Want to know the secret behind creating a successful business from Amazon to retail spaces? On this 159th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Norm Farrar, Podcast Host & Entrepreneur.  Norm shares his insights on how to build your brand's perceived value and stand out from the competition on any platform.

He also demonstrates how making small adjustments to your marketing strategy can have big results... and shows us exactly how. We’ll cover everything from building a following offline to optimizing eCommerce stores online- all while creating a bullet-proof brand. If you’re looking for some solid marketing foundations- this one is for you!

Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and SUBSCRIBE!

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  
• Listen on:
  

Maximizing Your Online and Offline Presence with Norm Farrar

Andrew Maff and Norm Farrar

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Norm Farrar

Norm Farrar is a visionary entrepreneur who provides online marketing and managed eCommerce solutions for brands. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, and 20th Century Fox. Since the early 1990s, Norm has focused on helping entrepreneurs optimize their operations and unlock their business’s potential. Presently, he hosts the popular eCommerce podcast Lunch with Norm and co-hosts The Marketing Misfits.

00:03

Like a lot of people think that retail is dead, and it's not. It might smell a little funny, but as long as you learn the tricks of the trade and get in and understand it, there's some huge numbers to be made in retail. I

01:09

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm show. I am your host as usual, Andrew, Maff, but today I am joined by the amazing Norm Farrar of Lunch with Norm. Norm the bearded guy, how you doing, buddy, you ready to do this?

01:22

I'm doing great. And yes, I'm ready to do this.

01:25

I am so excited to have you on the show. I'm a big fan of your podcast, so it's always kind of fun to have not only just other podcast hosts on the show, but even people that whose podcasts I listen to, and it is impossible for me to even open up LinkedIn without coming across your amazing beard that I get to see all the time. So I appreciate having you on the show. I also know you're doing you have another podcast now with Kevin King, correct,

01:50

yeah, the marketing misfits.

01:52

How do you find the time to be on so many podcasts and have your own

01:59

time management? Yeah, no, it's, you know, it's funny, but one of the main things that I do to be able to do this is time management, or there's no way in the hell that I'd be able to do it.

02:17

It's, it is crazy. I feel like I see you everywhere. Of course, you stand out. Love the beard. It always is a classic that we get to see coffee. So thank you. Give them away. The one of the reasons I love doing these episodes where I get to, like, interview someone that's also got their own podcast, because most of the time when we get to see you, you are the host, and so we don't get to really learn about you, because you spend so much time talking to other people about them. So now is your time to shine? Cool. We're gonna we're gonna let you do be the, be the center of attention today. Is that work for you? All right,

02:53

here we go. I might be a crappy guest, I don't know, and we're

02:58

gonna find out. I doubt it you know what you're doing. So I always like starting these off with the relatively kind of stereotypical approach, plus with yours, I know we've got a ton to get into, but I'd be, I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about, like, your background. How did you get into all of the different elements that you're specifically around? E Commerce today? Completely

03:19

by fluke. Didn't wasn't supposed to happen. I had a promo company, trink. We'll call it an incentive business. Most people call it trinkets and trash. So I sold pens, food chains, you know, coffee mugs. And we had to find a way to, you know, sell them for more. So this all started with perceived value. How can you sell the same coffee mug for twice the price, or 50% more? So we found a way, and we created this thing called we didn't create it, but it was a vertical integration. So we went out, we bought embroidery places, fulfillment centers, courier companies, and we got to expand. And everything we did was very high quality, and our motto was on time, every time, exactly like you ordered it. Well. From that, we started dealing with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and then we started to get their contracts for their catalogs. So this one fortune 500 company came to me back in the 90s and said, Hey, can you build us a website? And back then, a website. And then what they wanted to do is take a coffee mug, put the dealer's name on. Very simple to do today. Very complicated to do the day before back in that day, and we, I had no idea. I didn't even know what the internet was. And of course, they said, Yeah, sure, we could do that. And so I was able to contract out to a company in India. They built it for me. And then people started saying, Wow, other Fortune fives. Can you. Help us out do it, because we'd have our little, you know, link on the bottom. So then we started building these out. And so we got into E commerce that way. First e commerce site that for myself was back in the 90s, and I was doing print on demand, corporate identity. So we would do a logo, taglines, business cards, letterhead. So all of that. We were one of the first, maybe five companies in the world to do something like that. And then we just got more and more into it. Had a an incubator and a web company, a cert SEO company, way back in the day, we would get pages ranked and then rent out the pages to other companies. 2013 buddy of mine said, you know, we wanted to know if I wanted to go and learn more about ama Kindle. This is the old ASM guys, Jason CAC and Matt Clark. And he said, What do you think? And I said, this sucks. I'm not doing it. So we waited a bit, and then they came out with ASM, The Amazing Selling Machine. Went back to Vegas and said, Yeah, this is cool. Got into it. And before, I think I left the first conference, I heard a guy say he was a doctor. He was from Ireland, and he said that he specializes in, I forget what it was, but he was a specialist. He was not a specialist in Amazon or internet marketing. And he said something along the lines of, if I could only beat the SMP. And I heard that, I walked over, I interrupted the group, and I said, I can do that. And he said, you know, what do you mean? And I said, Yeah, I can definitely beat the S P I'll guarantee you I can beat the SMP. And so he gave me some cash. I created a like he didn't even know what I was doing. I gave him 10 choices. Attend product opportunities, did the branding, did the packaging? Got them on Amazon. They were toys, and then the second one was supplements. And so, yeah, that's where everything started. And I got involved with helping out with some other brands and my own brands on Amazon. I think it was launched before my own brand.

07:28

You're like, you're to me, there's an element of you where you're like, a legend in this space. I've been in this space for a pretty long time. I'm a little over 15 years now. When I started really getting into the Amazon space. Probably, like, eight or nine years ago, you were right there. Like, you were like, I started seeing your face everywhere. I swear I saw you at conferences. And you stand out, which is fantastic. And that obviously helps your personal brand. But like, you know, hearing some of these stories are just amazing. It's like, you know, sitting around and just being like, all right, story time from norm. What do we got? What's going on? Like, I think I've seen you probably at prosper several times. Did you do accelerate this year? I don't think I saw you there this year. No,

08:09

I know I didn't. Kevin and I were just doing we had a full months of events that we were going to, and then I was gonna go, and then I said, Ah, no, I gotta go home and do some work. And then so he went. I came back over here.

08:25

Nice. Did you so you, obviously, you've got all the podcast stuff. Do you still have brands of any kind? Do you still what else? What else you got going on? Yeah,

08:35

so I'm in the pet and in the beauty space.

08:38

Oh, fun. How's that going? It's going

08:41

okay. Can you tell by my face?

08:45

I don't see any pets either,

08:46

yeah, oh yeah, around somewhere.

08:50

Is it primarily Amazon? Are you? Are you also kind of delving into

08:57

this? Goes back when Amazon started with it. I wanted back in 1718, I really started building brands on like building a brand, not just bringing a product to Amazon. And then we started to see, well, having a brand on Amazon isn't what it was back in 2017 This is back maybe two years ago, three years ago, and saying it's got to be omni channel, like the aggregators back then, you could have a huge presence on any other online channel. Like, let's say it was Walmart or wherever, and they didn't count it. It was your multiple would not go up. It didn't do anything for your valuation, it was squat. Nowadays it's everything. So getting on to Walmart or getting into some other online space, getting into the wholesale market, maybe unfair or wherever, and then getting into retail, that's a key. And like a lot of people, think that retail is dead, and it's not. It might. Know, a little funny, but as long as you learn the tricks of the trade and get in and understand it, there's some huge numbers to be made in retail. So yeah, that's where we're going right now. We do a lot with trying to get people in there, into the retail market, and Walmart is doing a great job with, you know what they're doing right now. They're really doing a great job even, of course, Tiktok shop. So you know that side of things, if you do it right, if you're in the right niche, then you could do quite well on Tiktok So,

10:38

and you're, you're definitely preaching to the choir. I have been, I have been preaching omni channel for, I don't even know how long, because of exactly what you just said. Now, to your point, though, going to the retail side, I find that since COVID, it's actually seems like it's actually revitalized the retail space. I felt like retail was slowly dying, and then COVID happened. Obviously it was kind of forced to die. But then it was like, I almost feel like people realized the benefits of going and shopping in person. And so while e commerce is still growing retail, you know, it caused some retailers to kind of relook at how they had store designs and what their offering was and things like that. But otherwise, I feel like that's definitely an area that a lot of people are missing out on. Is that kind of more or less what you're seeing too?

11:24

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, they, a lot of people, they have a there, they don't understand the whole retail model, and the first thing that they think about is, oh, I don't, I won't have enough inventory. I won't make enough money, I won't have the cash flow. And there's so many different models when it comes to retail, like just the independent guys. There's hundreds of 1000s of independent retailers out there, and all you have to do is call them. If I'm in the, let's say, a beauty niche, and I have some hair supplies, I can call up all sorts of spas all day long, and guess what? They'll buy a case and they'll pay with a credit

12:09

card. I mean, I think Fair has done a great job at helping to kind of get in front of those types of retailers. I know that they're not the world's cheapest thing, but in terms of scale, it's definitely nice and quick and painless to be able to hop onto a platform like that. But I know also that your your big background has been in the Amazon space. What is your thoughts on where Amazon is going and how, like these brands that are even just now kind of getting onto Amazon, like how they're supposed to be kind of approaching that platform,

12:41

I think brands are continually gonna come on to Amazon. I think it'll be a big brand platform. It wasn't, you know, Nike left because I don't think that Amazon addressed the whole brand thing, the brand community, but now it has, and it's building. So I think that's probably where it's going to go. I like to see what's going to happen with AI and how Amazon's going to roll out with that the whole global market. I think that's something that all sellers should be looking at. And how can we expand out? What are the best markets? What are the best markets for my niche? You know, those are things that you have to take a look at. And I think people are going to have to start spending a little bit of cash too. And I'm talking about, if you're in a niche where you're a plastic shoe stretcher, and you could have sucky pictures or images or videos, the more and more competition is going to come in, you're going to have to have better and better videos. But now with AI, there's a lot of things that you can do to help make those bad videos or intermediate videos look a lot more advanced or a lot better, clean it up, like just for images, for example, just the other day, I was looking at these very low quality resolution images. They were horrible, and I just downloaded them. I uploaded them to an image. What's it called? Yeah, an app that'll enhance your images. Yeah night and day, you could not tell that this was not the original image. And now you've got these really crisp, clear looking images that are just beautiful. And I've seen a lot of really good product videos that are coming out, even with the influencers. Now there's so many platforms that you can get that lifestyle image where you'd have to pay a lot of money before. So there's a lot of changes going on. Yeah.

14:46

You know, it's interesting that I find, even still to this day, you still have sellers that enter, like the Amazon world, and they feel like, Oh, I could just throw my product up here and it starts making money, and you don't need to have a brand. Etc, like I'm I'm starting to see more and more, even large Amazon sellers start to really, finally bite the bullet and venture into building their brand off Amazon, and starting to approach that. In my opinion, while you can build a brand on Amazon, I think it's still very difficult in terms of, you know, if you don't have the data to leverage. How are you consistently getting kind of those repurchasers? Or how are you, you know, being able to stay on top of them and retain them? But what are your thoughts on that whole brand building element? Because I know you kind of mentioned that a little bit there. Well,

15:37

the high, majority of the people suck at doing it, yeah, you know, they, they'll get somebody five bucks or, you know, go to Fiverr, and, you know, somebody who's a graphic artist, but not somebody who understands brand or corporate identity. So when they're putting up their plastic shoe stretcher, and they're, you know, if it's a single product, and then they put up, you know, some non alcoholic spirits. You know, the two don't mix. So you really have to think of where you want to go. But then the next stage that you have to do is, once you go and you get it everything on Amazon, and let's say you do it properly, and you have the right fonts and possibly the right colors, and you kind of look like a brand. Your A plus looks like a brand. Your storefront looks like the brand. Some of the videos you've done, they're on target, you know, for your brand. Well, then they mess it up, because they what's the first thing that somebody's going to do when they check out a micro brand? Because none of these are brands, they're just micro brands. And so first thing that visitor is going to do is look at it. Go, who are these guys? They're going to click, you know, Mr. Google, and then all of a sudden they'll see nothing. Or if they do, they'll see a website that was back in 1997 because the guy was too cheap to pay for anything, or they did it themselves, or they got somebody to do it that has no for UX experience, right? So the user experience, they have no thought on it, or it was just poorly done, and they just did it themselves. Then you go to their social media and it looks like crap. They don't follow like there's no templates, there's no colors, there's no there's nothing, I bet you they don't have a style guide. These are all things that you have to do to build this brand. Because a person, they're they're not trustworthy. They're looking for the first red flag, and the first time you get a red flag, they're off to the next person. So if you have authority, like that's why, I don't know if you've ever heard me talk about it, but I love press releases. I like putting out a lot of press releases. And then the first thing people see, oh, there's authority. The second thing is just getting influencers to talk about my product. So, oh, it's not just him. Look at you've got all these influencers talking about it. So I did this thing on helium 10 elite year or two ago, and I was doing it with these dog chews. And I said, Okay, how would you like to have this as a search page result? And I typed in, you know, these keywords, keyword phrase. And on the first page, I was on chewy, then it went amazon.com then amazon.ca then it had these influencers. Then that whole carousel of images was all my product. The whole page was my product. And I said, Oh, how about page two press releases Pinterest, except for two spots. I didn't go any further, but I knew page had four spots. But that's not bad if you take up all that real estate and, oh, by the way, then I the again, something so important that people aren't doing is Google business profile. Google business profile is free. It publishes your information immediately. If you're using an article or if you're putting up a press release, all of a sudden you'll get these click List searches. So if you don't know what, if your listeners don't know what a clickless search is, let's say that you are doing something with a Damascus knife. It's a, you know, high end cooking knife, chef knife, well, it'll take it even though you're not looking for it. It could rank you for sushi knife, carving knife, all these other keywords that normally you'd have to pay big bucks for, and it's doing this for you, like we I saw something we did for another brand, but I did this thing Google business profile, and they weren't sure how it was going to go, because it does take a little bit of time to start getting results. And. At the end of the year, their e commerce Store had 177 proven clicks to their website and phone calls, 177,000 by using Google Google business profile, which they would not have had. These are strictly driven by their Google map or Google profile.

20:21

Crazy, and what are you? What's your main approach on what you're posting there? Like, is it? Most of these press release, just anything you can get, basically. So

20:31

there's an area that where you can publish photos, and it says, you know your product well, these are brands. So you can post your brand. Then you can post the photos underneath. And there could be a carousel for each set of products under that brand. Oh, you got another brand, and put it there. You can start layering all these, you know, brands under what you're doing. Or it could just be a series of product pages. There is what was the other thing that's so cool? Oh, the the post. So either from Facebook or any of the social media sites, if you have your your anchor text that or your anchor URL, so let's say it's xyz.com if you use that, you can drive all of those and get them indexed immediately from any of your Facebook pages or social media pages. As long as you put the word xyz.com It links it up immediately, all your photographs that you put into it become instant shoppable images and you can link them back to your Amazon page or Walmart page or both, or your E commerce page, or everything like it doesn't get easier. Why

21:53

do you think people aren't leaning in on that?

21:57

I preach press releases. I did courses on press release. I told and after I for product launches, right and after I would, especially this one spot, I did an hour long speech on, you know, doing press release, how important it is, how you can link it and get it sticky for keywords. Afterwards, a guy came up to me and said, So, what do you do for product launches? This is like, you know, I just talked about it. It's the same thing with Google business profile. It's like, I'll go and I'll talk about it. I did it at trafficking conversion last year. So spoke about it. And I probably think 1% might have done it. I know what the stats are. I know 4% of brands use Google business. Sorry, 4% of bricks and mortar use business. Google business profile and only point zero, 4% point zero. 4% use it. It's crazy, yeah,

22:58

I feel like it kind of comes down to the execution side. You get so many people that, like, listen in on podcasts, or they attend webinars, or they go to conferences, and they're like, oh, there's all this great information. And they take their notes, and then they go home and they don't do any of it. And it's like, why? You know, whenever you hear, like, some type of, like, golden information, like you just gave about the Google My Business, like, I never really understood, like, why people always struggle to just put that into action. Because my habit is usually like, Okay, this is interesting for our team. Like a project management system. I throw it in there and I go someone do this now, let me know when it's done, and we check it out, kind of thing, or, like, however that's got to get moved forward. But I feel like that's part of the issue. A lot of times it's just, like, the just inability to execute on some of this stuff is always very shocking to

23:44

1. Implement implementation teams, you know, so you can't take it all. And also, when you're going to an event, if you're sitting there and you're taking notes, I can guarantee you, 99% of those people taking notes are gonna get overloaded. Like, the first 10 minutes is great when you get to lunchtime, oh, it's still okay. By the end of the third day, the person won't know what, where to start. So, like, one of the tricks that I do at events is I use this, see that little thing, credit card thing. It's applaud. It records all my notes. It records everything like the the actual recording is here, and then it transfers everything into notes that has diff. It has eight different types of notes, from the questions the action points to summary to there's a bunch of different notes that you can do. You just press one, and it'll summarize everything for you. Then I can take that and I can shoot it over to one of my team, and they can get it done. Or the old way is I really. Listen, and all I do is I would listen, and if there was a one point, I'd go, okay, Asterix, whatever the point was. Wait 30 minutes later. Oh, good point. So if there's five points or seven points at the end of the day, I'd go up to my hotel room. Maybe there'd be after partying. It could be a pre party or at post party, but I would make sure that one of those asterisks got done. And if I got one done, then I'm doing more than 90% in the room, you know. And that's all you need. What are, and then you'd have seven points there. All the other stuff. There's a lot of fluff, you know, there's a lot of just information overload, and just take those action points and just do one a day, and if you get back, I never really have done this, but you know, just keep doing it until you run out of your action points. The other part to this is let your team listen to a podcast like this, summarize it, and then put it into like every Friday we'll have our I think the guys hate me for this, but your five strengths or five weaknesses, we pay for all their training. So what are your training? What did you learn? And are there any suggestions of what we can implement into our SOPs this week. And you know, that works. So I get people to listen to training, and then all they do is summarize it for me in a quick paragraph, and then I can see, all right? And then, you know the old question, which they hate? What can we do to implement? And then they do it. They don't hate it. Actually, we've got a very performance based culture. It's

26:44

good to hear we do the it's funny to hear you say that, because we do the same thing. You know, we I love the continual education side. We comp all the educational elements. I do the same thing where, like, you take the course and then tell us what to do, yeah, and then we implement it. It's great. It's a great way to, like, speed stuff up. It's fantastic. You've got, I know we touched on a lot of the personal branding podcasts, e commerce stuff. You have an operational side too. Correct. Are you doing three PL or, like, a warehouse or something? Yeah, right.

27:12

Yeah. Three PL, it's we had a warehouse for the last four or five years, maybe a bit longer, we had a capacity of around 1200 pallets. Now we have a facility that can hold up to 10,000 pallets. It just opened. It's a little bigger, yeah, a little bigger. It's a full three PL. And by the way, I mean, this is kind of scary. Those pallets go up seven there's, there's stacked seven, seven up, and not the pop the you know, and you look up 70 feet, and you're just going, Oh my gosh. And these forklifts that we had to buy, like, all this specialty equipment, but we've got that, so that's a full service, you know, we pick Pack Ship, but we also do a few other things. We do, FBA returns. So, you know, you a lot of people get stuck with getting one star reviews because Amazon shoots out, you know, a crappy product that was returned. Well, a lot of people will send them back, and we'll either send it back into Amazon or not the other part, so outside of the kidding, we can do bundling for them. And we have a special service that we just started, and this is a bottling and we have, we've signed into 72 premium formulas that we got from a place in the States and one place in Canada that we're making, or what actually white labeling we entered into the manufacturing side. So we're doing that in one one of the rooms in the facility. And one other thing that is so cool, we call it tariff Terminator. And 80% of the people, 80% of the Amazon sellers that try out terminate tariff Terminator, find out that they're Chinese manufacturers, or the codes that are they're using, these are called HTS. Codes are wrong, and to the point where we've seen it as high as 40% wrong off of your it happened with me with one of my products. So I was bringing in this, this olive oil soap, is a natural soap, and so I was paying 17% duties on it. And so alpha lobby, he was my partner after lobby, oralcon, you say, You know what? I think I can get this better. He said, You just have to change it to castile soap. Castile is an olive base soap. You can't lie, because if you lie, you're dead. But, you know. And then it came back as zero. I saved 17% I put 17% extra on my cost of goods in my pocket, and so but that's nothing like we've taken these aluminum signs that were these quarantine signs, and it was 40% to zero, 40% and so the average savings, the average savings that we've saved, so we talked to our clients, is $7,800 per tariff code on their order, $7,800 that they save on average. And so it's really simple. You go, there's an app that we developed. You punch in your code, and it'll tell you whether you know you're using the right one or the wrong one. You let us know, and then we charge for it is 500 bucks, but you already made it back,

30:58

saving 7800 who cares?

30:59

Yeah, he makes 3000 but back and then the other thing that we'll do is we monitor that so people don't realize that tariff codes change or compliance changes, so we monitor 10 other other outlets that could affect your tariff code, and it's if you're not, if you're not, you don't have to have paid us 500 bucks. Yeah, if you have 1000 ASINs and you want us to monitor it or skews, we'll do that. And I think it's like 100 bucks for, I think it's 10 bucks, sorry, 100 asin for 10 bucks. I think it's really cheap, or it's it's something along that somewhere in there, but so cheap that now you know you're safe, and it's costing you next to nothing. All you can do is, it's a win, win. So that's that's something that nobody else has. Write

32:07

that down asterisk, use one of your plot plots, right? Does he use that right

32:11

plot? Right here?

32:13

Right there. Plug. Get him to sponsor the show. Yeah. Norm, this was awesome. Man. You have your fingers in so many different things. Your experience is nuts. I greatly appreciate having you on the show. I know you've got a ton of stuff, so I would love to give you an opportunity to hear let everyone know, where they can find out more about you and more about everything you've got going on. Sure,

32:37

sure. So first of all, if you're interested in the podcast. It's Lunch with Norm. It's pretty easy to remember. I think I got a pretty good newsletter. I've been I've been hanging out with Kevin King, so he's been giving me some advice. And I think I have a newsletter that doesn't suck, and it is LWN.news, and it starts off with a personal story. All these stories are true, and then I relate them to how it affects a business. So that's L W N, dot news. And then the podcast, the other podcast, which is Marketing Misfits. And that podcast is just about marketers who have thought outside of the box to succeed, or they failed somewhere in their life, but they've succeeded. So that's it. That's awesome.

33:27

Norm. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Obviously, everyone that tuned in, thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes, but as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time.

33:47

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to theecommshow.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 bluetuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.