#105: Amazon Product Positioning in 2021

Episode: 105

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Brian Johnson, a PPC Expert and Founder of Canopy Management.

Subtitle: “There’s No One Size Fits All. There’s No One Magic Bullet.”

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes__trashed/episode-105-amazon-product-positioning-in-2021-w-brian-johnson/

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Brian Johnson, a PPC Expert and Founder of Canopy Management. 

Brian has helped over 20,000 brands be more successful on Amazon through ad strategy and conversion rate optimization. In this episode, he talks about product positioning and how to optimize Amazon product listings to improve their search visibility.

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 5:12 : Brian’s Background
• 8:18 : What is Product Positioning?
• 9:30 : Optimizing Listings To Improve Search Visibility
• 15:38 : Do Not Be Cheap On Your Listings
• 19:08 : Survey On Shoppers Of What Caught Their Attentions Based On Images
• 26:13 : Standing Out From The Competition Through Product Differentiation
• 27:16 : The Importance of Lighting On Product Images
• 35:09 : Grabbing Attention Through Your Product’s Graphic Design
• 40:42 : Does Adding Video And Lifestyle Photo Improve Attention?
• 46:50 : Optimizing The Title and First Three Bullet Points
• 52:13 : Seller’s Common Mistakes on Product Description
• 56:17 : Go For Highly Relevant Phrases Instead of Keyword Stuffing
• 1:02:27 : Q & A With Brian
• 1:10:38 : How To Balance Ranking And Positioning
• 1:14:43 : The Importance of Dayparting and Seasonal Bids
• 1:18:38 : Wheel of Kelsey

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• https://canopymanagement.com/
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-dMMLpioY_6s5HOHDUBuDg/videos
• Fiverr
• Animoto
• https://www.nolimitcreatives.com/
• https://canopymanagement.com/

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normanfarrar.com

Norman  0:02  

Hey everybody. It’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Micro Brands.

Norman  0:20  

Alright, so we have my buddy and returning guests, Brian Johnson on today from Canopy Management and we’re going to be talking about something really cool and we were just talking about this before the podcast and it’s not talked about enough and that’s Amazon product. Let’s try this again, Amazon product positioning. So before we get right into it, Kelsey, where are you, sir? 

Kelsey 0:45

Hello.

Norman  0:46  

Hey, how are you?

Kelsey 0:48

Good. Good. One thin, your laptop. Can you just tilt it down just a little bit?

Norman  0:53  

Is my laptop?

Kelsey 0:55  

There we go. Perfect.

Norman  0:58  

I’m an old guy. I am not used to this.

Kelsey 1:02  

It’s all good. It’s all good. Okay, so welcome everyone. Welcome to the show. If you’re new to the show, we have a Facebook group called Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and eCommerce Collective. If you want to be part of the community, part of the Beard Nation, head on over there. I’ll put the link in the comments. as well. If you’re on Norm’s personal Facebook profile, we’re not able to use your comments from that stream. So if you pop over to the Lunch with Norm podcast, the Facebook page or the group or YouTube, anywhere else, we can use your comments and your name will pop up on the screen just like this with Radd. Welcome, Radd and Steven, awesome to see you guys.

Norman  1:44  

How are you guys? Marina, how are you?

Kelsey 1:46  

Yes, so if you’re wanting to check out more YouTube videos, the highlights, the full episodes. It’s all on our YouTube page. Yeah. I think over 300 videos we’re going with right now. But, all that info is over there. Just search Norman Farrar and you’ll be able to find that and we do have a price today. It’s going to be a good one. So stick around for that and we have our Clubhouse link, or we have our Clubhouse events on Monday. So we have an event in our Facebook group. Just go there. All the link information is there. So yeah, how is everyone doing on this Friday?

Norman  2:27  

All right. Welcome. Welcome Mero, Jeffrey.

Kelsey 2:31  

Okay, so that’s it for me.

Norman  2:34  

Okay and like Kelsey normally does on a Friday, he forgets the most important thing and smash likes, subscribe, ring bells, do whatever. Get the word out, tag people, tag your friends and friends. See I’m doing your job. Oh my gosh. Next time I’ll get a hand puppet or something and dress them up as Kelsey.

Kelsey 3:00  

Maybe I’ll quit.

Norman  3:04  

Okay. No threats. No threats. All right. So if you do have questions or comments, just throw them over into the comment area. We’ll try to get to them as fast as we can and now just sit back, relax, grab that cup of coffee and enjoy the show.

Brian 3:22  

You guys are cracking me up. I just couldn’t stop laughing.

Norman  3:29  

Kelsey just gets on my nerves.

Brian 3:33  

Well, maybe he was just poorly raised. I don’t know. Yeah. Good to see you Norm.

Norman  3:41  

You too. How’s it going Brian?

Brian 3:44  

It’s going good. So as many people in the world know, this past week has been rather unique in the South United States and in Texas. We’re not used to having very cold weather and six inches of snow down in South Texas and that created power outages and water restrictions and all kinds of stuff right and so it’s abnormal. I’m sure you’re plenty used to it. 

Norman 4:18

Tell me about it. 

Brian 4:19

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No pity from the north. But yeah, down in the south. I mean, I originally grew up outside of Portland, Oregon and so that’s where I was born and raised and so I was just fine when I moved down to the south originally and moved down to Arizona and then migrated over to Texas. So I love both. I mean, I love Texas. Absolutely. But the infrastructure is clearly not prepared for anything that goes wrong. When it comes to weather. Like we can deal with hurricanes. But cold? No. That’s a lot of people who moved here from the north, they’re like, this is the reason I moved from the north down here.

Norman  5:08  

So why don’t we spend a minute or so just letting people know who you are and what you do?

Brian 5:12  

Absolutely. Okay, so my name is Brian Johnson, I am with Canopy Management. That is my done for you Amazon advertising agency. We do both advertise PPC and DSP advertising as well as say listing optimization. There’s a number of other services that go along with that there are complimentary. But primarily, our objective is to make category kings out of sellers within their product niche. So we love the idea and set up the strategy in order to dominate a product niche and that’s what our skill set kind of tunes into.

Norman  5:57  

So I’ve just changed the hashtag to Category King for the giveaway today. So why don’t we talk about that?

Brian 6:06  

Absolutely. So I do a couple. So I do coaching on the side and one of the things that we’ll be talking about today of course, is product positioning, really, kind of what we were talking about before is that this is something that is very much underutilized by most brands, it’s very poorly done and that creates a huge opportunity. If any of you actually implement these strategies, it’s going to give you a huge opportunity to move ahead of your competition, to gain more market share, to have higher engagement and conversion rates with your shoppers. So what I would like to offer is to basically give a one on one consult across Zoom and just go through and say, okay, from my perspective, because I do this on a regular basis, it’s probably a little bit easier for me to kind of read the tea leaves, if you will, as far as what each product niche, the opportunity that you have to for your product to stand out, as well as better ways to engage your shopper, as well as certainly ways to increase your conversion rate on your product. So most people know me for I’ve got a pretty good career here in the advertising space in Amazon. For what is it six years now? 20,000 brands I’ve consulted with or coached. Courses, software. But yeah, agency is definitely what kind of wrapped up as far as that. That’s the cornerstone is certainly the agency. So yeah, I’m looking forward to this because the product positioning topic is something that I am very passionate about, but most people don’t talk about. 

Norman  7:52  

Right. So we are going to accept #Category King, or the obvious, #I love Brian.

Brian 8:04  

There we go.

Norman  8:06  

Kelsey comes up with these things. I don’t know. So anyways, okay, so let’s talk a little bit about product positioning. So what exactly is product positioning?

Brian 8:18  

So product positioning is the concept of having your product actually visible by the shopper, have them actually get curious about what benefits and what’s in it for them as far as what, what your product can do for them and then ultimately, speaking to the shopper and saying, this is what’s in it for you if you buy this particular product. Essentially, the shorter version of this is grabbing that shoppers attention, making them look directly at your product, and then answering the question, what’s in it for me if I buy your product?

Norman  8:59  

Nice. So really what you’re just doing is positioning the product for success?

Brian 9:05  

Yes, yeah. That’s probably the better elevator pitch for sure. Yeah. I’ll find it complicated a lot more than that statement. But yes.

Norman  9:15  

So what are so few things that people can do? So you’ve seen like you said, You’ve seen 20,000, at least 20,000 accounts. What are some things that people can easily do to improve listings that they might not be doing now?

Brian 9:30  

Yeah, so I do actually have slides if you want to refer to those. But yeah, it actually works out pretty well, too. We actually did, so this is something that as part of the advertising, one of the things that we can’t ignore is what tends to create the formula for the greatest likelihood of success. As an agency, obviously, we have an obligation to make sure that we provide consistent results of increasing sales and profitability. We can’t simply just spend a client’s money and say, hey, look, we got you a bunch of visibility. That’s what Amazon currently does. We actually have to say, Look, there’s a positive ROI in working with us regardless of how big or the medium and larger and extra large brands out there. But ultimately, what we want to do is identify, okay, where are the weak points? That’s one of the reasons why we have implemented a Creative Services team probably a year and a half ago, I guess it was where we did things like listing optimizations, new product imagery, new copywriting on the title and the bullet points, a new competitive analysis, these kinds of things and what that led me to do is to do some additional because I hit up research and development to do new studies and new experiments to really identify Okay, what is it that shoppers actually see? When they’re shopping, what is it that they see, what don’t they see. So kind of the path this took me to is a series of experiments and tools that I built in order to study that. Similar to if you’ve ever seen as far as the studies that are done, where people wear these headsets and the eye trackers and there’s some studies that have been around for probably at least 20 years, where they monitor when people search on Google, where the eyes go first, second, third. The classic propensity to look in the top left corner of the page, look at certain objects or certain words, and then it kind of declines over time. So there’s things that usually naturally draw the eye of the shopper, grab their attention. It’s no different on an eCommerce platform like Amazon, Amazon has got a lot of imagery and they try to compress as much information into the search results, into a product detail page as they can possibly do. Whether it’s desktop or mobile, they’re still trying to shove a lot of information in a limited space. So then, what the main problem that that creates, it is becoming very evident now, like say, in the last six months is something that I’ve been observing and working on this and that is if I’m selling a product on Amazon, I’m going to get lost in kind of the weeds, if you will, my product does not stand out from the competition. A lot of concerns as far as like, Wow, there’s so much competition, well, there’s only a problem if you can’t stand out from that competition, which is the first thing that we need to do here. First thing we need to do is stand out from the competition by grabbing the attention of the shopper and grabbing their eyeballs. It’s kind of like that eyeball tracking. What is it that the shoppers are likely going to notice first and how do you tune your image, your title, your product listing in order to grab the attention of that shopper, so that you stand out and you grab the attention from all the rest of your competitors, so that you get the first attention, not the second, not the last attention, right? Because otherwise, you simply just won’t get engagement, you won’t get the click through, you won’t get the consideration from a shopper. So ideally, what we’re trying to do is to eliminate the competition as quickly as possible. First and foremost, we grab the attention of the shopper visually. Okay, the second thing we’re going to do is we’re going to set ourselves apart and beg some curiosity in the words that we use the title in order to bring that or attract that shopper to come into your product listing. Again, each time you’re reducing the amount of competition that the shopper is considering and therefore increasing the likelihood with each step of choosing your product over somebody else’s.

Brian 14:14  

If your product looks exactly like everybody else’s in the search results, you’ve got a very limited chance of reducing the competition because a shopper is going to Okay, if nothing stands out, then they’re going to start just going down sequentially. You don’t want them to go sequentially. You want them to drag their eyes really quickly, or their eye to glance at your product listing very quickly. To grab their attention primarily with your image. I can show you an example of how we studied that and some examples of that but grab their attention with the image. Second is going to be within a couple of words, maybe two or three words in the front half of your title, to beg the curiosity not clickbait but beg the curiosity of like, okay, what’s in it for me if I get your product. Second is also presents a second opportunity to stand out from competition, as in, don’t do the same title as everybody else is doing and then third, of course, is once you get them to the product listing, that’s where you really can drive home the differentiating your product, by specifically talking to the shopper as far as what the benefits are of this particular product in your hands, and then support that with features. Don’t leave with features, lead with benefits, support that with features.

Norman  15:38  

So right from the very beginning Brian, so when somebody sees an image, which is typically the way that they’re going to have it, get your attention. One of the things that I’ve seen some, possibly some newer or intermediate sellers do that. They don’t know that they’re killing their sales by this. Say it’s a plastic shoe stretcher and there’s three manufacturers, and you’ll notice that they’ll already have okay images that they’ve taken of the plastic shoe stretcher, and you’ll start to see these images populating on Amazon and they’re all the same images. So from the manufacturer, one of the things I try to preach is don’t be cheap. Like if you’re going to go out, have an incredible product image and one other thing, I think this goes back to early ASM days, right? What they were telling, and it’s so true, fill the frame, typical photography thing, fill the frame, don’t leave whitespace. If you’ve got a circle at the top, at the bottom, try to fill it out as much as you can. You gave a great example once about a shoe and we were looking at shoes, and you just said what’s the difference? How can you be different and you just turned it the opposite way. So you can get somebody, it’s just it’s a pattern interrupt. Yep and these are little things that people can do. But even in your like, so now you’ve got the person that’s going, Oh, that’s a good image, let me check it out, then they go into your slide deck and if your slide deck images suck, that’s not gonna help you out either. So I always like spending a little bit of money on my images or on social proof or and not writing a book on the image.

Brian 17:37  

Right.

Norman  17:37  

So I’m not sure how you feel about that.

Brian 17:40  

No, absolutely. I agree with that. So there are I would say that probably to extend that to what is working now and based off of what my hypotheticals were and what I ended up testing is going against the grain, to abuse some analogies here taking the road less traveled basically just doing the opposite of what your competition is doing. I’ll share my screen here really quick. Just kind of give people a visual example of what that means.

Brian 18:15  

Oh, come on, where is it?

Norman  18:27  

Kels, put on the Jeopardy song.

Brian 18:29  

Right now. Right?

Kelsey 18:31  

As we’re waiting for this. Steven has a question for the consultation today. He’s still waiting for his very first product to be checked in on Amazon. Is that still okay to enter the contest? 

Brian 18:45  

I would say probably try to schedule that, you can schedule it later. That’s not a problem. It’s not like there’s a time clock. Time’s running out or something. Norm, let me know if you can see on this, as far as why did the image, is that the slide is showing? 

Norman  19:04  

You’re talking to a blind guy but Kelsey, is the image okay? It looks okay.

Kelsey 19:06  

The image is up now.

Brian 19:08  

Yeah. Okay. It might be a little bit blurry. But because it’s blown up a little bit. But this is partly an example of one of the studies, if you will, that we do so this is actually something where we set up for we’ll survey American shoppers based off of what caught their attention as far as images, this is specific to images only right? As far as images that come back within a product niche for a specific search term on a search result page and so the example of this is, I was thinking there are certain things that I was thinking would come up more and pop but the more that we tested, the more things kind of bubbled to the top and this is pretty representative of what we consistently see across the different product studies that different search results studies. So essentially what this is saying here is, as far as what initially caught their attention, right and we go through, we filter this out, and we look at the responses because we actually ask more questions too. We say it’s like, Okay, which image caught your attention? What specifically about it? What about the image that selected your attention, caught your attention first, what about it, and then we asked for even more detail. So there’s kind of this is just kind of a, one of the questions in here and so, color seem to pop the most the detail on that color is typically the higher contrast, the brighter colors that pop, and consistently, because what we would do is we would mix up the sequence of the images and try to get some more variations as far as how the test was done. So it wasn’t always the top image, for instance. We would actually, we would mix it up a little bit and always consistently, what caught their attention now, as you can imagine, we’re not showing 10,000 images, we’re only showing typically what is going to show up in maybe the first 20 or so images that might come up in a search result. So part of this, your real first challenge is like, am I even showing up on the first page? Now that can be through an ad that can be through organic listing, but ultimately, you’ve got to show up first and for Amazon basically has to present your image in order for it to catch somebody’s attention, right? So what we’re seeing on this is color, typically the stronger bold colors that pop. Now, if you sell a product that is black in color, and everybody else has got a black or gray color, then the color is probably not going to be the thing that’s going to stand out your product from others. We do see certainly where secondarily, pattern or design typically things like odd patterns. Sometimes this is a case where let’s take a look like a shampoo bottle, for instance. Everybody’s using white shampoo bottle, you’ve got a white shampoo bottle as an example. But then the one that stood out the one that caught the eye, that drew the eye of the shopper first instantly, was the one that maybe had a reverse color bar across the front that said with conditioner, or something like that. It doesn’t matter what it said on there, it was the fact that there was something in the image that stood out that differentiated. Now, what’s interesting about this is pattern and design actually got some mixed feedback when we went into more detail. Because it could have been that there was something on the product itself that caught their attention, a weird shape or some kind of contrasting shape or pattern. But what we also saw was two things. One is the example that you had brought up already Norm was, everybody has got their image facing to the right, the shoe example, for instance. Okay, everybody’s got their shoe, slightly angled off to the right hand side and then you’ve got one image that has the same shoe pointed off to the right hand side, but then it has a vertical view of that same shoe turned around so you can see the soul and so like, wait, wait, something’s off here and so that became like a mix of these responses. It was where something stood out that was different from the rest of the search results and that’s what caught the attention of the shopper. That’s what we consistently see is simply being different from the rest of the listings that come back for a search term that you’re going after. That’s what’s going to catch the shoppers attention first and that’s the first challenge you’ve got.

Norman  24:05  

So, Brian, when you’re talking about pattern too, one of the things that I mean, it could be a mixed bag, you can go in there and you can say okay, I’ve got a pillow or a blanket or a baby carrier, diaper bag and I’ve got this really nice looking product, right but because it’s a product shot and let’s just say you took it with your iPhone, or you had somebody that’s not a product photographer do it. Now you’ve got this bag, that might be okay lighting, iPhones, I mean they take an okay shot, right however you don’t know the lighting, but you take a look at the picture and you’ve got wrinkles like maybe in a pillow or it’s just not consistent. So in that shampoo bottle that you were just talking about, I’ve tried to mention this to a bunch of different people where the shampoo, exact example by the way, so you’ve got a shampoo bottle, why is mine not shampoo not selling? Because your photography sucks. Really and if you take a look at what you did, I tried to save some money. So I took this in the basement, I think that’s what everybody calls it. But I just took it outside or whatever and that was it. Well, when we take a shot, we want to make sure that we go to a graphic artist that’s going to make sure that the lighting at least if if you’re not going to a product, even if you do go to a product photography, but make sure that the lights coming off, it sort of looks like a cylinder and if there’s any wrinkles, I just did some apparel and we had to act as a virtual iron. Just make sure that we made the pleat and made sure that the clothing looked good. But a lot of people miss that step. Oh, I did this, it cost me 500 bucks. Go to a graphic artist now to finish it up.

Brian 26:13  

Yeah, I would agree on that. So I was talking with somebody recently and they were saying, Man, I don’t understand as far as why why? Why am I in my click through rate and my conversion rate is so low, it’s like, well we started talking about this is basically a product positioning kind of product positioning, product differentiation. Now, most of what I’m talking about currently, is just product differentiation. Just standing out from the competition. How do you make yourself pop from the rest of the competition? It doesn’t have to be a bright popping red color. It’s like, well, my product’s not red. It’s like, no, it doesn’t have to be. Color is simply just something that we’re seeing through study, where people are saying, Well, yeah, that red color obviously popped so there’s things that are natural. What’s interesting is actually blue was more commonly the color when there were multiple colors. Blue was often the one that caught people’s attention first.

Norman  27:10  

You’ve got multiple colors. You want to maybe work on that one as your primary. 

Brian  27:16  

Yeah I mean, I’ve always been told that like, Don’t buy a red car because you’re more likely to get seen by police and red, it makes sense to me that that should be the color pop. For whatever reason, blue is the one that was brought up first is always catching their attention. Okay, it’s good to know. Now, one of the things that kind of depends on your point as far as the photography, the lighting is so critical. I would definitely said the most time that I spend in any kind of photography or videos or whatever it is on lighting. Because lighting sucks. Now, as I say that I realize I’m like, Okay, I’m at home. I’m not in my studio. My lighting is just kind of like that. So

Norman  28:04  

It’s dramatic lighting.  

Brian 28:11  

That’s right. Okay. I do tend to do that quite a bit actually. My business partner always says it’s like, why is it so dark in there? It’s like oh, but it’s dramatic. It’s like no, this is marketing. No, but what you were saying as far as like having somebody edit the videos even if they’re poor videos. I see way too many products that are washed out in their color, they’re not vibrant in their color because they’re taking it with their iPhone and they’ve got it inside. Inside lighting is horrific in most cases, right. But most people also don’t have the ability to diffuse lighting with some kind of a screen or something like that. Honestly, the poor man’s version of that is go outside on a sunny day, have somebody hold a white bed sheet up above your product that’s sitting down on a white bed sheet, and I mean that’s like like the poor man’s version of it, but it works is you’re just trying to get the light source to come in from a lot of different angles and not hot on one specific angle because then you get high contrast. Wrinkles don’t look flattering. Not on a person, not on fabric. You don’t have high reflection, you don’t have big shadow points and everything. So there’s a lot of different ways that people do photography that can improve things. There are so many videos on YouTube as far as talking about things like three point lighting or light diffusion or light balance and all that kind of stuff. It doesn’t require studio equipment to accomplish this. You can do it with next to nothing as far as an investment. It’s just a case of not being satisfied with simply just taking an indoor lit photo, because most people will use lighting that their eyes are comfortable with and not what the camera is comfortable with. It’s got to be a lot brighter in most cases, for the camera to really get the vibrant colors involved.

Norman  30:19  

I just looked at David here, he’s got another good example. Just a lightbox, if you can invest in a simple lightbox, right, that’ll help out a lot as well.

Brian 30:30  

Yeah, my first lightbox that I had back in my eBay days 13,14 years ago was something I bought off of eBay for 25 bucks. It wasn’t great, but for the smaller products that I had, a light box was great, because I could have big bright lights coming in on it and it would diffuse the light enough so that it still had a quality image. But simply just doing, going back and kind of looking at ultimately, kind of the whole product positioning. First of all, my point of this was to agree with you that you can find somebody on Fiverr, you can find five different people on Fiverr who can do Photoshop kind of editing and say come back with try to make this look better. Great. I mean, I’m in it for 25 bucks, I’m in it for $50 and you’ve got 20 different versions of the images that you took poorly, but they’re correcting and then you basically pick from the ones that look the most vibrant and pop the most that look the most natural or the most aesthetically appealing to you. Ideally, what you’re publishing as your main image is, look at the search results. Look at your competition you’re sitting among. How do you make that main image stand out from your competition? How do you make it and to kind of circle back around to something you had mentioned earlier as far as the classic, amazing selling machine of filling the image. Well, that was taught at a time when nobody was doing it. Well, there’s a ton of whitespace everything right? There are things both in advertising and product photography and in tactics that have been taught enough now that a majority of a product niche competitors are using it. Now’s the time to do the opposite again.

Norman  32:33  

That’s it and that’s absolutely true. Yes.

Brian  32:36  

It’s the concept of banner blindness. It’s kind of like going back and saying, well, more relevant example is a common mistake that I see sellers make is trying to show everything in their main image, try to show the value of the product in the main image by including every single accessory in with that main image, with that main product and the main image and what they’ll do is they’ll say, Okay, here’s my primary product, and I’ve got these 14 accessories and I’m going to wrap them around in the main image and everything and everybody else copies that and everybody else is doing the same thing and the search results and so now everybody has these spaghetti images of they’re just trying to cram everything in there and which one stands out? One guy that goes back and puts in the image with a ton of whitespace and that one main image, because simply it’s not because it’s correct or incorrect. It’s what catches the eye. It stands out from everybody else’s what everybody else is doing

Norman  33:41  

Everything in a box, maybe just doing it that way so they grab it. So yes, I mean, there’s always ways to break the rule and we just had to do this with this beverage that we put up. So the beverage was a very small bottle, compared to everybody else. So let’s say that everybody else was going very wide. This was very slim. Well, how can we do it? Well, the nice package, we opened up the package that actually came. It didn’t just come as a bottle. But you could spread it out and it just looked different than everybody else and you can see this too Brian, and then we’ll move off of images in a sec. But you can see this in supplements too. Like supplements, everybody’s got the one either white or black bottle, you can tell who the company is just by the design because everybody has the same design. I am noticing and I mean it’s really perfect. Go to a supplement page. If you’re listening to the podcast, go to the supplement page after the podcast and just check it out and what goes what will drive your eye. It might be a matte finish, it might be something that’s in a square box, it might be something that’s blister packed, instead of just being in that bloody white jar that everybody else is using.

Brian 35:09  

What’s interesting on that is, that’s something where I’ve coached a couple of times, and in both times fortunately the results were magic, were fantastic and that was, they had come up with product packaging, that was either popular at the time or recommended by the printer of the labeling, or that they thought would look good sitting on a countertop or on a shelf or on a whatever. Where it was aesthetically pleasing. It uses pastels that, it’s nice and soft colors and everything, soft colors, blended colors, pastels, those do not stand out on the search results. You’re not grabbing anybody’s attention, by blending in by having muted colors. High contrast, sharp colors and that’s assuming, again, I love the fact you said break the rule, because it’s going to be situational, you’ve got to look at what your competition is doing? How can you break the rule? How can you be different than everybody else in that product? If everybody is using sharp colors, then go like, like you said in the supplement space, you tend to have those that have like, Oh, this is like a multicolor fading color that wraps around, and it’s glossy and then you have those other supplements that look intentionally clinical, they look like prescription bottles. There’s a strategy to that. But ultimately, if you are using the same kind of flavoring, if you will, in your images that everybody else is using, nobody’s even going to notice your product in the first place. 

Norman  36:55  

Yeah, I’ve got a trick for the supplement or people that use jars. So a lot of the time when they do their product, they’ll take the product and put it in there. But if you’ll notice, if it’s a transparent jar, you’re gonna see all the background’s crap and so you airbrush that out, right, so now it looks clean. The other part is now you’ll see it everywhere, especially on anything that’s cylinder, right? All of a sudden, you’ve got tons of info, like the fine print, all the ingredients and all this other crap that’s going down the sides, that’s taking away from your logo and what it is and the size. So I remove it, and I expand. So now the information is very simplified, it’s removed and when they get it, they can read it or the information on how to take it or the directions are down below. They don’t have to see it in that main image.

Brian 37:57  

Yeah, kind of follow up on the images too, is that I also see too many brands that try to pack too many things into their supplementary images. They’ll say it’s like, Okay, well, here’s the top 14 features in this one image. Like really? Like pick one. Yep, pick 2. 14, it’s absolutely ridiculous. Five is too much for a single image. You’re putting too much on the attention span or you’re putting too much on a single image to carry the attention span of the average shopper, five seconds. If you can’t consume the information on that image within five seconds, you’re not passing over everything that’s on that image, break it up. That means you got to make some choices as far as which images you have. That’s one of the reasons why Amazon now has three places for videos, use those to speak to the benefits, use a video to speak to the benefits, use a video to speak to how do you, not just an unpacking, but like how do you actually use it to make people realize like, Oh, this is really easy for me to set up or to use word to understand. The third video would probably be something along the lines of like, here’s the quality and care this brand takes in manufacturing, here’s the extra mile that we do in our processes that you don’t even see but you get the benefit of the all of that work that we do on the back end in the product that you receive. So each of those videos is a great opportunity to again, set yourself apart from competition that’s going more into what’s in the product listing, which is kind of jumping ahead here. But at the same time it’s the same kind of concept, if one thing is kind of funny that I hear quite a bit is talking to a brand owner and says that isn’t a product niche and like I made this product niche. I’m the one who came to market with his thing. Everybody else copied me and as I told him, I said, great. You’re the innovator. You’re the market leader, it’s time for you to pivot and to set a new standard. You’ve got to go back and basically come out with a whole new way of presenting your product in your brand again to shoppers, so that now all of a sudden, you’re the one who’s innovating and they’re following you again.

Norman  40:26  

Very good. Now, one of the most important parts of this whole podcast is usually when Connie comes in and says Hi, she’s away today. So I have to pour my own coffee.

Brian 40:36  

I’m sorry to hear that.

Norman  40:38  

There we go.

Brian 40:42  

So I think we’re probably gonna move on. We’ve spent a lot of time on it. The next thing on this is, and I don’t think that we’re going to really cover much as we can briefly touch as far as an actual product listing, product detail page. As far as Radd’s question, adding a video, a lifestyle picture will improve the attention so the video will not as far as the attention. So the attention when you’re first trying to get in the search results, the only video you’re going to have is if you have a sponsor brand video ad, that emotion absolutely catches people’s attention. That is an absolute differentiator. We are testing that now in our image split testing and our title split testing that we do with, as you saw in that one where he had 220 surveyed in that particular example there, but yeah, if they see a video ad, that always catches people’s attention, because it’s motion. Now, sometimes you have to scroll down to see that video and so if you’re above that in any way, whether it’s a product ad or it is an organic listing, then you’ve got a chance to basically grab somebody’s attention before they get the video. But the video is quite distracting. That’s one of the reasons why Amazon has rolled out video ads to more locations and in the past few weeks. But yeah, to kind of answer that question on that is lifestyle images Yes, but not as much as I thought. So if you saw the earlier survey results, this is pretty consistent is I had always thought because I’d always been taught a course two things one is red will always catch somebody’s attention as a color and two is that people’s faces will always catch people’s attention first and we find that yes, red does catch people’s attention and people’s faces catch attention, like in lifestyle photos, but it wasn’t the primary thing that caught their attention first. They may take a second glance back at an image that has a color, a color pop or a model’s face for instance, lifestyle image will certainly do that, even if it’s not compliant for the main image.  Simply the pattern included things like that whole whitespace discussion that we talked about, where simply just being different than what your competition is doing is key. Simply being out of place, pointing in a different direction, for instance was a key way of grabbing somebody’s attention because it’s just like what’s wrong with this picture kind of thing. Once you get their attention, then you move into what they are going to consider next. Typically, that’s going to be your title. Now, we’re not really studying as far as how much attention goes to the review count, or the star rating, or I will say things like the green background coupon codes, that is a visual colored item that does catch shoppers attention quickly. But only if it’s different from what everybody else is doing. In other words, if everybody’s using a green coupon code, then you not using a coupon code is going to make you stand out. Conversely, if there’s only one or two competitors in the search results that use a coupon code, add in a coupon code because that green pops. Okay.

Norman  44:18  

Yep, very good. Now before we go forward, is it Jager or Jaeger? But Jaeger is looking for the slide deck. Are you going to be able to provide a slide deck afterwards so we can attach in the show notes?

Brian 44:34  

Yeah because I’m not actually going through the slide deck here. Oh, yeah, absolutely can and that actually has some individual sliders. It’s very succinct and it’s basically just kind of pointing out as far as like, here’s some common recommendations that we’ve discussed. We’ve been more talking about, we’ve been doing more storytelling, which is kind of a cool way to illustrate it. But yeah, I’ll provide the slides over to you too.

Norman  44:58  

Okay, perfect. The other thing, just a quick reminder. So if you like the information that you’re hearing, first, doing Kelsey’s job, hit the like button, hit the subscribe, ring the bell. But Brian is going to be giving a giveaway today and it’s consulting, it’s a one on one consulting. So, again, if you like what you’re hearing, just like I would personally put #I love Brian. But Category King is the other one. So we are accepting any of those two for the free one on one consulting. Brian, like I know you do it for some of our listeners in the past. But typically, you’re not doing any one on one consulting. Right?

Brian 45:45  

Yeah, that’s right. Well, basically, I do it internally for Canopy Management for the agency. In general, I don’t do this. This is not normally a service I provide and so this is something I’m extending because I love you guys and I obviously want to support you with your audience. I want to make sure that I’m giving something special for you. So yeah, so definitely want to do this and this will be specifically on most of you know me for my advertising. But frankly, I want you to spend more time on product positioning this month than on your advertising. That’s how important it is.

Norman  46:20  

That’s fantastic. So Kelsey, can we do a couple of questions?

Kelsey 46:27  

Yep. Yeah, there’s a bunch of different questions that can go through. Just let me see. 

Brian 46:36  

I know we spent all the time on the images and everything.

Kelsey 46:38  

But yeah, so how about there’s some talking about bullet points. I’m not sure which lane you want to go through. 

Brian 46:50  

Here’s kind of what I look at. So let me kind of recap as far as the sequence here. The first thing, of course, is you got to have your product shown in the search results, right, or a product detail page. Now that could be through advertising, it could be through organic ranking. Some of you may have to go for more longtail organic keyword ranking in order to get some visibility initially, right? Once Amazon shows your product or your product image and title on the search results or product detail page, your second challenge is grabbing the attention of the shopper. That’s what we talked about primarily here is how do you and I love that term for that phrase, break the rules. How do you stand out from the competition? How do you do the opposite of what your competition is doing from an image? The same thing applies in the third step, which is your title. How do you have it so that your product title is not speaking to the search engine, where you’re trying to stuff as many keywords in there hoping the search engine needs your help. They don’t. It does not, it hasn’t for the last two years. You don’t need to speak to Amazon, you need to speak to the shopper, you need to speak to the shopper in terms of benefits. Okay. Well, I would certainly agree and suggest that you continue to have one target phrase that is highly relevant to your product that you put into the title. I would make sure that in the first 75 to 80 characters, and I’m not saying limit to 75 to 80, I’m saying in the first 75 to 80 characters of your title, make sure that you’ve got two or three words that speak to the benefit, the key benefit to the shopper of why they should care about your product over somebody else’s? What is it that sets your product out from your competition and I can tell because usually, I get this kind of question as well, but my product isn’t any different than anybody else’s. It may not be physically different. But the benefit that you identify that is specific to the shopper, you can stand out by saying here’s a unique benefit of this particular product, benefit to you. Now remember, a benefit is not a feature. It’s not a Oh, this has five hours of lifespan before the battery dies or whatever the case is, right? The benefit is answering the question of what’s in it for me and trying to do that in literally like two maybe three words in the first 75 to 80 characters of your title that is different from what everybody else is showing in their title. Stand out in your main image, stand out in your product title by having something that begs curiosity from the shopper. An example of this might be for instance, if somebody if you’re saying well this product lasts for five hours before you need to recharge it is an example. The benefit to somebody is not the fact that it has a long battery life. What’s in it for me by having a long battery life? I get to do something else that I want to do longer. I can avoid the pain of my battery running out. These are some of the things that are ultimate benefits that’s what’s in it for me that you want to highlight. Because it’s unlikely because I see it all the time, it’s unlikely that your competition is pointing out a key benefit to the shopper. Certainly not in their title. Okay, so that was basically the first step, get shown, Yes, stand out from your competition, show a benefit in the title that begs more curiosity for the shopper to click through to your listing. That’s where you then come into the fourth thing, which is your first three bullet points, because that’s primarily what shows up on mobile and that’s the whole reason that 75 to 80 characters is because on mobile, you’re only getting 75 to 80 characters that show up initially. Your first three bullet points are primarily what’s going to show up in mobile. So make sure your first three bullet points are two things. One, it is led, it leads with a benefit statement, and then supported by a feature, by a compelling feature and then to his succinct, brief, not a paragraph.

Norman  51:22  

No, thank you.

Brian 51:23  

Don’t make people read, because they won’t. Allow them to absorb those three bullet points in seconds, not each one in 20 seconds. Right? Keep it brief.

Norman  51:35  

But there was a reason for that in the past, so long titles with 1000s of keywords in your title and I still see it like I’ll see something that has I’m just going to make something up boys, girls, men’s, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and you don’t need everything in the title anymore, like you said, but also, those long bullet points where you stuffed those bloody keywords in to get the algorithm to come. You don’t have to worry about that anymore and you don’t repeat keywords anymore.

Brian 52:13  

Yeah, you don’t repeat keywords. Yeah and one of the things that is funny is, because I go in, I do what’s called a takedown report and that’s anytime I do this a lot for my internal team. But I’m also starting to do it publicly, where I take search terms, and basically, I’m not doing a takedown of an individual product, I’m saying here’s a product niche, I’m going to tear it apart and I’m literally creating a video that I put up on my YouTube channel where I’m tearing a product niche based off of popular search term that I find from brand analytics, and say, here’s what people are doing, here’s what sellers are doing wrong, here’s what they’re doing right, here’s how I would come in and own this search term. So I think it’s kind of a fun thing. I’ve been recording a few of those recently. So I’ll get those published up soon. But my point on that is I’m going through and identifying what is it that the common mistakes, and one of the common things that I see inside of a product detail is you go down to the description, which the description and the A plus content. Honestly, for those of you who are not aware, only about 20% of the shoppers are actually going to read that, probably less than 20%. Right? Statistically, that number actually comes from Amazon internal based off of their study as far as eye tracking and content consumption description and A plus content typically only gets about 20% visibility. So what I see quite a bit of and you’ll remember this is at the bottom description says add to cart, or add to cart and that is something it’s like, go and look at your product listing. If this is something you have at the bottom of your content, that’s probably a good clue that your listing is about five years out of date.

Norman  54:05  

That’s about right.

Brian 54:08  

Painfully out of date like you are absolutely losing market share and conversion rate to competitors who have been gradually pivoting and updating their content over time. However, if you’ve got competitors in your same product niche, that’s an opportunity for you to be on the edge of speaking to the shopper, speaking to benefits and not using outdated methodologies like that. I know Norm you could probably speak a lot to that. 

Norman  54:40  

We had a guest on, Diana Boelstler about I don’t know it was last month. I believe the hypnotic copywriter. She’s incredible. She’s really incredible and she went on and talked about all this stuff, and actually making up a word that describes something that will bring out the feature in your product and if you get a chance anybody who’s listening, check it out. I mean, it was really great about just positioning your copy. We’re talking about positioning your products right now, but exactly like Brian’s talking about. I do want to touch on the keywords though, because there’s probably a few people that said, did you say that right? You don’t have to repeat keywords. Can we just touch on that? When we started Amazon, we were told at least at the very beginning, that you could put a keyword phrase in, you don’t have to worry about plurals. You don’t have to worry about this and basically, you key stuck the heck out of everything, there’s keyword phrases everywhere. Then a year or so later than it was in the back end you’re keyword stuffing, keyword stuffing phrases into search terms, keyword stuffing wherever you could. Well, it’s completely different right now and Steve Simonsson, that was the first guy I heard talking about this and just saying, I’m experimenting with short titles, I’m experimenting with just not repeating and not repeating and it was working for him. What are your thoughts on this? I just want to make sure that I’m not giving false information.

Brian 56:17  

Yeah, no, I see this all the time where somebody will have a title that says like for men, women, children, teens. They’re just stuffing like, how many words can I get in there that could be somehow combined with my normal search phrases in order to get in order to be seen by the search engine and to be shown and frankly, I mean, Amazon has been developing their machine learning algorithms for years, and it’s gotten better and better. A lot of times, we can actually create a brand new product listing, I’ve done that with some of my, for those of you don’t know, so I don’t have a single coherent brand. I’ve had a history of essentially collecting products in different niches, as a result of we’ll say, opportunity buys. People say and say, Hey, I want to get out of Amazon, it’s like, Okay, I know I can kill it. Because you simply just didn’t do the work you need to do for your product listing, positioning, your advertising, all these things that I know that I could kill it on and so I would actually just buy out their entire inventory, and then resell it. So my collection of products is very eclectic. But each time that I launch something new, I’ve done this before where I’ve experimented, because somebody would mention somewhere, they would say it’s like, Yeah, we launch it and we don’t put anything in we put something in the title that is like one or two words and then we just leave, we park it there until the product arrives at FBA, like, Okay, I’m willing to experiment with that. Let me try it and I would take something that had no content whatsoever, no bullet points whatsoever, you would have a very brief title, I put it into the correct subcategory, didn’t have any backend keywords and a week later, I search for a phrase that was relevant to the product and it would show up in the search results. It would be indexed. How is it indexed if the words are not actually in the product listing anywhere? Because Amazon already understands what the product is, who your target audience is, when to show it. The fact that I’m not doing anything to help the conversion, help the shopper gain trust that this is the product for me is a moot point, because in most cases now, I will say that anybody can come up. I mean, you can always find an example where there’s an exception to this rule, right? Whether that’s advertising, whether that is product content, whether that’s indexing, whether it’s sales velocity to somebody always has a counter strategy, and it can work and they’ve shown us okay, this works. There’s no one size fits all, there’s no one magic bullet, right? Ultimately, you’re gonna have to test for yourself, but I would certainly concur with you on that Norm is that you don’t need to repeat words, you don’t need to keyword stuff. The way I have it primarily is go very narrow, exclusive and go very narrow on highly relevant phrases that are focused on a very specific audience that’s looking for your product as part of how you’re going to stand out anyway. If you’re primarily focused on keywords that you found like well, these are the top five searched keywords that I found on Helium 10, you’re blowing it. You’re really broadcasting it, out hoping that you’re going to happen to get in front of somebody because you’re targeting high volume search terms.

Norman  59:51  

Yeah. We talked about that with bully sticks and how to bring that back so you’re not 200,000 searches a month and trying to and thinking that you’re going to be getting all these. You’re building the audience, it’s never gonna happen. Plus if you do PPC is like 20 bucks a click. But the other thing that you mentioned and you just breezed over it but making sure you product, this is part of positioning, but making sure you’re in the right category. Yeah. If you’re not in the right category, it’s a problem.

Brian 1:00:30  

That’s something we’re seeing more and more of this year actually, when it comes to category assignment is Amazon in the past has recommended like, Oh, we recommend that your product goes into one of these three categories. Great. I picked that category. I’ve been in that category for the last two years. Now all of a sudden, I’m delisted, why am I delisted? Because you’re in the wrong category, that violates the terms like A.) it’s relevant, and B.) you guys the ones who recommended it. But Amazon has implemented so many automated audit bots, if you will and frankly, they’re not perfect. They’re making choices that are very black and white, that are very not fair and so sometimes you have to go back and have to fight with Amazon to say like, this is the category that I put my product in, because you told me there’s the product, there’s the category I should put my product in and now you’ve delisted me for being in the wrong product two years after the fact has been fine. So yeah, they’re getting tighter and tighter when it comes to is your product directly relevant to the category that you’ve assigned your product in an easy way to test that is, if you take your top converting search term, or what you think is going to be your top converting search term that is very specific to your product, and you search on Amazon and what comes back is basically all your direct competitor products that come back and the category that’s the subcategory, I should say that comes up in the left hand menu of the desktop search results. That’s the subcategory that Amazon considers most relevant to that search term. It’s why it’s bringing back those products. It’s expecting those products to be assigned to that one to that first or second top sub category and if it’s not, you may run into problems regarding relevance later on.

Norman  1:02:21  

Very good. Okay, so let’s get to these questions. Five after one?

Kelsey 1:02:27  

Five after one. So. Yeah, so Gideon has a question. Are 250 characters too much for a title? Can it hurt with your index on Amazon? From my understanding, titles above 200 characters are not recommended.

Brian 1:02:43  

What I was mentioning, as far as like the first 75 to 80 characters is simply just getting eyeball visibility in the mobile app, it’s not about the length of the title. Frankly, you could have the title as long as you want it, in my opinion. But if you are getting there, because you’re stuffing it with things like accessories, and good for men, women, boys, girls or camping. If you’re trying to basically broadcast to 50 different audiences in the words that you have in your title, you’re going to lose the race. If I’m competing with you, you’re gonna lose.

Norman  1:03:22  

Yeah and one suggestion too, download your style guide and it’ll tell you how many characters are acceptable for that category.

Brian 1:03:32  

Yeah, well, and the style guide changes constantly. So if you haven’t looked at the style guide in the last two years, probably a good time to have some good bedtime read.

Norman  1:03:43  

Here’s something, like we were looking at the style guide, and we’ve been doing this for a little while. But they were suggesting that when you upload your images, have your ASIN, your primary image is your ASIN and then upload your keywords in with the other images that go up right. Perfect but that’s right in the style guide.

Brian 1:04:10  

To include that? Yeah, well, it makes sense. It used to be like, Oh, there was an SEO trick and some will say, Yeah, it worked because it worked on this. Well, I would usually argue it’s like it depends on the competition you have. Amazon gets more loose as far as its requirements when it doesn’t have enough inventory to show and that’s usually very, it gets more and more rare that you’d be in that situation.

Norman  1:04:36  

Right. All right, Kels.

Kelsey 1:04:38  

Okay, next one from Manny, what about stamps on the main image? Like made in the USA or handmade or 100% stainless steel?

Brian 1:04:47  

I’d say most cases you’re gonna get flagged on that.

Norman  1:04:50  

Never use 100%.

Brian 1:04:51  

Yeah, well, I would say any kind of stamp is a good word. Any kind of stamp on the main image is at risk basically of having the automated bot, we saw that quite a bit with a Prime Day and Cyber Monday where you put in like Prime Day and then they immediately get delisted. So I would say it’s like, if you’ve had that on your main image or you have a lifestyle image but you’re probably caught at some point. If you are creating a new image or if you’re considering testing this, you’re probably going to get caught because anytime you make a major change, like an image change, title change, Amazon is gonna run through their automated checks, and likely catch you now. It’s kind of a progressive quality control that Amazon does with those.

Kelsey 1:05:46  

What about a super low opacity logo watermark?

Brian 1:05:50  

I mean, an AI algorithm can figure out the difference between subtle shades of gray.

Norman  1:05:58  

Can you share some graphic video services you use?

Brian 1:06:05  

I mean, we have our own internal team so we don’t have a need to use external ones. Somebody had mentioned one that was like a photography service. But honestly the way that I do graphics and video so videos, my first iteration I’ll just use like an Animoto. Basically, it’s an image. It’s cycling through images and then having big bold text. As far as my 15 second video that I’ll use for sponsored brand video ads, or that I have is my primary video and I’m coming in with eye-catching compelling images and as big as bold of text as I can get. I’m shouting out. Here’s benefit number one. Here’s benefit number two. Here’s benefit number three. I’m not going into features, I’m not trying to sell them. I’m trying to keep them here and say like yes, that’s what I need. You’re talking to me in 15 seconds.

Norman  1:07:05  

Animoto is so easy and so cheap.

Brian 1:07:08  

Yeah. Like don’t overthink it, just get something if you have nothing up right now, just do it. Yeah, just get it up there now, because it’s unlikely that your competition is doing it and therefore you’re going to have an immediate advantage and it gives you some initial test data as far as Okay, we’ll spend once brand video work for you. In most cases, it increases conversion rate, it grabs attention, because it’s visual. It’s motion. It’s visual.

Norman  1:07:35  

We also posted Soona as a product photography resource and there was one last podcast that everybody seemed to like Kels, that was very inexpensive.

Kelsey 1:07:50  

Mina’s podcast? Limitless or limit free. No Limit?

Brian 1:07:58  

No limit? Yeah, I think I don’t think he had the I don’t think they offered the same kind of pricing is what he was suggesting. But it’s still reasonable. I mean, frankly, I mean, there’s plenty of, you can even go out to something like a Fiverr, you’re not gonna get a $5 quality job, you’re gonna get something that’s produced by software. But if you go out, you could probably find somebody who does something for 100 or $200 on Fiverr even. They could actually probably do some quality work for you. The reason I usually use the cheaper services on something like Fiverr is because I’m testing like three, four or five different ones to see if I get a variety of creative ideas and just stumble upon somebody who actually is better quality than the other four.

Norman  1:08:44  

Yeah, Mina was talking about this service, and I investigated it. I’ve never used it before. Kelsey, will post it in the show notes, but it was something like $25 a shot which and their service looks pretty good. Now you’re not getting models, but you’re getting some pretty good product photography, and they gave you a bunch of options, but Soona was definitely and that’s an option, productphotography.com is another one that does some pretty good work fairly inexpensively and we also have our own product photographer that’s fairly expensive, like this is when we’re doing a very high end work. We’re looking at like a half day shoot, and then you pay by the shoot. You don’t pay by the product or the image. So you’ll end up at 1200 bucks for a half day shoot.

Brian 1:09:39  

I have a partner who just did a recent photo shoot and they spent I think it was somewhere in the five to $8,000 range for the day. But they were doing all their products in that single day and they have a whole production crew and everything. That is way overkill for what you need to do on Amazon today. Like you could literally buy tomorrow, you could have an Animoto video up and tested and running included into your product images, or into your product listings at a minimum as well as started testing sponsored brand video, just to start getting something up. 

Kelsey 1:10:12  

It was called a No Limit Creatives. Unless you want to do one more question? All right. So this one, let me see, it’s from Steven. I just lost it. For the bullet points, one important thing is to catch your customers’ emotions. But you also have to put the appropriate relevant keywords for ranking and positioning. Any suggestions on how you balance those two?

Brian 1:10:38  

Usually, what I’m trying to do is the first and foremost is I’m going through in the analysis that I do with a brand is I am looking for Okay, what are the most compelling benefits of your products? Sometimes, you’d actually mentioned that earlier, as far as using, coming up with creative funny words, in the title that stand out that are synonymous, what the benefit is, the beg the curiosity, and example I use on that was an office chair brand that did double stitching along the top edge of the chair, right and so what I did is I had them put into the title, two words, Apex stitching. Well, Apex is a funny word like, what does that mean? Well, if you look it up, it just means top. Right? So all it means it was like double Apex stitching, I think maybe what we ended up going with, and so they people understood, like, okay, double stitching, but what is Apex? It begs curiosity, it draws them in and makes them pause for an extra half a second. Yeah, exactly and frankly, the X in a word in a short word like that, and x, it stands out and so if you can use, it’s not like you’re trying to do clickbait or you’re trying to be gimmicky, it’s more of a case of you’re using words that people aren’t usually familiar with that maybe mean the same thing. I don’t care if your product is exactly the same as the other 30 products on there. There’s something in the manufacturing process that the other competitors are not pointing out, that takes a little bit extra time, a little bit extra cost that you could point out, and people will think that your product somehow did something special. You invested more into your product than the other ones did simply because you pointed out

Norman  1:12:22  

Yeah. All right.

Brian 1:12:26  

Going back to actually his good question, though, as far as the bullet points, I lead with benefits, if I can try to get that within three to five words, as far as a benefit statement in the bullets and then I’ll have a hyphen, or a pipe or a colon or whatever the case is, and then I’ll follow that up with like, includes whatever feature that directly supports that benefit. In that feature piece, that’s usually where I can put in some additional keywords or phrases for relevance and ranking. Again, kinda like what he’s talking about earlier, you probably don’t need it. But if you feel compelled, we still do it out of habit is to include it anyway, just in case Amazon changes their tone later on. It’s already in there. So we don’t put it into the benefits. That brief benefit statement, we put it into the brief, feature supporting statement that goes along with each bullet point.

Norman  1:13:23  

I think it’s important that everything you’re hearing today could be out of date, a month from now, and so that’s what we’re trying to do is bring you new information, because we talked about Add To Cart. Well, yeah, that is so five years ago and there’s a lot of things you could do back in 2017 that you just can’t do anymore and some people listen to YouTube videos that are 2017, 2016 and so we’re trying to keep this all fresh. We’re trying to be on it. Before we get to the giveaway, and by the way, if you put in Category King or I love Brian, you’ll be entered. But I saw one PPC question that came in, and I think it was Dr. Koz and it was right at the beginning and we got to sneak this in. Is that okay, Brian?

Brian 1:14:17  

Of course. I can never get away from any of these without some kind of a PVC question coming up.

Norman  1:14:28  

Oh, it was Jeff. Okay.

Kelsey 1:14:30  

So it’s a two part question. How important is it to implement dayparting and seasonal bids? Then part two, how long should we run PPC normally before they gather data, before implementing dayparting?

Brian 1:14:43  

That is a great question. So my position on that is it depends on your individual product niche. If you actually can observe data in order to determine whether or not you need it. In general, seasonality is something I dress with a lot more than I would dayparting. Dayparting, mainly because Amazon does not provide enough detailed data on this. I think I kind of laugh when I see software that says, Oh, we adjust your bid every hour, it is not necessary. In other words, A.) it is not necessary, B.) you don’t have enough data feedback in order to really act on it. Now, somebody will always come up with an example, of course, like, Oh no, it worked in my situation. Cool. Awesome for you. That’s exactly what I’m suggesting here is you test it in your situation and see if it makes any difference whatsoever. Whether that’s dayparting. Seasonality, I do strongly believe in because there are campaigns, there are strategies, there are targets, whether they’re keywords or products that do work differently depending on the season of the year, and how your product is affected by seasonality. Now, seasonality, most people think it’s like, Oh well, okay, it’s Prime Day or Cyber Week or the holidays, but a three day under normal conditions pre COVID, post COVID, normal conditions where people look forward to three day weekends and having time off and traveling and that kind of stuff. Seasonality can be something as simple as people buy products a week before a three day weekend in preparation for that three day weekend and they check out and they stopped converting in the two days leading up to that three day weekend and then during that three day weekend, because they’re still camped out on their phone, they’re shopping, but they’re not buying. So conversion rates change right before and during any kind of even a three day weekend is seasonality, let alone something like graduation day or Prime Day or something like that, which are typically more emphasized. So I would say it’s something where you should probably test it for at least two weeks, maybe four to six weeks to see, does it actually make a measurable difference in your situation if I turn off ads during the day, if I turn it off for an entire week, and then turn it back on again, you’re going to get some mixed signals. Because the way the roll up data works where Amazon does something I see quite a bit and something you should definitely test for your product as well and that is turn off all your ads for a week. Now you may be in such a hyper competitive situation where you’re like going well, I don’t want to take that risk. Try to turn it off one campaign for a week. But don’t leave it off, what you’ll typically find is Amazon will still give you some visibility, it’ll shift over some organic sales, assuming you’ve got some organic keyword ranking and you won’t be spending as much that particular week on that particular campaign. Good. But eventually that’s going to catch up to you and Amazon will readjust and then all sudden, you’re like going, Oh, I need to turn my ads back on again. So don’t think it’s like, Oh, I turned off all my ads and, and I’ve got 100% profitability because everything’s coming through organic. It works temporarily. Just like dayparting just like seasonal adjustments is something that you can Test. Test it for a week at a time, test things like daypartingor seasonality for a few weeks to see if it’s right for your situation.

Norman  1:18:28  

Perfect. Okay, sir. I think that’s it for today. Kelsey, the Wheel of Kelsey.

Kelsey 1:18:37  

It’s time. Okay, I’ll pull it up. Give me a second.

Norman  1:18:42  

This is for a one on one consultation with Brian.

Kelsey 1:18:47  

All right. Let me just make sure we don’t have anyone else. Okay, so here we go. So 321

Norman  1:18:56  

The lucky winner.

Norman  1:19:04  

Near, all right.

Brian 1:19:06  

There we go. Let’s do a second one Kelsey.

Norman  1:19:09  

Are you gonna do a second? Oh, that’s fantastic.

Brian 1:19:13  

So what the way that’s gonna work for those of you who are not familiar with as far as the way I do it is I’ll give you a will basically share along with the deck that I didn’t show. I’ll show a booking link for you to schedule. Now, full disclosure in two weeks, I am on the road with my family for eight weeks for two months. 

Norman 1:19:37

You’re gonna lose hair.

Brian 1:19:38

I know right? So yeah, basically doing a West quarter of United States road trip with my family for two months. Looking forward to it and scared. But my point on that is the scheduling is it’s not like I’m unavailable for those two months. It’s more of a case of because I am working from the road, but just have some flexibility as far as the schedule. That’s why I’m going to give you a calendly scheduling link, and then we can schedule that time. Let’s do a second one. Kelsey. 

Norman 1:20:12

Oh, that’s awesome.

Kelsey 1:20:13  

Okay, perfect. 

Brian 1:20:14  

This is specifically going to be on product positioning.

Kelsey 1:20:18  

Right. Okay. 321

Norman  1:20:21  

Wheel of Kelsey. 

Norman  1:20:28  

Gideon got it. All right. Very good. So all you have to do is provide Kelsey with your information and we’ll get that over to Brian, or get you the Calendly link to book.

Kelsey 1:20:41  

Yep. So you can either message me on Facebook. My name is Kelsey Farrar, or you can send me an email at k@lunchwithnorm.com.

Norman  1:20:52  

So Brian, we’re setting something up. Sorry Kels, go ahead. Okay. So Brian, we started something really cool on Mondays. So right after the podcast, we have a Clubhouse. So it can be very interactive and if you’re available, and I’m not one, I don’t want to put you on the spot. But if you are available, it would be awesome to have you on Monday to join for a few minutes and answer some questions or stay as long as you want. 

Brian 1:21:21  

Of course. Yeah. I mean, let me know the time on that. I know I do. What time is it on Monday?

Norman  1:21:26  

It’s 1:30 Eastern Standard Time. Right after the podcast. 

Brian 1:21:28  

That’ll go work out great. Yeah, cuz I do a weekly Clubhouse on Tuesday mornings at 10:30 Central, at 11:30 Eastern and so yeah, absolutely. I think. Yeah, most Monday afternoons about that time, I should be able to jump on with you.

Norman  1:21:48  

That’s awesome. All right. So you will accept the invite, then? 

Brian 1:21:52

Yes. 

Norman 1:21:54

All right. Okay. Thank you, sir. You dropped a lot of knowledge today. I really appreciate you coming on again, and two consults instead of one. So you’re always sharing and that’s what I love about you. We will see you later. We’ll have you on again next month if you accept the invitation. I hope you do.

Brian 1:22:13  

Of course. It depends on if I’m stuck in the Grand Canyon or something.

Norman  1:22:16  

Oh, that’s true. Okay Brian. We’ll see you later and thanks everybody. I think that’s the end of the podcast and Kelsey, is there anything else that you’d like to add?

Kelsey 1:22:29  

Just thank you guys for watching. I think that was a great episode. It was a pretty long episode. We went on over an hour and 20 minutes for this one. But yeah, if you’re new to the podcast, if you want to watch some highlights, or miss some of the episodes like we mentioned Diane’s episode before. You can find all of those episodes on our YouTube page. It’s Norman Farrar, but if you search Lunch with Norm, you’ll be able to find it and yeah, join our Facebook group. That’s where the community is. That’s where all the good stuff is, the show notes or the slide decks, questions to the experts. We do polls. We might even do a giveaway once in a while. But I highly recommend going over there. So that’s Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and eCommerce Collective. So head on over there if you haven’t already and yeah, we have our weekly Clubhouse, as they’re saying at 1:30pm Eastern Time, right after the podcast on Mondays. So make sure you join there. All that information is in the Facebook events on the Facebook group too. So got all that. I think that’s it. All right. Of course smash the like button if you will, ring the bell.

Norman  1:23:44  

You’re getting it. There you go. Okay. Ring the bell. All right. So join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Eastern Standard Time at noon. Hey, thanks everybody. Look at the engagement. It was fantastic today. That’s what we love to see. That’s all part of our community. So thank you for being part of the community and we’ll see you next time.