Andrew Maff 00:03
When a brand is trying a certain strategy, in this case, let's say meta ads, the immediate thought is, if I'm not seeing the return that I want, kill it.
Narrator 00:14
Welcome to the Ecomm Show podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTuskr, 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 02:14
I swear there's someone's job to figure out new fees at Amazon. That's my judgment.
Andrew Maff 00:29
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Ecomm Show and today I want to talk to you a lot about omnichannel marketing strategies, mainly because we had several situations happen just in the past couple weeks here that made me start thinking about this, and thought this would be a good topic for me to discuss. So, here we go. So, here's a, here's something I find a lot of brand - this is where I - a lot of brands make the biggest mistakes in from a marketing perspective to give you the story of something that we just proved out with someone, brands pretty successful on Amazon came to us, was looking for starting to diversify, didn't want to be so reliant on Amazon, fees are going up, blah blah, basically same thing we hear almost every day, and so first step was in their scenario they were ready to take the jump, so we didn't need to test any like off Amazon marketing strategies, driving to Amazon, that wasn't the case. We went straight into a website, so we did a website project, built out the website, put all the fun bells and whistles together, cool, ready to go, right. Did that project for a little bit, and based on the product line, it's very differentiated. There is absolutely nothing else like it out there. Well, there's stuff like it, but it's extremely differentiated. So, it's going to require education. So, the move is absolutely social ads. Like, social media is going to be the way to educate the market. Otherwise, you're doing Google ads and getting clicks for stuff that people aren't 100% known on.
Andrew Maff 02:03
So what happened. So we started off on Meta ads. It's a little bit more of an expensive product. It is a couple $100 for the most part, comparatively, and basically, what we were thinking about is, like, okay, we need to run some Meta ads. We started off the med ad side, obviously, that's going to be the better move, because it's a little bit more expensive. There's the more affluent audience between Facebook and Instagram, let's go that route. But the other thing that we were talking about, so we're driving the ads to the website, and we've got heat map, scroll tracking, all that fun stuff set up, and we're looking at all the data, and everyone seems pretty interested. They are basically, they're all over the place, they're going through product images, they're going through descriptions, they're learning about the product, but they just aren't pulling the trigger and one of the things that we did on there to help kind of mitigate that barrier to entry was we added buy with Prime. So, Buy with Prime, the goal being that you're going to see people hop over from your website to Amazon to purchase. So, the goal with Buy with Prime is to mitigate that, get them to purchase through Buy with Prime, pull over some reviews from Amazon, because when you launch a completely new site, you've got no social proof, so like it comes off like you're a completely new business. People get skeptical, and so they tend to leave and go shop with you on Amazon if they shop with you at all.
Andrew Maff 03:36
Well, the Buy with Prime side, we've seen scenarios where buy the prime is great and it does exactly what we want it to, where they see the reviews from Amazon, they see they can buy it from Amazon, they can get the product in a couple days, they feel more comfortable, they make the purchase one and done, we're all set. The other side of it is sometimes I'm not even really sure why, but it does kind of make sense. Is you'll see consumers will come to the website, and they will see that you have Buy with Prime, now knowing that you sell on Amazon, and my guess is if they want to purchase other stuff, or if they're just comfortable shopping on Amazon, regardless, and they're not familiar with Buy with Prime. They now know that you sell on Amazon, and so they leave your website, and they go to Amazon. So, running Meta ads, we've got tons of creative, we have a ton of different types of creative, we're testing different types, we're testing different audiences. If we want to lean into that, or we went broad, and then we're testing copy, like we're trying all these different things, and the return just wasn't like great, but what was very interesting was Amazon was doing really well, and we hadn't changed much of anything from their advertising, but they were seeing some pretty nice improvements, and they have seasonality to a certain extent. But now is not the season, so we're kind of like, oh, this is interesting, and when we say that, like, Amazon was performing better, I mean, like, they were up almost 50% from where they were, so, like, really nice jump, considering ad spend and maintained on Amazon, nothing crazy.
Andrew Maff 05:22
So we were like we had a theory, and so we did is we started digging into the data, and we looked into search term reports, we looked into brand analytics, we pulled a bunch of data out of it, we started watching the heat map and scroll tracking on the site, and basically what we were able to figure out is that a lot of people were leaving the website and going to shop on Amazon, so this was a prime example of when a brand is trying a certain strategy, in this case, let's say Meta ads, the immediate thought is, if I'm not seeing the return that I want, kill it, and the problem with that theory is you're unless obviously you only have one sales channel, but the problem with that theory is no matter where you point the consumer, it doesn't mean that's where they're going to shop, it just doesn't, they might go shop somewhere else, they might find you on somewhere else besides Amazon, but if we killed their Meta ads, we would immediately see a reduction on the Amazon side, and so we now know that we're educating people, but right now, obviously, we've got to do some cleaning up on the site of what we can figure out to try to really incentivize them to stay on the site, because we want to keep their customer data, but if we killed Meta ads, that's going to take the rest of the business down with it.
Andrew Maff 06:44
So now we have to look at, like, okay, we actually have to factor in what are we doing on the Meta side of things, and what is that going to do in order to do, we need to factor in revenue coming from Amazon in some way, shape or form, because we also want to see, like, all right, if Meta is doing that well, we factor those sales in. Now we need to start scaling it up, so that's where it becomes kind of interesting for us to evaluate the bleed over there. And this was just a - this is one of probably a dozen times this happened over the past several months, like this is extremely common. We see it's the rising tides lift all boats, it's the halo effect, right. A lot of brands sell on TikTok, they'll see very similar situations where they'll start ramping up on TikTok, and then they'll start to see a lot of growth on the Amazon side.
Andrew Maff 07:35
Actually, I can give you another example. We just did a whole review with a brand that came to us, they were having issues with their Amazon, and one of the things that we were able to figure out was the agency that they were working with was just piggybacking off of all of the off Amazon success, they were spending a lot, like six figures a month on off Amazon marketing, mostly TikTok and Meta, Instagram, etc. And so they would spend a ton of money on off Amazon, and what the agency was doing is they were basically allocating a majority of the budget towards just branded terms, which don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of playing defense, I think you have to do it because otherwise your competitors just going to bid in your name, and they tested some stuff, and sure enough, that was the case, like you can't get away from it, but you can either, A, you need to figure out how to make those campaigns more efficient, so that you're not spending as much on branded, but they were effectively spending no money on any non-branded terms, so basically not generating any new business, they were just piggybacking off of the success from an off-Amazon perspective, and so that's where obviously things can kind of go the other direction, and so with them, what we started to look at was, well, you've got clear areas of efficiency that you could actually improve your branded campaign, so you're not spending so much on them, and you can earn like the true, like a majority, if not all, that impression share, so your competitors aren't taking over.
Andrew Maff 09:07
But then, B, you, they did have like some very like small data coming in from like auto campaigns, and a few broad things, for whatever reason, that we saw, like, hey, you've got some opportunities with these non-branded terms, so you can actually generate new business, so instead of this approach of, like, hey, let's just, you know, benefit from whatever's coming from off Amazon, let's actually see what we can do to generate new business here, and so that was another clear example of where it's a flip side of what we're focusing on the Amazon side, and so this isn't just through different sales channels, right, because from an off-Amazon perspective, obviously all of that's going to be targeted towards going to the website, but there was bleed over and they were going to Amazon, same thing with the original story I told you, you also see this happen with other marketing strategies, so not just sales channels, but there's a lot of people that you will see, and social tends to be where a lot of this stems, and it's really just because the consumer is...
Narrator 10:09
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Andrew Maff 10:42
In my opinion, in 2020 consumers took a really big jump forward in terms of the best ways to shop online, mainly because there were so many scams going on during that whole COVID period that they got used to doing their own due diligence. Is this a real company? If I see something on social media, and it looks really cool. Am I about to get scammed? So they end up leaving social media. They may Google you, they may now, they may talk to AI about you, they may go to Amazon and see if you sell there and see what other people are saying. But even if you have like an influencer that's telling them about the product and is like telling them everything's awesome about the product, they still are just like this is just one person who clearly has a bias, but it does seem like a cool product. So, let me do some digging. And so, what ends up happening is these consumers hop around, so they may leave, they may see your information on TikTok, and then guess what, they're going to take your name and they're going to go Google you, and if you've got Google ads running now, you found their website, and so they're going to click on your Google ad, they're gonna go to website, learn more about your website. They still aren't convinced, they're going to go to Amazon, see if you're on Amazon.
Andrew Maff 11:48
So when you look at your marketing strategies of what is working, the biggest problem that we've seen, literally, I swear this happens nine times out of 10, where someone's like, I'm not, I'm running these ads directed at my DTC website, and I'm not seeing the return that I want, so I'm going to turn them off, and then the next thing you know, another sales channel starts to come down, and they're constantly just trying to, it's like whack a mole, trying to solve these problems, and that's part of the biggest problem, is like that's just not how marketing works.
Andrew Maff 12:25
One of my biggest examples that I always, I always just kind of, it makes me laugh when I think about it. I was obviously a huge fan of Mad Men. There's not a single scene where the owner is sitting down with Don Draper and he goes, 'Hey, I want to know the exact ROI of that billboard that you guys ran, like that's just not a thing. It is a comprehensive message that you are sending out to user to potential customers across many different marketing channels, and the user is going to shop wherever they are most comfortable. So the question then becomes like, cool, yeah, Andrew, I understand that, but I've got to make money, like, duh, I'm not telling you to pour gas into stuff that's not working. What I am saying is the best way to evaluate what is working well is looking at everything holistically first, then figuring out and diving in deeper to the analytics to evaluate where should I put more money.
Andrew Maff 13:23
So I'll use ourselves as an example, right? I do this podcast, I've got a newsletter, we have social media that goes out, we do a little bit of advertising, we go to conferences, we do webinars, like we're.. I try to do, you know, as much as possible, and if I sat down and looked at, you know, what is where should I put more of my efforts. I can tell you right now, it's not this podcast. This is not something where I generate a lot of business from it. This is just an opportunity for me to kind of stay involved in the industry and voice my opinion, and, and obviously I get to have all these great people on the show and everything, but what does end up happening is every now and then I hear someone, they're like, "Oh, I started working with you and I actually am a big fan of the podcast, or maybe they were on the podcast, or we were working with so and so vendor and they were on your podcast, so like every now and then that kind of like ancillary stuff comes through, but most of the time it's they actually came through, like according to all of my data, oh, they came through from an email or they came through from our social media or something like that, so like I have to factor in that there are things that we are doing that I cannot put a very true ROI to, but I know that if I stop them, it's going to pull everything down, right. And so that's the concept that I find a lot of brands mess up with.
Andrew Maff 14:50
And so really, what it comes down to is how can you dig into those analytics. Amazon's the biggest one, right, because Amazon has developed this big platform that everyone loves, and so obviously, if they're, if someone is more comfortable shopping on Amazon, that's where they're going to go. So they go to Amazon, they shop there. So the question always becomes, cool. Well, what am I doing? Everything that I'm doing from an off-Amazon perspective, how am I supposed to judge how much business I am generating on Amazon?
Andrew Maff 15:17
Well, here's what I can tell you, it's a little bit different for each brand, right, because if you have a, if you have a product that is a consumable, or it's something that someone purchases a lot, it's a little bit of a different beast, because they might have found you on Amazon, and then they might just want to purchase you again, and so they're coming back to find you on Amazon, and either way, you still got to bid on your brand name, because otherwise your competitors are going to take over, if it's not necessarily that, maybe it's actually more of a product that they only purchase very infrequently, or maybe only once. Now it's a little bit easier to make a judgment of it, because if they're searching for your brand name, what? How the hell did they find you? Right, like I love when there's a product that it's something that you really only need to buy once, maybe again, if it breaks, kind of thing, but then that's it. And I always get the same answer from every brand. It's like, oh, they just love it so much that they then come back, and then they buy a second, or they come back, and then it's a gift for a friend, and like, yeah, but like it's not that frequent, like it's just not that often that that's happening. So, like, we all know that you have the world's best product, and you, you have the greatest thing out there. Cool. Yeah, sure. Which, by the way, obviously some people do, but like, can we all admit, like, it's not that great sometimes.
Andrew Maff 16:33
So it's, it's the messaging, it's the product. The products can always be better. There's always improvements to be done, but if you've got a product that is a typical one-time purchase. When you're on Amazon, it's really easy to pull search term data through, like, brand analytics or directly through your ads and evaluate, like, just throw it into a quick spreadsheet and just see how much more impressions, clicks, just general search volume that you've generated from your brand name, and what is that percentage? How many people, or how much traffic, maybe have you driven to your listings holistically, and what percentage of that is stemming from branded? If that number keeps going up, maybe not the percentage, because maybe you're doing more from a prospecting perspective on Amazon, but maybe the actual number, how many impressions or clicks are you actually generating from your own brand name, and is that number consistently growing? If that's the case, I can tell you it's probably stemming from a lot of the stuff that you're doing from an off-Amazon perspective, because otherwise, how the hell do they know your brand name?
Andrew Maff 17:38
Like, it's, it's uncommon for someone to come across your product on Amazon, not purchase it, and then relook your brand name up. Is it possible? Absolutely. But is it common? Absolutely not. So you have to make a judgment on how much bleed over is there. There are platforms out there that say that they can like track this, and they like, they can tell you, like, hey, you're getting x amount of revenue or x amount of, you know, results from your off Amazon efforts, bullshit, like, no, you can't, like, it's just no, you can't, like, it's just not doable. Yes, you can use your Amazon attribution link, yes, you can track revenue through there if you forced people to go to Amazon, but in this scenario, I'm not saying that, I'm saying you sent them to your website, and then they decided not to go there, and then the people that say, like, oh, they're coming from this and that, like, bullshit, like, no, there's some data you can pull out, analytics, but brand analytics, but it's not a ton, so you do have to make a slight judgment call, and it's a, that's where there's a marketing mind versus a like, like a CEO,CFO mind, where it's like the, you have to understand the gray area, and I think that that's where some of the best marketers live, because they understand that how each individual platform can help itself, right, like there's definitely scenarios where you run social ads and they go to Google and they Google you.
Andrew Maff 19:04
There's absolutely scenarios where you run advertising, it's a longer sales cycle, they go to your website, maybe they fill out the pop up, they wait a really long time to the point where they fall out the attribution window, and then the next thing you know, they convert through email and you're giving credit to email, but turns out you were generating all the contacts through advertising, so like there's things that you have to understand of how much different efforts might be affecting other strategies when you're looking at advertising. ROI is obviously a very self-explanatory thing to look at, but then you have to factor in, like, all right, what's what's our estimated gray area of where we might be seeing lift on other marketplaces most of the time. Amazon, how many new contacts that didn't purchase did we acquire through our email marketing efforts that may purchase down the line?
Andrew Maff 19:52
So there's there's different things that you have to factor in, and this then stems from like all of your individual messaging, it's all one comprehensive message that you are basically trying to grab at the heart strings of the consumer or the customer, and you are trying to not, you're not trying to sell them the product, you're trying to convince them that they need to decide that they need the product, so it's basically incentivizing them and explaining to them, if you want this type of solution, or you want to feel a certain way, then this product is what's best for you.
Andrew Maff 20:34
There's certain ways to say that message, it would especially like, you know, the way that you talk on TikTok, I hope, is very different from how you talk on other channels, so that's something you have to factor in. But when you're doing that, you have to also think about, like, okay, then that means that the user is going to be in a certain mindset on that channel, so they might be ready to pull the trigger right away, which is like a Google side of things. It's pretty middle of funnel for the most part, depending on what you're doing from an advertising perspective. Social media is a lot more top of funnel, they're just now educating themselves, they're learning more about the product, so there's that bleed over that you have to think about.
Andrew Maff 21:09
So, when you go to kill your ads, or when you go to like severely cut ad spend, because you think you're not seeing the return that you want, highly recommend look at where you might be seeing bleed over, and the best way to look at that is from a brand search perspective. If you're seeing influxes in non-branded terms, that could be a categorical thing, that categorical, categorical thing, that could be a market thing. That's usually pretty different. It's rare that someone searches your product type and then goes to your website, decides they might want to go shop on Amazon, and then researches the product type. If they decided they want to shop with you, they're searching your brand name. So that was something I wanted to talk about, only because it's happened so many times over the past couple of weeks. I kept thinking about it.
Andrew Maff 21:54
So I highly recommend, look at how you can evaluate those different areas, so that before you make a big cut, like completely pulling away from a certain marketing channel or cutting back on it. How is it going to affect the overall business, not just that one sales channel that you were hoping consumers would stay at? That's all I have for you today. Thank you all for joining me. As usual, do that whole fun thing: rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to The Ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes, but as I always say, thank you for joining and I will see you in the next one!
Narrator 22:31
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 Ecomm 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!