Day 3 Session 1 Amazon Shopping by Nancy McLaughlin

nknown Speaker 0:10
So with that I will introduce you or reintroduce you to Brad Geddes and he’s going to do a I know from experience an incredible job moderating today.

Unknown Speaker 0:23
All right, so Well, thank you, David. And we should also thank David for all the work he’s done and putting us together, as well as several people not here on the board who just do an amazing amount of work. So that’s really, you know, first kudos of the day, thank you. But you’re not here right now to listen to me. You’re really here to listen to Nancy. So we’re going to, we’re going to start with amazon shopping. First, we have Nancy, who’s up. She’s been involved in e commerce for quite a few years. She’s called the director of search and Enterprise Services marketplace channel at snooty. So please welcome Nancy or virtual claps for everyone. And please share your screen and kick us off for the day.

Unknown Speaker 1:04
Awesome. Hi, everybody. I also just want to say thank you so much for having me today. This has really just been such an awesome community to get to know. So David, thank you for inviting me to be a part of it really excited to be here. So today, I really was thinking about how can I give you the most information in the shortest amount of time, and make sure that you’re walking away with something that maybe you didn’t know, or maybe something that you want to try and test and explore. And so as we think about e commerce in 2020, we saw e commerce grow 27.6% reaching well over $4 trillion. And we are not seeing that slowed down and in 2020. And I want to make sure that we are looking at Amazon as a part of a larger marketplaces ecosystem. So as mentioned, my name is Nancy Laughlin, Director of search and Enterprise Services here at Trinity. I am very grateful that I have been able to work on both brand and agency side. I’ve also had incredible experiences working with some of the largest brands in the world, as well as startups that are new to platform and been able to take brands to acquisition. So very thankful for for the career that I’ve had. If my brain was not so hyperactive, I would absolutely be a ski bum on Mammoth Mountain, and that would be my day to day. But in the meantime, I will stick to doing that on the weekend. And so as I said, I’m from community, we manage over $2 billion across the triathlete. However, that’s not what I’m most proud of. I’m most proud of our culture and our client retention. We really built strong partnerships with clients to ensure that we’re looking across the triathlete to grow their brand.

Unknown Speaker 3:00
My team specifically focuses on all marketplaces. So we’re starting to investigate on platforms like instacart Kroger, we have a well established business on Walmart. And so when you’re thinking through some of the principles that we’re talking about today, let me know if you have any questions because a lot of these principles can be translated to these other marketplaces. So last night, I thought, let me just pull up my my Amazon homepage, let me take a look at what she is currently looking like. And I had a little giggle to myself, because very clearly, my husband and I share a Amazon account. He watches sport on Amazon on prime video, and I’m looking for care packages to send to girlfriends. He is potentially buying pizza, and I’m buying hummus. And I really thought about you know, we’re putting all these different things in our cart. And really what that kind of goes to continue to show is Amazon as the everything store. And there is no clear aisle on specifically, you know, we’re going into the store to buy only bread today. We there is this multi dimensional interaction with Amazon. And so as marketers, we really have to adjust our mindset to thinking like that. We’re being influenced whether it’s by Alexa or Ott ads or through the app. And so starting to think about how we access our customers through brand on Amazon is really important. So as I mentioned, Amazon is the everything store. There’s no clear aisles here. And so as we continue to think through how we make that work, we have to kind of take in the different pieces. So let’s level set a little bit on Amazon as the everything store today. So we now know that about 69% of Americans are shopping Paying online on a regular basis, I don’t think the pandemic drastically was made something happen, that was never gonna happen, but it absolutely accelerated. And so we’re seeing this acceleration of online shopping adoption, we’re also seeing on our data that that hasn’t dropped off yet. And so we’re continuing to see new to brand or new customers shop online and continue to purchase online. What I think is interesting is we’re also seeing a shift of total retail sales being purchased online. And then we look at Amazon, specifically, Amazon’s continues to come out with new products. I’m really excited about video and Ott, I think they’re doing some really cool stuff with their Amazon Marketing Cloud. And so we’re having all these intersections of media and consumers are becoming less and less exploratory on Amazon when they know what they want. And that’s that’s kind of the key piece there is understanding how targeted and where on the funnel is your consumer, because what we have been seeing is about 70% of customers are not clicking past the first page.

Unknown Speaker 6:12
So let’s take a couple steps back again, this can be an overwhelming amount of information, if you are a brand that is sitting with your product, and you’re thinking I just need to get the product from my warehouse, into my customers hands, you know, there’s all these different pieces, I have too lot of competition on Amazon, growing competition on Amazon, depending what category you on, there are kind of new restrictions and things like that, that you have to continue to be aware of. And so you have all these things kind of running through your business analysis. And so I’m gonna try and break it down into kind of three main categories. How I like to think about it, and how we act annuity like to think about it is really operations as the base, then you layer in creative and advertising is going to drive that traffic to our page and drive in new customers, as well as retain our loyalists. And so in order to to have operations, you really need to ensure that we have a smooth flow of shipments, a stable supply chain, and this will help drive growth across your Amazon catalog. We really as a vendor, especially you need to master the ins and outs of in the central This includes demand forecasting, competitive Intel chargeback purchase order management, catalog manager and more. We really did see a shift in how Amazon thinks about this during 2020. And vendors as well as sellers, but vendors specifically have had to become more agile. And so when we’re thinking about how to do this, and the influences of operational and getting to a PA, I like to break it down into this diagram. So we have our indirect factors and our direct factors. When we’re looking on the left hand side of the page, we’re seeing the inputs that are going to drive traffic to our Detail page. So the detail page is essentially when you’re looking at a product that that homepage of your product. And so you can drive traffic to asen pages through advertising or through organic traffic, seasonality may impact that as well as as promotions. And so these are all going to be indicators to Amazon’s algorithm on understanding the demand for that specific asen. As well as that category. Amazon is then going to take into account a number of other factors. So thinking about vendor lead time thinking about Amazon’s own profitability. What Amazon’s also going to do is they’re going to understand the ecosystem in which your brand plays. So how are you doing relative to other other brands and other other sales, and then they’re going to come out with a PA. And so understanding this system allows you to be able to move quickly, if you can influence whether it’s a promotion or making sure that you have stock availability, does that mean that maybe you do a different page set up in terms of variation. And so looking at those individual pieces, to help move those different levers to get those larger peers. The other thing that I wanted to talk about today for anyone that is working with a vendor or vendor themselves, is essentially Amazon’s direct fulfillment program. So this is something that our operations team has been working very closely with our vendors on. It’s very similar to drop shipping. And essentially it lets vendors use EDR to automatically share real time inventory information with their entire sorry, their entire catalog with Amazon and so if your warehouse is able to do this, I would highly, highly recommend that you think about setting this up so that you have a backstop in terms of inventory. Some quick notes to think about here is Amazon, specifically, it’s going to show as shipped and sold by Amazon. So we want that it’s going to have that Prime badge, if you if you are able to provide the paperwork. And it has to be consistent. So we can’t have an A plus week, one week and then a C minus the next, Amazon is going to kind of take that into consideration. What this also allows us, it increases the number of aces. So if there’s something that has to be has to be a dropship, this now provides the ability for those vendors to do so

Unknown Speaker 10:46
there’s no waiting for POS you’re able to essentially send that directly to the customer. And then you know, the other benefits of being a vendor on Amazon, whether it’s out of stock, or hassle free returns, those are still going to be handled by Amazon, this is still part of your vendor negotiation program. So you’re still gonna pay a co op fee and things like that. But this is a great way. If we’re thinking about June of last year, when essentially Amazon stopped ordering non essential items. And customers or clients that had direct fulfillment setup definitely benefited at that time when they weren’t receiving POS from Amazon. If you are curious about what it takes, if you have a vendor or a vendor client, you can go into your warehouse settings and vendor Central. And it’s it’s pretty straightforward, you can follow the on screen, you know, instructions there. The second piece, the second layer of this is really thinking about creative. I get really excited because I often have brands tell me that Amazon doesn’t allow you to have a brand voice and Amazon, you know, you have to follow their you know their specific things, and it kills my brand story. And I just don’t think that’s true. And so when we think about how to build your brand on Amazon creative is so important. Yes, there’s templates, but we’re shifting from this demand capture side to really this brand building site. And there’s so many ways to do that on Amazon today. So when we’re thinking about advertising, there’s there’s so many ways to come up with unique creative there. But specifically detail pages, specifically storefronts. And when we’re thinking about our store, I really encourage our clients to think about their stores, their Amazon websites, so you’re not going to leave your website untouched for months, and hopefully not untouched for months and months on end. And you want to make sure that you’re adjusting your store to seasonality. And you’re thinking about that too. And something I am really excited about is Amazon posts. I think these are really cool. And currently under leveraged by a lot of Amazon, vendors and sellers. So essentially, an Amazon post is a new product for browsing and discovery on Amazon. As of 2020, you can now essentially July 2020, you can have multiple products in a in an image or in a post. And so what this looks like is essentially it looks like our social media threads. And I think we’re gonna continue to see the adoption of this by Amazon we’re gonna continue to see them test where are these are being placed and how they’re being utilized, both in app and desktop. So that that’s this is something to watch. A couple things that we have found really interesting is our shorter caption posts tend to have higher engagement. Now this is category dependent. If it’s nutrition, if it’s fashion, we tend to see or apparel, we tend to see that shorter caption really do much better. And AB testing is really important. We want to see we have been testing clients different time of day for posting. We’ve been seeing different types of posts product only lifestyle makes sense. And then thankfully, you can actually edit the post as you go along. So it’s not a set it and forget it, you’re able to edit almost everything within the post. And then currently it’s free. So you know, why not test it out. And there’s no limit to the number of posts you can make. And you’re thinking about you know, in terms of assets, you already have these assets from your social media platforms, reuse them to create that connected shopper experience on Amazon. This is something that I think we should watch. I think it’s something that you know, Amazon is going to continue to lean into that lifestyle curation of how to integrate Amazon into your day to day. One thing to note here is if your product is out of stock, then the post will show. And so that’s why it’s so important that we have the operational basis set first. So with Amazon, I know I get a lot of questions around data and how it can sometimes seem like a bit of a black box. And so I want to include what’s currently available for posts in terms of understanding the data. And so essentially, this is what the UI looks like you can see our viewable impressions, you can see engagement and clicks. And then you can start to understand how these posts are.

Unknown Speaker 15:41
Our net are operating on Amazon and that engagement there, your we have heard that we’re going to continue to see sales come through. And there is an effort behind here. What I think is pretty cool too, is you can actually click follow on your Amazon on Amazon. And you can start to understand these how many followers you have, following your posts. And what I think Amazon is going to here’s a hot take, what I think Amazon is going to do is we’re going to be able to start to essentially create audiences, based off these Amazon posts that we can plug into the DSP. I don’t know if they’re gonna do that. But I can see a pretty quick path to kind of curating somebody that’s already a loyalist or interested in the brand and creating this specific audience type within DSP. The the third and final piece of kind of this pyramid of how to build your brand on Amazon is advertising. We know this is paid search Association, we know how important it is to support the brand with with advertising. And so I wanted to give a quick recap on some of the 2020 product updates. So within sponsored product updates, we had product targeting, and we had improvements. Why this is important is because we continue to see specific categories, gross signet, all categories are growing significantly on Amazon. But specifically we’re seeing apparel specifically, we’re seeing home health and health, house and health health, wow, need more coffee, and health and household grow as well. And so essentially, what we can do here is with product targeting, we can get really specific on how we think about targeting complimentary products or targeting that up. So we had a client that sold Nick cream. And so what we did was we specifically targeted perfumes, because we thought about hey, what would it look like if your consumers are spraying perfume and, you know, they’re bringing attention to this part. And so we actually tested that. And that was really interesting, because it’s not necessarily a direct link. And we’re starting to get creative about how we think about our consumer relative to shopping on the Amazon platform. Some sponsored brand updates, we have a new ad format for video content. And we’ve continued, they’ve continued to expand where they’re putting our sponsored brands placements. And so we’re seeing those on detail pages. Those used to be those product display ads. And so now we’re seeing SBS come in there and continue to custom create an expansion. And then you know where we are seeing that adoption of new shopper language preferences. And so we’re going to continue to see Amazon bring out new ad formats. And it’s really important that we are testing and learning and thinking about how to utilize these, even if it’s a small budget, it’s so important to be early and fast. So that you can understand that initial impact as well as you know, jump on something before before mainstream. And we know that Amazon is getting more competitive, we know that those CPCs are rising. And so this is one way that you can continue to move fast forward for your brand or your client.

Unknown Speaker 19:15
The thing that I’m most excited about was advertising is his video. I think we’re all excited about video. I think the the stats speak for themselves, but essentially, you know, this new ad format, sponsored brand video allows retailers to leverage sponsored brands and those placements, but to tap into the power of video and that video content. So this is in line with our with our SERP and it is a scrollable ad. And essentially, you know, we’re seeing that we have incredibly high engagement on these videos we’re seeing actually, consumers watch a large bulk of that video. So if Quick Tips here to think about is trying to keep that video really short. So 30 seconds is the max. But if you can bring it down even shorter that that is really where we want to hit, and thinking about optimizing your video for ad format. So these automatically play in line with no sound. So if your key part of your ad is the sound, that’s not a good video for our Amazon sponsored brand video, as the video is also going to be looped. So think about the consumer experience, it is we advise our clients to have a break in the video after the video before before it loops. And then this seems like an obvious one. But know your audience This is really important, understand and use the data that you already have to really speak to that audience. What are the questions that they’re asking whether it’s on other sites or in Amazon? What are what are the reviews, say? Is there something that you can address in a video that might be harder to do on a detail page, so think about who you are talking to when using these videos.

Unknown Speaker 21:15
And then key takeaways. So I was thinking about key takeaways. And it would be easy for me to you know, list out some of the things we’ve spoken today. But what I thought would be even better was to show you how we’ve actually applied this to a brand. And so when we’re thinking about our key takeaways for today, we really need to focus on sound operations, we need to make sure that we have everything in order in order to grow our business. And so when we partnered with full define, they had a multi level goal, they wanted to reach new audiences. However, they also wanted to scale profitably, who has heard that before I want scale and profit. And and that that is possible. But we have to we have to be strategic about how we do that. And so like I said, the first step here was making sure that our operations was in a good place, we partnered with the boulder five team to ensure that their products were in stock, we like to say that we walk the store, essentially, we’re understanding where their products are showing up, we’re understanding how shoppers are clicking through variations if they are or if that needs to be a separate Detail page. So this is to help ensure maximum visibility and customer experience. The second thing we did was we did an audit. So I encourage you to do this for your customers or for your brand is look at their content, look at what they’re doing on their detail pages. And think about that consumer journey on Amazon. So when we’re thinking about, you know, what are we doing on our other platforms? Does that make sense for Amazon? Can we reuse some of those assets? Or is this a different shopper experience, and in some cases, yes. And for boulder phi, we actually pulled a lot of the assets they already had, what we did do is we updated our product, detail pages with how to videos, and that that really helped kind of engage that consumer. The next thing we did was advertising. So I spoke about sponsored brand videos, this was part of our testing program. But taking a couple steps back from that the first thing we did was we essentially restructured their entire advertising campaign, and we did a one to one. So this means one asen per one campaign. What this allowed us to do is really get specific on testing also get really specific on bid optimizations. And so understanding how a product was reacting relative to that ad type, and that functionality, and then being able to bid up and down. And this sounds like a lot of work. And it was and so it’s really important to have technology to help you scale. So we have enhanced technology that allows us to have one to one across a large number of aces. But what that also allowed us to do is create labels and group together certain tests. And so that that’s a key takeaway here. The other piece here is, you know, when you bring this all together, we really saw a huge impact for both the fai. So we saw a three times more return on adspend. And we saw impressions go up, you know, just tenfold 8 million new impressions. And so ball defi continues to grow and continues to really follow best practices to help build their brand on Amazon. And that is it. I know that that was fast. And I am here to answer questions if we don’t have time. today. I’m also on the panel later. But Brad, thanks. Thanks for having me. Well, thank

Unknown Speaker 24:53
you, Nancy. And we have a couple questions. Yeah, so first off for Amazon posts, you mentioned that if a tagged product associate the post is out of stock, the posts won’t show. If you have 10 products associated the post and only one is out of stock, will the post show the other nine are in stock and one’s not?

Unknown Speaker 25:15
We have seen that impacts the whole post. So I have one show.

Unknown Speaker 25:19
Okay, so that’s one, two, how are you projecting your Amazon spend for q3 q4, we expect more people to go back into stores.

Unknown Speaker 25:33
I actually thought that question was gonna go somewhere else I thought that person was going to ask, with Amazon Prime Day being shifted. So you know, as we’re thinking about people going back and stores, what’s really interesting is even the so we’re able to look at through our Amazon DSP, we’re able to look at essentially area code targeting and engagement. And we have still seen a lot of adoption on on Amazon. And a lot of that net new to brand customer is not trailing off. So as we’re thinking about q3 q4, we’re actually holding steady if not increasing spin. And the reason there is when we do our spin projections, we also build an Amazon is a baby compared to Google and Amazon advertising is still so new, and they are coming out with products all the time. And so when we consult with our clients, we actually build in a test budget. Now I know if you’re a client, you’re like, Oh, I hate the word test budget, it doesn’t feel you know, it’s a squishy thing. But thinking about, you know, the opportunities that that came up last year that maybe we didn’t initially plan for. And it’s really important to at least hold steady on that budget for q3 q4, the other pieces, we don’t know when Prime Day is going to be this year. Typically it’s in the summer. But you know, it did just as well in in the middle of November last year. And so Amazon has not given any indication on when they’re going to going to do that. So I would say hold hold or increased budgets.

Unknown Speaker 27:11
Okay, and the last question before we have to move on. So when in regards to you can always keep your brand feel on your brand story right to going on Amazon?

Unknown Speaker 27:23
Mm hmm.

Unknown Speaker 27:24
Are you seeing the true luxury companies? Gucci Prada or things like we sell high end diamond rings? Are you seeing the move to Amazon yet?

Unknown Speaker 27:35
Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question. And just for a little bit of background, I actually used to work in luxury beauty. So very familiar with the space and, and some of the, you know, nuances, we’ll call them around brand equity for some of these luxury brands. I think Amazon is trying so if anyone has downloaded or upgraded their their Amazon app recently, you’ll see that they have a new luxury store. So they’ve rebranded a couple so we have premium beauty, which used to be luxury beauty, and which is essentially more high end but still mass beauty. And then we have true luxury beauty. And it really looks like a different a different store. And so I think Amazon is trying they have brought on some some really great brands onto that platform. And they’re trying to make it exclusive. So it’s invitation only they’re making a big deal. We’re seeing a lot of Ott ads supporting that launch. But I still think there is going to be hesitation until luxury brands can see enough data that

Unknown Speaker 28:42
supports that. Fair enough. All

Unknown Speaker 28:44
right. Well, we are out of time. So thank you very much, Nancy. That was much appreciated everyone. Give a clap to Nancy thinker here thinker on Twitter, wherever you like to chat with people. And you have what we’ll see you back for the q&a, we can get more into things

Transcribed by https://otter.ai