Strategic Marketing on Amazon with Kevin King

Strategic Marketing on Amazon with Kevin King 00:00:20 I'm Lori Flackhead of Saltar Solutions and I'm here today on Focus Forward with an amazing guest. I am so excited to introduce Kevin King, six-figure-a-month Amazon seller. Kevin, thanks so much for being here. I'm glad to be here, Lori. How are you? I'm awesome. I'm so excited to be having this interview with you today. You're going to be sharing some really high-level information. So just give us a brief introduction into how you got involved in Amazon. Well, I've been in the drug marketing business for quite a long time, and I've been selling on Amazon as an FBA seller for the past year. But I've been selling on Amazon itself as a platform probably for 15 or 20 years. I have one of those old school accounts on their old platform where I can get the daily withdrawals, don't have to wait two weeks. 00:01:12 So that kind of tells you how far back I go. But I did something in their Advantage program for a while with calendars. We sold calendars that they would actually purchase orders for and we would ship in. So I've been doing that for a while. We just started the FBA about a year ago. Okay, great. So you must have a lot of experience in that much time. Lots of different experience, lots of changes, right? Lots of changes have happened, that's for sure, in the past year. It's a constantly changing animal. Amazon is constantly refining what they're doing, especially with all these FBA folks that have come in um and some of them that are trying to game the system and do different things; Amazon's starting to tighten their belt a little bit and and clean up, uh, clean up what some of those people were doing to protect their platform and their customers. 00:02:05 Yeah, I think that that's a good idea because sometimes there's some crazy stuff going on. But today on the show, what I would like us to talk about is marketing on Amazon. It's so interesting because I think that there's two different camps on it. Some people are heavily into marketing and marketing their product, pay-per-click, and all different types of things. And other people, it's more like hope marketing. They put the product up there and hope somebody sees it. So I would like to. Dive in and figure out how to maximize marketing for the Amazon platform, sure Amazon's the world's biggest mall basically. And so when you start to sell a product on Amazon, you don't need to worry about anything outside of Amazon-you don't need to worry about Facebook, you don't need to worry about Instagram, you don't need to worry about Google. 00:02:53 Put all your effort into maximizing your opportunity on Amazon because Amazon is like a freeway where there's cars driving at 60 miles an hour down the freeway, and you're standing on the side of the freeway, the credit card reader, and as they pass by with their window down, with their credit card out, you're just worried to swipe. So put all your efforts initially into marketing on Amazon. And the number one thing to being successful on Amazon is having something people want. If you have a product, it doesn't matter how good your product is or how bad your product is, if it's not something that's in demand, you're not going to sell a lot of them. So there's a lot of tools out there that you can use to do research to actually see what people are coming to Amazon to buy in significant numbers. 00:03:38 So that would be one of the first things is to make sure you have something that people want. The second thing is you want to make sure there's not just a ridiculous amount of competition. Some competition is fine, but you want to make sure that there's not 5,000 other people selling the exact same thing as you. And if there are and you still decide to go through what you're doing, you have to make sure you differentiate yourself. You have to be different. You need to be the only one that has this certain feature, the only one that has this extra bonus with it or whatever it may be so that you stand out. And then you have to have a good product. 00:04:12 It doesn't matter how well you sell on Amazon or how much money you spend on marketing on pay-per-click or anything like that. If the product in the end is no good, you're not going to succeed. You might at first, you might get a lot of sales, but once people start coming in with reviews and realizing this is not a good product, you're going to be dead in the water and you're going to be liquidating them out. So on Amazon, those are three of the critical things you want to do. Make sure the product is in demand. Make sure you have not a lot of competition or a way to differentiate yourself. And the third is make sure the product is strong and unique. That's great. That's great advice. 00:04:51 So then say you have a good product that people want, but you do have some competition. Or even if you don't, how do you get the word out that you have that product and that product is something that they can pick up at your store? Like how do we do that? Well, on Amazon, everything is based on what's called the A9 algorithm. And there's some guys, they're actually not in Seattle. They're in the San Francisco Bay Area that sit in dark rooms or something and work on this algorithm. And it's one of the smartest algorithms out there. It really zones in on what people want and what to show. What you see when you type in some keywords on Amazon may not be the same thing I see. Because they use your history. 00:05:33 They use your past buying behavior. There's all kinds of things in there. So, what you have to do is you have to get the attention of this algorithm. There are millions and millions of products on Amazon. And so until you have some sort of proof that people actually want your product, Amazon's not going to show it. They're in the business of making money. And so they want to present the products that are most likely to appeal to you at the best price that maximizes their bottom line. So in order to get that attention, you've got to get a few sales because until you have any sales, nobody's going to find you unless you're the only one of that particular thing and nobody else exists with it. But typically, you need a few sales. 00:06:13 And so the first thing you're going to do once you have your product up, is to get reviews. And you don't need a lot of reviews, but you need five or ten reviews on your product. It gives it that social proof because the people on Amazon are really, they really pay attention to the reviews. They may not read every single review, but they're going to at least read the top good ones and the top bad ones. Or if they don't even do that, they're going to look at your star rating to make sure that there's other people that have gone before them. People like to follow, not necessarily lead. And so those reviews are critical. So until you have five or ten of those, You're probably not going to sell a whole lot unless you just have a really trendy item that just people want at that particular time. 00:06:55 But to get those reviews, there's several ways to do that. But I think we'll talk about that in a different episode. The next thing you want to do is the strategy that I use is actually lower my price. I'm coming out with an item I'm originally going to sell at $29. 95. I might actually start at a much lower price, say $14. 95 or $19. 95. Even though I might actually lose some money on every one of those sales, but I need to get some traction. I need to show that A9 algorithm that, hey, people want my product, and I want to associate keywords with my product. So if they type in blue widget, I want my product to come up for blue widget, and I want people to buy it. 00:07:35 So then the A9 algorithm says, okay, Kevin's product for blue widgets is the perfect thing to show to people that are searching for that. So in order to do that, you need – to get some sales. And the best way to do that is to lower your price so it's almost irresistible. So anybody that comes across your listing is going to buy it. And then turn on pay-per-click advertising. And initially you want to turn on an automatic campaign. The automatic campaign initially, instead of a really high, as high as you can afford budget, as you can afford cost per click, maybe $5. You probably won't pay $5. Uh, per click but put 00:08:16 it something high and that's going to give you the data because there's all kinds of tools out there that you can use for keyword research but they're all guessing um they're not actually using true buyer data some of them use Google data some of them go and use when you type in on Amazon and you start to type, you know how it auto-fills? They grab that information which is a good starting point but it's not what people really buy your product done. The only way to get that information is through the pay-per-click or sponsored ads program on Amazon. Because on your organic sales, which are sales that don't come with advertising, you didn't advertise to get that sale. People just found you. They don't tell you how they found you. 00:08:54 They keep that a dark secret. So the only thing you can do is use the sponsored products ads. Let that run for about a week or so. And then you can download a report. And in that report of this automatic campaign, they're going to show you what they served your ad for, all the different keywords, and how many impressions. Which ones were ones that actually resulted in sales. And you want to use that data to readjust your listing to make sure you have the ones that are converting in your title and your bullet points and readjust your listing, see which ones are working. And then you can start like a manual campaign with some of those keywords that are either high impression or that were converting well for you, and actually put those into a manual campaign with an exact and a phrase and an auto. 00:09:44 And go from there. So this is really interesting. What I'm hearing from this is that you're working really hard to understand what the keywords are, how people are finding your products, and you're actually, in essence, buying the data, right? So when you're doing your pay-per-click ad, you're not just trying to get more sales. You're really trying to get the data. That's correct. I operate my pay-per-click in the beginning at a loss. There's something called the ACOS that Amazon tells you in there. That stands for Advertising Cost of Sale. And it's a percentage based on what your selling price is and how much it costs you to actually get that sale. So if your ACOS is 100% and you're selling your item for $10, that means it costs you $10 in advertising to make that sale. 00:10:37 So obviously you're not making any money at that. And the higher that number, the more expensive it is in advertising to make that sale. So you have to play with that data. Amazon, to succeed on Amazon without luck, it's a very scientific, data-driven thing. That's why all these tools have popped up online. There's probably 100 of them out there, people that have created all kinds of software to analyze the data on Amazon. And that's the beauty of Amazon. There's never been anything like this in the past. In the past, you had to kind of guess. Like, hey, yeah, it's a great product. I think it's cool. My friends like it. My family likes it. My neighbors like it. But that doesn't mean the whole world likes it. 00:11:14 And you can use the data on Amazon to really advance yourself and pivot if you need to. If you thought that I've had this happen where I had a mirror product when I thought it was, you know, the word portable is what people will be looking for. Portable mirror. Well, when I ran, so that's what I had in my title. That's what I had. I geared everything to. But when I ran the pay-per-click advertising, I discovered through the auto report that everybody is looking for travel. They're not looking for the word portable. Portable is way down the list. Most people type travel. And so I shifted and changed the word portable to travel in my title and focused on that, and the sales doubled. So you use that data to your benefit on Amazon. 00:11:59 That's the beauty of Amazon. It's not a set it and forget it thing. It's a constantly evolving and you've got to stay on top of it to see what works and what doesn't work. This is brilliant. I love it because I have a product that sells every single day and I'm not exactly sure, because I've never done any pay-per-click or anything. I'm not exactly sure why this particular product sells every day, but every day that product sells. Sometimes two and three sales a day. And since I just started, I'm a little bit confused about why that particular product over all my other products is so successful. But this has given me a great idea. Why don’t I just do the pay-per-click on it and find out what those keywords that people are using are? 00:12:41 Great. That’s what I would recommend is set an auto campaign. And you don’t even just do it low and see what people are searching and what’s converting. Now, the pay-per-click reports run a couple days behind. So a lot of new people get in. And they say, oh, I spent $50 today and I didn’t make a single sale. Well, don’t get discouraged. They’re reporting on Amazon. They’re really fast to tell you how much money you spend, but they’re not really fast to tell you how much money you made. So there's about a two-day lag, sometimes up to a week, because sometimes people put something in their shopping cart or in their wish list and maybe come back to it on payday or when their credit card gets cleared and they make a payment or whatever it may be. 00:13:20 So you've got to give us a little bit of time. Don't get discouraged in the beginning; if you're not seeing any results, okay, great. That's great advice. Thank you. So now I know that you're really interested and working hard to build brands. Can you give us a little bit of an idea about that? Sure. Some people get into this Amazon business and they see it as a cash flow machine, and they don't really care what products they sell. They don't really care. They don't care. They don't care how it's presented. When the customer gets it in the mail, they don't care if it's in a brown box or a nice box. They're just trying to make money. I'm not on Amazon for that reason. I'm on Amazon. 00:14:03 It's a great launching pad to build brands. So the real money in the future is off of Amazon, whether that's in brick and mortar stores, e-commerce sites, my own website. or selling the company. Amazon's a great, great, great place to launch a product. There's nothing else better. But you have to remember it's not the only place. And in order to succeed and protect yourself, I believe you need to create brands. And I have five different brands that I sell on Amazon. And each one of those I'm trying to build into its own little entity so it has its own little following. And every product I do extends that brand. So someone who bought the first product is likely to buy the second one or the third one or the fourth one, or maybe not the second one but they'll buy the third one, so they're all complementary and so everything I do is built around that. 00:14:59 From the packaging I create really nice packaging to my images – uh, the way it's presented, you know. Some people take pictures on Amazon with their camera, they're still their phone, their iPhone or Samsung phone, or whatever, and just put them up and they don't care; well, that says a lot about you. I mean, when someone doesn't know you from Adam, and so when you're not – you're not Phillips, you're not one of these big brands that people trust on Amazon. So when they come across your, your blue widget, you've got to convince them that, 'Hey, you're worth trusting and they're going to value for what they buy. And the way you do that is through your images on your listing. And the images are critical. 00:15:36 I mean, in an Amazon listing, your and bullet points and backend keywords are very important for discoverability. but to help close the sale through price and your images. And so those images, I'll spend $3 ,000 to $5 ,000 creating images sometimes, but that helps me stand out. And in a field where there's a lot of competition, like in the sports category I'm in, there's one of my keywords, if you type it in, there's about 6 ,000 results. But because of my images, I'm like the 15th best seller in that particular. I'll try it out of the gate because people trust me. And so branding is extremely important. And what happens if Amazon shuts your account or Amazon changes their algorithm or the business model? 00:16:21 If you don't have a brand, you're dead in the water. If you have a brand, then you can actually still continue as a business. And it's something that you can sell in the future. It's just having a cash machine that I at any point. Well, that's awesome. That's great advice. I love it. I really believe in brands. People pay more for brands. They trust brands. They feel confident when they're purchasing a brand. And then they're more likely, if they have a good experience, to go back and choose that brand again and again. So there's a level of security when the details. Is there and that brand has been well developed and a strong foundation. So, that's great advice. Now, give me three tips that any Amazon seller can do to market their products more effectively. 00:17:13 The number one thing I would do is do your research on your keywords. There's lots of tools out there. I use about seven different ones and I combine them all into one master list to find my actual keywords. That's the number one-make sure you have the right keywords so that you can even get discovered. The second is make sure you have a really good product. If you don't have a product, if you just are buying the cheapest one that you can get or there's issues with it, then it's just not going to work. No matter how many sales you get initially, it's going to die on you. And then the third is spend money on your images. Spend money to create really compelling images. That's not just show four angles of the product. 00:17:56 Here's the front, back, side, and top. It's show the product and show it in use. Put the consumer in your shoes as if they were holding it or actually using it. Do it from their perspective, and you'll see a lot better results. Great. Thank you so much for being here. This has been a wonderful show. I've learned so much from you. Thanks. I'm glad to be here. I hope I helped a few people. I'm sure you have. Thank you so much, Kevin. Was that amazing or what? I learned so much from this guy. It's just unbelievable. Now I can understand why Kevin King sells over what was it, six figures a month on Amazon? Amazing. So thanks so much for being here. Like, comment, subscribe, share. We really, really appreciate you watching. Thanks. Bye-bye now.