#297 – Amazon Marketing, Community Building, And The Art Of “Social Listening” With Steven Black

In episode 297 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Steven discuss:

02:43 – Steven’s Background And Story
04:00 – Focusing On Relationship And Community Building
05:56 – What Is The Thing You’re Missing On The Amazon Platform?
06:58 – Why Is Email Marketing Important?
08:37 – How To Start The Process Of Getting Correct Customer Infomation
09:40 – How To Drive A Community To Your Amazon Business
10:26 – You Do Not Have To Be An Expert On The Subject
13:25 – Creating A Brand For Your Community’s Needs
16:28 – How Big Of An Audience Do You Need To Help You Sell?
18:08 – How To Get New Members To Your Community?
20:51 – The Speed To Conversion Metric
21:54 – How To Get People From Amazon To An Email List Or Community?
23:23 – Breaking Down The “Attention Capture Device” And Examples
31:43 – How Kevin Executes These Tactics In His Business
34:40 – Your Most Important Asset
39:00 – Know Your Customer’s Terminology And Language
39:52 – Facebook Groups And Forums Are “Focus Groups”
41:06 – The Value Of Social Listening To Understand What The Market Wants
45:15 – How To Start Conversations Inside Groups
48:22 – How To Get The “Brand Lift” Effect
48:42 – Sending Your Audience To Shopify Before Your Amazon Store
50:40 – Kevin’s Facebook Audience Profile Tip
51:51 – Tips And Resources From Steven Black
52:47 – Learning E-mail Marketing And Using Helium 10’s Portals Tool
55:06 – How To Get In Touch And Contact Steven
57:12 – The Golden Nugget

Transcript

Kevin King:

Welcome to episode 297 of the AM/PM Podcast. Get ready to take some notes, because in this action packed episode, Steven Black and I are gonna be sharing some amazing strategies and ideas to get the juices flowing on how you can build a community off of Amazon and how you can leverage the sales and customer data on Amazon to add to that community. In fact, Steven is gonna share some of the tips and strategies that one of his clients used to take a 10,000 investment and turn that into a 30 million dollar a year business on Amazon.

Kevin King:

All right. In this episode, we’re gonna be speaking with Steven Black. Steven, I’m so happy to have you here on the AMPM podcast. You know, I was just doing a podcast, I think it was two podcasts ago and I had Brandon Young on and I asked Brandon, I said, “Brandon, who are some of the most influential people in this space that you follow or you think are really on the cutting edge?” And he said something I already knew. He said, “Steven Black” first name out of his mouth was Steven Black. And so I was like, alright, well, gotta get Steven on. I know this guy’s busy. He’s very selective in who he speaks with and what he does his time is precious. And so I reached out to Steven and I said, “Hey, you know what? You’ve spoken at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You’ve spoken on the Helium 10 Elite training that we do. It’s always amazing stuff. We have to have you here on the podcast. I’m so happy to have you here. Welcome, man.

Steven:

Thank you so much for having me, Kevin, as, as you said, I have spoken at your BDSS summit and that was amazing. I’ve spoken in Brandon’s group. I’ve spoken a few other places and it’s always fun to be able to dive in and talk about some of the extra pieces that Amazon sellers can use to really take their business to a different level and give themselves an unfair advantage.

Kevin King:

I agree. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna be talking about today. I promise you’re gonna learn some stuff. Steven is super smart at what he does. So I encourage you if you’re driving listen closely, you might have to re-listen to this episode later with pen and paper because it’s gonna be an amazing episode. Now, before we get into some of the nuts and bolts. Steven, tell us a little bit about your background. I know you’ve sold yourself. You, you consult with a lot of big eight and nine-figure brands. Can you just give us a quick backstory of why we should listen to you?

Steven:

Of course, of course, I have been a marketer for 16 years. I was a marketer and selling outside of the Amazon platform with brick-and-mortar businesses and some online things for about a decade before I even jumped into the Amazon world. I have multiple brands of my own, both on and off of the Amazon platform. And as you said, Kevin, I consult with a few hundred different brands all the way ranging from startups to a few companies that are doing over nine figures each and even a few ad agencies. I speak, like you said, very selectively, but you know, it ranges from a high level Amazon crowd, like your Billion Dollar Seller Summit event that you run. I did an event a couple of months ago and there were only a hundred people in the room and the average revenue per person was 30 million a year. So, I mean, it gets places and I’m a little different, I don’t just talk about–

Kevin King:

Was that an Amazon event or just e-commerce or?

Steven:

No, it was not Amazon. Okay. It was e-commerce and DTC, brand owners and people like to talk to me because I’m not just, here’s the latest tactic or here’s the latest strategy. I don’t like all of that. I’m all about leveraging the relationships that we can have with customers and keeping them coming back. My whole game is once I have somebody, how can I use the customer experience as a conversion pathway to get not only the highest average order value and pay the lowest cost per acquisition but to continually keep them coming back. I want the highest customer lifetime value that I can drive out of them because when we sell things online or anywhere for that matter, we can either have a relationship with people or it can be transactional in nature. I want people to feel like they can trust.

Steven:

They can talk to us. They can reach out like it’s community member because they’re going to trust more. And they’re going to buy things that we recommend. If we have that kind of open conversation pathway with them, versus it only being transactional in nature, like the grocery store clerk, that’s checking you out when you get your food. I don’t want it to be just that passive because now they’re just going to be comparing feature to feature for the price of the things they buy, as opposed to all of the other things that I can pull on to sway things into my favor.

Kevin King:

Now, this is something that’s becoming more and more important selling on Amazon in the past. A lot of people would say, just use a tool like Helium 10, find an opportunity, go to Alibaba, find a product, stick your logo on it and sell it. Those days are pretty much over. I mean, you have the occasional success of someone that does that. Now it’s all about relationship building, community, building, exactly what you say. And that’s something that’s missing from a lot of the training sessions out there. That’s missing from a lot of the dialogue out in the space. And it’s so critically important. And it’s something that a lot of people just don’t really understand. So how do you even start this process?

Steven:

Right? Well, let’s, let’s set this up as my mentality. When I talk to Amazon sellers, even if they’re very successful on the Amazon platform, like you said, where do I even start moving off of this? What I usually tell the Amazon crowd is what is the biggest thing you’re missing with only being on the Amazon platform and that is being able to talk to the customers and owning the customer data. So the first thing that I always try to talk to people about is number one, how can we set up a standalone landing page that will lead people to an email list or to click through to our products so that we can better convey the benefits and messaging that we want people to take notice of versus our product listing only where it looks like all the other product listings and you see all these different things to click on that’s number one. Number two, how can I set up an email marketing flow or series of email marketing flows to start that process with people?

Steven:

Because that will seed you for expanding into say Facebook ads or Google ads or your own store or a community or whatever it is. And honestly, no matter how big you are, if you’re not doing email marketing, you’re missing probably about 30% of the revenue that you should have. And it’s incredibly profitable because email marketing is the only form of marketing that is permission based marketing people are saying, yes, I want to hear from you. Please send me messages that are relevant. Now, does that mean that everything needs to be sales related? No, it needs to also, you know, have some niche content on things in which they’re interested. And then the next question is, of course, how do we find that? How do we build all of that out?

Kevin King:

And I’d like to take it two different angles. One angle is if you’re coming off of Amazon onto Amazon. So you’re building a community off of Amazon to actually help you maybe launch a product or get some information and build a list that way. And then I’d like to do it the reverse way because a lot of people don’t understand the reverse way is if you’re you’re selling on, what about those customers that didn’t find you off a Facebook ad, or they didn’t find you off the email that you sent them, they just found you because you’re ranked well on Amazon. How do you get those people to join this other community? So I’d like to approach it from both ways, if you don’t mind, and share some ideas and the importance of audience segmentation, you know, a lot of people don’t understand what is audience segmentation. Let’s talk about that and feel free to take it from whichever angle you would prefer to start with.

Steven:

All right, well, we talked about where you first mentioned, how do we get a community going to drive people to Amazon? That’s usually the one that people want to know the most. I say, okay, if I’m already on Amazon, how do I get people that are not here yet to Amazon? What I want you to understand is that the phases of the buyer’s journey you have prepurchase purchase and post purchase. When people go to the Amazon platform, they have already done their research on having a deeper understanding of what their problem is and what avenues they need to go to solve the problem. And now they’ve decided they need to buy a product and they’ve already probably compared one kind of product versus another. And now they come to the Amazon platform ready to buy. And it’s just down to features at that point.

Steven:

It’s what is going to have the best chance of eliminating this problem and has the least chance of getting to me and being an awful product. That’s what people’s mindsets are when they get to Amazon. So the question is, how do I leverage that prepurchase part so that when people are thinking about what to buy, they’re thinking about my stuff. That’s what people really wanna know. So here’s how we do it. In terms of setting up a community, people don’t care about your brand. People don’t care about your product. People care about does this person that’s making a product recommendation, really understands things from my point of view, do you speak their language? Could you write a magazine article that they would read as a member of the space? That’s a good way to think about it. So what I usually do is I’ll take some of my broad keyword, you know, like let’s say, you know, I think the example I used in Billion Dollar Seller Summit was scuba equipment.

Steven:

If I sell scuba stuff on the Amazon platform, I’m gonna take scuba diving and I’m going to go to some of the off Amazon places that I can find, even like Facebook, go to Facebook groups and just search on Facebook, scuba diving, and then click on groups. And you’ll see all the groups for scuba diving. It’s a niche related, broad match keyword. You can go in those groups and say, okay, let me try to understand what the different categories are that people are talking about. Rock and roll. Can I find five categories? Sure. If not go to your bookstore, and pick up a hobby magazine for the space. If you have that going on and say, okay, what are five categories? If you can’t find that use, what’s called a Google search Modifier and look up “forums: keyword”, and your Google search results will only show you forums where people are talking about that specific thing.

Steven:

You can go to the online forums and find like five different categories that people are talking about around the space that you’re selling within or around the problem that you’re trying to solve with your product. Cool. Now you got five. Okay. Can I then find, let’s say 10 different topics that are hot topics that you see it come up repeatedly, or it’s gotten a lot of engagement in a Facebook group or forum or something of that variety? Can I find 10 little topics under each category that way? Great. Just write those down as ideas. Those are 50 different ideas, rock and roll. Now, guess what can I make content where it’s a short little bit of a conversation starter where I’m saying, “Hey, you guys, I have this going on. What about this? What about that?”

Steven:

What are your thoughts on it? Like if I’m saying for all of my people do like a scuba diving kind of thing, for all of my people that are wanting todo reef photography, I’m going over to this site. What are your camera settings for this? And just let people talk because let’s say I sell, dive photography, and accessories. I want people to talk about that kind of stuff. Can I do it in the other Facebook groups? Yes. All I’m gonna do is I’m gonna try to be a contributor in the space so that my name keeps coming up. Now people are gonna say, “Hmm, that’s pretty insightful. That’s pretty interesting.” Now, here’s the catch here’s the part I want you to write down. You do not have to be an expert on your subject. Please do not think you need to do that to participate in social communities and build one of your own.

Steven:

You are the editor of a magazine, curate the content and put it back in front of people. That’s what you need to do. That will allow you to learn, to speak the language of your space. As you learn to speak the language of your space, better optimize your listings. And guess what people are going to start following you from those groups. When you get about 50 people that follow you on your regular profile, start your own group. You’ve already got 50 ideas. If you can present them three different ways, you have 150 days of posts. What can I do to curate content under these five categories and 10 subjects that I found that everybody wants to know about? And you can set up a simple calendar that way, go into Facebook creator, studio, and auto post it.

Steven:

And guess what if 150 days of post ready to rock rotating content variety, it’s always relevant. And in between all of that, you send people to your Amazon listing the whole point behind it. And you can do that on Instagram. You can do it on Facebook. You can do it in a community forum that’s not on social media. You can do it in your, in your email. If you wanna start an email list, the point of it is you are letting people know that you understand things from their point of view, you are building trust as a member of the market. And so when you make your product recommendations and you have your sales and all of this kind of thing, where you’re sending people a link in between your content posts, they’re not seeing it as a cold offer. They know you they’ve talked to you.

Steven:

There’s accountability. If something goes bad and because they see you as a member of the market, now you’re making a product recommendation as opposed to a cold offer. Does that make more sense? That’s, that’s kind of how that works. So there’s a whole simple little system to take things, set up a community, or get a community to start following you to where you can set up your own or an email list or whatever you want, or a topic page on Instagram or Facebook, whatever you want. And then get people moving over. I have a seller that I’m working with right now and he started a sleep aid brand and he was originally going to have just some kind of like a snoring device or something like that. And it ended up being a supplement line that helps with migraines and everything else because he found through the groups that part of the reason that people were having sleep trouble was they were having headache problems and they couldn’t rest. And they didn’t really have a wind down routine. And guess where he built his following, doing selfie videos, talking about sleep tips on TikTok.

Steven:

It’s that simple. He found what people were wanting, repurposed it as simple little videos. And he has like 13,000 followers gets like millions of views on his sleep tips and has made a migraine supplement brand. He’s he’s got other things going on where he is tying that in. People are asking him for a simple little digital course that he can tie to that, to help them with accountability of winding down and getting better sleep. And people love him for it. It’s that simple. You just have to listen to the audience and they’ll tell you everything you need to know.

Kevin King:

How big of an audience do you really need, because you have people that will participate that will give you good information, but they’re not necessarily buyers. So I see a lot of people that may try to start a community on Facebook and they’re like, I got a hundred people or 500 people or a thousand, is that enough? Because only a small percentage of them in most cases are actually gonna turn into buyers when you’re planning those, you know, recommendations. As you say, when you’re the editor of the magazine, not an author of a book, as you like to say, you know, make sure it’s a magazine. So it’s a variety of things. Not just a very focused, that’s an author, it would be very focused on a single subject. Because I see, just as a quick, a little aside here, one of the things I’m doing to build communities right now, and I’m talking about this at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and at Sell and Scale in September, the big Helium 10 event in Vegas is how to use NFT to actually launch products and build community.

Kevin King:

But a lot of people think NFTs are just a little JPEG picture, but NFTs really are more about community and they’re big on discord servers. And so you’ll see 20,000 people on a discord server, it’s kinda like telegram or like Facebook, but only 2000 people end up buying the NFT. So it’s like a 10% ratio there. So you can see the same thing when you’re doing Facebook or Instagram or something. So can you talk about how big of an audience do you really need to build to actually leverage that properly to help you sell your products on Amazon or Shopify or wherever?

Steven:

Yeah. So no matter where you send them as a checkout point, you’re always going to have a fluidness to your audience. You’re going to have new people come in that are discovering your content. You’re going to have people that it’s not for them anymore. You’re gonna have people that buy and that’s it. You’re gonna have people that buy and come back. You’re going to have people that lurk. So one of the things that I really like to do is I like to take the questions that I find people are asking usually three or four or even more word, long-tail search phrases around my space. I’ll either have a piece of content written by like somebody that writes SEO articles or something like that, or I’ll write it myself. I’ll set up a basic content website, nothing, nothing fancy. I’m not trying to go for millions of SEO views or something like that. It can even be like a simple square Squarespace site that functions as a niche blog topic site, you can run Google search ads on those long-tail questions that have super low competition, drive those to your site, and then take everybody that engaged with that as a custom audience over the last, you know, say 14 days and drive them to an opt-in page for your group period. And you’ll start getting fresh blood that comes in saying, Hey, I know these guys, I read that article. Sure. That’s great.

Kevin King:

So these long tail questions where you recommend they get them from answer the public, or where would they be getting these long tail questions from

Steven:

Answer the public or Quora usually is a good spot for those. I mean answer the public is going to be the easiest one because it will give it to you in both a visual diagram and is a downloadable spreadsheet. If you use the Chrome Extension keywords everywhere, it will also give you search volume and trend data for those long-tail searches. So you can see exactly what searches are producing, what results and what the competition is, and blah, blah, blah. And it’s very, very easy to say, okay, here’s a bunch of long tail keywords. I’ve had some articles written for say, 20 of the top searches. Can I set up simple Google searches for $5 a day as a campaign to get anyone searching, anything near that to come over to my site? Sure. Super duper easy. You’re getting people for pennies to come to your site and you’re not paying for it unless they actually click to come over to your site.

Steven:

And then it also means you’re not having to pay much to get people into your community or onto your, your, your, you know, social media topic page or wherever you want to send them a discord community, wherever it is. But the point is you’ve qualified people who are joining your community. This is how you get higher quality people because they have taken action to say, I want to know more about my problem. And if they join the community, they’re saying I want to be around other people who are either part of my same passion pursuit or have a similar problem to mine. And that means they’d like a solution without having to waste time. I try to keep track of what I call speed to conversion. That’s something in the content marketing world where when you get first touch with somebody in a community environment, how long is the average to see a sale from that member?

Steven:

And it’s usually about 28 days is, is what we normally see when people first touch content to where you can usually make a sale off of them, or you’ll start seeing a drop off in engagement. People usually know within about 28 days, unless it’s like a really, really high ticket kind of thing. By when we’re talking like thousands and thousands of dollars, people pretty much know that either they want something or they don’t within 28 days. Now that’s bringing everybody to Amazon. We can drive people to content. We can repurpose it. We can send people to the community. We can take everybody that engages and send them an advertisement with an offer. We can totally do all of that, but this is how you start manipulating the customer experience and qualify people to see your offers and send them to Amazon. Now let’s shift gears, I think that would be good.

Steven:

And let’s talk about how to get people from Amazon to an email list or to a community. Now years ago, I started talking about the whole QR code and messenger bot thing, and it kind of has taken to be normal. Now, everybody knows about you’re running QR codes. Everybody talks about messenger bots, all of that kind of thing. But what people don’t think about is, okay, what do you really have to get people to notice you? We cannot email people on Amazon directly outside of their transaction. We just don’t have that leverage anymore. And so how do we get people to stop opening and playing with their product and actually pay attention to the point where they’re going to come and actually try to be part of a community or talk to us. Where I’m going with this is, can we spend a little more to go from having just a generic postcard style insert to something that is more of an attention capture device is the QR code presented as part of the packaging in a premium kind of way to where people go, oh, wait a minute. What’s that? Am I talking about explainer videos, scan the QR for explainer videos, scan the QR for more ways to use blah, blah, blah. People really like use cases and speeding up the process to better use what they’ve just picked up. Okay.

Kevin King:

Just to interrupt you on that.

Steven:

Go ahead.

Kevin King:

That’s a good point that he just made pay very close attention to. Most people are just putting a little business card or they’re putting a little, like he said, a postcard kind of thing as a package insert. And yeah. And honestly, I buy a lot from Amazon. I mean a lot. And the first thing I do is I don’t even pay attention to that stuff. You know, sometimes they’ll put the big stop sign it’s right on top of the box. So right. When you cut it open, you see like a big stop. I don’t even pay attention to that. The only time I pay attention is if I’m trying to reverse engineer, you know, my competitor to see what they’re doing, but what I do now with a lot of my products is I actually make this capture actually look, feel like it’s a part of the product.

Kevin King:

You know, you get, sometimes you get a product in inside the package. There’s multiple packages, you know, once got the, I don’t know, I’m just making this up. The adapters in a box and then another one’s got the device in a box. Another one has the cord in a box. I will put another box in there. That looks cool. That actually, when they open that up, that is my attempt to get the lead captured in my QR code or my whatever. So it almost feels like it’s part of the package. You can’t, you can’t miss it. You just, you can’t miss it. And they, and they pay attention. But go ahead. Steven.

Steven:

Yes. You’re, you’re absolutely a hundred percent right. Kevin. That is absolutely what people need to think about. And that’s why I use the word attention capture device. If it looks like it’s part of the stuffing and the padding and the packaging, that’s disposable. People are going to dispose of it. You’re allowing it to be wallpaper. You’re saying, Hey, you know, please, if your board kind of notice us, please, whereas what Kevin was just talking about, where you make it an actual part of the product, or you make it part of, of the display when they open the package, you make it something important that they know they should look through. Now they’re paying attention. One of the things that, that I did for a long time is on all of my packagings. I made sure there was a cutout in the packaging.

Steven:

And instead of just a regular card, I spent two extra dollars per unit. And I had plastic, like a credit card, like material printed with the QR code. So it looked like it was like, now you’re part of the club. You have the thing because when it looked like a credit card, it felt like that plastic deal people didn’t throw it away. They’re like, wait a minute. What is this? And it was so different that if you pick that up, you go wait, okay, hold on. What is this? And when I get people into that, my first thing outta the gate is always a thank you video, always, Hey, I’m a real person. This is us. You know, thank you so much. This is what you can expect. If you click the link below, this is what you’re gonna get. Here’s some how-to videos.

Steven:

Here’s our community of other people, just like you. This is what we talk about. We’d love to see you in there. You can talk to me in there, blah, blah, blah. And you’re setting the tone for people that, Hey, yeah, you just bought my box on Amazon, but you don’t realize now we’re dating now. We’re best friends. I wanna do everything that I can to make your life better. And when you convey that to people, they’re either gonna go, okay, you’re full of crap. I’m gonna sniff you out. So I can, I can, you know, say no way, or they’re gonna, they’re gonna take a look and say, whoa, man, nobody else is doing this. How easy is it to get reviews from that? How easy is it to give them a place to land where other people are already engaged? So they can say, oh wow, there are more people like me here.

Steven:

And they’re talking about my problems and there’s already so many solutions and, and participation. And it’s so encouraging. And it feels good. It takes people from being an isolated name on an order sheet to being part of something. When, especially for the last few years, we’ve all felt so distant from each other. So allowing people to have a place to land is the easiest way to get people to engage. And there, there are quite a few brands that do this extremely well. One of my favorite brands, absolute favorite brands, and they’re on Amazon and off of Amazon. And they do this probably some of the best I have seen. There’s a protein powder company called MYOBVI, MYOVI, it’s collagen-based protein. And if you look at their community on Facebook and they’re listing on Amazon, like they do seven figures, easy from just their community alone.

Steven:

It’s so silly and everything about their opt-ins and their emails and their website. And just leading people from Amazon. Everything is about getting people to that community because they know that if you’re in a space and we can surround you with other people to validate your interests and to help you with your problems and to make you feel like you’re not alone. Well, that’s something that not everybody that you’re buying from on Amazon can offer. And if I offer that, no one else is touching it. So that’s something to leverage as you go along. What

Kevin King:

Do you find that drive? You know, a lot of people, they’ll just say here’s an insert card, go register for your warranty or download this PDF book. What are some of the things, you know, that are usually not that effective in my experience. What are some of the things that you find that are really compelling to get people to actually, okay, we’ve got their attention? You know, we’ve done, like you said, we’ve done a cool thing inside, it’s got their attention. What do I need to do to actually get them to take those next steps? In your opinion, beyond just a warranty or sign up for my VIP club or something that’s really gonna motivate them. Do you have any examples of anything that’s worked really,

Steven:

Really well. Right. So make it personal, make it personal. This is, this is more about copywriting and conveying a reason for them to engage than anything else. Because if I say, okay, product warranty, that’s overly vague and generic, they’re gonna say, okay, but does that mean I’m gonna have, I’m thinking about my product breaking. There’s a VIP club. Okay. Like, I just bought something from you. Do you want me to buy it again? Like what’s in it for the end-user. You know, what I will usually do is I will think about what the main benefit is on my listing that I was trying to run with people. Like if I have a sleep aid supplement as an example, is it because it’s going to solve migraines? Is it because it’s going to help them not be groggy in the morning?

Steven:

Is it going to help them sleep? Even though they may have allergies? Is it non-chemical like an all natural kind of thing I’ll say on the insert, here’s more things you can do based around that benefit? Cuz you’re making it personal to them. And it’s hard to do when you have a broad-based product, like a sleep aid supplement, because people are going to be converting for different reasons. But usually you can find one where you can say, Hey, scan this to join our community of other experts that are going to help you get the best sleep you can and wake up rested. Like some, something of that variety you’re reiterating the reason that they bought it and they can read that and they can go, okay, they’re not asking me to buy something else. They’re saying, Hey, we wanna continue to help you solve your problem.

Steven:

You have to talk about something personalized. We can pick a number of different niches and it would just be a matter of trying to formulate kind of a simple headline to sell that, click, sell that scan, to get them moving. If you’re offering something where they feel like they’re gonna have to buy something else or you’re making it about you and your company, usually not effective like Kevin said, but if you can make it personalized about them to where they understand, oh yeah, this is the reason I bought this. Okay. This feels like they actually understand what I’m going through. Let me take a look a little deeper into that. That’s how you’re gonna get higher opt-in rates on those inserts on top of making the insert a premium part of the experience. And this is what people don’t understand. And Kevin, I’m sure you’ve seen this a million times with all the, you know, countless people that you’ve worked with over the years, people completely neglect the deliverable and unboxing experience that comes with selling something and buying something as a consumer. And it drives me batty. Have you ever found that?

Kevin King:

Yeah. You eat with your eyes first and so many people, don’t get that. And so I spend money on the packaging because it validates that you just made the right decision. If you order something, you know, for 50 bucks and it comes in a brown piece, junk cardboard, you know, came from China with some black marks on the side and stickers all over it. You’re like, okay, cool. When you’re opening up, man, what did I get? But if it comes in like an Apple type of box or something, and it might have cost you a buck or two more to deliver that. And this validates not only like I made the right decision, but it validates it. And back to your point about the insert, just to give a little story of something I’ve done, that’s been highly effective.

Kevin King:

You know, we’re talking about warranties or PDFs or giving something personal. Cause I’ve had dog treats is one of the products that I, that I sell, and what we’ve done is we’ve done a couple of different things with that to actually get people onto our list. And what we’ve done is if I’m selling a dog bowl that people buy the slow fee dog bowl on Amazon, it’s a custom dog bowl that I designed. And then the insert actually says, we have a special cleaner for this. We’ll give it to you. We’ve done it for free. Just go to our website, you know, and get this special cleaner, you know, it’s better than soap and water. Yeah. And we’ll send it to you for free. We’ve done tests with free plus shipping and, and free. And we’ve done it with dog treats where it says, get us free sample pack, you know, say I have got six different products on Amazon six different dog treats, you know, duck feed and pig and whatever these different little treats.

Kevin King:

Yeah. I’ll make a little gift box, it’s really small. It’s really lightweight and ships. It’s got like one of each treat and like a little box of chocolates, almost that will say, go to the website and we’ll give it to you for free. That costs me money. But I get a very qualified person, a very interested person who is very appreciative of me. And then when they come to the website, I ask them, what’s your dog’s name? Oh my dog’s name’s Fido. How old is he? You know, what breed is it? You know, I get just some three or four, not, I don’t go through a big, huge questionnaire. And then what we do is on their dog’s birthday, they’ll enter the dog’s birthday. And about a week before the dog’s birthday, we will send the dog a present through the mail and the dog gets this present through the mail.

Steven:

That is so smart.

Kevin King:

And they’re that shocked. And they’re like, holy cow. And this costs me, you know, it depends on what it is between three and $8 depending on the offer. And it depends on the product price. And yes, it comes outta my margin, but the dividends, it pays in reviews. You know, people are always saying, how do I get more reviews? The dividends that people will buy it just because of that, you know, it’s like, I always remember. I used to buy when I was in the movie I used to do a lot of television production. We would buy blank–, you know, you don’t have to do this anymore, but you have to buy the blank beta tapes, you know, to put in the camera. And there’s this company on Philadelphia that we would buy from.

Kevin King:

And they would always put two little packs of m&m’s in the package. So you’d buy a case of tapes and inside the package, two of those like Halloween size packages of m&ms and I would order from them just because of the freaking m&m’s that I would from some way else. Because you know, I could go down the store and get that, but those little things make a huge, huge difference. And yes, that’s a comes outta the market budget. Yes. That cuts into your margins. But if you can get creative with something like that, you build a huge list of loyal raving fans that you can then market to. And that’s what so many people don’t understand it. And your customer list, Steven said this earlier is your most valuable asset. Maybe your IP could be up there with it, but your customer list would be next.

Kevin King:

And so many people think they make a sale on Amazon. I’m done. And that’s it. You know, it doesn’t matter. You’re selling a spatula. Well, they don’t need a second spatula. I’m not selling a continuity. No, you’re not done. Like he said, the email, you know, so many people don’t understand. They feel, oh, I don’t wanna spam my customers. I know people that have lists of 200,000 emails. They’ve never emailed. ’em Once holy cow, you’re sitting on a gold mine here. It’s just amazing. If you build the right relationship, people will buy from you over and over and over. And you’ve gotta be thinking about that, especially in how competitive Amazon’s gotten these days. It’s the way to build a brand. It’s the way to build a business. And what Steven is saying here is, is so critical. You’ve got to pay attention to this and maybe you can’t do it when you first start, because you’re on a super tight budget or something, but you gotta have this in your roadmap and your plan to get to this point, if you really wanna stand, stand apart

Steven:

Again, think about the personal thing that Kevin was just talking about with his dog treats. It’s something completely unexpected. It’s something that when the customer receives that they know that it was an unnecessary thing, but the company went out of their way to still send that they know that they may not have bought for months. But guess what? Now that repeat purchase rate or people coming back in to buy other things, their barrier to conversion is now so low. When they receive that treat in the mail guys, they’re looking for a reason to engage with the company. He’s given them something that they need to reciprocate. They get this gift and they’re like, oh my gosh. Okay. I that’s amazing. Yeah. Next time I need to buy something. I know exactly where I’m going. There’s no version of I’m gonna shop elsewhere. There’s no version of I’m gonna compare and see what else I can get. No, you go, okay. I know who’s going to take care of me. I wanna be involved like this.

Kevin King:

And you’ve gotta understand your customer too. You got like he said the intent. And we’ll talk about understanding buyer intent here in a second, but you gotta understand what’s valuable to your customer. Just giving them something that you think is cool, may not be cool. Here’s another quick example is one of my past businesses back in the late nineties and early two thousands, putting sexy girls on baseball cards was a thing. It was a big, big business where you would go out and you’d shoot bikini models or you’d shoot sports illustrated models. Or, you know, it even went to like Playboy models and stuff on little baseball cards, just like collect a football or basketball, you know, stars, people collected these. And we had a company that we did that. And what we did is to our customer base every year, we would hire a sexy model in lingerie and have her doing something with Santa Claus, you know, sitting along on like doing something with Santa Claus and in a sexy way.

Kevin King:

And then we would customize, we would create a card set because these are collectors, cuz we understood the mentality in our buyers and they like things that are limited edition. You know, there’s only a thousand of these, there are only 5,000 of these. And so we would make a special limited edition card. It’s a single card, you know, two and a half by three and a half inches that was numbered, 1/5,000, 2/5000, or 3/5000 we would Mount it to a bigger card and send that out to them in a nice envelope as a Christmas present every year at Christmas and to all of our customers and they loved it, you know? And they were super loyal. We were voted like the number one company in the business year after year after year. And it just paid such huge dividends and, and it gave them something that they exactly wanted, you know, and it played right into their psychology run into their psyche and they ate that up.

Kevin King:

So you have to think of things in those terms, not just something that’s cheap and easy, you know, you know, you go to a conference and people are here, here’s a key chain with our logo on it. Who gets a crap about that? You know, who’s gonna use that. You know, I don’t even take the gift bags mostly at these conferences cuz it’s people haven’t thought out what is actually practical and used usable to that audience. They’re just doing whatever the latest promotional thing is or something they can do for cheap. So you have to think in those terms.

Steven:

Yeah. And to piggyback on what you’re saying there, Kevin, what I always think about is the things that I’m optimizing for in terms of keywords are search terms. The things that people are using to search for certain products are not the same terminology and language that are the reasons they’re going to convert. And what Kevin is talking about is doing what we spoke about in the very beginning of the podcast, going to where your customers are hanging out. Maybe that’s on social media, maybe that’s on a discord, maybe that’s on some forum somewhere. And being able to read those conversations. There’s an old school thing in marketing called a focus group where you would get a bunch of people together in a room and you would present different things to them and psychologically evaluate their responses for, you know, product development and marketing and a few other things, guys, social media, anytime that you can go and read through people’s conversations, that is a free archived focus group. Facebook groups are focus groups. Where do you think? I mean, I scuba dive, but where do you think I learned so much more about what’s really important to all of the other divers I went, I went through, I went through Facebook groups. The more you understand about your customer base, the more you can optimize for leveraging how much they’re going to identify with you and how much more they’re going to gravitate toward what you have going on versus all of the other pieces in the market.

Kevin King:

And you gotta speak their language. I mean, you have to speak their language and put it in their use words that they use the phrasing that they use. You know, another good example is if you listen to episode 294, the, the first podcast that I hosted of AM/PM Podcast a couple weeks ago I interviewed Manny Coates and the original founder of Helium 10. And in that podcast, we talked about how Manny’s launching this NFT project called Bulls and Apes Project. And you know, I’ve mentioned this a few times that I’m launching an NFT project primarily for the reason of community, not to have some JPEGs that hopefully go up in value, which like I said, I’ll be talking about later, but Manny is already doing this. So when he launched his project at the end of May, what did I do?

Kevin King:

I did exactly what Steven is preaching to you to do. I didn’t go to Facebook or Instagram. I went to in the NFT space, Twitter spaces, it’s kinda like clubhouse, you know, when the pandemic clubhouse came to be a thing. And now it’s Twitter space. Twitter spaces is where all the NFT talk is happening. You know, I’ve had a Twitter account since like 2013. I think I had two followers at the time. And now I have a few hundred because I joined a Twitter space, but I went and listened to Manny’s Twitter space because when they launched their product on May 31st, they did 24/7 Twitter spaces for like five days to launch the product, to help sell it out. Just constant. They had guests coming on guests, coming on, people that had bought coming on.

Kevin King:

And I’m like, this is the perfect freaking opportunity to do exactly what Steven is just saying to go in and listen to these people. Yes. Some of it was boring me to tears, but I, every waking minute for five days, I was on there. Not because I wanted to know, what’s the coolest thing that he’s doing. I wanted to get into the psychology of the buyers. I wanted to know what are they talking about? What’s important to them. Why did they buy this stuff? And the information that I got, and the insight that I got is irreplaceable. I could not have read that in any blog or any magazine or any book or anywhere. And then I just went to NFT, New York, 16,000 people at this NFT conference in New York. And I went there. I listened to some of the talks, but I was there primarily to size up the audience, to talk to some people to look at, okay, what is the age group of these people?

Kevin King:

Okay. I see they’re mostly 18 to 25 year old guys with no business experience that are trying to do this and this and this. And it gave me some really good insight. I don’t need to become an expert in that space. Just like Steven said, I don’t have a super passion, but I see the power and the way to leverage this. And I need to understand that. And so when I create our project, that’s how we will create it with that in mind. And that it’s so, so critical to do this. And so many people don’t wanna take these steps or don’t wanna do this. And like Steven said, it used to be focus groups. You’d have to spend a lot of money. I remember you’d go in Vegas. I think it was at the MGM that when you’re walking down to the restaurants, they had like not an office, but like a retail kind of store there that was a focus group place.

Kevin King:

And they would just grab people. They have people with clipboards out, as you’re walking to go get your hamburger or something and say, Hey, do you have a 15 minutes? Will you come in here, we’ll pay a hundred bucks or buy your hamburger for free. If you’ll come in here and watch this short little commercial and give us your feedback, you don’t have to do that anymore. The internet is so valuable and you can get so much information, use this and, and create your listings this way, build your audience this way. And it will make a huge difference. It’s not an overnight success. This is not, you’re gonna do this. And it’s not a field of dreams. It’s not, you gotta execute. And it takes a little bit of time. But once you get the snowball rolling downhill, you’ll have an avalanche before you know it.

Steven:

Yes, yes, yes. A hundred percent agreed with everything that you just said. I mean, and not to be the dead horse, but honestly, even a little bit of effort, the more you know about your customers, the easier a time you’re going to have, not only leveraging the information for more sales on what you already have, but it’s going to make your product development a lot easier too. There are so many things that I had as original ideas from some of the data like we all play with and Helium 10 and elsewhere. But then I go and actually do some of the social listenings and find out what’s really important to people. And I’m like, Ooh, here’s another thing that people want solved. I don’t really see any features on some of these products or what some of the brands are putting out that are kind of addressing this need that the market is continually talking about. So if I address that need, I don’t really have much competition and the market and the hunger for it is already there. So I always try to go that route.

Kevin King:

I think you might have, maybe it’s already a term, but if not, I’m gonna give you credit for coining this term, social listening, social listening is, I don’t know if that’s something that people have used before, but I like that that’s gonna be something I’m gonna latch onto.

Steven:

I will confess. I picked that up. I picked that up from the content marketing world. It’s not my original term. It’s just one that I beat to death. You know, if I go into a group and I pose as a user and ask an open loop type question, or if I say, Hey, I’m new. Can I find out about blah, blah, blah? You’ll get everybody come in and, and give their opinion on what’s going on. The I’m new bit works great for getting all of the experts in the space or anybody that has anything to say pile on and just vomit all of the information you might need about what’s important, it’s so easy to do. So

Kevin King:

I think one of the things that you said was a great I think this might have been one of your presentations at Billion Dollar Seller Summer or something. You said, actually, this is a good line to put, when you go into a social media group like you said, you know, say you’re new, but you, you specifically said right to post this, you know, you’re a blank if when you blank. Ah, and then you put in parenthesis answering comments. You know, so the exact phrase is, you know, you’re a scuba diver if, when you, yeah, whatever the answer is, you leave that blank. So they’ll fill it in answering comments and parentheses and people will then start just filling it in and you’ll get so much valuable information. And because there’s so much comments going on that post will be seen by a lot more people.

Kevin King:

It could, you know, instead of being seen by 50 people, because everybody’s commenting that sends out social signals to Facebook that, Hey, we need to show this to more and more and more people of the group. Because remember when you post on social media, this is something to, to keep in mind too. If you don’t get engagement, your post doesn’t go anywhere. So maybe you’re going to a group of, you know, like Steven said, a scuba group, and there’s, you know, 5,000 people that say in this group and you’re like, I’m gonna go in there and do everything that Steven just said, I’m gonna post something. I’m new here. What should I do? And you get one or two comments. Well, all those 5,000, maybe a hundred, 150 people are gonna see that post all 5,000 will never see that post. But if you post something that gets them to respond and not all, and give the same answer, not a yes, no answer, but different answers. Then Facebook sees that this is valuable instead of going to a hundred, 150 people, you might reach 1,000, 1,500 who knows 2,500, maybe the whole group. If you’re lucky, that’s the way you gotta get this information.

Steven:

And to piggyback on that, you’re gonna get momentum. So if you do something like I talked about and have a set of posts ready to go, when you post each day and you start building engagement, and momentum, Facebook will see that. And they’ll say, okay, this person’s posting. We’re gonna go ahead and give it a little more reach because it’s creating a better user experience. And they’re getting those user experience signals because of the engagement rates. Like Kevin said, I have multiple groups that in which I post, and usually within 48 hours of the post, I’ve reached a full 20% of the group’s members organically.

Kevin King:

That’s awesome.

Steven:

And that’s crazy business. And if you can do that over and over and over and over again before you know it, there’s a lot of people talking about you, a lot of people searching you out, they’ll go to your profile. You can say, Hey, you know, founder of this, or, you know, have a link to the store or what have you. And people start clicking through. The other thing that you need to pay attention to that you will see is brand lift. If people know that you are associated with a certain brand and they start really latching onto your messages, you’ll see brand searches increase on Google and on Amazon happens all the time. And while I’m talking about that, one of the things that I like to do, this is a separate little trick where I use Shopify and Amazon together, because I like to use Shopify before I send people to Amazon, because I like to be able to keep the customer data. And I have better advertising tools available to me when I use a Shopify store. But what I’ll do is my highest intent audiences that come to my store, let’s say, abandoned cart or abandoned checkout.

Steven:

I will create a custom audience of them on Facebook and Facebook’s audience builder. And instead of retargeting them to my Shopify store, where they can check out with the order they already have in the basket if I have those items on Amazon, I will almost always run a reach campaign. And the reach campaign on Facebook just has put this in front of as many people as possible. And if it’s a custom audience, it’s just that small group of people, I’ll say, Hey, you left something at the store. Did you know, you can get this on Amazon for a couple of dollars cheaper and get it two days with a Prime experience. Now what I’m doing is I’m sending them over to Amazon. And even if they don’t click on the ad, they’re gonna go and search either my brand or by the product name, they’re gonna look for it.

Steven:

Right? So I get that. And because of the perceived discount, because my Amazon listings are a few dollars cheaper, there’s a perceived discount, but they’re still buying it full price. And when you do that, I, I still have that customer data. It’s a simple thing to do. So I just, I know that was a little tangent there, but it’s important. So if you have even a single product Shopify store, you can run traffic there and then retarget people to your Amazon listing and get traffic over on your Amazon listing with still being able to maintain all the customer data. The cool thing is even if they go to Amazon, you can take that same custom audience that you built and get them to opt into your community, get send ’em to an email opt in page, whatever you wanna do, you can still play with them and manipulate that customer experience to, to keep things moving on your end. So just wanted to make sure I covered that one too. Cause that’s super easy to do and super overlooked.

Kevin King:

It is. I’m not gonna give you one little other tangent. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this one, Steven, but there’s a little tip for those of you out there, but let’s say you’re selling a gift for newlyweds, you’re wanting to get into, you’re doing your research on Amazon. You’re like, I wanna sell, you know, or maybe how already have a product, or that would be a perfect gift for newlyweds or you’re looking to do something. What I’ve done is I’ve actually gone onto Facebook and I’ve run ads and choose the targeting audience. And I just type in “friends of”, if you just type “friends of” when you choose your audience profiles. And then it will show friends of people getting married in one month friends of people that just got married.

Kevin King:

People, friends of people who that are wedding anniversary, coming up, friends of people who have a birthday friends of women who have a birthday friends of men who have a birthday. And you could post something like you know, you could just go on there as a person and say, Hey, my, my friend is getting married. What would be the perfect wedding gift to give them I’m looking for something cool and interesting and unique. And just look at the responses you get and look at the ideas that you get for products, you could do this for a lot of different things without even having a group. There’s just so much amazing stuff that you can do out there. If you just gotta think out of the box and, and get creative with it. And the tools are, are super powerful

Steven:

Very, very much so. So in terms of starting, if you’re an Amazon-only seller and you wanna start elsewhere, I would go to unbalance.com and look at their blog because they’re gonna have some great information on setting up. What’s called a lead capture page versus a click through style Lander. And that’s, if you’re gonna either wanna use a sales page to send people to your Amazon listing and, you know, run, run traffic to that where you’ll have an increase in conversions or if you just wanna capture emails, I would send people to a place called really good emails.com as a place to see what good looking and high converting emails look like based on the niche or based on if it’s a welcome series flow or a post purchase flow. And you’re going to get a lot of good information on starting to set that up. Now, just like when everybody started on Amazon, learning the Amazon platform, learning products, sourcing, all of that.

Steven:

Yeah. Okay. You had to learn all of that, but what if you could easily 5x, what you’re doing by just adding a couple of other pieces. We’re not saying that you need a 10 armed octopus, if you’re at that point where you’re like, I wanna venture off and I want, I wanna start, you know, having a little more leverage. That would be really cool. Great learn landing pages, learn a little bit of email marketing. It will help a lot. The supplement company I talked about much earlier in the podcast MYOBVI guys, they started three years ago with $10,000 as their initial capital into the protein powder market. And in three years time, they built a $30 million a year company. Wow.

Kevin King:

That’s awesome.

Steven:

Because it’s all about customer experience and community. Yeah. It’s crazy. They spend so much time in their community. It’s bonkers, but it works.

Kevin King:

It does. And just as another landing page, you know, all of you that have Gelium 10, you also have Portals, which is a landing page builder built within Helium 10. So if you don’t wanna use one of the other tools out there, you have access to that as well. Well, Steven, we could probably sit here and talk for about another four hours. Yeah. So absolutely on this, but we–

Steven:

I wanna push on that last point. You just made though. Hold on one second, Kevin. I wanna push on that last point you just made. Yeah. If you’re on Helium 10 and you have the Portals feature available to you. Oh my gosh. Don’t be a bonehead and switch off. It’s already integrated in everything for you. Don’t pay extra for it. Go to Unbounce and learn about what’s actually gonna work and then go back over to Portals and build it out, baby. Absolutely use that to your full advantage, because guess what? I promise if they looked at it from the back end, the amount of people that have access to that versus the amount of people effectively using it, it’s so silly as it and how underused it would be. And that’s so easy to use and gives yourself a crazy advantage in your space. So definitely use that if you have it on Helium 10 guys.

Kevin King:

Awesome. Well, Steven, I know you have the Unstoppable FBA group, you got like, think about 10,000 plus members in that. How else can people reach out to you if they wanna learn more or hear more of your talks or learn more, or reach out to you if they wanna maybe use you for something what’s the best way?

Steven:

The easiest way to get ahold of me to find out more about what I have going on is what Kevin just mentioned. It is the Unstoppable FBA Facebook group. All I do is talk about marketing tips specifically about, you know, the things that we talked about and more, I talk about copywriting. I talk about conversions. I, I talk about email marketing. I talk about advertising all of the extra marketing stuff, specifically geared for Amazon sellers. I’m in their everyday posting tips. I’m in their every day answering questions. You can reach out to me personally there. If you have questions, I am happy to answer whatever you guys wanna throw at me. And you know, looking forward to having you, if you would like to come and know more

Kevin King:

Awesome, Steven it’s been a pleasure speaking with you the time flies when we speak about stuff that we’re passionate about and that we love. Thanks. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing the AM/PM Podcast audience.

Steven:

Oh, Kevin, thank you so much for having me. The pleasure is all mine. Anytime you wanna pick my brain, you know, all you have to do is ask and I will happily go ahead and have a party and talk with you, my man.

Kevin King:

Awesome. We’ll have to do this again. Thanks, Steven.

Steven:

Thank you.

Kevin King:

As you could tell Steven, and I could talk about that. We’re quite a bit longer. We’re both super passionate about marketing and building a great customer experience and building an awesome customer list that you can use over and over again. Hopefully, you get some good value from this episode. Don’t forget. We’ll be back again next week with another jam packed episode. Also, the Helium 10 Elite training will be on July 21st. So if you’re a Helium 10 Elite member, be sure to check that out. If you just have a basic Helium 10 membership or any level of Helium 10 membership, make sure you check out the Freedom Ticket. It’s free to access for anybody who has a helium 10 membership. It’s an A to Z on how to sell on Amazon available at no extra charge to all Helium 10 members. And don’t forget the Billion Dollar Seller Summit is coming up in August in Austin, Texas. It’s sponsored by Helium 10, and I’ll be speaking at the Sell and Scale event, the Helium 10 event in Las Vegas, and September. So just to close out with this week’s golden nugget, kind of along the lines of what we just talked about today. “Remember, people follow incentives, not advice. People follow incentives, not advice.”

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#297 – Amazon Marketing, Community Building, And The Art Of “Social Listening” With Steven Black

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