#184: Transform Your eComm Store Into An Iconic Brand

Episode: 184

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Ryan Rigney – BoostRooster’s Co-Founder 

Subtitle: “How to Transform Your eComm Store Into An Iconic Brand”

Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEU8UWBsjEg

Back on Lunch with Norm…Join today’s episode where BoostRooster’s Co-Founder Ryan Rigney talks about what defines an iconic brand, the process of looking for brand with potential and mistakes when creating your brand. Ryan focuses on marketing for eCommerce with innovative software tools to get your brands to the next level.

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In this episode, we discuss:

• 0:00 Intro/Housekeeping
• 3:48 Welcome Ryan Rigney                     
• 6:31 Chatbox Tool for Amazon Sellers          
• 8:46 Criteria in Building an Iconic Brand                                                      
• 20:48 Targeting and Marketing your Own Brand                                          
• 25:15 Market Sales Volume                               
• 29:00 Product Innovation for your eComm Business                 
• 33:18 Social Engagement for Brands        
• 38:09 Mistakes That People Make in Building a Brand                                         
• 42:08 Time and Effort to Spend in Making your Product Profitable   
• 1:03:35 Social Media for Product Launch and Brand Awareness

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Explore these Resources

• n this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

  Boost rooster – https://boostrooster.com/

  Athletic greens – https://athleticgreens.com/

  
  

   9 Iconic Brand Metrics I Typically Look At, from my notes (as requested on the pod today)

  Brand Name

  • Spellable, feels good to say it, memorable, if it is narrow is it large enough to expand into a large brand

  Brand Style / Messaging

  • Easier to fix this
  • Story brand, emotional appeal and making ideal avatar relate and go on a journey with you to creating the company

  Domination

  • How much real estate to do they take up in the marketplace they sell in?
  • We can fix this w/ levers we pull

  Sales Volume

  • Market size vs. their current reach. Use Google trends, Amazon tool, see if the market is going in the right direction and how much of it they occupy
  • We can fix this w/ levers we pull

  Reviews

  • Sometimes we can fix this, harder in some categories

  Household Name

  • In a sub niche. Example: Athletic Greens in green juice powders. They do one thing, many people may not know but those in the market for green juice all pretty much know at this point

  Innovation

  • Is the product unique, has the market caught up, what do they do to meet customer expectations. Innovate first, maintain quality and customer trust over time

  Following

  • Do people feel inspired to talk about the brand? Is it social friendly?

  Doing Good

  • Can the brand spread good to the world in a genuine way?
  
  

  Profit Factory – Tim Francis – https://profitfactory.com/

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normanfarrar.com

Norman Farrar   0:01  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm. The Amazon FBA and ecommerce podcast.

Norman Farrar  0:21  

Okay, we got a good show today on today’s show, we’re gonna be talking about how to transform your ecommerce Store into an iconic brand. So I think that’s gonna be really interesting. We talk about Amazon quite a bit, but how about your e commerce Store into an iconic brand. Our guest is an eight figure ecommerce seller, private coach, with the emphasis on marketing for Ecommerce. He’s also the co-founder of Rooster or boost rooster, an innovative suite of software tools to help Amazon sellers market their products. He’s a returning guest Ryan Rigney, and I can’t wait to start talking to him about this. So if you do know people that want to build that iconic brand, listen, there’s going to be a lot of good tips today. But before we get to it, I want to just thank our sponsor, a refs, Webmaster Tools, looking to become more of an Amazon seller, start increasing your sales with your own website with the help of H refs. With their new very advanced and very free SEO tool. H ref will help you launch inbound sales from your very own website with ease while you’re listening to lunch with Norm So sit back, relax, relax and let h refs do all the work. So take control of your business and check out Atrus webmaster tools at ahrefs.com/awt. That’s ahrefs.com/awt. Okay, so where is the Boy Wonder?

Kelsey   1:51  

Hello, hello. Happy Monday.

Norman Farrar  1:53  

Happy Monday, sir. You know we have the producer for the people right above me.

Kelsey   2:00  

Yes, I I heard that producer for the people still there. Yeah, yes. My brother, aka my brother Hayden, who was on the show once before. I think you got to get a review from the folks from the beard nation. Yeah. But anyways, enough about hidden. Okay, all right. Okay. But especially like buttons. We do have a really great show today. So if you have any questions, put them on over into the comment section. Let me see. If you haven’t yet please join our Facebook group once Norm Amazon FBA ecommerce collective. We’ve got two giveaways today, which is going to be awesome. And if you’ve missed an episode, if you’re looking for more, you can check out our YouTube channel. That’s Norman Farrar, or you can search entrepreneur him and you’ll be able to find all the episodes. And yeah, nice. Seven.

Norman Farrar  3:01  

There you go. There we go. I don’t know if it’s a tight one. Kelsey.

Kelsey   3:06  

Sorry. I like this. Aiden was good. Kelsey is great. And beard certified. Alright, thank you. Thank you. Okay. Okay. But anyways, if you have any questions, put them on over in the comment section and share this episode, get those likes, likes to flow in. And yeah, if you’re interested in more beard, you can check out our membership program where we can do q&a sessions guest lessons, free SOPs, all that good stuff on our entrepreneur website. Just check out and click the membership button there. But all right, that’s it.

Norman Farrar   3:37  

Very good. So questions, just throw them over to the comment section. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. Welcome. Where are you, sir? Oh, hey. Hey, Ryan. How’s it going? I like that. I screwed up the name of your your app.

Ryan Rigney   3:54  

Yeah, you got it eventually, though. I did. I did. But then you’re like, I don’t think I can say anything. Yeah, it seems like the show dynamics have changed a little bit with Kelsey. His brother?

Norman Farrar  4:05  

Uh, yeah. The producer for the people. Yeah.

Ryan Rigney   4:09  

Last time I was here, I think it was just Kelsey. So it’s like, he’s very touchy

Norman Farrar  4:13  

about that. Okay. Try not to say anything about Hayden. But all right, sir. For those of us who don’t know you and what you do, can you just give us a brief description?

Ryan Rigney   4:24  

Yeah, yeah. So I guess a short like history of how I’m here talking to you today. Um, I was working as a lawyer a couple years back and I built an E commerce business on the side. I found that I liked that a lot more than being a lawyer. So I gradually transitioned into doing that full time. During that process. I started helping people online, on Facebook particular how to grow their brand and I was coaching people escalated into coaching people privately. I built a software tool on the side while I was doing that to solve some problems of the people I was coaching and I ended up doing just a lot of different things, super overwhelmed, I guess. And over the last like year or so I’ve tried to dial that back and do less things, especially with like, you know, I had a daughter about a year ago, and I was trying to do the dad thing and not do like 15 projects and balance so many things. So what you know, what I’m doing now is not doing private coaching anymore. And there’s a reason for that kind of relates to like, one of the things I want to talk about today that I’m working on. So, yeah, what I’m working on now is I’m working with a group of people. And what we do is we invest in or acquire outright, ecommerce brands kind of sound similar to an aggregator, but it’s a little bit different. And that we don’t just buy like, or invest in things that are like at the top, what we do is we look at brands that we feel have iconic potential, which we can kind of go into and we feel we can grow over the long term. And it’s not necessarily like volume, quantity over quality, it’s quality over quantity. So there’s a whole bunch of reasons why we made that distinction and why we’re focusing on that. But that’s, that’s what I’m doing mostly now, instead of like the private coaching and all the stuff that’s super time consuming. I want to invest in brands that I feel like I can have a personal impact on and grow those. So.

Norman Farrar  6:12  

Oh, fantastic. Well, we’ll talk a little bit more that a bit later on for your app, and we don’t have an affiliate link or anything. But can you just describe it, I like to give some options here to Amazon sellers.

Ryan Rigney  6:28  

Yeah, yeah. So booster we were really at, I’d say like the first like, done for you chatbot launch tool. For Amazon sellers. We built this specifically because there was a lot of friction. And in the product launch process, people were using chat bots to launch products. And I as far as I know, like I was, I was one of the first people to do that. And I was teaching people this very complicated, elaborate like process where they had to connect like five tools to get the launch to work. So what we did is we made a software tool that simplified that so people could make the launch in just a couple of minutes. So that’s like the first tool that we made. And then we added on a second tool in the last year that helps people make their their product insert. So the design for it, and also the landing page and the whole funnel process. So no demo. Yeah. Oh, cool. So we have those two things. And it’s really like, it’s not necessarily built for like the elite like marketing guy wants things like super customized and, you know, maybe has like $100 million $50 million business, it’s like the people that are just trying to get something that works and get it in a cost effective way quickly, so they can test it. So it’s like the everyday Amazon seller who wants like the higher level strategy in their business?

Norman Farrar  7:41  

Like it. Okay, so let’s dive into the topic today, turning your ecommerce site into an iconic brand. So I’ve always I’ve talked actually, the original name of this podcast was the rise of the micro brands, with the help of Amazon, you know, every everybody was a micro brand. And it’s funny, because when you try to describe a micro brand, a lot of people think that their brand, and they’re doing Oh, I’m doing $10,000 A month I’m doing $100,000 a month. No, you’re a micro brand. And anyways, getting it to that next level where it’s a household name, you’re starting to see that there are some companies now that have become household names. And they they took off from Amazon like anchor. Right? Anchors everywhere now. And that started out, you know, just as an Amazon brand, but it’s a high quality. I think it’s a high quality brand did a great job with their quality. So yeah, anyways, let’s talk about you and building an iconic brand. Where do you start?

Ryan Rigney  8:45  

Yeah, yeah. So I do a lot of vetting of brands now. Like Basically, most of my days just spent, like trying to find the brands that we see potential to grow. And it’s kind of funny that you mentioned anchor, because one of one of my partners in this venture, he was actually back in 2016, when he was really active on Amazon, he was the number two Amazon private label seller on the platform and the number one was anchor Hmm. So when I when I made this this venture and decided to go in this direction, I really wanted people that do like how to operate at the highest level, not just on the Amazon side, but also building brands that people like really, really know. His brand was called case ology. I don’t know if you’ve, you’ve heard of it, but it was a cell phone case brand and he got acquired. So that’s one of the partners so what do we look for when we’re, we’re looking at the brand can be iconic? Well, when I think of iconic, I think, are people proud to buy those products over and over again? Are they sharing it with people without being asked to? Is it something that’s like we’re customer loyalty, you can actually sell them more things over and over again, versus where you see a lot of these Amazon sellers go to it’s just building real estate on Amazon ranking for keywords and having products that are convert well, but maybe the customer is not building a relationship with the brand, they might not even know who they’re buying from. So how do you how do you go from like being that real estate on Amazon to building the relationship and having multiple products you can sell to somebody that’s like step one, to getting the iconic status. And then if you’re an iconic brand, they’re not just going to buy on Amazon, if your Amazon listings not there, they’re going to find you somewhere else. And people are just going to be Googling and talking and they’re gonna find you wherever you’re at. So and, like another brand recently that I think started as an Amazon brand I heard about it was high key keto snacks if you’ve heard of them. So that’s that’s another example of one that recently kind of made that transition from like, Amazon seller to iconic brand and like they sold for like, couple 100 million dollars or something like that recently. So there’s, there’s a big, there’s a big, big upside to building a brand like the larger acquires not just the aggregators will want to spend a lot more on a branded, like has that loyalty that they can see a huge product line being built out, around. So did I answer your question?

Norman Farrar  11:05  

Yeah. So if I understand dand you correctly, when you’re looking for a brand to build, it’s not a one off if I’m looking for. I don’t know, it might be a fly trap, a moth trap, right? When you want to go in and you want to check out that moth trap, you want to make sure that you could build out the brand. So it has all sorts of other and I shouldn’t even use that because it’s going to pesticide it’ll come up but But anyways, what I read about pesticides, wow, oh my God, but it could go very wide. It’s not just concentrating on the one niche, it can go wide and you can build?

Ryan Rigney  11:45  

Well, yeah, you can. You can be a household name and a very specific sub niche if if the markets large enough like I think in fly traps, like pest traps, there are some iconic brands that people really know and recognize just because they’ve been around for so long. Like, you know, I don’t know if it’s necessarily good reputation, but raid like everybody knows the brand name raid, I’d say that’s like an iconic brand. How do you how do you get to that level, if you’re starting online, you have to do something different and get the message out quickly enough before you know one of these large conglomerates like copies your product and takes all the shelf space, right. So we have nine criteria that I kind of look at. And then if I see if I can make that transition to the iconic brand, where people are really like building the relationship with the brand rather than just buying whatever’s on Amazon. So one of one of the criteria is brand name. So when I’m vetting these brands, like that’s what like the first one I look at, because it’s kind of difficult to change brand name. If you already have all these listings on Amazon, like you can technically do it. But if you change a brand name, like you don’t wanna have to re communicate to everyone now where, you know, dust x instead of, you know, this really hard to spell thing that nobody could find. Like, I’m looking at spreadsheets, like with a whole bunch of brands on them a lot of time. And it’s like the brand names, I just don’t know why people choose some of these. Nobody knows how to spell it. Nobody knows how to pronounce it doesn’t have any significance. That’s another thing. Like if it’s like really generic, and it doesn’t really stand for anything, it’s kind of like, you’re kind of fighting an uphill battle, you can do it, but it’s tough. So Brandon is one,

Norman Farrar  13:20  

you know, Brian, Orion. That’s a great point. I like talking about like, I’m a brand guy. So when I start looking or talking to people about this, people will go over, they’ll try to get something on a.com They’ll end up doing a either a 30 character long name, or something that has hyphens in it or something that has a misspelling in it. And they don’t understand by putting in that misspelling, that could be a real problem, right. And the other thing is you want to check consistency. So there is a, there’s a domain out there called name, ne, I think it’s an A M check, or an A M, E, check, see, CH K, and you punch your domain. And you can see right across all the social media platforms, whether it’s there or not. And you could you could go in and get your domain name. But it might not be available on any social media platform. But it’s so important to go out. And we’ve talked I don’t know if you’d agree with me on this. But there’s other domains out there that bring equity. It doesn’t have to be a.com. Like I buy, I just had cigar club. But I’ve got you know, it’s a premium domain domain, very expensive domain, but it’s premium, and it should bring equity at the end of the day because I’m building a community around cigars, right. So

Ryan Rigney  14:47  

anyways, and like just the fact that you have that brand name that’s very easy to spell and sounds catchy like people, they really will like and do a lot of value to what you’re doing. They think that you’re official because you have that domain to

Norman Farrar   14:59  

exactly And you rank in about two weeks on Google. So that’s not bad either. But okay, so that was your first criteria. What are a couple of others?

Ryan Rigney  15:09  

Yeah, I’m just a brief note on that. So the brand name if example, like athletic greens, it’s a green powder, you would you would think like, Okay, this brand name, it sort of limits them to selling you know, green things that promote athleticism and healthiness, right. But if the markets large enough, they can they have become, I’d say, an iconic brand, because most people that are in the market for buying healthy green stuff like they know who they are. And they’ve really focused in on one product. So you don’t need to like make it. So you can expand into a whole bunch of different categories, per se. But the category needs to be something that there’s like a passionate and large enough audience behind or that you can, you can build that audience behind like athletic greens, that’s like an example of focus, product focus, brand name, but also iconic, in that it’s a sub niche, right. Now, the second thing I wrote down here, so brand style messaging, this is a lot easier to fix over time, rather than the brand name, I’d say. And this, this really is like there’s a couple different components to it. So there’s this trend for like a story brand approach where some like nutrition companies, they’ll have like the founder who had cancer, and then they got this product, and then they started their Healthy Transition. And now they have a whole line of products that are like healthy. So the other there’s brands that have like the story behind it. And people when they run ads, and they have this story, people will resonate and have like emotional attachment to supporting that business versus just buying like whatever else is competing against them, or whatever ad hits them, because they have this relationship to the brand and like the story. So that’s like kind of part of the style and the emotional appeal that we can build. It doesn’t need to be there. And like one of the brands that I was looking at and that we’re looking to invest in. They they’re like in the home cleaning category, and they really didn’t have any story. And I was talking with them like so how did you how did you pick your brand name, like it’s an interesting brand name, and they just said, I thought that the customers would like it is because the brand name had like, girls that had a gender assigned to it. And none of the founders were girls, and they had no no connection to female things at all. They just picked it because they thought girls would want it

Norman Farrar  17:12  

sounds like a typical guy, though. Right?

Ryan Rigney  17:15  

Right. But yeah, we can we can add a story we can we can add some significance to it, you know, we can find somebody to represent the brand and kind of push that message in the right direction. But the fact that they’re just kind of winging it to make make it seem like it does kind of work, but there’s no significance behind it. So right? Yeah,

Norman Farrar  17:32  

no, and this is where you would go. And it’s so nice, right now when you can do these mini focus groups on usability hub, or over at PickFu. And you mean, this used to cost a ton of money back in the day to try to, you know, get some feedback, but you can go to your specific demographic right now. Ask questions, and really see if you’re on track or not.

Ryan Rigney   17:57  

Yeah, that’s Yeah, I think that big those big data surveys used to be like 10s of 1000s of dollars, right? Yeah, you can do like micro tests, like that’s, yeah, they definitely solve a huge problem with PickFu. That’s, that’s great. You can use that now. So yeah, brand brand style messaging, a lot of its aesthetics to just how do they have a consistent color scheme, font scheme? Are their listings consistent with one another, across their website? And on Amazon, all the channels, does it look consistent, a lot of these like smaller Amazon sellers, they just kind of throwing darts at the board working with different agencies piecing things together, using different font. It doesn’t create, like a sense of unity of all the products in the brand. So it just, that’s, that’s something we can fix. But see, there’s a lot of problem with that, too. So if I see that they don’t have that that’s actually a plus for me if they’re already doing pretty well. Right, we can ramp it up.

Norman Farrar  18:50  

Yeah. So going and from your Amazon listing, even staying consistent with the font that you’re using on your E commerce page. And that carries over to social media. I think, Kelsey, don’t let your head go big. But Kelsey does a great job of keeping our consistency with the brands, the color, the fonts, everything across social media, our website, everything. So anyways, it’s so important because you know somebody is going to go, and it’s these little things that add up between you and your competitor, right already equals trust equals sales.

Ryan Rigney  19:25  

Yeah, yeah. And that’s all Kelsey doing that too. Right? Not Hayden.

Norman Farrar  19:29  

Yeah, Hayden? No, no, but he wants to take over. Okay, just

Ryan Rigney   19:33  

checking. Yeah, so those are the first two criteria just keep going on if that’s cool with you. Sure. So the next one I look at is domination in the sub niche. So when people are searching like keto keto cookies or something like how many how likely are you to see that brand pop up in Google and whatever search engine you use Amazon like are they advertising aggressively? Have rankings that have multiple listings, locks, there’s like different ways to scale brands, you can scale I call it horizontally or vertically. So you already have a rabid following behind like a certain type of product, like you could just launch more similar variations like that product. And there, the chance of successes is higher, I’d say because you’ve already proven the market and already have an interest in it. versus say, like launching a brownie instead of a cookie, like you might completely flop on that. But if you launch like a different type of cookie, like you’re already known for that people are like searching for you. So and when I launch products in my brand to like, I focus a lot more on the Proven Winners and finding different ways to like, vary those and like really fill all the gaps in the market for any way they could possibly want to consume that product.

Norman Farrar   20:45  

So when you’re when you’re Marketing on Amazon, are you targeting your own brand? Obliviously

Ryan Rigney   20:52  

with PVC, yeah, I do. I think it’s like under 5% of budget, just because it can really, it can really eat a lot of your budget if you just bid on your brand name, too. And it’s kind of like a balancing act. You don’t want to overspend too much, but yeah, a lot of competitors bid on it. So you have to, you have to be sort of defensive with your PPC campaigns to stop those offensive attacks from taking the visibility on Amazon, especially because there’s so many brands like competing for eyeballs, different story on your website, of course for just you. Right, um,

Norman Farrar  21:23  

one thing I forgot to mention to everybody that you have a really great giveaway today. You want to just talk about that for a second.

Ryan Rigney  21:30  

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I’m a partner with boost rooster co owner and I just stopped for you guys with the beard nation. I think you call it right. Right, right. So beard nation can give you a one year free booster subscription, which would typically be I think, like $800 or All right. Okay, you get one of those away.

Norman Farrar  21:50  

Fantastic. That’s a that’s a great giveaway. So if you’re interested in that, that’ll be hashtag. We’ll have Kelsey, if you want to enter twice, it’ll be just take two people either on this channel, or outside. Kelsey, we have another giveaway today. Two from Marsha. Right?

Kelsey  22:08  

That is correct. So we have one from StayWell copper from a beard nation member, Marsha Reese. So every Monday we give away a cuppa phone plate. Me a normal half one, oh, this helps a kill germs with the back of your phone because you’re constantly touching it with your products on. You just got to visit. But please visit stable copper.com For more information about it. And this giveaway is only us in Canada. So okay, that is hashtag, I want to stay well. So everyone put those in the comment section. So we got two giveaways. And yeah, we’ll let it permissions in the comment.

Norman Farrar  22:48  

Okay, so just following up on what you were just talking about, with Amazon. So you spent 5% of your PPC budget on marketing your, your brand. And then on Google, are you using Google My Business or anything to market your Google Images?

Ryan Rigney   23:06  

Google Business Manager? I don’t do anything to market the images I do shopping and like, brand brand search defensive stuff? I don’t I don’t know about the image thing. What is that?

Norman Farrar  23:17  

Oh, it’s really cool. So with Google My Business, you can just create your own. Add your brand, add your product line. And you can add meta description just like you would in Amazon. And then Google will automatically index and put it into Google indexing, as well as it’ll be like Google Shopping. So when it comes up, you’ll rank you’ll you’ll index instantly, you don’t have to wait around for the spider. And you’ll just as the more information in the more content you add into Google My Business, they have what’s called a search list. Search is that searches actual search? Yeah. And it’ll start building up the keywords around your, your, your product line. So if I’m selling soap, it’ll talk about natural soap, handmade soap, whatever it is, and start marketing on our behalf. So it’s like Google image, it’ll automatically be inserted into Google image. But with a link if as long as your anchor link is going back to your shopping page, then you got a link going right back.

Ryan Rigney    24:19  

It’s pretty cool. Is that is that new? Or they have so many Yeah, like features and all these tools that I it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Yeah,

Norman Farrar   24:26  

yeah. Google My Business. It was for bricks and mortar but now they’ve opened up to brands.

Ryan Rigney  24:32  

Nice. Okay. Got to get on that. Yeah, that would that would be a good good do you have to pay for those for my sponsor free right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, definitely need to do that. That’s that’s one of those things where like that relates to that domination criteria of like, How present are they for different keywords tear so

Norman Farrar   24:49  

yeah. Oh, and by the way, like, if you do rank for that keyword in Google My Business on a mobile phone, you take up three scrolls, three scrolls at the top. can’t become second, it’s always three, you dominate three pages of scrolls for that keyword.

Ryan Rigney  25:07  

Wow. That’s great. It’s okay. Definitely I get on that. Okay, so the next next criteria I look at is sales volume. So I look at the market size, where the market trends are going and how much of the market sales like are they are they getting and you can kind of use some tools to get a rough approximation of like how large they are in comparison to like the top dog, it’s easier on Amazon than it is, you know, on Google or on their website, where you have no insight into BSR. But sales volume, that’s something that’s we, we can fix, right? It doesn’t, they don’t need to be the top seller to eventually be an iconic brand, they could just be in their early stages, and they haven’t quite found their message. And their product USP hasn’t been emphasized in the right way to really break through the market and be like at least number two, or potentially number one takes time to get that awareness. And like, when you’re when you’re selling on Amazon, it’s kind of harder to break through, you need to usually find some other way outside of Amazon to drive that awareness to really break through just because like Amazon’s like a search engine, you’re just getting people searching for a specific thing. And for some of these like breakthrough iconic brands, you have to drive awareness to the point where they they don’t really know what they’re searching what they want until you tell them sometimes. So that’s that’s kind of like how we move that lever the sales volume lover. Reviews, reviews, social proof. If I see like an Amazon account that it’s like potential investment, I look at their catalogue, do they have a lot of accumulated reviews, especially if they hit like the 1000 review Mark, if they have five or six products that are over 1000 reviews, and they’re just not doing well, like they’ve tapered off like that’s like a goldmine in my opinion, because they have like a lot of like that that could cost you 10s of 1000s of dollars to accumulate that many reviews over the course of a year or two years, depending on the category and like how much sales volume they’re pushing. But like in nutritional supplements, for example, like 1000 reviews, if you have a listing with that, like gives you a pretty big advantage in most in most subcategories of supplements and like, we can inject brand messaging, better images, consistent images, drive some awareness to it, that that can revive something that has like 1000 Plus Reviews, and it can actually maintain it because it has all that social proof already. So that’s that’s something most people probably know about. But there’s something about like 1000 review, the threshold that really like makes it a lot easier. That’s such a hard number to get to, for most for most product, right. So yeah, I’ve got four other criteria here. household name. So I kind of talked about Athletic Greens earlier. A lot of people watching this might not be into like green juice powder, and all that stuff. They might not know who athletic greens is. But if you are more of like a biohacker healthy person, you’d like to try to optimize everything, like you probably know who they are, because they’re just kind of present on all channels at this point. You listen to podcasts, they have ads, you go to Google after visiting their website, they’re targeting you with display ads all over the place. I get hit with Facebook ads all the time, even though I’ve never bought anything from them. Just because they probably know like, you know, I sell I sell supplements. I’m always on supplement websites. So they’re constantly hitting me. And it’s like, I hear about their brand name like every two days even though I don’t want to. So. Yeah, it’s like that’s an example of like, and I know they have like a rabid following people that keep keep subscribing. So household name. It doesn’t need to be like everyone that knows just the Avatar the customer that you’re focusing on, do they do they know about? Or have they heard about it? At least?

Norman Farrar   28:48  

I liked it. I like that. It’s it’s those seven touch points. Right? Are you here? It’s gonna become a household name,

Ryan Rigney  28:56  

huh? Yeah. So the the next criteria, this one is kind of harder to. To engineer, it’s, it’s better if they kind of already have given you some of the legwork up front. When you’re investing in a brand, if it’s innovation, and this kind of relates to that USP of the product, have they done something that’s actually better or different, they’re emphasizing something in a different way than what’s on the market. So a lot of brands, what they’ll do on Amazon is they just kind of do whatever’s the cheapest way to get on the platform. So if they’re selling like, say, a hand warmer, they’ll just go to the supplier that makes hand warmers, there’s probably three four other people selling hand warmers they tried to make it look different. There’s really no innovation just because they can’t afford to do like the r&d to innovate. But if they’re already doing well, and they have profit, what they should be doing, at some point is reinvesting that profit into like a second version product that actually does something better and different. So that can really like start to build like awareness. and social blog posts about them YouTube videos, if they actually do something better and different, costs a lot up front for the r&d work, it’s a big risk versus just going to the manufacturer ordering 500 units, you probably have to order 10,000 plus or more and invest like a significant amount of money. But when you have the money to do that, you should start looking at how do I how do I make something different?

Norman Farrar  30:21  

Yeah, exactly. I think you nailed it, these meet two products. You’re just competing with me two products, you know, you can change your packaging to make it look nicer. But product innovation, I think is where it’s at right now.

Ryan Rigney   30:36  

Right? Right. And that’s something that this this group I’m working with, like we really, we really emphasize that that is super important for survivability on Amazon, and all all platforms really, because if you’re just going for real estate on Amazon, like people can copy what you’re doing, they can mark your price down. And eventually the markets kind of kind of all all replicate the market leader to some extent. And if they, there’s going to be somebody that comes along, eventually, that just lowers the price and copies what you’re doing that just kind of constantly moving the needle and keeping things competitive and finding new new angles and then trying to get complete domination. So people can’t really believe their way into that. In real estate.

Norman Farrar  31:16  

I saw this I use plastic shoe stretcher a lot. You know, just as an example. This was a true case study that I had. And I was looking for a plastic shoe stretcher for our client. And it came in it was terrible. There were seven that were already selling on Amazon, the highest had three and a half, three and a half stars for the reviews. I mean, they’re all crap. They’re all falling apart. The plastic was crappy, the the the spring was crappy, told the person not to go with it. The sales were crappy was just a few 1000 in sales a month. But if you change this around, you spend a little bit more and you do do a wooden shoe stretcher. They were doing 100,000 in sales. And their profit was so much higher now they’re sad. You can check out they were the first wooden shoe stretcher. That’s what I was telling him to do. Yeah, you know, and I saw that there was this one company that was dominating with no competition. And the guide, he fell in love with this plastic shoe stretcher idea. And he stuck to it.

Ryan Rigney  32:18  

Right? Right. So like, yeah, what what you’re doing that type of situation when you see there’s like a problem you can solve. If you’re the first one to solve it, you have a first mover advantage, at least for a couple months until somebody tries to rip you off and lower the price. Yeah, that is as long as you build up that sales volume review influx awareness coming in, over that period, you’re really like keeping your foot on the pedal. And then after that period, you find every other way that you can attack that angle, like can you make a different size? Can you do a different type of wood that does the job better? And just make a whole bunch of different listings so that there’s no way somebody can like come at you from a different angle, they’re always going to try but really scaling vertically and like building like a fortress around that product. Like that’s if you have a winner. That’s what you should probably be looking at. Right?

Norman Farrar   33:05  

Right. Okay, how many more?

Ryan Rigney   33:08  

How many more? Just do more so good. So I get stopped out?

Norman Farrar   33:13  

No, no, I’m saying good that, you know, this is good stuff. Yeah,

Ryan Rigney   33:17  

yeah. So the following. This this one, it kind of when I’m looking at like a brand I want to invest in its I could see it from both both angles. Like if they have a low following and they’re doing well it’s like okay, we can we can find a way to make the products unique get a following put it in the hands of influencers, run ads, or on the other flip side, do they have you know, 800,000 people on Instagram that are commenting and super passionate and they’re just like really not doing well on Amazon for whatever reason. Because like, my specialty is like getting Amazon awareness. And I’d say like my second. My second focus is the the other stuff, but if somebody is already kind of done a lot of the other stuff, and I see like a gap in Amazon where they could like, take their audience and push it to make another channel that maybe even like eclipses what they’re doing on the other, the other side of things. Like there’s there’s two different ways to look at it. And it’s more common. It’s more common. These brands I’m looking at that they have very little social engagement, I’d say. Especially when they’re like already selling on Amazon, if they are in Amazon, the social engagement, they haven’t really put much effort into it. So hope that makes sense. So there’s different ways to look at it. And then the other the last thing it’s kind of more of a philanthropic like Goodwill thing. Are they doing good? In the world? Are they like donating? Are they doing something that drives like positive like earned media like press to them? Just by you know say like they are like TOMS shoes or donating a shoe for everyone they sell like if they’re the first one to do that. It gets a lot of awareness but if they’re the 15th one to do that. Nobody really cares anymore and everybody just kind of knows like Tom shoes is the one that’s doing that. Can you find a unique like way to do good that really gets gets your brand like plugged into these Different time audiences that really are passionate, they like sharing stuff.

Norman Farrar  35:04  

And you can’t fake it. Right? If you’re, if you’re, like putting an insert in with your brand all over it, and you look like you’re just doing it for promotion, it’s gonna come through, as you know, you’re just a big fake. If you can do it where, you know, like, for us, we have one brand that we have a product that goes to a charity page, right? They go, our brands not even on it, they can donate if they like, we provide a 10% of actually, with one of the products, it’s 100% of the profit that goes back to the charity, but you don’t see our brand. You know, it’s just it’s kind of just a goodwill thing.

Ryan Rigney   35:46  

Why don’t you tell your customers at all about that? Yeah, it’s on an

Norman Farrar   35:49  

insert that, that it’s gonna, that this happens. But here’s the link, click on it and go over and then we just let them take it from there. Plus, there’s an option that they can donate more, which is great. So usually, it’s the charity doing most of the promotion that we’re doing for him. But yeah, we, we don’t want to be known as that. And that’s the thing. I mean, if you’re going out there blasting your name, that you’re doing this for this charity, I look at that as not really a great citizen, you’re just getting great promotion.

Ryan Rigney   36:25  

Right? Right. And I think like, in an ideal world, what you would do is just donate and not tell anybody. Yeah. But I guess, kind of trying to create a hybrid where you’re doing good with the brand. And you’re also, if you’re going to tell somebody that’s going to help your sales, but you don’t want to tell people just for the purpose of getting the more sales, right. So it’s kind of like a balancing act.

Norman Farrar  36:47  

Yeah. And, you know, at the end of the year, if you want to do that, as a company, and you want to do this anonymously, without telling anybody, you can absolutely do it, you know, but I do think it’s good that, especially if it’s for a good, like a good cause, you know, doing something in a third world country, that could help a village or something like that, people have a feel good when they, they know that some of the profit is going back and make sure that some of the profit is going back,

Ryan Rigney   37:16  

right. And, you know, give people a chance to buy their everyday things, and also do good with that money. So that’s, there’s sometimes a gap in the market where they want to, like, you know, help people get shoes in Africa, but they don’t know how to do it, but you buy shoes from this company, they’re gonna help you do that. So yeah, it’s more scalable, which it’s kind of like, this is something that we want to add to every brand that we invest in, find a way to do something that’s beneficial to the customers that they serve. So

Norman Farrar  37:46  

very good. So Kelsey, can I like to be able to just put a the nine different tips that you just gave down on our show notes, Kells, and that would be great. I think each one of those were fantastic.

Norman Farrar   38:03  

Okay, I can share it, too. Oh, that’s fantastic.

Norman Farrar   38:05  

Thank you. The other thing I want to talk about is the mistakes that people make, right, building a brand, what are some of the ones right off the top of your head that you know, come to mind?

Ryan Rigney   38:18  

I think the first one that comes to mind is when they the brands that I’m looking at, they’re usually they already have achieved some level of success, otherwise, I wouldn’t be looking at them because they have to have at least 500,000 in annual revenue to get on my list at all, because I want somebody who’s already done some of the groundwork and gotten a little initial traction, because it’s a lot easier for us to take something that already has customers and profit coming in and improve that. And that’s something that I, I learned from coaching a lot of people privately and that’s kind of why I stopped doing the private coaching is no matter how good my intentions are, I can’t control what their daily actions are. If I tell them, you know, go do this, go do this. And then they just ignore me. And then they come back three months later and say, you know, my sales are down 25% can you refer me to someplace where I can liquidate my inventory? It’s like, okay, well, what about the things I talked about with you? Yeah, and that that that gets really, really like depressing for me. I don’t like seeing that failure and I feel like some level of responsibility like I should step in and fix it but it’s like when you’ve got so many people with so many problems it’s like really draining on me because like I like to do things correctly. Like I’m super OCD about it and then when I can’t control it so the problem I see is like people the people that I would see that that have problems and they fail it’s like the product they didn’t give enough thought into how to stand out in the marketplace like that’s the major thing if they didn’t do that right there’s no there’s really no chance at all. The next thing is for the from the brand perspective when they have a proven winner, they don’t double down on it or find different ways to to attack that market. They I try to, you know, say they’re selling like a back scratcher that’s really unique. And they’re like, Oh, I see another opportunity over here. And in pest control, the markets booming, like, I’ll just make another brand and pest control, and they just keep launching more and more brands, instead of focusing their capital where it should be. So lack of focus, that, that those are, those are the problems that I’m trying to solve with this new thing I’m doing instead of like, coaching, you know, 50 people privately and losing contact when they do something that I didn’t tell them to do. Investing in a small number and actually having hands on to to pull the levers that we know can grow the brand. So

Norman Farrar  40:37  

yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. On the coaching side. You know, when you’re, when you’re seeing something that’s obvious, and the person doesn’t, you know, take advantage of it, there’s nothing you can do, and you feel kind of useless if the person can’t execute, especially, I’ve seen it where this affected cash flow persons going really wide. They’re investing in all these other brands, because they think they have money. But they’ve got one homerun happening. And they could they could make it explode. But they they’ve got some cash, so they go wide. And then it usually what you’ll find is the brand just dies.

Ryan Rigney   41:18  

Yeah. Yeah. And like thing that commonly happens in the space to somebody makes like, say a really successful pet brand. And they exit. And then after that they’ve tried to find something else to do. And they go into a completely different niche, when where they really could have just made another pet brand, they’re already an expert at just keep doing the same thing you already know how to do, like, why why reinvent the wheel. So to be really good at one, one niche and one type of product and have your finger on the pulse. Like it’s hard to do that with so many different things. So if you don’t have the team to manage that, and like really take ownership of it. It’s it’s tough to to grow when you’re like in those, those startup stages where you’re like under under 10 million, or if you’re not focusing on one thing.

Norman Farrar  42:00  

So if you’re on Amazon, and you’re selling and you want to get over to that ecommerce side, and Shopify or WooCommerce, how much time how much effort do you spend on that?

Ryan Rigney  42:11  

Yeah. So I, I started that process when I was like, two and a half years and, and now I’m like, five and a half, six years in, but the the time to to actually get enough traction where you’re profitable. Like, it really varies. Like if your product is great, there’s there’s sort of like, a balancing act like is your is your product so standout, that you don’t even have to market it, that does happen a lot of the time. less often than that I would, I actually wouldn’t say a lot of the time, like, that’s kind of like the exception. But um, it’s either you’re going to have to find a channel to market your products in a cost effective manner where you can acquire the customers more cheaply than then, you know, I’m really tired. So I have a hard time supporting the sentence. But can you acquire the customer for less than they pay you over the long term? These lunch are the norm, things like that East Coast time, right? So I’m like, not used to talking like 9am, and your

Norman Farrar   43:06  

new dad so completely understand. She’s

Ryan Rigney  43:09  

great. She was screaming at 4am. So I’m like, right, so. So six months or so I guess is how much time you should really like focus in trying to experiment with different channels. And then when you find one that’s getting some traction, going more in to that channel and finding way to scale it. So if you’re trying to try to get your EECOM store to work, it’s really like, can you improve the conversion rate on your your store by looking at stores that are already doing it? Can you optimize the lifetime customer value, so you can pay more to acquire customers. When you when you have those two things in mind, as you’re looking for a traffic partner way to generate demand, it gets a lot easier. But if you’re just trying to generate demand, and you’re not focusing on the website, and the conversion and the customer value, then it’s you have to look at all three of those things at once. And with Facebook changing, like who knows if Facebook’s going to be the best way to do that, you might need to advertise on Pinterest or generate like a an organic media strategy where you’re posting blog posts and doing press releases and things like that. There’s a lot of different ways to generate demand. But finding one that works and then going more in that direction as much as you can. That’s right, you get to work.

Norman Farrar   44:22  

And you have to be careful. It’s not like Amazon where you can spend X amount of money. Because you don’t have a captivated audience. You’ve got to find your audience. So to understand your audience is probably the most important thing. And then you’ve got to be careful with your with your ad spend and the amount of money that you’re spending on everything because you can spend a ton of money building out your website and building putting in these apps that are costing, whatever it is per month. Then you’re doing your social media you got all these, these social media companies that you’re outsourcing to do that, it all adds up. So you’ve really got to concentrate and understand how much money you’re spending outside of Amazon. Right? And maybe just like, maybe just have a budget, you know, have a budget. And if you go over the budget, you know, you’ve got to rethink, you’ve got to rethink this is the beauty of being an entrepreneur, you can move on a dime, right? You can make decisions, but Right,

Ryan Rigney  45:27  

yeah, I’d say like the budgets a really good point. If you’re, if you’re like an Amazon salary start on the Amazon platform, probably don’t give much thought to finding another way to drive awareness until you’re like 50k Plus in revenue. And you can kind of experiment a little bit here and there. But yeah, I mean, getting the Amazon thing dialed in, once you kind of figured out how to get the reviews on the ranks and things are humming along and you have consistent profit, you have a little bit of profit experiment, setting like how much of your your monthly profit will you devote to experimentation of adding another way to drive awareness? How much of that is going to be towards inventory? How much of it’s going to go to new product launches? And, you know, those are the expensive things.

Norman Farrar   46:10  

And I do want to just mention, again, I say this, I don’t know, I’ve said it 100 podcasts, but know your numbers. And there is one of one of the guys nother Canadian, Tim, Tim Francis, he’s got a great course called Know your numbers, the so. So it’s called the profit factory and go over there. I believe we have a code for it’s not an affiliate, but I think you get $500 off, I think, but it’s a great course. My team goes and even though they might be on the creative side, they take it to know and understand your numbers. It’s not an accounting course, it’s just get in there, understand where and what you have to calculate to to move forward and be profitable.

Ryan Rigney   47:02  

Yeah, but is it? Is it just sort of like you go through it yourself? Or did I have a Yeah, so tiring

Norman Farrar  47:07  

yourself. It’s, it’s already the way that that it was made is it was set up. And then there was a new version of it that went over sort of an eight day period. So he’s got quite a few it’s not like a two hour course. It’s it’s very, very in depth. But he makes a really interesting. So it’s, it’s great, you can take a little or you can take a lot. And the other thing he has, is understanding Excel formulas. So putting together really simple Excel formulas that give you the answers that you need. So you know people have Excel, but they only know 2% of Excel. Yeah, well go to 7% and see the difference that it’ll make in your life.

Ryan Rigney   47:59  

Yeah, yeah, I’ve had those conversations with some staff where they have on their resume, like, proficient in Microsoft Excel. So I’m like, Okay, so can you help me with this? And they’re like, I don’t, I don’t know. So proficient? Does that mean, you know how to open Microsoft Excel and type in the cells? Or do you actually know how to do the formulas? Because there’s a whole nother tier of knowledge and Excel. It’s really crazy how complicated it gets to be a programmer, basically.

Norman Farrar  48:22  

Yeah, so just, you know, completely off topic. But you know, just listen, if you don’t know your numbers, and you want to learn a bit more about Excel, check out profit factory comm. He’s got a list of his courses there. And I believe Kelsey, I’m not sure but we might have a 500. I think it’s a $500 discount. So it’s, it ends up being 495 rather than 997. All right. Let’s see. Just before we get to the questions, if you are interested in in getting the plan today, and Ryan, what was it? It was one year, one year free. antastic as it’s one year free, that’s an $800 value. Just put in hashtag, we’ll have Kelsey tag two people, and you’ll get an extra entry. And also with Marcia Reese’s, they will COPPA, I want a hashtag I want to stay well, that’s for North American, or Canada and US only. Okay. Kelce questions.

Kelsey   49:28  

Okay, so let’s jump into this. We had a couple of questions come in. See. All right, first one, from Simon. And awesome brand story will always protect from being ripped off with cheap copies brand reputation takes time, effort and persistence to build. How do we build a moat around our new brand?

Norman Farrar  49:49  

Great question.

Ryan Rigney   49:50  

That is a great question. I like that you use the word moat as well. Yeah. Yeah. So part of Yeah, part of that is do it. Do it. something different and getting enough awareness before somebody else. Take takes takes like the market awareness from whatever you’re doing. So if you have, say, a new type of back scratcher, and you have an innovative way of doing it, and nobody on Amazon is doing that in that way, and put it on the market, and then find a way to get it in the hands of influential people as quickly as you can before somebody copies you, provisional patent, yeah, that to that, too. I was gonna mention that. So yeah, that’s kind of like a given right, you want to protect your IP, if you’re inventing something, find a way to legally protect it in the US or whatever country you’re selling it in. So that that. So the other thing that you can do is find other angles and other different ways to, to approach this problem and use this patent that you filed in this new type of innovation, can you make it a different size, different color, just flood flood the market with as many different unique and valuable ways that you can find to do it, if it’s already successful. You don’t need to do that right away, like really focusing on getting the first one in the hands of some people that can really push it awareness. And then find, I’d say just one, one traffic channel that you can really scale, spend or awareness. Typically, it’s not going to get, like total brand recognition and like a dominant reputation unless you’re spending like $500,000 a day in ads, you have some sort of like organic strategy or influencer strategy where you’re getting in the hands of like, several people per day consistently. Unless you find like one influencer, like Kim Kardashian or somebody that just everybody knows, and you work out that sort of deal. And then that sort of sparks the fire where everybody’s telling everybody about it organically.

Norman Farrar   51:45  

Yeah, I like that approach. And the other thing is building a heavy layer of content. So either really high quality press releases, that’ll get you ranked, that if you do have any competition, you’ll knock them out of like we did with Amazon. With DSP advertising, we knocked Amazon down to number two. And number three, Oh, yeah. And then they actually ended up contacting our clients and you know, what are you doing? But and stop? But, but that happened, but that was strictly with content, right. And that’s one way of being able to get out there. Somebody’s writing up keywords. Like I love the content play. I love the influencer play that you talked about, too. If you get it out there and people get to know about it. It’s you they’re talking about it not your your competition

Ryan Rigney   52:40  

is ahead. What I also do personally, for my brand is building a list and nurturing the list with weekly messages so that they’re, you’re they’re constantly thinking about you. And when conversations come up, they’ll they’ll say, oh, yeah, remember this brand name. Like if they’re not constantly seeing your brand name, they might forget it. And you might just kind of drift into the back catalogs of their mind and they’ll move on to something else. But you can email your list once a week and building a list is valuable. The other thing that I built which was valuable, maybe the strategy won’t be viable in the coming years visit Facebook groups around topics. A lot of it depends what demographic you have as well, like older I’d say Facebook’s more of like the older senior citizen type social network. Yeah,

Norman Farrar   53:23  

I’m on Facebook.

Ryan Rigney   53:25  

Yeah, I’m still there too. So I feel like I’m an old soul right? But um, yeah, like building these groups and the group the value of the group is people will see it in their feed every time they open their phone, their Facebook, they’re constantly seeing people talk about your brand and this group if you if you set up the group right you gets a lot more awareness than pages these days. So those are ways to build the moat. So hopefully that answers your question.

Kelsey  53:52  

Okay, great for powered, any measurements of customer satisfaction that you analyze and evaluate the process?

Ryan Rigney   54:01  

Yeah, I have a system for my website I can speak of first as a whenever there’s a bad review or some slight negative comment that comes into customer support we note those down and then during our staff meetings, we talk about what their recurring problems are. If there’s a problem that pops up a couple times over the course of a month then we find like how can we how can we address this and improve the product so I sell supplements some of them have tastes like people say like oh, you know the the taste on this patch wasn’t good then we hear that like three times and we’re gonna go contact the manufacturer and be like, Alright, what’s up like it’s not consistent and fix it. But if you don’t have like, a process to like, note down problems, then you have somebody look at like, what are the common problems then you meet and actually address it, it things just kind of stay mediocre forever. So recursive improvement. How do you measure satisfaction on Amazon like it’s reviews and voice of the customer? guesses somewhat useful, but not so much. It’s really like reviews and conversations with customers. So having somebody that actually is engaging in dialogue and Facebook groups are also valuable for that, because we hear, you know, problems with products pop up in the group, and we address it publicly. And people see that you’re dressed it and then that spreads word of mouth and goodwill for the brand too. So there’s a lot of value to that.

Norman Farrar   55:25  

I think if you’re going to be doing a survey, poll or whatever, it is a customer satisfaction survey. Don’t make it complicated. If I see this, you know, you hit the end all do it. Hit one, and there’s 17 questions ago, I just, you know, escaped I one question, you know, how are we doing? And it’s seven or below? It’s a negative eight and above. Okay, we’re doing good.

Ryan Rigney  55:52  

All right. Yeah, I’m, I’m like one of those people that’s never filled out a customer satisfaction survey. So I’m kind of like, who is actually doing this? It’s time. But the reviews? Like, if I’m really happy with the product, or really not happy I’ll usually say something. If it’s in the middle. I won’t say anything. So yeah, you could I’ve never actually like done much of like a How are we doing? Like broadcast email? probably makes sense to do that, at least to collect like, likes and dislikes of customers and segment your list, but I haven’t done that. Do you have any service that you use for that?

Norman Farrar   56:24  

Yeah. What is the service? I can get back to you. But yeah, it’s a common service.

Ryan Rigney   56:32  

Okay. Something survey Survey Monkey? Yeah, I

Norman Farrar  56:36  

think that’s what it is. Okay. Something like that. Yeah.

Ryan Rigney  56:38  

Pick the animal. Yeah, exactly. Or

Norman Farrar   56:41  

certainly giraffe.

Ryan Rigney   56:42  

Yeah. Where the where the booth rooster so yeah.

Norman Farrar  56:48  

All right, next question Kells.

Kelsey  56:50  

Okay, Tony, I’m looking for an opportunity to sell outside of Amazon, do you think which is the best place to move to Shopify? Or, or Walmart?

Ryan Rigney   57:00  

Okay. So Walmart is going to be the easiest to capture existing demand. Shopify is easy to set up, I’d say a very rudimentary framework you can set up and you can integrate Shopify with Walmart. So it doesn’t really hurt to if you just have a couple products, put it on Shopify pay $30 a month, get I think the Walmart app to set up a connection with Shopify and Walmart, it’s free. So I kind of use Shopify as like a central hub for the orders, and I pull in the Walmart orders and it ships from there. So you can kind of do both. But um, if you want to see results, like you’re probably going to get those more quickly on Walmart than Shopify, because there’s already Walmart’s a search engine. And there’s people searching for products, it’s similar to Amazon, just less volume.

Norman Farrar   57:46  

Right? Make sure you read the Walmart Terms of Service, because you don’t want to just copy and paste your Amazon listing.

Ryan Rigney  57:55  

Right? Yeah, the listings will come out really ugly on Walmart, if you just copy and paste, like there’s so many formatting things. Yeah.

Norman Farrar   58:02  

And like just symbols like hashtags or, or sorry, pipes, you know, you’ll get it. You’ll get it published, but your ranking will be low.

Ryan Rigney   58:12  

Right? Yeah, they just won’t index here. Right. And you won’t know what’s going on. Right.

Kelsey  58:18  

Okay, great. Seven, you mentioned avatars, what is your technique of building out your personas?

Ryan Rigney  58:25  

Right? That’s a good question. We, we have like a branding partner that we used to do that. I’m not entirely sure how they do it at scale. But what I did, personally for mine is I started selling products that had existing demand, I learned about the customers through conversations with them, and reading reviews, building a community and I could kind of see like, what they were interested in what other products they were buying, I could look at their Facebook profiles and see who they are. So I kind of know like, when I’m making an advertisement, to to get more customers like them, like just find somebody that looks like them, speaks like them lives in the same area as them, buys the same types of things, as then has the same problems. So you know, income, gender, age, geographic location problems are trying to solve, I look at those things. And that’s that’s actually how I found a couple different related products to launch just by talking with them and seeing like, what else they’re buying? Because I’d say no, do you guys sell this and say no, but we’re working on it, we’ll get it to you. So there’s categories have things or the customers like expect the brand to sell like different different products, and they all kind of solve the same problem, but they’re different things. So just talking with your customers the first step in on Amazon, that stuff to do so find a way to talk with your customer.

Norman Farrar  59:46  

With your app, you can build out just an ongoing sort of conversation, just a couple questions at a time to find out whether they have a well they have a pet what type of pet next email would go out or Nice next chat would be small, medium or large dog, right? You know, and then just build it out that way that yeah,

Ryan Rigney  1:00:06  

you can use the booster product insert tool and start collecting emails and set up an automation where you’re sending a survey or asking questions and getting to know them through that process too. So that’s one of the valuable things of product inserts, like getting contact with your customer.

Norman Farrar   1:00:22  

Right. Alright, close.

Kelsey  1:00:25  

Okay, we’re just past the hour mark. So we’ll just do one or two more questions from Rosalyn, when you’re evaluating a brand you prefer any particular categories of products in the story behind the brand and so on Amazon usage, just telling it in the listing, or in a plus contents?

Ryan Rigney   1:00:44  

Yeah, my personal preference and it’s kind of kind of interesting, how everything worked out because I was coaching people in like, sort of like a do it yourself coaching thing where they would just go through my content and make brands and part of my criteria was like, I like categories where there’s recurring purchases, larger Lifetime Customer Value, it’s not just like a one one off, buy, if you can find a way to sell multiple related products, or it’s something that they’re going to buy every month for the rest of their life. Like I like those categories. And a lot of people that went through my training ended up building brands that kind of were like that. And now I’m at the stage where it’s like, I can invest in these brands that kind of got built in the perfect way that I want to invest in them. So I’m actually talking with like, some of my students from like, three, four years ago that built brands using like my preferences and now it’s like so much easier, easier for me to like, it’s already what I like so the question I was gonna answer the rest of the question, but it disappeared. Kelsey

Kelsey   1:01:43  

just a second Oh go

Ryan Rigney  1:01:50  

yes, story behind the round one selling on juice. Okay, telling it in the listing or in the a plus content, so a plus content is in the listing. So you want to you want to have the experience of the story and the brand like in probably one of the main listing images and also in the a plus content in some way. The big thing that most people don’t use is the video fight if you can find a way to inject it and if your story is compelling enough and put it in the video somehow that’s good. I honestly haven’t really been able to do that because I’ve just focused the video it’s like under a minute on showing the product and like a spiffy like looking way and dress it up and using it and talking about the problems it solves how many to take you have limited amount of time but if you can get the story in the video somehow and your story compelling enough you can do that too.

Norman Farrar  1:02:39  

Don’t forget you can put your brand story on amazon store.

Ryan Rigney  1:02:44  

You can you can in your store. It’s good point. There’s also like a widget like on the top of the a plus content which I don’t feel it’s formatted very well. But I would say you could put it there but I don’t like the positioning so don’t put it there.

Norman Farrar  1:02:57  

Right. Oh, by the way, when you when you talk about your brand story. Don’t make it so unbelievable. Like he climbed Mount Everest tapped into this mine. Went down mine 300 feet to get this Bessell Himalayan salt. Let’s see. Yeah, unless you did. Maybe people will believe you or they won’t believe

Ryan Rigney   1:03:19  

you. Yeah, video evidence. Yeah.

Norman Farrar 1:03:23  

Climbing Mount Everest.

Kelsey   1:03:26  

And our last question from Anthony. Which social media should I focus on first for product launch and brand awareness.

Ryan Rigney  1:03:34  

All right. Well, the one that you’re on now is pretty good Facebook. Still pretty good. I like tiktoks long term potential and organic reach a lot their ad platform I’m not super happy with it at the moment. Seems kind of hard to to get it profitable and scalable in my opinion, but um, organically if you if I’ve seen some brands that have just a few simple 10 Second tick tock videos go super viral just because their products unique. There’s this there’s this I can’t remember the name but they sell these like ice cream cone chalk. It’s like the it’s like the ice cream cone the bottom of the cone they just chopped off the bottom part and created a snack out of it. And they posted a video on tick tock of just them putting like an ice cream cone on a cutting board and chopping the end off and saying like we made a product where you just eat this and it’s like 10 seconds and they got like 16 million views on that. So I’m like 10 seconds of content using a phone just if the products good enough like you can really hit a home run and they like exploded just from tick tock from doing that. So another thing you could do like find a way to there’s this brand that sells like shoes I saw a pretty interesting campaign they ran and they they found like their target customer at their work setting and they went there and they gave the shoes to those people and they recorded the reaction and then it had a really big like emotional response and people like to share in common like engage with emotional type videos where it’s feel good, so there’s there’s unique ways you can approach it. But tic TOCs good for organic, I’d say.

Norman Farrar   1:05:07  

Yeah, I like what you said about the whole reaction side. Like we’ve we’ve gone out, and we’ve done with, I don’t know if you know, Rob burns, but marketplace reviews where you go out, you know, to the boardwalk, and you just you already have the questions you’re going to ask, and then you get people’s response. And that works like magic. If you can start promoting that. The only thing I want to add to the social media side is it does depend on your audience, too. So I mean, if you’re, if your target audience is Pinterest that you know, and I think that would probably be 35 to 45 women. That is a great market that’s got the highest average order value, I believe. But if you know, you were talking about you know, as older guys, maybe not so much you but are on Facebook, right? Who’s your audience. And if you can know your audience, and you can market it and use that as your one or two social media plan, I wouldn’t go across every social media platform is just too much find one or two.

Ryan Rigney  1:06:15  

Yeah, would you agree with that? Initially, find find where your customers most likely to hang out? Yeah, throw enough darts at the board. See if you get something if not, then pivot. But given enough time, people quit too early to Facebook, getting organic traction on Facebook, pretty difficult. Unless you have a group that really blows up. You’re not going to get it from a page, your posts on your page just don’t get visibility because of the way the algorithm is like structured on Facebook, Pinterest, you create a consistent strategy to post useful infographics and things that people want to click and share like that can I can do well, but model success and I’d say like if you have a social product great and create quick videos like in most, in most age ranges and demographics, Tik Tok like works. It’s getting more mass appeal now. Then, like on the other side, like you were saying Pinterest is more like, stay at home moms have a lot of money and they’re like buying everything for their entire family. I’d say at least that’s my understanding of it. But um, it works for a lot of different types of products there too. Because right moms are buying like everything so.

Norman Farrar  1:07:19  

So Simon, I saw your comment there. Yes, you could use me to go out and do that.

Ryan Rigney 1:07:27  

What was the question? Was Yeah,

Norman Farrar   1:07:28  

to use attractive people, young people? Yeah. So

Kelsey   1:07:31  

if you’re going to approach people in the street, would

Ryan Rigney  1:07:33  

you have any beard oil like sponsorships or anything? Like

Norman Farrar  1:07:37  

that’s what I you know what? I don’t even sell one single beard oil product.

Ryan Rigney   1:07:42  

What’s the deal?

Norman Farrar   1:07:43  

I know I should. I gotta get into that.

Ryan Rigney  1:07:46  

I know a few like beard brand owners. Like hang on if you want. Yeah, there we

Norman Farrar   1:07:51  

1. Yeah. Okay, what do we got there?

Kelsey  1:07:55  

Uh, that was just a comments. Tick tock videos showing awesome customer reactions could make great uploads to a listing as long as they’re sincere. That’s true. Yeah. From caring family.

Ryan Rigney   1:08:06  

Yeah. I’ve also seen fake tick tock reaction videos get a lot of negative. Oh, and there’s so many Yeah, yeah. Okay, kill so I think it’s that time. Yeah,

Kelsey   1:08:21  

right. Here we go. Alright, so this one is for the stable copper giveaway. Alright, just cool. It’s if you are the winner, please email me at Kaitlyn Noren. Calm I’ll play god everyone. And to one

Norman Farrar  1:08:51  

there’s a song called

Kelsey  1:08:53  

I know we’re still working on that. Okay. There you go red. All right. Red is the winner.

Kelsey  1:09:02  

Bran

Norman Farrar  1:09:02  

TAS do so you know how to. You’ve won a few times. So you know how to get ahold of Kelsey.

Kelsey  1:09:08  

Yeah. I have rats email. Okay. Okay, that’s good. Here we go. Looking for the year subscription to booster booster. Three, two. We’ll have Kelsey, there you go. And the winner is I can’t even read. Oh, Andrew. See?

Norman Farrar   1:09:30  

All right. Congrats Andrew.

Kelsey   1:09:35  

Congratulations. So Andrew, I have your contact information. But please email me Kate at lunch with Nord comm. And I’ll connect to

Norman Farrar   1:09:42  

and that was a great arise.

Ryan Rigney   1:09:44  

Yeah. Also, just to add additional thing for anyone who has a brand that’s selling like 500k plus a year and they want somebody to kind of look at it, see if it’s something that is investable from my perspective or things I would would improve like I can take a couple questions over the next Like, two days if they messaged me in the next 48 hours, okay, I’m just going to cut it off give a little scarcity. So,

Norman Farrar  1:10:06  

yeah, there you go free 48 hours time is ticking me

Ryan Rigney   1:10:09  

a message on Facebook, I can answer.

Kelsey   1:10:11  

would that be on Facebook or

Ryan Rigney 1:10:14  

I’m in the I’m in the group, the norm norm group you can find me send me a message I’ll check that.

Norman Farrar  1:10:20  

Okay fantastic, sir. Thank you I know you’ve had sleepless nights. I’m so glad that you were able to come back and talk about this.

Ryan Rigney   1:10:29  

Yeah, thank you for having me. And it’s been a while but great show.

Norman Farrar   1:10:33  

Well, thank you. And thank you for those nine points. I think you know, that was something that everybody needs is to understand those nine points is so important. So thank you for dropping that knowledge. And we will have you on hopefully, it’ll be sooner than later.

Ryan Rigney   1:10:48  

Awesome. Yeah, maybe we can be in person at some point.

Norman Farrar   1:10:51  

I hope. All right, Ryan. We’ll see you later.

Ryan Rigney   1:10:55  

Thanks. Never.

Norman Farrar   1:10:56  

Thanks. Oh, okay. So we have next. Oh, geez. We have on Wednesdays are Brenda Ruby coming back on calls?

Kelsey 1:11:07  

Sure is. Yeah, fantastic. Third time? Yeah.

Norman Farrar  1:11:13  

Yeah. So you know, if you don’t know, Brenda, she had a nine figure exit. So that’s not bad. She and her partner created snow. And they, by the way, were one of these people that did an incredible marketplace review. Shoot, on that board rock that I was talking to you about. And maybe what we can do is share some of those videos just to show what we’re talking about during her her show. But anyways, I can’t wait. She’s always interesting to talk to. And she’s going to be talking What’s she going to be talking about? What’s the subject?

Kelsey  1:11:55  

I believe building an econ team. So

Norman Farrar   1:11:58  

Oh, that’s right. What’d

Kelsey   1:11:59  

she look for? So

Norman Farrar  1:12:00  

yeah, so that’s really important. Okay, so I think that’s probably it for today’s show. You’re going to remind me about something. And I already know what it is. I want to give a great big thank you to our sponsor, global wired Advisors, a leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, please visit global wired advisors.com. That’s it for today, Kells,

Kelsey   1:12:30  

yes. All right. So thank you, everyone, for tuning in. We had some new users, some new viewers again today. So that’s awesome. I had saw some questions about if we have a Facebook group, and the answer is, of course we do. That is the Lynchburg norm, Amazon FBA e commerce collective, so you can search with that. So we have a Facebook page and a Facebook group. So they are different. So make sure you head on over to the Facebook group to that’s where our whole community is. And you can ask questions, share some memes, all that fun stuff is over there. And if you are looking for more of the beard, if you want to just donate a cup of coffee monthly to we have something for you. That is our Patreon that are paid membership groups. So if you’re looking for full private group q&a is as well as guest lessons. We have our private Gold and Platinum Membership q&a tomorrow to at 2pm. Eastern time. So we’re gonna have a very small group discussion, just about anything that’s happening with our group there. So if you’re interested, go over to the lunch with Norm site and click on membership and you’ll be you’ll be all sets. And I think that’s about it’s

Norman Farrar  1:13:52  

okay. Well, thank you very much. And you join us again next Monday, Wednesday and Friday, eastern standard time at noon. Thank you everybody for joining the community. We really appreciate you being a part of it. We couldn’t do you do this without you and enjoy the rest of your day. Mantra Mantra

Transcribed by https://otter.ai