 to $3 million in ordered revenue in 12 months. That is exceptional. You put a lot of work into this and I think that the nomination just goes to show the heart and soul you poured into this launch. But I think it's cool because a lot of people have this fallacy. I know that you can't launch on Amazon anymore or it's too competitive and too expensive. Now, it may be a little bit expensive, but if you do things right, I think there's still so much opportunity on the platform. And this campaign, this nomination really goes to show how much opportunity there is. Do you want to talk a little bit about what this launch was like and how you tackled the project? Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. I would say number one, you know, breaking into a space like pet food, right? It is not a, an easy task, right? There's a lot of big players, a lot of really established brands. So, you know, number one, it was just about learning, right? We had the discussion early with the brand that we wanted to take our first 60 to 90 days, right, to just learn, like, where are we placing the market? What are our price points compared to competitors? Where are we converting? You know, those types of learnings, right? This was 2024, so this is pre-AMC, right? There was no, you know, kind of, I don't want to say easy entry, but it was very much, let's take 90 days, let's invest, let's learn. And then from there was really, you know, finding what works, scaling that from a spend, from a visibility aspect. And then, you know, really leveraging tentpole events, right? You know, in a category such as pet food, right? It's all about customer acquisition when there is demand on platform. So, yeah, that was really the main focus there for the first year, for really first, I guess, three to six months was learning and then scaling our learnings to customer acquisition. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I mean, just scrolling through the notes here, that first month, the conversion rate was around 10%, which is still really good for a new product launch. Because when I say these were new products being launched, I mean, brand new. We did not have, you know, review authority. So 10% conversion rate in this category is still relatively good. You actually ended the year with a 22% conversion rate. So conversion rate doubled once you started driving some authority. One of the parts that I love is how we leaned into Prime Day. So the launch in general was successful, I would say. It wasn't a profitability first launch, which is one of the reasons we took on this brand is they had very realistic expectations around ACOS and Tacos objectives for a new brand. But then Prime Day came around, and we've always been very outspoken around pit bull events, I would say, at Better Media and the opportunity and value here. But some of these numbers are absolutely fantastic. I mean, at this point, we had enough data to really understand where we had a competitive advantage in the category. So you lean into that, you build our traditional ranking style campaigns. But the numbers are fantastic. That was your first jump and subscribe and save. You hit over a thousand percent growth in subscribers by taking advantage of Prime Day. That's huge. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, it was really... I didn't want to over-complicate it, right? It was seeing what works, scaling what works, right? There was no magic pill, no very complex situation. It was, where are we converting? Let's dominate those keywords for as much as possible. Let's have the discussion. I think that was something that was really important, right, ahead of time. Look, we're not going to be focused on achieving a 20% TOC us or whatever you want to throw out there, right? Our main focus here is customer acquisition, right? Because that's going to lead to subscribe and save purchases down the line. And that's where you have to work hand in hand with the brand that you're working with there is what are our subscribe and save deals that we're running in place there? What is the focus here? So yeah, it was primarily focusing top of search. And I'm going to be talking about competitor targeting as well, because we knew that we were going to have a price point advantage against a lot of the category. And taking advantage of people who are willing to take a risk right in Prime Day, where buying a 10 is super high. And then being able to retain those customers, of course, is super important. As we've seen, you know, throughout 2024 to 2025, we do a great job of that as well. So it was very straightforward, I would like to say. Speaker 2: Yeah. Straightforward for us. This is the learning that I've had is, you know, just because we think something's fundamental and basic to a strategy, a lot of others still don't quite do it. We're just really good at launches, I would say. When or have you incorporated DSP into the overall strategy? Speaker 1: I believe we launched DSP after our first year. So we didn't run DSP at all during the first 12 months. We launched, if I'm not mistaken, around month 12 to 14, somewhere in that range. Speaker 2: I couldn't remember what that was. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Once we saw we had the opportunity, you know, off platform, you know, to drive more awareness to the brand, right? I don't want to say we had scaled out totally right on PPC because there's always room to scale, improve new launches, new initiatives coming out from Amazon that we can take advantage of. But we saw the need, right, to start targeting audiences versus just focusing keyword targeting. So, yeah. Speaker 2: That's a great call out. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: I think that's something that I kind of want to back into here is what made this launch so successful? Yes, the fundamentals, but also the way you communicated with the client and the objectives and the education and some of the nuances in the category as well. Because you mentioned, you know, that the tacos objective wasn't going to be realistic if it was sub 10%. So you still have to communicate and show that you're driving value elsewhere and tell that story. We know that this is a product that has pretty high repurchase rates, if done well. So you were able to tell that story of, hey, we're really looking at new customer acquisition. We're looking at subscribe and save. Amazon in general was a new platform for this brand. So when you're launching on a new platform, you're not always quite aware of exactly what KPI's are available to you. And I think that's something that you did super, super well here is you built the foundation, you told the story of what we're trying to achieve. And now as we're looking at year two, we're continuing to grow a ton and you're really starting to incorporate more of those upper final initiatives, right? That's something I'm super excited about is seeing how you guys are expanding into TV And again, that's a whole nother story that you really have to educate your client on when you start looking at TV. You finally got the tacos down to an incredibly profitable place, which is exceptional. And now we're going to be layering in these upper funnel initiatives, which means it's more complexity in our reporting and more complexity in how we're looking at the numbers, which I think is almost as important as the fundamental strategy is how you're communicating the strategy. Speaker 1: Right now, 100%. You know, once we get through that first year and we see continual positive trends in both efficiency, tacos, you know, order revenue, things of that nature, it makes those discussions a lot easier, right? Because we've shown with the data showing that we are gaining market share, gaining interest within the category. So then we can come to the brand and have that discussion. Hey, we want to test these upper funnel initiatives. What do we look like or what does budget or anything look like for next year? Creative look like for next year? You know, being able to have those discussions a lot easier while also, as you mentioned, being able to I don't want to say trained, but almost trained to, you know, let them know, okay, what can we expect from this? Let's run a test. Let's do, you know, going into a different temple. Let's test Fire TV. Let's test DSP. Let's see the effects of those things. So it makes those conversations a lot easier when you have the foundation as solid as we were able to do during those first 12 months. Speaker 2: Absolutely. We love the test and learn mindset here at Better Media. I would say the moment we were in the first beta for AMC, the whole team was pretty much forced to be a power user of it. And the same thing, you know, sponsor prom, sponsor products video. We love the test and learn mentality. Our brands that lean into the test and learn mentality are also the ones that are typically the most disruptive in the category. And I mean, the results speak for themselves. I'm looking at just the prime day numbers in 2025. Conversion rate was 34% across the account. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: If you guys are listening, you remember that we launched with a 10% conversion rate and you were able to push a 34% conversion rate. That is exceptional in this category. I mean, you can justify a lot of high CPCs when you're converting that well and I'm assuming a lot of that was driven from the AMC work you were doing and then just siloing our campaign the way that we do for better targeting. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. I mean, when really it was a game changer when AMC came out for this brand, because we were able to hit all sections of the funnel, right? You know, the new to brand, the high likelihood based on shopping activity, remarketing with those who have clicked and added to cart and haven't purchased, those who have already purchased. We're able to really hit every level of the funnel there. And then just scaling our existing tactics, right? Focusing more on rank, more on sponsored brand video with new creative, DSP coming in and being able to help out there. It all played a part. But ultimately, it was just slowly building on the foundation that we had set, right, just scaling, compounding the spend, and then being able to take advantage of, again, solid product, really good price point versus, you know, competitive high market share. Competitors. And again, continuing to focus on acquisition during those deal periods, right? We'll be able to continuously scale up our daily average, you know, order value and total sales just by focusing on acquisition during those periods and then maybe scaling back and focusing a bit more on efficiency outside of those periods. But yeah, it's ultimately proved a really good playbook for them and something we're, you know, continuously doing going forward. Speaker 2: I love it. For those who are listening in and maybe are not as familiar with BTR strategies, we have actually released a playbook on how we launch our campaigns. And one of the things that we do is we segment all strategies by stages of the funnel. So you heard Zach mention that we have campaigns for ranking and new customer acquisition. We have campaigns for remarketing and loyalty. We have campaigns focused on efficiency. Because we break out our campaigns in this way and we have an incredible nomenclature within Ad Console, it allows us to move quite a bit quicker because now we can go to our brand and report on the discrepancies in these strategies. Maybe our efficiency campaigns have an incredible ROAS, but our ranking campaigns have a low ROAS, high conversion rate. We can report on this in a segmented fashion, but we can also move our budget around really quickly based on client needs. So let's say it's Prime Day and we're focusing on lead-in. We're going to shift our budgets towards our biggest goals, whether efficiency or new customer acquisition. And we can move incredibly quick with this. The client has a lot of transparency behind what's going on in the accounts because they can see it all segmented out. And I think it just makes everything flow so much better, even from a relationship basis. And I think that is probably the biggest key to the foundation we've built that allows us to drive the trust we do with our clients, but also the results on the backend. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. I mean, like you mentioned, it makes it so much easier just to have the conversation and say, you know, say we're going into a meeting, like, oh, how's our ranking campaigns doing? They have visibility to that just by typing in rank, right, in the ad console. We can show it to them through our internal reporting and all that good stuff, but we want them to be able to have the visibility on exactly where their money is going as easy as possible. Not only for their, I guess, peace of mind, but also, like you mentioned, for us, it's very easy for us to be able to To be flexible and be agile in the way that we're allocating budget, going into events, out of events, you know, where we want to focus for the next 30 days. Okay, we have our competitor targeting campaigns labeled out by, say, they want to target a specific brand. We have that labeled. They can go in and see performance. We can go in and adjust our budgets and bids accordingly. So it makes it incredibly transparent, number one, for the brand, but also super easy for us to be able to be As flexible and agile as possible. Speaker 2: Well, it's incredible to hear you get into the weeds and provide this amount of transparency behind something that was so successful. And I cannot shout it from the rooftops enough how proud I am of you and this nomination and getting to, you know, hop on stage and take fun photos with the award. Congratulations, Zach. Like, exceptional, exceptional work. Speaker 1: I really appreciate it. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun, honestly, kind of building it from the ground up, seeing where it's come today. But, you know, more to come here. Speaker 2: More to come. I think that's the perfect note to end on. Again, congratulations. And if you're listening in, give Zach a follow on LinkedIn. We are always posting our recommendations. And as you can hear, the Better Media team has a lot of value to provide. So thank you for sharing so transparently. And hopefully, everyone has a fantastic rest of your week. Bye, guys. Speaker 1: Bye.