#419 – Boosting Conversions Through Creative Content: Mastering Amazon Listings with Daniela Bolzmann
E-commerce listing wizard Daniela Bolzmann joins us to uncover the secrets to mastering Amazon listing optimization. From her tech beginnings to becoming a trailblazer in e-commerce optimization, Daniela shares her incredible journey, revealing how she discovered her passion. Her insights on the pressures and freedoms of transitioning from startup life to following passion-driven ventures paint a vivid picture of today’s evolving work culture.
Our conversation dives into powerful strategies for Amazon advertising and branding, challenging the status quo of product marketing. Starting with creative development, Daniela emphasizes capturing consumer attention through sound-infused product presentations and consistent branding. We explore the structured processes that help brands elevate their content, from sharp data analysis to creative briefs, and discuss the importance of split testing. The episode dives into the various levels of support brands require, whether they’re seeking full autonomy or ongoing collaboration.
The art of enhancing Amazon listings and A+ content through creative optimization and visual storytelling is another focus, highlighting the role of specialized teams in transforming product imagery into engaging stories. Daniela sheds light on AI and advanced search tools reshaping product discovery, and the importance of embedding metadata in images for visibility. We discuss the power of premium A+ content, featuring innovative strategies like hotspots and carousels, to boost engagement. This episode promises to inspire listeners with actionable insights to elevate their Amazon presence and drive sales growth.
In episode 419 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Daniela discuss:
- 00:00 – Mastering Amazon Listings With Daniela Bolzmann
- 01:59 – Speaking at Amazon Accelerate Event
- 08:25 – Amazon Sellers Lack Marketing Psychology
- 09:13 – Amazon Advertising Strategy and Branding
- 11:28 – Elevated Content Creation and Process Implementation
- 15:32 – Enhancing Amazon Listings Through Creative Optimization
- 17:09 – Amazon SEO Optimization Fundamentals
- 19:38 – Google Image Traffic for Amazon Products
- 23:12 – Optimizing Amazon Listings for Search
- 24:25 – Future of Image-Based Search Tools
- 27:12 – Common Mistakes in Image Creation
- 30:23 – Optimizing Amazon Listings With Visual Storytelling
- 32:45 – Utilizing User-Generated Content for Marketing
- 36:46 – Seamless Image Design Techniques
- 42:41 – Exploring Peruvian Cuisine and Fusion
- 48:11 – Kevin King’s Words of Wisdom
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 419 of the AM/PM podcast. My next guest this week is none other than Daniela Bolzmann. Daniela is a master when it comes to actually creating listings. Her and her team create some amazing listings of some amazing imagery A-plus content, A-plus premium content. She is the best when it comes to doing this. She works with a lot of the top brands in the world and really helping them refine and double their conversions, increase their sales, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about this week on the podcast. Enjoy this episode with Daniela. Daniela Bolzmann, how are you doing? Welcome to the AM/PM podcast.
Daniela:
Thanks for having me, glad to be here.
Kevin King:
It’s awesome to have you here. You know, just, I guess it was September, I think it was, that you came on the Helium 10 Elite and presented an amazing presentation. So those of you that are listening, if you’re not a Helium 10 Elite member, you’re missing out, because Daniella came on and showed some really good listing, optimization and image stuff and just some amazing, really cool stuff. So after she did that, I was like you got to come on the AM/PM podcast. We got it. We got it. We got to talk more about this because that wasn’t enough time.
Daniela:
We brought the fire. That was a lot of fun, and we don’t get to share a lot of visual examples with very many people in that way, so it was fun to kind of break it down for everyone and show them what is actually possible, especially since that’s what we got to share and speak about at Amazon Accelerate.
Kevin King:
Yeah, you actually were one of the few that was chosen to speak at Accelerate right. You actually went on one of the sessions. That’s not an easy thing to get tapped out. That’s like you got to get tapped out on the shoulder like in a secret ceremony right. To actually speak on their stage.
Daniela:
It was really interesting. I didn’t even know I was speaking at Amazon Accelerate until 30 days before. So–
Kevin King:
Yeah?
Daniela:
Yeah so I was invited and so were two of our clients, so we got to come and share their journey on Amazon, and the way that that came to be is actually quite interesting, because ever since last year, I have been sharing our case studies that we publish on our website to our contacts at Amazon and they submit them to the PR team at Amazon and they have selected a few to get their big push for PR. So because of that, they invited us to come speak and share that story as well. So it’ll coincide with the release of their content later in the year or maybe into 2025.
Kevin King:
What’s your background? Were you a seller? Were you in advertising? Tell me the Daniela story background.
Daniela:
Sure. So my background’s in tech, actually and through my 20s, early 30s, I had a on-demand delivery business. This was like pre-Doordash, pre-Uber courier type service, right, so we would deliver from store to door. After we exited that business, I went through like a mini life crisis where I was like what do I want to do?
Kevin King:
Was this in the US? Was this in the US?
Daniela:
This was in the US. This was in Chicago. I was in Techstars. That was a previous life of mine and my biggest lesson in that was, you know, we had 20 something angel investors. We had a couple billionaire investors and my lesson in that learning was I was, I was young and I was already felt. I felt like I was already leading a team and having to be in an office every single day, being almost like a motherly, parent type of co-founder to 20 people in our office, all of which were even younger than me, you know, and so there was a bit of naiveness that went into that at that age. But in hindsight, looking at that, what I realized is this is the first time in our and ever in the world that our generation and future generations have the chance to pick up their laptop and go and work anywhere and have these freedom businesses that we can run with passion and do things that we just enjoy every day. And while I did enjoy my startup, it was amazing. It was an incredible experience. There’s a lot of pressure that comes with that, a lot of expectations that comes when you take other people’s money, and I didn’t want to go through that again, and so what I realized was that I have all of these marketing skills that I had from that chapter of my life and I wanted to put them to good use and help brands that I believe in and brands that really want to be out there in the world, and brand builders like me, right. And so I knew that I was going to be in e-commerce. I knew that was the trajectory I was going towards, and it was about figuring out which part of e-commerce do I want to be a part of. Because at that time I could build websites, I could do email newsletters, I could do SEO, I could do all of these things that I had from my tech background. But then what is the piece of what I want to do in this e-com world? And it was around the same time.
Kevin King:
When was this? When was this?
Daniela:
It was around the time that Amazon bought Whole Foods.
Kevin King:
So around 2015, 16, somewhere.
Daniela:
Yeah, so at that time my family had a. One of my aunts had a $50 million CPG business and I had said to her you know, I can do all these things. I’m really interested in this Amazon piece because Amazon just acquired Whole Foods, so I’d love to figure out what that looks like for you. Do you mind if I just get this selling on Amazon and see how it goes? And in that experience, I realized that there was such a huge learning curve for someone like me that had a marketing background that I was just thinking how are other founders doing this, like my aunt? She’s the creator of this product, not necessarily a, you know, a marketing Swiss army knife able to do all these things, but she knows her business inside and out. But how does she, how does someone like that, get over this learning curve of Amazon, you know? And so once I went through that experience and saw all the pain points that that founder was going to go through, I realized that I needed to figure out a way to learn how to make that easier. So initially we started out as a full service Amazon agency. I literally was like building chatbots and shipping stuff out of my husband’s sister’s garage. They were like our prep and ship team. We’re doing PPC, we’re doing all these things and, to be honest, we were not great at anything. And I told the brands we’re working with we’re learning, we’re going to learn alongside you. That’s why our rates are so low. Did that for a couple years, got a little bit better, but was pulling my hair out until I realized that our sweet spot and what we are just really great at is just the piece of the SEO and the creatives. So as soon as we decided to not offer full service and just get into the SEO and creative space, that’s when we really accelerated our own learnings and when our team really became, like this, master of our craft at just this one piece.
Kevin King:
So today are you dealing with mostly these big CPG brands or are you dealing with like half a million dollar a year Amazon seller, or is it a mix?
Daniela:
It’s very mixed. It’s very mixed. If you go to our website, you can see we have brands that they’re in the million dollar range for the most part million dollar or more range but we still work with startups. It really comes down to are they a right fit for us in terms of their branded mindset? Like is this, is this, if it’s a founder that is launching a product, are they coming at it from the perspective of I have my Shopify site. I fine tune my creatives on my site. I know what I’m doing. Like is there some sort of signal to us that they’re ready for this on Amazon? What’s the challenge for us is that it’s a struggle to work with brand builders that watch a video on YouTube and they go and either buy somebody else’s business and they want to become a millionaire overnight and they have this really short sighted mindset of what Amazon content can do for them, whereas or maybe we’re like their last hope I don’t want to ever be someone’s last hope either the brands that really do well with us are these D to C minded thinkers that they understand and they invest in creative content. So if you look at the brands that are coming to us, they might already have these like amazing Shopify websites, but for some reason their team has just not been able to translate that to either exceptional creatives on Amazon or performance or both, and so what we’re trying to do is make sure that they have some consistency. So if somebody sees them on TikTok or on their website or somewhere else and then they land on Amazon, that the consumer instantly knows it’s the same brand and has that same feeling associated with it.
Kevin King:
A lot of Amazon sellers have no clue how to do that. I mean, I have a degree in marketing from Texas A&M and so my background, my entire life, has been marketing and marketing is all psychology. And a lot of people on Amazon, like you said, they watch a YouTube video, they go through a course, and these people have no marketing background. They might have some email background, some SEO background, but they have no branding. No, they don’t understand that it needs to be consistent. When you see a McDonald’s logo, you don’t even have to see the whole logo. You see part of the logo and part of the colors and you know, instantly know, what that is. Or you see Tiffany blue, you instantly know what that is. I mean, and that’s a consistency across everything. And Amazon’s e-commerce sellers don’t get that. And I’m actually doing a webinar on December 11th. So, in like, this is a Halloween today when this is coming out. So in like six weeks, all about the psychology of marketing. I did this presentation at Helium 10 Elite’s live event at Accelerate, actually, and it went over exceptionally well. So I’ve gone back and like modified it and I’m basically like one of the premises in there is like everybody’s taught to find a product. Go to Helium 10, find an opportunity, go to Alibaba and source it and then create your creative. I’ll tell them no, do it the other way around, actually, do the creative first and then find the product.
Kevin King:
It’s a whole different way of thinking and showing them how you have two seconds to capture somebody and the consistency and how you can use sound in your advertising and like, yeah, I can’t use sound on Amazon to sell. I guess you can’t. If you can use sound on it, you can use it on any single product on Amazon. If you can use sound, you’ll increase your conversions by 26% by adding sound to your products and they’re like well, does that mean music or something? I think no, it could be music, it could be a theme song or it could be, but no, just the sound of the product. You know, unzipping of a zipper, unzipping, uh, and, and there’s a lot of cool techniques that they just don’t understand. But that’s branding. That’s not a do this and make a hundred thousand dollars tomorrow because of some sort of hack, and that’s what a lot of people are not willing to do on Amazon. But I think a lot of people are starting to realize that this is the game now. It’s not this short-term um, get rich quick anymore. It’s like you got to be a real company with a real brand, unless you just get lucky, and that’s where people like you and that’s like what you presented on the Helium 10 Elite. I was like this is refreshing because this is what people need and it’s work, though it’s not as easy and it takes testing and it takes a different way of approaching it.
Daniela:
In all fairness, it’s even hard for the brands that have full e-com teams. We work with a number of you’d be surprised. A number of brands come to us and they have a full e-commerce team at their disposal, but that team might not be cross-trained in the intricacies of Amazon. So while they might have all of these beautiful infographics and all of these places and all these resources and a design team, they don’t necessarily have the skill set to follow or the process to know exactly what they need to be doing to execute on Amazon creatives.
Kevin King:
You got to mix commercial branding with guerrilla marketing and with direct response marketing and that’s a lot of times a lot of people can’t ride both of those lines.
Daniela:
Yeah, and the split testing piece of it, right. So we have. We worked with a, let’s just say, a company recently that has a handful of some of the biggest brands in the world and their content was surprisingly atrocious. I’ll say that. And they had just worked with an agency before they came to us, a content agency before they came to us. I was kind of shocked that any amount of money got them what they got. I was just like, how is this even possible? That’s how bad it was. And then when we, when we went through the process with them, it wasn’t so much about delivering elevated content, which is what I preach, right, and yes, a lot of data goes into that and a lot of like science pieces goes into building that content. It’s not like we just want to make pretty things, but for them, I think what was most interesting is understanding from a fundamental process standpoint, like, what are the pieces that we need to be considering every time we’re doing this? So when people go through a project with us, it’s not like we just take their money, come back, here’s your designs.
Daniela:
We’re actually bringing them through a series of steps so that they can see okay, please review this creative brief. This is all the data we pulled from all of your resources, your brand analytics, your PPC reports, anything from Helium 10. We literally pull everything together. We create a Loom video to walk them through. These are the things that we’re looking at and this is why we think that they’re important, and then, once they’re able to just watch that video, they start to understand why this is the first step, why this is the second step, why this is the third step, why we need to then split test, then why we need to change the design, then why we need to, you know, upload that design in this specific way, or those are the pieces that I think the team internally in these larger e-comm teams is not trained on, so they’d rather just come to us, accelerate that for the first few SKUs, understand what they need to be doing and then they can replicate it internally and they have the master design files from us in order to roll it out across their catalog.
Kevin King:
So then they don’t need you anymore, or do you still do stuff for them?
Daniela:
Depends. So we have some brands that they’re like great, we got it from here, thank you so much. They got to see the whole process. Now their team knows what they need to be doing and that’s totally fine with us. Then we have other brands that are like no, please do this forever now. You know like keep going, and so obviously those are you know, some of our favorite brands are the ones that just literally let us do this year round for them. I was on a. I saw a webinar yesterday for an agency training and one of the things that they were preaching was this that we needed to be testing year-round and that, yes, we’re talking about testing in Q4. Q4, honestly, is not the most interesting time for testing for me. I think you should have been testing in Q1, Q2, Q3. Q4 testing is so difficult. It’s the data skewed. It’s like your back’s against the wall, you know, and so the only clients that in Q4 that are really testing. They’re not even really testing. They’re just kind of like our content’s so bad it doesn’t even matter. Just rip the band aid off, let’s go. We know anything could be better than what we have and that’s kind of the Q4 type of sellers that we deal with. But everyone else we’re recommending Q1, Q2, Q3, should be testing the entire year round. So by the time Q4 comes, like right now, you’re like you know exactly what’s working, your content is ready, like there is nothing else you need to be doing. You know–
Kevin King:
Just like Amazon. They do the heavy bulk of their testing in quarter two. Usually it’s around quarter two, a little bit dips, drips into Q3. But a lot of it is in quarter two, which is the slowest time of the year for them, and then leading up to Prime Day. I mean, that’s that’s why they did Prime Day is because that’s just a dead time of year. So when you’re working with these brands, do they think they know Amazon when they’re coming in? And they actually don’t? Because I see how this happened with the aggregators and this happens with a lot of these big companies. They have some guy that just graduated from Harvard with an MBA in marketing and they’re like this person is the perfect person. Or they have a $40,000 a year intern that’s running their Amazon side of things, and neither one of them has a clue. What do you see that? A lot.
Daniela:
Not really. I mean, maybe we’re just less than the clients we get, but I would say most of the clients that come to us they know that they don’t know everything and it’s this mentality of like we’re still learning to write, like Amazon changes so much. We learn with every single client test that we’re running every single day and we try to share those learnings amongst our team to make sure everybody’s leveling up for every client. But I think a lot of the clients come to us and they just know that like they need an extra set of hands that specializes in Amazon creative specifically. Like most of the clients that we work with, they already have agencies, like full-service agencies.
Kevin King:
Oh okay.
Daniela:
Like full service agencies or PPC agencies.
Kevin King:
Okay, okay.
Daniela:
And so the thing is that their agency either doesn’t offer content or doesn’t offer the level of content that matches what they need and the level of expertise and split testing and all that that needs to be happening alongside that team. And so we have a client recently that they just they left one full service agency. They hired another one that specialized in just PPC and they hired us so that the two of us can be working in tandem year round.
Kevin King:
That’s smart.
Daniela:
Because content and traffic, content and traffic like it just needs to be this symbiotic relationship. And I think all too often the conversation is just about pushing PPC and we all know where that’s going. You know it’s like it’s just the water is super full. Everyone’s trying to push PPC and if your conversion’s not right, then then, like, why are you even pushing that to begin with? We need to get back to the basics and make sure that we’re refreshing our content, that we have the right content, that it has the right messaging, that it’s targeting the right avatar and even within these like mega conglomerate brands, there’s really smart testing that they’ve thought about doing. That we didn’t think about doing. They’ve kind of collaborated with us and thought about this like, can we take a seasonal approach to this content rather than not a holiday approach. We’re talking about like a seasonal approach based on their consumer trends, like it’s allergy season, it’s this, it’s that, like bringing in that data and saying, okay, let’s not make this a difficult task for them to swap out content, but let’s just make sure that one or two images in the product images in the A plus is easily modular and moved around based on the time of year, so you target that audience first.
Kevin King:
You said earlier, you also do some SEO stuff. Is that on Amazon SEO, or is that outside Amazon SEO?
Daniela:
Yeah, on Amazon specifically. Everything we do is on Amazon. Maybe someday we’ll branch out, but for us it’s really just fundamental stuff, right? The SEO is just making sure that their listings are completely optimized in terms of copy. Like you’d be surprised how many brands still are not running title tests, are not running bullet tests, have not updated their backend, don’t have alt text on their A+. That one’s a shocker for me whenever I see that, but it’s pretty common still to this day, even though you and I know this and you and I probably talk about it every day and we’re sick of talking about it and it’s not even interesting for us, but it’s. It’s not. It’s not common that, like, all of these listings are optimized when they come to us. It’s just really surprising.
Kevin King:
Are you doing putting metadata on your images as well, so that when Google scrapes it and others scrape it and some, some people are saying there’s no proof of this, but they’re saying that the AI is actually looking at the metadata? Like I know, in Photoshop I don’t use Canva, I don’t know if you can do it in Canva, but on Photoshop you can go in, you can add metadata. It’s like a description and keywords and it actually attaches to the image. So it’s the next step beyond alt text, it actually stays with the image. So when that image and now some of the AI with Amazon recognition and some of what they’re doing where they’re analyzing pictures, they’re actually reading that data and Google reads that data to index images and stuff too, as part of their AI. So are you doing any of that?
Daniela:
That’s really good. We are not. We’re not. I’m going to look into that.
Kevin King:
Yeah, you should. I know Photoshop does it. It was in my newsletter, like I think. Last week I had a showed how to do it and I’ve been doing it for years, even before I was selling on Amazon. I’ve been doing it for years because it’s always helped on Google. And then some people say like naming the file, like keywords, but I don’t think that actually matters because Amazon renumber, they rename them, they reclassify them a lot of times.
Daniela:
And have you done any tests at bulk to understand, like whether it’s truly in fact working? I don’t have hard data.
Kevin King:
I don’t have hard data on it, but I know I start showing up outside of Amazon, so I don’t have proof that this made a difference on Amazon. But I just read something from some people I trust that are studying the AI and they’re saying it’s actually like Matt Altman and Leo Scovio and some of these guys are deep into like geeking out on the AI stuff.
Daniela:
Yeah.
Kevin King:
They’re saying that, that that data in the images is actually making a difference in Amazon recognition. So on the AI side, I don’t know if it’s helping you rank better, necessarily right now, but with the switch to AI.
Daniela:
I think it will. It will, that’s where it’s going.
Kevin King:
It’s going to play a factor and it’s where it’s going and where I have absolutely noticed it on, like Google images, where there might be a Google image on there and you know, when you do a search in Google Images, your product picture might show up from Amazon. You click on it. It takes you to Amazon. So I’ve definitely seen that. But yeah–
Daniela:
That’s the good thing about working with so many clients is that we just need two months to like run this on all the accounts and know whether it’s working or not. So like I love hearing about these little tests, because then I’m like I tell my team I’m like this is a good hypothesis, let’s test this.
Kevin King:
I would love it. I mean run with it and prove it wrong or prove it right, because I don’t have hard, I don’t have, I have hard facts. I know it works on Google.
Daniela:
I mean the evidence would be in the traffic right?
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Daniela:
So like if you change the image metadata and it’s showing up more in Google, more people see it in Google. They click on the image get to your Amazon page, hopefully your product page, so you should be seeing an uptick in traffic, probably depending on the product. But if we run it at scale and see any significant upticks, that would be interesting.
Kevin King:
The other thing is that on Amazon, if you’re not Amazon Comprehend Matt Altman talked about this. If you go back on AM/PM podcast, it was during the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, so end of May I think, May 23rd, May 25th of this year he talks about Amazon Comprehend and how they’ve been taking all their images and listings and putting them through there and the AI looks at it and gives it a score and they’ve been making modifications and it’s making dramatic differences and then also towards your images. Now the way the images are actually composed is making a difference with the AI side of things, where it’s analyzing that image and it’s taking a look at what’s in that image and how things are positioned or if certain keywords are actually even in the image. If you’re selling a beach umbrella but there’s no beach scene in there, it’s just someone holding an umbrella walking in the rain. It’s going to classify you differently and I’ve done some testing on that.
Kevin King:
Where I had on the back of my phone, I had like a little case that had some little reading glasses that popped out and I popped them out and I took a picture and I told a tool to analyze it Amazon Recognition analyze this and tell me what it is. And it came back and said, oh, this is a mobile phone with some key chain, with some keys, an attachable key chain. And I was like no, these are like little reading glasses. So I changed the position of how the angle was and ran it again and it actually recognized them as glasses. So little things like that is getting to the point where it’s going to be critical. It’s still early, but being prepared for some of that and actually creating with intent on exact composition is going to be super important and I think it’s going to affect a lot of people coming up as we switch more and more towards the AI.
Daniela:
I think it’s a noteworthy topic right now and I think what’s important for people to remember is the way that we search right now. I feel like it’s the same way we’ve searched always on Amazon. It’s due to change. It’s like it’s ready for a refresh. Like, as a shopper, I myself get frustrated shopping on Amazon sometimes when I search for something and I get showed the same results and I’m scrolling and it’s the same thing and I’m just like I just I’m like I’m looking for a very specific thing. Why is it not showing me the thing that I’m looking for? And you change your search, you still can’t find it and it’s so frustrating. But where search is going is going to align with not just not just how we type in search, but it’s how we see search too, because now we can able, we can take a photo and say click on the screen and say I’m looking for this, this specific water bottle. Find me this water bottle and Amazon will go find you the most similar one, right? So like that’s, that is like very high intent way of searching that I know the thing that I want. I have a picture of it. Show me where to get it. Period, I want to get as close to it as possible. But then there’s the different, the other side of the funnel, where I’m in discovery mode and I know that I want a black water bottle, but I specifically want one. I think we shared this the other day. It was a matte cup, right, I want a matte cup for my tea. I specifically want one that is handmade in Argentina. I don’t want one that is made in China, because I know the ones in Argentina are made a special way, with special wood. It’s better for the tea, whatever.
Daniela:
Now, if I type into the search box in Amazon right now, what are the best handmade Argentinian matte cups? All of the results will take me to Chinese results. Right, but in the future I think this will get better. I think we will be able to see the results that we’re looking for more specifically, more fine-tuned. I just think we’re at the very early stages, and so what we’re doing when we’re crafting the imagery and the copy is we’re trying to think through yes, what are the questions that people are asking right now in Rufus that we can see on other listings? Yes, what? What is the data that we’re getting back from? You know all of the reports and everything. And then what are the things that we think people are going to be asking for related to this product? Because we’re already putting it in the copy of the images we know today those images are not being used in rufus. I think they will be used in the future in rufus, it’s just a matter of time.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I agree. Just recently they released five new image-based search tools or something like that, where you can actually circle something like a piece of a photo and say find me this, and then you can, like you said, find me similar bottles to this. And there’s five of them, I think different ways to actually search differently. I agree, search is going to change. I saw some stat I think it was the president of Microsoft or OpenAI one of the big tech companies said that by 2026, they expect search volume to go down 25% to 40% on Google. Normal search is going to go down because AI search—
Daniela:
AI search yeah.
Kevin King:
A lot of people are already doing that. They’re moving to perplexity.
Daniela:
I am, yeah.
Kevin King:
I do that a lot. I do both, but a lot of times I get better results out of perplexity. But a lot of times I get better results out of perplexity.
Daniela:
Same, same.
Kevin King:
It actually understands it better.
Daniela:
That’s how I found this but then I went back to Amazon to find that specific brand, but the only way I could get the search results to show up was by searching in perplexity and then putting it into Amazon and then I got this.
Kevin King:
From a client’s point of view, from a seller’s point of view. How do you address that so like? How are you helping your clients change their mindset of it’s not just keywords and sentience anymore.
Daniela:
Well, it’s also the attributes right. Part of the problem right now is that that could have been something that was in the listings as one of the attributes, but it wasn’t, and so I think that is the first thing we need to make sure that’s in there, not just putting it on an image. If we know that it’s a critical thing that people are searching for in relation to your product, it has to be built into the copy on the listing the backend attributes somewhere. Right now, that’s like the most instant solution. I don’t think. Even if it wasn’t there, I don’t think Rufus would have shown it yet, but I think we need to prepare for Rufus to show it. We need to be thinking about what are all the ways that Rufus might pull that data in the future in order to show that product.
Kevin King:
You should do that your agency should do as a case study. Go buy 10 of those and throw them up on Amazon just as some crazy product and see what it takes to actually get it to rank right.
Daniela:
Well, I think Vanessa is working on that right now, which is really interesting. Yeah, Like I think she’s. What she’s doing is studying reverse engineering what Rufus is giving us today, because right now Rufus isn’t giving us a report of, like here’s all the searches that are happening on your specific listing, which I think, again, that will be coming in the future. It’s just like a no brainer, but for right now, I think she’s able to reverse engineer what people are searching based on competitive listings, pull that in and then make sure that’s built into the backend attributes and the SEO copy throughout the listing, right. And then there’s a matter of time. I think she said there’s like a period of time where it takes for the Amazon to rescan it for Rufus, right, like it doesn’t happen immediately. In some cases it does, In some cases it doesn’t. So in some cases it might take weeks, but it’s better for you to prepare now, you know.
Kevin King:
A couple of the common things. Like people listening, they’re like I got this, my images are good, my thing. And like, no, they’re probably not. Every time you have a new client come, you’re like, oh, here we go again. What is? What are some very common things that you see that people are just flat out doing wrong.
Daniela:
Honestly, it’s like the most basic, basic, basic things, and that’s what surprises me, because some of like the most amazing brands that I love are still not thinking through every single image. So, from our lens, every image should have a function. It needs to show, it needs to tell something. Not 10 things, not five things, just one main thing for each image, and it should align with what you know are the five to 10 most common selling points for your product, for your product specifically. And that data is so easy to know now, like there’s so, even if you’re launching a new product, it is so easy to know. And if you’re not launching a new product and you’re an existing seller, you have all this data at your disposal. It’s just about pulling it and understanding what moves the needle and then split testing to understand which image priority it needs to be.
Kevin King:
So how do you know if you’re a new seller? You said it’s so easy to know. How do you do that for the people listening? I know but for the people listening.
Daniela:
So, um, what we need to be doing is pulling in um, your search query report, your PPC report, Helium 10 data, pulling in as much data sources as you can and understanding at a fundamental level like what are the? And the reviews data, the reviews analysis on not just your listing but your competitors as well and understand what are these, these, what are the top selling points for your product. So, if you look at all of that data, it’s very clear to understand okay, people are searching for this, people are complaining about this, they mention this a lot in their reviews, they love this. These are the themes that we need to pull out and we need to dissect and we need to understand. And once you have them, like, let’s say, there’s ten, right, so the hypothesis is that these ten things are the things that people consider that they need to check off the box when they’re buying the product, right, likely, those are the 10 that you come up with from your data, but I can guarantee you it’s five of them or less that are really moving the needle for conversion, right? So, like, sometimes it’s a gift image, like showing the gift image sooner in the product image stack is going to help it convert quicker. Or sometimes it’s the us versus them image or the most powerful image that you can be using as a product and use image just across the board in Amazon.
Daniela:
So once you figure out what is your messaging, who are you talking to, what is the thing that they need to check off the box in order to add this to cart? You want to kind of narrow that down and just make it like dead simple on every single image, and the thing that’s going to kill you is when you are wasting an image not doing that. So I see a lot of brands that just have like a pretty flat lay, like an Instagram pretty image but no text on it, and it’s like okay, but you’re showing me something. You’re showing me that this, this looks really cute and I’m drinking, and I’m like a supermodel drinking my mate. But what are you telling me? Like do you have an opportunity to tell me the one thing that the shopper needs, because I need to know if this is made in Argentina, like, is it made in Argentina or is it not? Because if it’s not, I’m going to another listing you know.
Kevin King:
She’s an Argentinian supermodel. C’mon she has to know.
Daniela:
I’m like just tell me if it’s made in Argentina. And so it like. Those are the things that we need to connect the dots and make sure that we are saying, in addition to showing so that the customer can just check the box at the cart, move on with their day, because Amazon is high intent, people just want to find the thing that they’re looking for, put it in their car and move on to the next thing, they got a list of items they need to buy.
Kevin King:
People are reading the copy. I mean, I’ve always had mixed. I don’t know how many people actually read the bullet points. I think people skim them and if it’s a technical product I think they might actually read them. But I think most people buy with their eyes. They look at the price, the title and the photo.
Daniela:
90% 90% of people buy with their eyes.
Kevin King:
That’s where all the selling happens, the back end, the SEO happens in the copy. It’s moving towards images, like we talked about also. But so on the images, some people say you should actually tell a story, it should like walk you through a story. Do you do that kind of stuff or is every image just emphasizing one of these five main points and you’re walking them through that? Or some people say, you know if you’re, if I don’t know if it’s, I’m trying to think of probably one of those things that washes a car. They say that this is probably a bad example, but they show a dirty car and they show you wiping it, and they show the process of wiping it and then drying it, then the whole way it works. You know it’s like it tells a story through the seven images. Do you do anything like that or you just really focus in on the five, these five, uh, main points that’s that move the needle?
Daniela:
The way that we we build out the content. We have a storyboard when we’re building it, um, but essentially, like, every piece in that storyboard has to serve a function right. So like, for instance, if we have we’re working with a product right now where it went just like straight into benefits of the product, which is great. But if you’re looking at this product and you like maybe heard about it on TikTok or somewhere, like there is a step before that where you’re like, wait, but how does this even work? Like, does this work, you know, and so like from a shopper’s perspective. Like yes, I’m interested in this product, but it is kind of a new product to market, it’s buzzworthy, whatever, but like, how does it work? Why does it work? Like, tell me that. And then let’s get into like, okay, and the benefits of why you want this one over the competitors, right? So it’s figuring out, through that lens, what is the story that we need to be telling for the specific products? Some products will need more of a story than others.
Daniela:
Also, there’s a way to infuse your, your brand story, your founder story, and really connect with the audience better as well, and so show social proof throughout. So by social proof. What I mean is like calling out badges for trust, like is it gluten-free? Does it have an award? Is it you know? Whatever? All those things in terms of like, trust and badges. Then there’s building trust through media mentions. Have you been mentioned in the media? Can we bring in a testimonial from the media? Logos from the media as a logo? Media bar, like you see on a lot of Shopify websites. And then UGC trust as well. So showing that showing the people who use and love your, your product as well. That’s something we did with yes Bar back in the day. That was really beneficial for them that they had this really grassroots community of people that just loved their product and they hadn’t actually posted they weren’t sponsoring posts at all Just people on Instagram were just posting all of these amazing photos of them with their yes Bar because they loved it so much, and so we’re able to take all those images and incorporate them into the visuals that people see and then they feel like, oh man, people really love you, feel. You feel that feeling when you hit a page right. So there’s a lot of brands like that that can lean into that, and it’s just about taking the pieces that you have and leaning into it a little bit more.
Kevin King:
Are you doing video as well for your clients? Or are you just doing?
Daniela:
We do a bit of video and the angle that we take on video, and here’s why. A lot of the brands that come to us they are a big brand and they have video content and they just need us to edit it down Great, let’s just say 50% are not those and they have very minimal video. And so for those brands, I don’t think it’s wise to go and spend 10, 20, $30,000 on a high-end video production when their money could be better spent in other places. So right now, getting UGC content is so easy that we do a three-angle video pack where we’re trying to figure out okay, do we want to be talking about the education of this product, how it works and why? Because we know that that’s one of the things people need to know. Then we want to be talking about, like, how easy it is to clean, because people are asking that as the number one question in the reviews. And then we wanna be talking about, like, all the different ways that you can use this product, or how you can use it in conjunction with all of these other similar products that are hot sellers on Amazon that maybe don’t have a video on their listing, and if we publish this video on our listing, it’ll show up on their listing too. So, thinking through the lens of different angles with the video and then taking snippets of that b-roll and making your master video for your premium e-plus.
Kevin King:
Now how important is a plus and premium a plus?
Daniela:
Every seller central brand should be upgrading to premium a plus? um. We have clients that are paying 500k for one ASIN one year to have access to premium a plus content on vendor central. So I know this is true today and and so from that lens I’m like every brand should claim it right now. We don’t know if Amazon’s going to give brands this access forever. Hopefully they do. Hopefully this becomes the new normal. I think basic a plus content is going to be phased out anyways. Um, but where where we see premium a plus going is more in the direction of getting more functionality, like we have on Storefront, and maybe even more landing page aesthetic and bringing in more with posts, bringing in more with other UGC types of content, like I think it’s going to get more and more interactive and fun and engaging.
Kevin King:
You can add like two or three second videos. Right, you can add like a background video or something to it now right?
Daniela:
On storefront, on storefront, you can add background video. But I did. When I spoke with the A-plus team, I told them that’s like my number one request for premium A-plus right now. I would love the ability to bring that into premium A-plus, because it just makes your content feel like just so much more engaging right.
Kevin King:
So for those that are listening that maybe they don’t they’re like what are you talking about? I know about A+. It used to be called EBC, but what’s this premium A+? Can you explain the difference?
Daniela:
Yeah, the biggest difference and there’s a bunch of differences so I’ll break them all down, but the biggest one, top of my list is that you can have mobile optimized content. So we know that most of the shopping behavior is happening on mobile. So right now, when you go and look at your a plus content if it’s basic a plus content, if you look at it on desktop and then you look at it on mobile, you’re not getting the optimal shopping experience because those banners are not sized specifically for the mobile person in mind and that maybe you can read it and that’s fine, but can your parents read it? Can people in different age demographics read it? You have to be thinking from an inclusion standpoint. So that’s one of the biggest differences is being able to resize your content for mobile and really optimize that. That’s gonna make the biggest impact out of the gate. The other things that are amazing are the ability to add video right there, embedded into your content, so it just flows right into your A-plus content. Seamless images. So right now, with basic A-plus content, you see those white lines that break up the banners. Without those white lines, you can design something top to bottom that feels like a scroll-stopping landing page. And so if you go look at our website, you’ll see that–
Kevin King:
It’s not one single image. It’s tiled right?
Daniela:
It looks like one huge, big single image, like a landing page but it’s actually banners that stack one on top of the other and you can’t tell, because there’s no seams, there’s nothing in between, there’s no margins. And the other thing you can add is hotspots on top of your images, which I think those are going to get more and more sophisticated over time. Right now, they don’t allow you to go to your storefront, they only just allow you to add, like a hotspotted description, but it’s still an engagement factor that we want to be considering. And then the last thing is carousels. It allows you to add carousels to that section, and so a lot of brands right now they come to me and there’s a little bit of friction. They’re like I don’t want carousels, I don’t want hotspots, and from my perspective, the way I look at it is you want as much engagement as possible. You want Amazon to see your dwell time is going up, right? So we know that Amazon is tracking all these metrics, similar to the way that Facebook might track likes and comments on posts, right, like we know that Amazon tracks every single minutiae of a product page. And if they see that a customer is spending five seconds on your listing and then you change your content and they’re spending 30 seconds on your listing. That’s gonna be a huge data point for Amazon, right. And so that, what are the things that can contribute to that? One, just having like just better content overall. Two, making sure that you’re using the engagement modules that Amazon’s giving you inside of that premium A plus, so that can be video. Video is a huge one. The other thing to consider beyond that is, with A plus content, that is your last chance in some cases to stop the scroll before they get to the review. So it’s your last chance to tell someone, just like, one more data point, one more thing that you know they need, and hopefully you cross the line or check off something off the box before they get down to the reviews, because they’re gonna read the reviews, right. So, like, how do we get them at least two more pieces of information? It’s in that premium A plus content and we see insane results with premium A plus. We’ve seen up to 600% increase in sales.
Daniela:
Surprisingly, the case study that we had recently that had a 2500% increase in sales that one was actually on basic A plus content. And I’ll tell you what we did not want to do basic A plus content. We just didn’t have a choice because they’re in the frozen category. They’re a vendor seller, so they don’t have $500,000 to be dropping on premium A-plus content. But what most people don’t know and this is what I learned at Amazon Accelerate today people still don’t know. Sellers don’t know that they can claim premium A-plus for free. It is absolutely for free for sellers. You might think you might have tried to submit what Amazon tells you to submit for the prerequisites and you might think that you’re disqualified. You are not disqualified. We have been able to lock it on 100% of the brands that have come to us this year. You absolutely should get access to Premium A-plus content. The only things that you need in order to unlock it is to have brand story turned on or applied to every single ASIN in your account for that brand.
Daniela:
So what that means is it actually doesn’t need to be a pretty designed brand story. If you don’t have anything designed, take a lifestyle image, put it as the background. Take another lifestyle image and put it as the foreground image. Submit it. Don’t put any text on it, just submit it as a placeholder and get the get the brand story approved. Apply it to all the ASINS just as a placeholder, so you can get access to premium a plus content. You can design it later. Then you need at least five submissions of a plus content. This doesn’t this does not mean that you need to have five products in your seller central account. It does not mean that you need to have five unique designs of A plus content. The only thing that this means is that you take your A plus content and that you submit it to Amazon and then, if you hit duplicate submit, duplicate submit, duplicate submit, duplicate submit. That is five submissions. They need at least five submissions within a certain timeframe and the accounts that we’ve seen that are not unlocking after you do these two steps. For some reason in some categories you need to do that duplicate submit 15 times, because 15 used to be the old requirement. Now it’s five, but in some weird scenarios it’s not going through. I don’t know why. So it’s literally as simple as that, and you should then go in a week later into your seller central account, go to the a plus section and you should see basic and premium right next to each other with your brand story. So from there you just click into premium and you should be able to add or start designing your premium a plus content.
Kevin King:
There you go, you can all go home now. Now, that was awesome, so. So just to summarize, so the the main image is your seven image stack should be addressing those five up to 10, but five what you said, key points. And then the A plus, or, if you have the premium a plus should be basically closing the sale, correct? Like adding two of that. A lot of people repeat the same pictures, they repeat the same stuff down there. You don’t want to do that, right, or do you in some cases want to reemphasize a key thing.
Daniela:
Yeah, I’m not against repeating, if we absolutely know that those are the five things, because we can’t assume that people are scrolling through every single product image.
Kevin King:
Right, right.
Daniela:
And sometimes they need to know is this going to be the right size? And you only said that in your product image and not in your A-plus content. So if we absolutely know they need to know this, then it should be in both. Now the other thing that carousels in the A-plus allow you to do is to add on secondary content, right? So, like there’s the five things that we know people need to know to convert, that has to be at the very first thing they see in the product images and the A-plus content. But beyond that, there’s the nice to know, there’s the oh wow, I didn’t realize that I can make all these recipes with this thing and that’s cool. They can scroll through all these recipes, great, like there’s all of these other things that can help nurture the sale. But the have to know is the thing that you need to get to first.
Kevin King:
Now you said earlier one of the beauties about this job is the freedom. So you’re actually not in the States now. You were in Chicago before, but where are you now?
Daniela:
So I’m in Peru. I’m in Punta Hermosa, Peru, which means beautiful, point. It’s a little surf town.
Kevin King:
Why Peru? You have Peruvian heritage.
Daniela:
I do. My family’s Peruvian. I grew up in California, then moved to Chicago for eight years and because I grew up a beach baby, I just needed to get back to the sun, came here to escape Chicago just in the winters and then got stuck here during COVID and basically reverse engineered my life from there, decided to stay here.
Kevin King:
My ex-wife loved Peruvian food. She’s Colombian and she loved Peruvian food because it’s a mix between, like, Japanese and Spanish. I mean there’s a lot of Japanese influence in Peru that a lot of people don’t realize it’s like this mixed.
Daniela:
So a lot of fusion.
Kevin King:
Yeah, a lot of fusion, like and Peru. I went on this. I’m still on this stint of like. I want to eat as, eat as at at as many of the top 100 restaurants in the world as I can.
Daniela:
Yep, we’ve got a lot of them.
Kevin King:
Peru has like seven or eight of the top 100 are mostly in Lima, Peru, and it’s not what you would necessarily think. So two, three years ago, when we were still married, it was her birthday in November and I said what do you want to do for your birthday? She said I don’t know, I just take me to some. I want to eat some good, a good meal. And I was like, well, are you willing to get on a plane? She’s like, maybe. I said, well, don’t worry, it’ll be business class. You know, I got some points, it’ll be business class. And she’s like, okay, I said so on. Our birthday was on a Saturday, on Friday, like she was doing English classes at the University of Texas. So after she got out of class we left six o’clock nighttime, I don’t know, like four o’clock afternoon flight, got to Lima like at nine or something that night and maybe we left earlier, sorry, but we got to Lima that night. We went to dinner, like a late dinner, like the last, seating at 10 o’clock at one of the top 100 restaurants.
Daniela:
Nice.
Kevin King:
Uh then no, we couldn’t get into Central.
Daniela:
Okay. Which one was it?
Kevin King:
It was um man, I can’t remember the name of it. It was two story building. Uh, it’s a big square.
Daniela:
Mito.
Kevin King:
No, that one. We ate lunch the next day at there. That’s like number five in the world or something like that. That’s the best meal I’ve ever had anywhere. It is lunch, it was lunch and we were like in heaven. Then that night we went to the one that’s near Central, but it’s a newer one. We could not get into Central because it was like I don’t know three months lead time or something like that. But we ended up going to that one and then we flew out the next night. It was like a short weekend trip and we ate at three of the best restaurants in Lima.
Daniela:
That’s awesome. You need to come back because I’ll take you to some even better ones. I was telling Vanessa, one of the best restaurants here right now got voted top restaurant in South America by Food and Wine Magazine. It’s become really hard to get into, but it’s incredible and it’s a Venezuelan Peruvian fusion and it is so so so good, it’s called Medito, and so next time you come, you have to come with Vanessa.
Kevin King:
I will tell her we’re going to Peru. There you go, we’ll come visit you and we’ll come eating fruit. She’s my eating buddy. We eat a lot of nice restaurants around Austin. Anytime I want to go somewhere, try a new restaurant like Vanessa. What are you doing?
Daniela:
She’s the, she’s the sushi queen and we have the best. We have the best sushis in Peru, like it doesn’t even I mean it’s insane, how good it is.
Kevin King:
Oh yeah, and the ceviche and everything. It’s just, it’s just really, really Well, this has been fun. We could sit here and talk for quite some time, I think, on some cool stuff, if people wanted to reach out to you or find out more about your agency or about you, or what’s the best way to follow you or get in touch or anything.
Daniela:
You can find me on LinkedIn, Daniela Bolzmann. You can check out our website, mindfulgoods.co. We’ve got tons and tons of case studies on there. You can check that out. At the very bottom of the homepage of our website we have this thing called a mini audit. So if you want me or one of our creative directors to take a look at your listing, you can click and check that out and see if it’s the right fit for you.
Kevin King:
So that’s not dot com. That’s dot co, dot co, and Bolzmann is spelled B-O-L-Z-M-A-N.
Daniela:
M-A-N-N.
Kevin King:
Oh N-N, V-O-L-Z, like in Zedd, M-A-N-N. Awesome, well, I appreciate it, Daniela, thanks for coming on.
Daniela:
Thank you, my pleasure.
Kevin King:
Great stuff with Daniela there on building masterful listings and imagery and really focusing down and finding out what those five big pain points are that move the needle on conversions Great stuff. Be sure to check out her presentation too, in Helium 10 Elite. That was in September. Those of you that are Helium 10 Elite members, if you’re not a Helium 10 Elite member, you can join Helium 10 Elite. Go to h10.me forward slash Elite yeah, it’s h10.me forward slash Elite and get all the details. Every single month we have two guests that come on. I do 7 Ninja Hacks. We do weekly calls with myself and some of the other members of the Helium 10 team. It’s something that you want to be a part of if you’re serious about your Amazon business. And don’t forget, I also have a newsletter that comes out every Monday and Thursday billiondollarsellers.com totally free. It’s like a free $25,000 mastermind every Monday and Thursday If you’re serious about your Amazon business. You’ll be back here next week as well for the next AM/PM Podcast.
Kevin King:
We’re gonna be talking about organic rank and there’s a company that’s out there that’s doing some amazing things that can tell you specifically, down to the letter, of what you need to do to actually rank organically and beat your competition. We’re gonna be talking about how that works, what you can do. It’s gonna be an amazing, amazing episode, so be sure to subscribe to the channel, share this podcast if you enjoyed it with a friend, and we’ll see you again here next week. But before we go, I’ve got some parting words for you of wisdom. Those who keep learning will keep rising in life. That’s Charlie Munger. Those who keep learning will keep rising in life. See you again next week.
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