Jeff Anderson talks about Ecom Mastery .ai featuring BDSS

It's not a demand generation channel anymore or never really was. Most sellers in competitive niches are playing, you know, they're kind of playing the wrong game if they're coming in and they're chasing rank and defending keywords and they measure their success by revenue and tacos. Competitive niches, the biggest wins often come from not competing. It's knowing your numbers so well that you can confidently walk away from a keyword fight that looks like a win but really isn't. Hey Jeff, how's it going? >> Good. How are you? >> I am excellent. I'm calling you because you are speaking at ecommastery.ai in Nashville April 8th through the 12th. And I wanted to dig into your topic and just get a feel for what you're covering at this event where we're covering all the e-commerce channels along with the latest and greatest in AI. It's the first event of its kind and you're going to be talking about marketing in competitive niches. This is the hardest thing. If we ever want to launch a supplement brand or anything related to a meto product, we have to be ready for competing in that space. It is so tough, but you're a master of it. You're going to be talking about it. How excited are you for this event? >> I am super excited. One, Nashville is a great venue. I love the city of Nashville. I go there every year. So, I'm really excited to go there and I think Kevin's events are always, you know, some of the top tier events out there. So, a great city, a great event. This is going to be a real winner in my opinion. >> I love it. I agree as well. Jeffrey, you're known as the PPC goat. Most most sellers in competitive niches feel like they're throwing money into a black hole. What's one thing that separates the sellers who win in brutal niches from the ones who bleed out? Yeah, the ones that win, you know, they really understand that Amazon is a harvest channel. It's not a demand generation channel anymore or never really was. Um, most sellers in competitive niches are playing, you know, they're kind of playing the wrong game. If they're coming in and they're chasing rank and defending keywords and they measure their success by revenue and tacos, most of the bigger winners, they're optimizing based on contribution margin dollars, not percentage. you know, it should be the actual dollars in the bank at the end of each month. And kind of the uncomfortable truth that in competitive niches, the biggest wins often come from not competing. It's knowing your numbers so well that you can confidently walk away from a keyword fight that looks like a win but really isn't. So, it's the sellers who bleed out are the ones that, you know, who won the keyword, but they also lost the margin a lot of times. So the ones who I think that it win are the ones that ask the three questions. There's probably three questions that you should ask before you spend a dollar. And that is what is my contribution dollar rank or how do I want to say that? What is my contribution margin dollar at rank number four versus rank number one? Is the demand something that I created? You know, did I create this in, you know, with a metacreative or did I create it with a viral Tik Tok video or is this demand that I'm borrowing? you know, it's just actual search traffic that exists on Amazon naturally. And what happens if I stop defending this keyword? You know, am I gonna have more dollars in the bank? You know, my revenue may slip, my unit sales may slip, but you know, my dollars in the bank actually increase. So, >> that's it. It's just about knowing your math, protect your margins, and let the competitors fight over the expensive terms. I think that's really profound to me because I know some pros sellers that are eight figure sellers that got into a competitive niche and they're they're really good at Amazon. They've done eight figures on Amazon in other categories and they got into a really competitive niche and they just were crushed and they're not having the same success that they had in other categories. And I think what you described, what you just described is the reason for that because you're right, Amazon is no longer a create demand platform. It used to be we could capture so much traffic with Amazon PPC, but times have really changed. That's why we're having this event, ecommastery.ai, because we want to talk about all the channels. We really want people to understand what channels they should be on, how to actually grow on those channels, and how to utilize AI in that. So, if a seller is in a niche where the top three competitors are spending 50k a month on ads, what's the realistic strategy for a smaller brand to compete or should they pivot? >> I'm going to give you an answer that's probably a little controversial. If you're a small brand looking at a niche where, you know, entrenched players have been there for years, you know, the ranking has kind of settled in, they're spending 50k a month, Amazon's probably not your path to winning. I I mean it could be a slow growth channel for you, but it you know it's probably not going to be your primary channel. You have to look at it as Amazon's a mature low alpha channel right now. The sellers winning in the competitive niches are already there. You know, they're entrenched. They have reviews, the rank, the data, you know, the margins to absorb a fight. Like, you know, we have the margins to absorb a fight of a new player. Um, you know, a new player may not have those margins or, you know, not be VC backed or something like that. So if you're coming in small and you're trying to outspend them or outspend, you know, bigger players on their home turf, it's that's not a strategy. It's a donation to Amazon. That's what it really is. So um the exception is if you you know, you have massive external traffic. You know, if you have a viral, you know, Tik Tok blowing up or a meta engine that's, you know, just printing and influencers driving sales, then Amazon becomes what it's supposed to be, you know, a harvest channel capturing demand you created elsewhere. So, if you don't have that um external engine, you need to look for other channels. Like, you know, a good example is uh Apploving. Like, that was printing money a couple months ago. It's kind of gotten a little saturated now, but that was a new channel that popped up and the people that got on there early, you know, printed pretty well. >> That's incredible. I know you're going to be really dropping a lot of great strategies about getting into competitive niches, uh, growing in competitive niches, and what is one strategy you'll share that most sellers have probably never even considered? >> Yeah, I don't think it's so much of a strategy. It's it's just a mindset shift about what Amazon actually is now. Um, you know, you still see, you know, sellers looking for hacks. You still see the advertisements out there. you know, the trick, the secret campaign structure that's going to unlock everything. I mean, that's the old game. That was the game when we first got in, you know, um that's back when Amazon, what I call was a high alpha channel. So, there'll be, you know, a whole talk on, you know, alpha versus beta and where Amazon actually sits in that right now. And, you know, you can find the edge and exploit it and how to do that. But, you know, what I'm going to walk through in Nashville is how we use AI to be operationally excellent in PPC. you know, not to find the magic, you know, it's to eliminate the waste and how we're doing that and how we're looking at that in a brand that does 100 million a year. So, you know, a lot of data, a lot of data points, you know, it's a little bit of the unsexy stuff, but that's what you get in a low alpha channel sometimes. So, >> you know, I think it's the unsexy stuff that wins. And the more speakers that I've been interviewing throughout this process, the more I'm learning, hey, we're all focused on the basics. That's how we grow. We get back to basics. we get back to what works and also we have to pay attention to as you brought up the changes. This is not we're not playing the same games anymore. Now the game has changed and we need to look at it differently. Mindset shift is huge and this event is all about mindset and strategy shifts based on what's happening now. So I love that you're going to be sharing that. I can't wait to learn from you. I can't wait to see some of these case studies and from all the speakers that are going to be out there covering every topic from hiring to business growth to utilizing AI to growing on each of the channels. Just really going to be awesome. So, this is April 8th through the 12th in Nashville. Uh you guys can go to ecommastery.ai. You can use codemastery to save 20%. Jeff and I are going to be there. We can't wait. And uh we'll see you there. Yeah.