Follow The Brand Podcast with Host Grant McGaugh
Are you ready to take your personal brand and business development to the next level? Then you won't want to miss the exciting new podcast dedicated to helping you tell your story in the most compelling way possible. Join me as I guide you through the process of building a magnetic personal brand, creating valuable relationships, and mastering the art of networking. With my expert tips and practical strategies, you'll be well on your way to 5-star success in both your professional and personal life. Don't wait - start building your 5-STAR BRAND TODAY!
Follow The Brand Podcast with Host Grant McGaugh
Scaling Brands on Amazon: Insider Secrets from AMZ Advisors' Mike Begg & Grant McGaugh
Ever wondered how AI is sculpting the future of e-commerce? Discover the transformative strategies that can propel your brand from $1 million to $10 million and beyond in our latest episode of Follow the Brand. Join us as we sit down with Michael Begg, the ingenious CEO and co-founder of AMZ Advisor, to unearth the secrets of leveraging AI to outsmart the competition. Get an insider's look at how Amazon’s innovative logistics are rewriting the playbook for online business, including repurposing old malls into cutting-edge fulfillment centers.
Learn how AMZ Advisor is the game-changer brand that needs to regain lost market share on Amazon. This episode unpacks the critical digital strategy gaps brands often overlook, from improper advertising to poor catalog management, and how AMZ's expert interventions have led to astonishing growth. Discover why brands generating $5 million or more on Amazon benefit immensely from partnering with agencies like AMZ instead of relying on in-house teams. We'll also walk you through a remarkable case study of a brand selling educational products that skyrocketed to $400,000 a month thanks to AMZ’s expertise.
Finally, get ahead of the curve with a deep dive into current trends and the role of AI in e-commerce. Understand how AI is revolutionizing search algorithms on Amazon, shifting the paradigm from traditional searches to AI-driven queries and reshaping marketing strategies. We discuss the importance of building a consistent brand and driving external traffic to maximize your Amazon visibility and sales. Whether you’re an entrepreneur aiming to scale or fascinated by the future of digital commerce, this episode offers invaluable insights to help you thrive in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape.
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest marketing trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates from us, be sure to follow us at 5starbdm.com. See you next time on Follow The Brand!
Welcome to another episode of Follow the Brand.
Speaker 1:I am your host, grant McGaughan, ceo of 5 Star BDM, a 5 Star personal branding and business development company.
Speaker 1:I want to take you on a journey that takes another deep dive into the world of personal branding and business development using compelling personal story, business conversations and tips. Development using compelling personal story, business conversations and tips to improve your personal brand. By listening to the Follow the Brand podcast series, you will be able to differentiate yourself from the competition and allow you to build trust with prospective clients and employers. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Make it one that will set you apart, build trust and reflect who you are. Developing your five-star personal brand is a great way to demonstrate your skills and knowledge. If you have any questions from me or my guests, please email me. At grantmcgaw, spelled M-C-G-A-U-G-H at 5starbdm B for brand, d for development, m for masterscom.
Speaker 1:Now let's begin with our next five-star episode on Follow the Brand. Welcome to the Follow Brand Podcast. I am your host, grant McGaugh, ceo of Five Star BDM, where we help you to build a five-star brand that people will follow. And today we are diving deep into the transformative world of e-commerce and the game-changing role of AI in digital business strategies. I want you to think back to the early days of online shopping, when people hesitated to enter their credit card into their actual computers. So fast forward to today and platforms like Amazon have revolutionized the way we shop, making it an integral part of our daily life. And today's episode is especially exciting because we have a guest who has not only witnessed this transformation, but has been instrumental in driving it. He is the CEO and co-founder of AMZ Advisor, a company that has helped brands scale from $1 million to $10 million and beyond on Amazon, and in our conversation, we will share the secrets behind this success, including how to leverage AI to outsmart the competition and the innovative strategies brands can use to protect and grow their market share, and we'll also dive into specific topics like retail arbitrage and what is that and how does it work, and why it's a game changer for new enterprises. Plus, we will explore the incredible story of how Amazon turned old malls into cutting-edge fulfillment centers, a move that redefined logistics in the e-commerce space. So, whether you are an entrepreneur looking to scale or a business owner aiming to dominate the digital marketplace, or you're just plain curious about the future of e-commerce. You are in the right place, so sit back, relax, get ready to uncover insights that could transform your approach to business. So we want to welcome to the show the visionary behind AMZ Advisors, michael Bay, on the Follow Brand Podcast, where we are building a five-star brand that you can follow. Welcome everybody to the Follow Brand Podcast. This is your host, grant McGaugh, and I'm going to take you back just a little bit into my world.
Speaker 1:You know, I started information technology a long time ago and I remember, you know, the 2000s and before that, and people were talking about e-commerce. You know this was a big thing. So, like AI is now, they weren't really sure exactly how this thing was going to go. People were making these shopping carts and people were like kind of tiptoeing into it. They're like, well, give me my credit card. Are you out of your mind? I'm't want to get out of your mind. I'm just going to put my credit card into this machine of nowhere land and somewhere out of the box. Something's going to return.
Speaker 1:And look at now. Look at now people Look at now You've got Amazon, one of the largest, richest corporations in the world. You look at companies like eBay and so many others who have just taken off understanding digital commerce and e-commerce and what it really does and how it really works. We're going to talk to someone who's been living in that life and teaching others how to live that life and actually get to that. I call that bag at the end of the rainbow. So, mike, would you like to introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:Go ahead. Thank you, and yeah, I'm glad to introduce myself. I'm the CEO and co-founder of AMZ Advisors. I've also co-founded a variety of other businesses, but what my company does is it helps brands scale from one to 10 million or more on the Amazon platform, specifically Amazon man who doesn't work with Amazon.
Speaker 1:I know they really blew up on COVID. I remember when Barnes Noble was a big, big big thing and everybody was running a bar. They said Amazon, get books online. You're like stop man.
Speaker 2:It changed the game. I remember I've been selling on Amazon. I've seen the entire evolution. I've seen things come and go. I've seen things come and go. I've seen the competition rise on the platform and it's just no joke, Like if you want to be found if you sell a product online, there's no better place to be than Amazon.
Speaker 1:So let's back that up a little bit. On your story, how did you get started in this business? I mean, why did you pick this up? What's your passion around doing e-commerce?
Speaker 2:That's a very good question and kind of going back, we'll start there. Yeah, I graduated university, I went and worked in consulting. I realized I really didn't like consulting. I moved into real estate development and I moved into real estate development for Sears and Sears is obviously, obviously the massive retailer that no longer exists and it was an interesting time. This was back in 2013.
Speaker 2:We started seeing the problems already happening. We were focused on how do we raise money and I joined the company. We raised a real estate investment trust. We sold it off. It was about $2.5 billion that we raised for the company, which you would think would last a while, but unfortunately, sears burned through it very quickly and after I did that, I moved into the real estate development side and in that side I started focusing on we have these real estate assets. How do we get more value out of them? What stores are we going to close? What stores are we going to sell off?
Speaker 2:So it was a variety of different stuff and it made me realize two things from an entrepreneurial standpoint. One is that there's no such thing as a safe job. Your job is only as secure as the decision-making capabilities of the leadership of the company. And two, I started seeing interesting deals that were coming through. So Amazon and FedEx and maybe I think it was UPS too were buying up old malls that Sears had closed stores at. And I was like, why would Amazon want to buy them all? It makes no sense. Why would FedEx want to buy them all? I mean, they don't own stores. And what I realized they were doing is they were turning these malls into warehouses. They were turning them into fulfillment centers because they had such a big space already. They had the ports for receiving and shipping out trucks and massive pieces of land for expansion if they needed.
Speaker 2:But anyway, that's what I realized and I was like, oh, all right, well, let me learn more about what Amazon's doing. That led to finding out that I could sell books on Amazon. So I started selling eBooks on Amazon. That was where it started, uh, and then from there I figured out I could sell products on Amazon. So, uh, and I could do what's called retail arbitrage. So I went to Walmart, I went to target, uh, bought everything that was on clearance, turned around, sold it on Amazon, started making money that way.
Speaker 2:Next step was hey, I can build my own brand on Amazon. Uh, let me go find a manufacturer in China to produce a product for me, import the product sold it on Amazon and that's where we started realizing that brands on Amazon don't know what they're doing. This is back in like 2014, 2015. We were selling art supplies myself and my two partners in that business, and the biggest art supply company is obviously Crayola that's the name that comes to everyone's mind and there were categories where we were competing with Crayola and Winnie and I was like, well, that's interesting, they have massive advertising budgets. They should be blowing us out of the water and we're competing with them. And I was like, ok, these companies don't know what they're doing. And that's where AMC Advisors came from. It was like, all right, let's help these companies figure out how to leverage the platform.
Speaker 2:I mean I can grow my own brand, but I can grow their brands a hell of a lot faster if I have the advertising budget they have. So that's where the idea for the company came from. That's where I started getting into e-commerce. I think my passion was more of just interest in what was going on and what was growing and what was changing within the world. I mean, back then people weren't shopping as much online. It was becoming more and more popular, but it was pretty clear that things were going in that route and I think that's why we kind of made myself and my partners kind of made the jump into let's go full fledge into e-commerce on Amazon and figure out how to grow and be successful there.
Speaker 1:Man, that's a great story and a great learning that you were working and then seeing a trend.
Speaker 2:Now.
Speaker 1:Sears, who doesn't?
Speaker 1:know, Sears Roebuck. I remember growing up. Everybody, oh, you buy anything from Sears. It lasts forever. You know that's what you did. When you bought a major appliance, you went to Sears. That's what you did. It was a big big thing. And here we are now. No one thinks like that anymore. And here we are now. No one thinks like that anymore. That the retail space is.
Speaker 1:You understand why or how Microsoft became the giant company that it did at the time that it developed Windows in the 90s? It wasn't because it developed some whiz-bang operating system that was outperforming IBM. All they did was give it a better interface. And because they gave it a better interface in person, computing wasn't even a thing who would want to like. There was a number of crunching machines Like who wants that in their house? Like they didn't have the vision. You had the vision.
Speaker 1:You started to understand because you started to see the shrinking footprint of a well-known brand, like in Sears. And you start seeing these malls, these empty malls, and then you start seeing someone buying like, why would they do? They said all right, something is happening, something is afoot here, and then when you have something that no one would have foreseen, like a COVID-19, that takes place, but everybody is now forced into their homes and having to utilize a digital platform and then it blows up. But you brought up some other great points that people have maybe seen or heard. Some of these things like retail arbitrage, what's that? Or then, what you were doing is that you were starting to advertise on the platform, because I don't think people understand what amazon truly is. I'm sure you help us understand how they operate as a business, fundamentally, because amazon doesn't necessarily make things or they don't make everything. They are a retail center. Help us understand just the platform itself sure?
Speaker 2:uh, there's a lot of different pieces that go into the platform, obviously, starting with the selling aspects. You have third party, you have one party. Third party sellers are essentially you and me. We have our own brand. We want to sell directly to consumers. We can launch on the platform, sell our products. One party brands would be an established brand like Johnson Johnson. Amazon wants to buy Johnson Johnson's products and sell the products themselves, and they're going to make the spread on the markup from the retail price and from the wholesale price. That is the fundamentals of how products are sold on the platform.
Speaker 2:Now, when we look at the platform itself, where Amazon really makes its money is from the advertising. So Amazon as a platform is a search engine. It's the same as Google. Google makes all of its money from advertising. Amazon makes the majority of its money from advertising. So that is exactly how the platform works. You're a seller. You want to get on here. You're competing against other sellers to get visibility. You're going to pay for advertising. The advertising dollars are going to increase the visibility of your product. It's going to lead to sales. It's going to make Amazon money and everyone wins. That's essentially, at a high level, how the platform works.
Speaker 1:Well, this is very interesting again because Amazon and people may or may not know this really kind of invented cloud computing, cloud computing, aws, amazon Web Services Because they had so much capacity to say you know what, we're not always utilizing all this compute power, why don't we resell it?
Speaker 2:And AWS is massive. Now, aws is a I mean, I think that's actually Amazon's number one, number one revenue source. It's that and ads. Those are the two biggest ones.
Speaker 1:I don't think. I never knew that, to be honest. I'm thinking just the products. Like I go to Amazon, I see something. And another cool thing that ease of use, that you get the prime membership and you get it overnighted to you, or within a few hours in certain cases and they got some magic formula in the back. I'm talking about AI, air Force Intelligence how to know what product is going to be in demand in certain areas and be able to ship it to you that quickly is miraculous. So let's go back to your business when you say, hey, you know what, we were selling online. We were showing up and then we started seeing these major brands and you were beating them at their own game on the digital platform. So you know what? Here's a business opportunity. Let's teach other businesses how to sell on these platforms. Talk to us more about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So again, most brands didn't really know how to leverage the platform. So back then it was more like you threw your product up and it started selling. If you were looking for Johnson and Johnson shampoo, I'll use them again. It was there. Number one Johnson and Johnson shampoo was the first result that came up because there wasn't that much competition. So the evolution of it was as more competition came into the platform and it really took off. After COVID it was how do I differentiate or how do I create visibility for my product?
Speaker 2:Again comes back to the advertising piece, and where most of these brands were failing is that they weren't doing basic stuff with advertising or basic stuff with managing their catalog on the platform. For example, you're Johnson Johnson, I'm a third-party seller. You're selling your shampoo. I can buy your shampoo and this is where the retail arbitrage comes into play or even buying it wholesale. I can buy it on discount from Target or whatever. Turn around and sell it on Amazon. So there's the arbitrage I'm buying it cheaper in Target, I'm selling it online. If I can undercut your price on Amazon, my products is going to sell over yours. So these brands were losing sales to these third-party sellers that were arbitraging sales. They were creating duplicate listings. So you have your Johnson and Johnson products, I have my own Johnson and Johnson, I'm going to run ads on mine and I'm going to sell more than you. So, and that's another very good example. On the advertising, they weren't protecting their own brand name, so Johnson and Johnson wasn't even advertising on Johnson and Johnson. So, like anyone can come in and advertise in Johnson and Johnson. So everything was just wide open and there were just massive opportunities for people to start making sales and start growing on the platform.
Speaker 2:So what we did when we started working with these brands is all right, let's get control of the platform. Let's figure out where these gaps are. We worked with brands to help them establish map agreements, minimum advertised pricing agreements with their resellers. We helped them manage their catalog by consolidating these duplicate listings and making sure there was only one listing on the platform. We helped them take control of their advertising and their brand name by making sure that they were showing up. Whenever someone searched for their brand, it was them showing up, it wasn't anyone else. And that's really how we started helping these brands get market share back and just from that alone, we were seeing growth of 20% per month for a lot of these brands, so we were increasing sales. They were getting more visibility on the platform. It was leading to more sales. Obviously, more people are coming to Amazon during this time as well, so more and more people are buying. It's just a win-win for everyone at that point.
Speaker 1:So your ideal client. I want to understand AMZ's brand persona. Who do you go after? Who's the client that you just salivate over? You just love to see some of them coming through the door, ideally for us.
Speaker 2:We love clients that are doing like $5 million or more online or on Amazon already, because that means they have the advertising budgets to start scaling and when we see those brands come through we're like, all right, let's go. That's like our sweet spot. We know we're going to get you from five to doing probably more than 20 million on the Amazon platform in less than a year and it's all a matter of just taking that advertising budget and deploying it in the right ways to maximize visibility, to increase conversions, to drive more brand awareness for our product, increase consideration against our competitors, find people that are in market. We're doing all of that stuff with the advertising budget to just put your brand out there and everywhere so that anyone looking online is going to find it.
Speaker 1:So if I'm the chief marketing officer of a major brand or, let's say, like a $5 to $10 million company that's a nice mid-sized company how do I know that I need you? I'm already doing marketing, I'm already on Amazon, let's say I have a decent amount of return how do I know or maybe I don't know that I truly need you?
Speaker 2:That's a very good question and I think it really comes down to what your internal capabilities are. I mean, I think in that mid-range area right there, it's still difficult to hire a full team in-house to manage everything. I mean, when we look at what's required for Amazon, you need people managing the catalog, you need people managing customer service, you need people managing support cases, you need people managing advertising, graphic design, copywriting All of these things need to be pulled together, and that's where a lot of companies that are in that range are like well, I can either hire for all of this or I can use an agency, and typically, going the agency route is where you're leveraging the knowledge of everyone. I mean, at this point, our companies work with 500 brands. We have of everyone. I mean, at this point, our company's worked with 500 brands.
Speaker 2:We have, I don't know, 15 account managers, four strategists and, I think, seven or eight advertisers on our team right now, and all of that knowledge and all of that experience is something we can leverage. It's like all right, here's the problem. How do we deal with this problem? We ask it out, throw it out there into the team until we find a solution and then we actually move forward. So you're getting the benefit of not needing to hire all these people internally, but also leveraging all the knowledge that we have internally already.
Speaker 1:And now I get that. It makes perfect sense. It's the same way. Yeah, I could probably build a house if I had all the materials, but I've never built a house. I'm sure that house is not going to look like the one on the brochure after I got done. So I built a lot of houses as the wherewithal, the credibility and all the permits and licensing and what's necessary to make it work, and then pay me on my premium and there's a pretty good ROI because you've got all your tagline and once you're LinkedIn, it says I'm going to take you to $1 million to $10 million. That's a big stretch. Give us a success story. Tell us a story about somebody who came to you and you were able to 10x their business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have plenty of these, but I'll talk about one. That's one of my favorite examples. We started working. This client has been with us for about seven years. At this point, uh, we started working with them. I guess it was 2017, 2018. At that point, uh, and they sell a child educational product. Uh, they were launching on the platform for the first time. They were doing a couple thousand dollars a month. It wasn't that much. Uh, within three months, we had them doing 30. Within three months, we had them doing $30,000. Within six months, we had them doing about $70,000.
Speaker 2:At this point, the brand owner was like I'm doing well, I'm almost doing a million-dollar run rate right now. I'm going to do this on my own. This is where the brands make most mistakes. She ended up leaving. Her sales went back down to about $35,000. We're hanging out around there. She came back to us and was like all right, I can't do this, I need your help. And we continue to work with her. We're still working with her to this day, but over the next few years, we took her from about that $35,000 mark when she came back to us to during the height of COVID, we were doing about $400,000 a month, so that was 10x right there. That was an incredible experience and it's also great to have that working relationship. We've been together for so long and for her to continue to see that success over seven years is massive for us. Well, that's proof.
Speaker 1:You know it's all about proof of work and when you see it it's there. She probably had other problems at that. Like you got to keep inventory. Like you know, mike just keep selling all our stuff. You got to keep it at house. That's why all these Amazon warehouses are all over a set of cities, right? Instead of some of these retail places.
Speaker 2:It's one of the best compliments we get, and we get it frequently. It's like, hey, we're selling too much, we don't have enough inventory, and that's how we know we're doing our job. It's like if you can't keep up with it, it means that we're killing it on the marketing side.
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Speaker 1:I'm not. You know, mike, I'm starting out. I don't have a lot of sales. I understand that this is a way, just like a traditional way, of opening a business. You're a startup, or maybe you've been in business a couple of years and traditionally you would. You know, obviously you'll get a brick and mortar location. You would do some traditional advertising, maybe take out some radio TV ads, and that was the old model. Now you've got to come to the digital platform and, like your other, these big brands are. There's a lot of people still not savvy in the digital e-commerce world and they're like I think I know what I'm doing. I'm doing, I'm doing a bunch of stuff on social media. You know, I've got a couple of pages, I've got a Spotify or Shopify. I see Amazon. Help me understand how to get going and generate some income.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because you mentioned a lot of different examples there, and we've worked with companies doing millions with two people, and we've worked with you know companies doing millions with two people, and we've worked with you know multi-billion dollar companies, and we're frequently amazed that some of these companies are actually able to achieve the success that they are seeing. But, uh, yeah, anyone can pretty much come onto the platform and it really uh, depends on how much time you're willing to invest really setting up the fundamentals. So when we start talking about what are the fundamentals, uh, it starts with the product itself. You have to make sure you have a really good product. You have to make sure that your manufacturer is reliable that can deliver the product on time. You don't want to be getting bad reviews once your product goes live. That's the big thing that's going to kill your product. If your product is not good, the customers are going to find out quickly. So there's number one. Let's focus on that. Number two we need to get our listing set up on Amazon. So we're going to focus on SEO here and we're going to focus on graphic design SEO. We want to find the main keywords for our product. Put them in our product title, bullet points and description and then the rest will go in the keyword section on the back end. That's going to help us rank for stuff and help people find us.
Speaker 2:And then, when we look at imagery or graphic design, we really want to focus on two different aspects. The first one is your main image. Your main image you want to take as much of the white space up as possible. You might even want to get creative with your design on there to feature an example of what the product looks like inside the packaging, outside, just so the customer can understand. That's going to drive click-through rates and that's going to help drive conversion. So when you're looking at search result, if you see a picture that looks good, you're more likely to click it and go to the page and that's going to help, you know, keep the process going. So that's important when someone gets to the page. The rest of the images uh, they need to be actually highlight how your product benefits the consumer or what problem it solves for the consumer. So you really want to focus on using the imagery to explain that with text overlays, with examples, with a variety of different features or benefits, whatever it may be, but really focus on how your product is benefiting the consumer, how it's solving their problem. That's much more important than what your product features are. That's going to lead to conversion. So now we've built our fundamentals with that. Now we have our product, we have our listings looking good.
Speaker 2:Next piece is fulfillment. How are we actually going to fulfill these orders? Amazon FBA there you go, you are going to send your product to Amazon's own warehouses and then, because of that, you're going to get the Prime badge. So your product is going to be Prime. It's going to improve conversions. It's going to increase visibility on the platform. Amazon will handle the customer service. It takes a lot off of your plate. So that's the benefit of that. And then from there, after you've established that piece, is where you really start the marketing and that's where you're going to focus. You know, bottom of the funnel how do I convert people? How do I find people that are ready to purchase my product and actually get them to buy it? So that's the fundamental piece for anyone starting. But again, you kind of got to make sure you follow all these steps. You really can't skip along or otherwise you're going to run into problems at some point down the road.
Speaker 1:I like how you just said. Those are the blocking and tackling. You know it still comes down to the fundamentals, but you're doing it in a different way on digital and if you're not savvy, that's just why you're harder. You're harder so you need to understand it, so you're not just pouring out money and you don't know what you're spending at all. You need to understand it. But once you start seeing it actually operating, understand why you need to spend money on your SEO, why you need to spend money on imagery. I want to ask you, because you've been in this game for a while, what I want to ask you because you've been in this game for a while.
Speaker 2:What are some of the biggest trends that you're seeing now, with advertisers and retailers on the platform? That wasn't in the past, but you're seeing it now and it's gaining traction. One of the most interesting things that we're seeing is people actually using off-platform resources to drive traffic on-platform. So there's a few different reasons brands would want to do this. The first one is that I think it's about 70% of all online product searches start on Amazon. So if someone's searching for a product, they're going to Amazon to look for it. So that's phenomenal. Let's use that information.
Speaker 2:How do we maximize our visibility now? So when we look at how we maximize our visibility, we have to look at the Amazon ranking algorithm. It's different than Google. Amazon takes two main factors into consideration. One would be your conversion rates how frequently do people buy your product when they hit your page? And the other one is sales velocity, we like to call it, or. How long have you been converting people at this rate? Essentially, so. If you've been doing it for one week, great. Have you been doing it for one month, even better. Have you been doing it for one year, phenomenal. All of that is going to help you rank higher in search results.
Speaker 2:So what we see now is a lot of brands want to push more and more traffic to Amazon to maximize that visibility and drive more conversions. So, for example, tiktok is a great way to drive traffic to Amazon. Other social media channels are working really well Affiliate marketing, public relations. There's a variety of different ways to acquire that traffic. But by getting that into Amazon it's giving you a lot of control. Now they're purchasing the product on Amazon, or at least they're within the funnel. We can retarget them with advertising on Amazon. We can retarget them with advertising on Amazon. We can retarget them off platform now with advertising. So it's like once they hit the page it kind of opens up all the doors. So why not push as much traffic to Amazon?
Speaker 2:And that's something that brands weren't doing even two years ago. That's something that a lot of brands have shifted their focus to now See there's some insight that everyone is getting.
Speaker 1:We're not going to charge you today, but I do encourage you to seek out Mike and AMC Advisors. There's no doubt about it. He has the knowledge, he has the wisdom. He is making people millionaires overnight. I think that that's great. We had talked about a story earlier we were talking about and I told Mike this story about how you've got to put in the work before you see the results and a lot of times people think you know it's just overnight and it just happens, and you've got to put in the required amount, how people understand what it takes to get to where the end goal would be, let's say, if it's a 10X and that type of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's a lot of work that goes into it. Obviously, we talked about the fundamentals there, on the basics, but I think the bigger thing that most brands don't consider is that, or most sellers don't consider is that you need to build a brand. You can sell random products but that has no benefit in the longterm. You want to be able to establish a brand that's going to have value. That's how you're actually going to increase the value over time. That's how you're going to keep customers coming back and searching for your product.
Speaker 2:So, brand building I'm not an expert per se in brand building, but it does require a lot of consistency on the platform. It requires your branding looking the same across all your listings. It requires having high quality customer reviews. That is what establishes a brand, because when people find the listing it looks good, it looks the same as all the other products. Customers love it, and that's really where you start building out a brand on platform. At least Everything you're doing off platform. I mean there's a variety of different stuff with social media. We've already talked about that. Pr all of these things are just creating more and more brand awareness and we can do more advertising on platform to increase that brand awareness. So if you want to scale over time, you really got to focus on the brand and that takes even more effort than just getting the fundamentals of Amazon set up.
Speaker 1:Well, you're speaking my language right there on the Follow Brand Show. Brand awareness is king and understanding that that brand awareness is occurring on the digital platform at a higher velocity than any other way, word of mouth is still king. People say, hey, you know what? Follow brand is a great podcast. You need to listen to it and that's how people will tune in. They'll search for it, you know, on on google and all the other platforms, and they come to it and then they'll have a conversation and, because I built that brand, now they'll see like, wow, you know, I am interested in e-commerce and business development and now you've got a great show, you've got great information Great not only from a technical standpoint, but from the fundamental things that you need to succeed. As someone who's already doing these things, I would like you to talk to us I'm giving you the mic of all the things we just talked about, what are some things that you feel are very, very important, that people need to know about your brand?
Speaker 2:about my brand. Okay, uh, that's a good one. That's. That actually was a little bit of a curveball, uh, look, I think the fundamental things to understand is that we have established ourselves within the space and it's hard for people to see from the outside. But when we look at what happened with COVID, what's happened over the years? Amazon consultants popped up out of everywhere. Covid came, most of them consolidated and went to other companies.
Speaker 2:There's only a few companies that are our size in the space, and that's because we're so good at what we do. We show our value by actually putting out work and by putting out content. So obviously we do a great job on the work that we're producing for our clients. We try to share that through case studies. We try to increase visibility that way. But from marketing and content. Marketing is really where we help other people even know we exist, and we do that in a variety of different ways Webinars, podcasts, like today, blog content, social media content, partnerships that's another great one. All of these are helping us maximize visibility and get the word out there about what our brand does, and that's really what we focus on, and I think that's the most important thing for any company to focus on.
Speaker 1:Well, I think you've also done a great job. Word of mouth, okay, I mean. All of a sudden you see your neighbor that used to, you know, be in a station wagon. Now they're running around, you know, in a rolls royce. You're like what is it? So you gotta talk to mike. Amz, I don't know what you're doing, but I talked about you talk to mike, so it's not, and it's happened many times.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's plenty of brands that we've started working with that go from zero to a million dollar run rate within two months, and it's crazy when that happens, mainly because they can't keep up with demand. But it's just awesome to see the results for us, because it just means that what we're doing is working.
Speaker 1:And how people understand. Like all right, you know what? Yeah, it's saturated. It's like I'm going to build another Walmart-like building next to Walmart. How do people understand the market potential that still exists on Amazon?
Speaker 2:There's always potential and it's actually interesting. There was a study that came out a few months ago. When you look at how long a number one bestseller stays number one on Amazon, the average lifespan is less than seven years. So when we look at that, brands are constantly cycling through the platform for a variety of different reasons, part of it being competition, part of it being challenges with the platform. But it means that there's always the potential to become the next best-selling product on Amazon and because of that, that's why you really need to invest.
Speaker 2:If you're going to maximize your visibility, if you're going to be there, if you want to be competing, you need to be competing against everybody else. I mean, there's plenty of niches that still exist with Amazon for brands to come in and focus and sell on. But the real big thing is, like, how does Amazon fit into your bigger idea of what you're trying to sell online? So like, if you have your own Shopify store, if you're selling through Walmart or eBay, some other platform, it's probably worthwhile building an Amazon channel just to acquire customers and then try to push those customers to other places, because you don't need to become 100% reliant on Amazon. There's plenty of brands that have become multi-million dollar brands through all of these other channels, and then they come to Amazon and just switch it on and start selling. So there's a variety of different things you need to consider. It's it's yes, it's crowded, yes, it's going to cost money to compete, but the reason it costs money to compete is because there's so many people looking for products on the platform.
Speaker 1:Very well stated, and how do we get in touch with you to get a consultation?
Speaker 2:The uh. The best way to get in touch with me is my email, mike at amzadvisorscom. You can also reach out to me through the website amzadvisorscom. And then, finally, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter, instagram, any of those platforms. You can send me a message and I'm glad to speak with you and see if there's any way I can help.
Speaker 1:Well, ted, this has been wonderful. I am intrigued by your story. I am intrigued by your story. We need everyone to understand that and I talk to this a lot that a lot of the wealth that has been created in the world has only been created in the last 10, maybe 15 years, to say, but it didn't go back hundreds of years or 50 years ago or 20 years ago like this. Because of new platforms and we've got to remember this Artificial intelligence is a major game changer and he who knows how to leverage it to its fullest will be majorly successful. So, before we leave, I want you to answer this, because you were at the beginning seeing how e-commerce has morphed and changed and become and you've all you've ridden this amazon wave. Now, with this ai engine being more not just in the hands of the fortune 500 companies but in the hands of the everyday consumer, how do you see this changing?
Speaker 2:uh, that's. It's very interesting. So, from from our side, I mean, the easiest thing where we see a change coming is that the actual search algorithm on Amazon is slightly changing. It's more of an AI focus, which is interesting, so it adjusts some certain things that we need to do with our listings. I think the biggest thing we're going to see is that once AI has the capability of going online which is scary to think of it's going to lead to the way that people actually search for products. People might not be searching for products on Amazon anymore. They might be searching for products through ChatGPT. Hey, what's the best rated shampoo on Amazon right now? Here it is. Here's the link Buy now here it is. Here's the link Buy now Boom.
Speaker 2:The impacts on search and the impacts on the way that products show up online is probably going to be profound from changes within AI, but the way that brands market and the way that brands advertise is also going to be drastically impacted. So your advertising should hopefully get more efficient when you have AI in it. The content you're producing you should be able to produce a higher volume of content to reach people. I think that's really where the two main levers are going to come from from the marketing side, the e-commerce side, but AI is constantly changing quickly. I mean, on our side, we're constantly implementing AI in new forms. I've launched three new AI tools this week alone, so it's been pretty awesome seeing it coming and like it's exciting for me because I just see the way that it's improving our efficiency and improving our results.
Speaker 1:Well, I see you using the same program that you did years ago, as you saw the changes in retail and got on board with e-commerce. Now you have an AI-enabled e-commerce engine that, like you said, search and social could change dramatically, and having that precision with AI, which is an intelligent technology. I always tell my audience we're moving from information technology to intelligent technology and this is a fundamental game changer and will radically change the business landscape. It should make it better, but if you're not, if you don't know how to talk to it, just the same way we're talking if you don't know how to build SEO and SEO has been around for a while what's that? Search engine optimization, because you need to know how to talk to Google.
Speaker 1:If you don't know how to talk to Google, you don't know how to talk to Google, you don't rank in those, you don't get those 10 blue lines that come up, the links that come up, right. But now that seems the AI is changing how Google is going to work, like hey, you know what? We better get on board with this and knowing how this automation, this audio automation, is taking place, visual automation that's taking place, and then can it, and this is where we're going to get to where hopefully we'll get to that where the AI is not so biased that it's unbiased, can actually look at three different products and say you know what this one's better. It's more expensive possibly, but it's better in your use case, and here's why. And then, boom, you've got it. So it's not all those other reasons that used to be why you go to Amazon. You see the links and you're like, oh, that looks good and you click on it. Now you've got more intelligence than state.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you bring up a really interesting point about bias, and bias is gonna be, I think, much more challenging to eliminate from AI than it will be from people, because AI is just trained on what's out there, so the more voices you have on a certain side versus another, it's going to adjust that and change that bias. So that's an interesting challenge and it's interesting to see how companies are going to deal with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll see what happens, but this has been wonderful. Mike, I want to encourage your entire audience to go ahead and listen to all the episodes on follow the brand. That's at 5, the number 5 star BDM. That's B for Brand, b for Development and for Masterscom. There you're going to have about 160 experts like Mike talking about all kinds of things from technology, innovation to business and career development, to financial empowerment, to all kinds of other things, especially executive presence, and I think, mike, you have executive presence at a high level. I really like what you're doing. I'm glad you're being so successful.
Speaker 1:Thank you for being a guest on the show, grant, thank you for having me. It's been great chatting with you. You're welcome. Thanks for joining us on the Follow Brand Podcast. Big thanks to Full Effect Productions for their incredible support on each and every episode. Now the journey continues on our YouTube channel Follow Brand TV Series. Dive into exclusive interviews, extended content and bonus insights that will fuel your success. Subscribe now and be a part of our growing community sharing and learning together. Explore, engage and elevate at Follow Brand TV Series on YouTube. Stay connected, stay inspired. Till next time, we will continue building a five-star brand that you can follow.