Amazon + Off-Amazon Growth Strategy: How to Turn Ads, SEO, and Data Into an Engine | EP. 222

Andrew Maff 00:02
You're going to have people that go to your website and leave and go to Amazon, like it's just going to happen almost all the time it's going to happen. So allowing them to just go ahead and do that is is fine, because you're really doing nothing but improving the customer experience.

Narrator 00:15
Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I'm your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce Industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!

Andrew Maff 00:29
Hello and welcome to another episode of the E comm show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am going to be running solo again because I wanted to talk to everyone a little bit about off Amazon Marketing and how you can use different elements from that to grow your Amazon business, as well as how you can use the Amazon business to grow your off Amazon business. It's a little convoluted, but here's here's my thought process, right?

Andrew Maff 01:00
So when you look at your average consumer, they have, especially after covid, they learned how to do some serious due diligence on their shopping habits. And so what that basically did is it taught the average consumer, when you're seeing an advertisement, you can learn a little bit more about the business before you make the purchase, right? What they tend to do? And let's say they start on Tiktok. They see an ad. They like the ad, they go to the Tiktok profile to see what this business has been posting. This is often why we suggest you have to make sure that you are actively posting on whichever social media platform you're utilizing, because they want to know that you're not a scam, and they just didn't get hit with a random ad. Sometimes it can be argued to do the same on other social media platforms, because some people like Tiktok and Instagram pretty equally. So then they'll go to Instagram to see what you post there. But if the ad is taking them to a website, let's say a lot of users will actually leave the website and go to Amazon. A, to see if they can get your exact same product at the exact same price, but a little bit faster, or is it less expensive? Or they'll just go there to learn about your reviews. There's a theory, which I've seen my wife do this verbatim, is users believe that the reviews on your DTC website can often be manipulated, especially if you have like, a flawless score. If you've got like five stars across the board, it's usually bullshit. So they want to go somewhere else where they know you can't control the reviews and learn more about you from there. So they go over to Amazon, they learn about it, and then it depends. Then it's just a price game, right? Sometimes it's a time game, but it's typically a price game. So the user has learned how to do all this due diligence and a lot more. And so one of the things that that basically taught us to do is we have to make sure that we understand that it's the rising tides lift all boats concept, right. Wherever you're advertising, it's growing more and more brand awareness and knowledge into your product line, and is allowing the consumer to understand that this product exists, and if they want it, they're going to go wherever they're most comfortable to shop to get it. A lot of times, that's Amazon, depending on the situation, on your website, that could be your website. So because of this, if you're running ads on Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, or if you're doing Pinterest or whatever, no matter what you're doing, it can really incentivize them to go to Amazon as opposed to your website, or vice versa. There's definitely been some people that have been frequent purchasers we've seen on Amazon for certain brands, and then they realize I'm becoming pretty loyal to this brand. Maybe I should go to their website. No, they have a pop up, or 10% off his discount, or maybe I go there, just so that I can get coupon codes all the time. So there's a dozen different reasons that they would do it. So because this user's customer journey is becoming so fluid, you have to make sure that your marketing pertains to that too, pertains to that pertains. Is not a word, I don't think.

Andrew Maff 03:59
But that's where you have to then think, okay, how can I use all of my different data points? How can I built all these assets? Right? I've built this business on Amazon. I've built these ads on Amazon. I've built these users coming to my listings. I've built all this information on Amazon, then on your website. I've built all of this organic traffic, I've built all these social media followers, I've built this email list. You've developed all of these assets, and the question becomes, how do you leverage those assets? That's where it becomes very interesting. So first I want to talk about how you can grow your Amazon business, leveraging off Amazon Marketing Strategies. And there's some standard ones, right? Yeah, you can run an email and send people straight to Amazon. Done. You can run Google ads and meta ads, Tiktok ads, or whatever, send them straight to Amazon. Easy. There's a few that it gets a little convoluted, and that's kind of what I wanted to talk about today, the ones that aren't as obvious. And then I'm going to talk to you about doing the vice versa. The reason I'm gonna talk about the Amazon one first is because. I know most people listen this podcast or Amazon sellers, and then they also have a D to C site, and they tend to look at them siloed, individual sales channels.

Andrew Maff 05:10
I like to look at them a little bit more holistically, because if you look at and I know I did a podcast about this, I think, last month, where I like to look at ad spend across all sales channels, and then start to break it down, because it helps me paint the picture of how much net new customers am I building on any of these sales channels, how much brand awareness Am I developing on any of these sales channels. But let's talk about the marketing side, right? So the first one I want to talk about the SEO side. I know I did a podcast on this, I think a couple months ago, probably one of my favorite topics to talk about. So if this interests you, I would highly suggest going over there and checking it out, but leveraging traditional SEO strategies to grow your Amazon business.

Andrew Maff 05:55
So every high level to make this relatively quick for you, every website has a domain authority. Amazon's is effectively perfect at 100 right? Every page, though, has its own page authority. And when you first launch a page, it starts off with its own page authority. And so if you have a website with like, a 20 domain authority, and you launch a new site on, I'm sorry, you launch a new page on this website, it's going to take you a little while to get a tolerable page authority, because your domain is only going to allow you to go so far. Amazon's is effectively perfect. So when you launch a new product, it can start to rank relatively quickly, but you still have to give it some love to get it up there and get it highly, more highly ranked. So what you have to look at as traditional SEO approaches, but target them towards your Amazon listings. So backlinking, getting backlinks to your Amazon listing is fantastic if you're doing affiliate marketing and they're linking on a blog or something that's already a checkbox, but you can do traditional backlinks. You can help create content, or do guest posts, or even create your own blog and actually make sure that you're linking back to Amazon, and the more and more backlinks that you grow, and the more and more content that you're developing, the more that listing is going to start to rank better on Google. And then, as you know, if it ranks well on Google, you're getting up to, let's say, page one in a perfect world, and you're in position one in a perfect world, you're now getting all this organic traffic to your Amazon listing. And there is nothing Amazon loves than off Amazon traffic. And the more that that's coming in, for an audience that already has a high intent, they're more likely to purchase, which means your conversion rate is going to be high, which means not only you're going to get more revenue, but your BSR is going to improve.

Andrew Maff 07:36
You can do this same thing with PR elements, listicles, things like that. Anything you can do to start getting your product even mentioned, or your brand name even mentioned, you're starting to go and see more and more improvements on Amazon, even though you're doing off Amazon Marketing from that all the llms, your Chatgpts of the world. It's the same thing. The thing that they really look for when you ask, like, hey, what's the best of this type of thing is backlinks, because it's proving that people are referencing you more and more, and then just mentions, just general mentions, even if it's not linked to you, people that are talking about your brand name. Is fantastic. LL ChatGPT used to lean in really heavily on Reddit, and it's not doing it as much anymore, but so was Google. Google was really leaning in heavy on it, but not as much anymore, but they're still referencing people's opinions outside of just fact or stuff that maybe you made on other people's websites. So from an SEO perspective, that's easily one of my favorite strategies. There's some other things you can do in there where you can use like Google ads to drive traffic to a blog page, to get the blog page to rank really well for a certain keyword, and then you make sure that your Amazon listing is in that blog and the keyword, it's linked for that keyword that you're trying to target, and that really helps your listing over to like, there's some, like, convoluted stuff that, like, my SEO team would have to, like, really take that explain better. Maybe I'll bring them on the show next time, but that's a strategy that I absolutely love.

Andrew Maff 09:05
Paid advertising side. This one's a little hit or miss. There are companies out there that claim that they can track sales coming from Amazon and directly attribute them back to things like Google and Meta I'm calling bullshit. I've seen them, and it's usually like, not 100% accurate. And I like, I don't really like things that are 100% accurate. So the issue with running Google ads and meta ads is you're running those ads directly to your Amazon listing, and the only thing that you can do, because Amazon doesn't talk back to those platforms. Is optimized for maximize clicks or in for Meta. It's like landing page views or link clicks, right? The problem is, is that basically tells both platforms get me as much of people that are willing to click on shit, and that's it. So not necessarily more likely to convert and what that does is that drives a lot of traffic to your listing, which is great, but typically unqualified traffic, so it's just tanks your conversion rate, which obviously is going to tank overall sell through, and so your BSR actually starts to fall. So you can have the opposite problem. Now there are some scenarios where you can get a little bit more, a little bit more creative with it, where you can create a landing page, send them a landing page first, and have them educate themselves there, and then have the conversion be a button click over to, let's say, an available on Amazon, button that then sends them to Amazon. And obviously, if you're using the affiliate link, you can track that so you so it's, it's nice, and it's better because you can track it through the affiliate link. But that data is still not kicking back, so it's still not perfect, but I do, I do like it. I prefer to do that actually on DTC sites. I know it's if you're, if you are really sick and tired of Amazon, and you're trying to grow your actual like DTC, your own e commerce website business. You will hate this idea, but I promise you, it works really well, putting an available on Amazon button on your PDP, and allowing people to just go straight to Amazon if that's what they want to do. I know you hate it, but a you set up the affiliate link so you get the 10% commission on it. It's not entirely trackable, which is part of the problem, but you can put an event code on it, and so it helps a little bit.

Narrator 11:29
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Andrew Maff 12:02
You're going to have people that go to your website and leave and go to Amazon like it's just going to happen almost all the time. It's going to happen. So allowing them to just go ahead and do that is is fine, because you're really doing nothing but improving the customer experience. Plus then they're not going to Amazon searching for you and then actually finding some competition that maybe was better priced and now you lost them, right? Or the Buy with prime side. I also love the Buy with prime side, because you get to keep all that data that obviously helped, that does help grow. So this is actually something, by the way, I learned this, unfortunately, too recently. This was in September. I spoke at Innovate, did a little bit of a presentation around something similar to this, and talked about some buy with prime stuff, and one of the Buy with prime reps pulled me aside after the show and go, actually, that's not entirely true. It's like, oh, cool, great. I lied to everyone. But basically, I've always said that one of the biggest problems with buy with prime is that it doesn't it doesn't affect your ranking on Amazon. So what's very interesting is the Buy with prime team on Amazon is very separated from, like pretty much other teams. So like people that are involved in how the algorithm runs and things like that, they have, they don't even know to begin on how to cut, how to get in touch with them. So the interesting thing is, there they ran a bunch of tests, and they can't say for sure, because they would just, obviously, there's no proof behind it. But they ran a bunch of tests, and in almost every instance, for the most part, they saw brands really leveraging buy with prime, saw improved bsrs on Amazon only because the theory is, on Amazon, you're obviously fulfilling at FBA in that scenario. If you have buy with prime and because you're seeing more sell through, that's all the the algorithm likes to see. So it's improving your BSR over time because you're getting more sell through. So there's an argument for buy with prime to actually also improve your Amazon business as well. Email is another great one. I love email. I think that sometimes giving, depending on the situation, giving users the ability to go to either your website or Amazon is another fantastic way. You can also look at how you can generate emails through Meta and then just have a newsletter. And do it that way if you don't want to have, if you don't want to have a website, which I don't recommend. I recommend. There's really like, there's countless ways to do it, and if you start to look at it, the struggle always becomes, and it's always the biggest issue I have with having this conversation with brands is unless you're willing to look at your entire business holistically, these strategies are very difficult to prove right, because you're sending the traffic to Amazon, and then you have the black box of Amazon. You could use affiliate links, but they're glorified UTM codes, so those things break. People start shopping on their webs, on their phone, then they move to desktop. Like it's not perfect, but it can work really well in some scenarios.

Andrew Maff 14:59
So every brand is different. Every product is different. Some products require a ton of education, and sometimes the sales cycles on them a little bit longer. So it's not always the best approach, but I digress, I still think that it can be a fantastic way. Realistically, there's almost anything right, like there's we work with brands now where they will do really big sales on Amazon, and we'll use their Meta ads. We'll use Google Ads pop ups on their website. We'll use email and tell people like, hey, go if you want this go to Amazon and buy it, because we're having a big sale there. Helps from sell through perspective, sometimes that they've got too much stock or anything, but that's one of my favorite ways to kind of look at like, how can we use all of the assets that you've developed to grow the business, wherever we need to at that time. You could have too much stock at FBA. Let's push it there. You could have a new product you launched on Amazon. Let's push everyone there first, because then new product launches are fantastic. You get that snowball effect. Things work out fantastically. So there's a lot of different directions in how you can kind of use your off Amazon Marketing to grow on Amazon.

Andrew Maff 16:05
Now, I kind of want to look at it the other way though, right? Because this is always the big question you end up with. You end up with these brands that are just tired of Amazon, right? Like competitions getting wild. It's a lot of overseas sellers, at least in the US, so you end up with basically a race to the bottom that, like, frankly, like a lot of brands just can't do. And so they have to look at, how do I grow my business from an off Amazon perspective? And so I'm not so reliant on this. I think that there's a lot of backdoor ways to still grow your Amazon because checkout is seamless. It's so easy for people to just hit a button and check out on Amazon, so That's often why people like it as well, because it's quick and painless. So the question is, can your website do the same? But there are ways to grow your off Amazon business, leveraging Amazon's own data, and some of them are gray areas TOS may not be a fan of what I'm going to say in some scenarios, some of them are completely white hat, and Amazon encourages it. One of the things that's always a gray area is the concept of doing inserts in your products. I like them. I've never seen anyone get flagged for them. There's kind of some things that you have to do to make sure that you don't get flagged for them. But I'd be lying if I didn't tell you, probably two in every five boxes that show up to my house have some type of insert in them, and they're still shipping. I think that Amazon frowns upon it. But if it's inside your package, it's effectively part of the product. And so if you're encouraging people to register their product on your website, or you're encouraging them to come back to your website to get X percent off next time, that's a fantastic way to use Amazon as more of a customer acquisition channel.

Andrew Maff 17:57
The other side of it is a lot more white hat, and this is my favorite. But I actually just spoke with my Amazon rep yesterday, actually about this. It's leveraging DSP. So if you have, if you, if you use MCF, even if you just use it for one product, handful of products, whatever, or if you buy with prime and same thing, one product, handful of products. Amazon allows you to run ads from Amazon back to your website. So don't think about like, okay, I can use all of Amazon's data to run ads. Because while that sounds fantastic, that's a huge audience, and you don't entirely know their intent. You can figure that out within DSP, but I like to stay let's go low hanging fruit. Let's go after the obvious. Let's go after your customers, people that purchase you on Amazon. Let's wait 30 days, run ads to them and tell them to go back to your website for the next round. Or maybe they bought something and you can upsell them on something that you don't sell on Amazon on your website. Or, you know, maybe you, maybe you don't want to buy anything, maybe you want to encourage them to register for something. There's so many options, right? You can do it for your competitors too. So they bought with your competitor, or they visited your listing and didn't convert. Like, stay middle of funnel. Focus on that audience going back to your website, and is a fantastic way to use Amazon as a customer acquisition channel and incentivize people to shop with you on your website for the next time, or at least give you their information so you can start to earn your data back from Amazon. The issue with this was what I spoke to my rep about, was like Amazon, uh, by the way, and if anyone wants this, let me know, MCF, DS, MCF, and buy with prime. Even if you try it for a while and you don't, you don't have to keep it. They will give you a $20,000 ad spend credit, but it's matching on DSP, so a lot of people. People like, their ears perk up and they're like, Whoa. You're going to give me 20 grand to do this, yes, but you got to spend 20 grand on DSP to do it. And if you ever run ads on DSP before, you're typically, most brands are just they're not playing in the streaming world as much as I think they should. And so typically they're mostly display ads, and those can be kind of hit or miss. So they have to be creatives got to be flawless, otherwise it's going to suck. So you got to work with a really talented agency plug.

Andrew Maff 20:29
So you got to work with someone that, like really knows how to do it correctly, to get it to work well. And I think that not as many people have adopted DSP nearly as much as Amazon would like them to. Maybe that's why they're doing the matching credit, I don't know, but I love it. I think it's a fantastic process. I love the idea of I love the idea of not being so reliant on Amazon, but I also hate the idea of Amazon not existing because I think it's a fantastic customer acquisition channel. So the question becomes, how do you leverage your assets from an off Amazon perspective to grow on Amazon, and how do you leverage the assets that you have on Amazon to grow off Amazon? And then are you willing to look at your business from a more holistic perspective and looking at your overall revenue? Because at the end of the day, it matters how much money is in your bank account, and you're not going to tell me, okay, that dollar came from Amazon, that dollar came from Walmart, that dollar came No, you're gonna look at one big fat number in your in your bank account, and you're gonna be like, awesome. So that's all you got to do. That's, that's my thought process around both Amazon and off Amazon and how they can work together. Because, you know, you get brands that are solely DTC, and they kind of want to get onto the Amazon train, but they're a little worried about it, but I think that there's a correct way to do it. And then you have brands that are on the Amazon train and they want to get into E commerce, so they're not so reliant on Amazon's ridiculous crap that happens all the time, but like, it's a different world. It is. It is two different worlds that when they work together, it can be fantastic for brands, but you have to make sure that, not only from a marketing perspective, but from a fulfillment perspective, you have everything cohesive so it can all be done correctly. Another thing that you can do which is relatively similar, MCF, will fulfill directly at a Tiktok. So if you, even if you don't want to build your own ecommerce website just yet, you can start selling on Tiktok and just have Amazon do all the fulfillment. So if you're shoving stuff into FBA, you can do the exact same thing. Let Amazon ship it all out and lean in on Tiktok. And it's a great way for you to, like, kind of test out the off Amazon world and see how it does for you, and if audiences are willing to be interested in your product, if you only do it that way, you're kind of limiting yourself to just the audience on Tiktok, which I don't care what anyone says, it's still the people that are pulling the trigger on sales tip or on any purchases are typically still younger and they're usually lower price point stuff. Yeah, but that was my rant for today. That's my theories on on Amazon, off Amazon, and how you can benefit both worlds as usual. Thank you all so much for joining me. Please do the usual rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff, or head over to the ecom show.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But usual. Thank you all for joining and I'll see you next time. Have a good one!

Narrator 23:24
Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to Ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce, sellers looking to accelerate their growth, go to Blue tusker.com now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show you. The.