How to Launch, Protect, and Grow Your Brand on Amazon

Transcript

Becky: Wanted to go ahead and get started. I'd like to welcome you all today to eComEngine's webinar with Shannon Roddy of Marketplace Seller Courses. Today, he's going to be talking about how to launch, grow, and protect your brand on Amazon. And I'm Becky Trowbridge, I'm the content strategist here at eComEngine, and I'll just be fielding your questions. So, send them throughout the webinar, and we'll answer them at the end. Okay, and then just to tell you a little bit about eComEngine as we get started, we make software tools for Amazon sellers. One of our major tools is FeedbackFive, which is available in 15 international marketplaces. I know Shannon is definitely a fan. FeedbackFive is a reputation management software, you can send review requests, get review alerts, use the Request a Review functionality, see your order volume, and a whole lot more.

Becky: As you know, reviews are really essential for brands and they work in collaboration with a lot of the concepts that Shannon's going to be talking about today. So, if you need some help getting reviews, definitely check out FeedbackFive. We also have MarketScout, which is a product research tool for Amazon sellers, RestockPro, which is an FBA inventory management tool, and then SmartPrice, which is an algorithmic repricer. And then I wanted to introduce my friend, Shannon Roddy. I met Shannon a couple of years ago at Midwest e-Com in Minnesota. Shannon's a fantastic person. He has founded this business called Marketplace Seller Courses, and he's worked with over 100 brands and manufacturers to help launch, grow, and protect their brands on Amazon, which is what he's going to be talking to you about today.

Becky: In that time, he has helped successfully launch over 23 number one new releases, which is amazing, four number one bestsellers, and 29 Amazon's choice products. So, Shannon is incredible, has a ton of knowledge to share. Buckle in, get your notebook, this is definitely going to be a lot of great information. So, Shannon, I'll let you take it away.

Shannon: Awesome. Thanks for that intro, Becky. And yeah, those stats, we stopped counting at some point because there were just too many products, too many clients. But it's such a passion of mine to really empower brand owners with the strategies, tools, and resources, to, as Becky mentioned, successfully launch, grow, and protect their brands on Amazon. That's really our bread and butter. So, with that said, I'm going to get started today. If this sounds like you, you want to start selling on Amazon but are feeling a little overwhelmed, that's perfect. If you're already selling Amazon but want to increase in sales, which is usually pretty much everybody. Maybe your brand is growing but you're having trouble protecting it, we've got a solution for you that I'm going to mention at the end of the webinar.

Shannon: But my goal from this webinar today is to help brand owners who sell on Amazon, who want to increase sales and retain control of their brand without violating Amazon policy. So, that's really the crux of the content that we're going to cover today. Here are some high level truths, I want to talk about some principles of Amazon success before we dive into some of the content. In order to increase sales and maintain control of your brand, you have to have what I call a detailed Amazon brand strategy. This is specific to your brand and your strategy on Amazon. And then in order to execute a successful brand strategy, you have to have the right information, tools, and resources. Again, I'm going to give you some insight into how to get all that later on.

Shannon: Who this webinar is for, obviously, for brand owners, but also very applicable to manufacturers, if you manufacture your own products, inventors, if you've created your own product or invented a product, entrepreneurs, if you've bought a brand or sold a brand, like to invest in companies, this is going to be great for you. And then authorized resellers who have exclusive distribution maybe for a certain territory on Amazon, or for the Amazon platform itself. Who this webinars not for, and what we don't cover, finding products to sell, we're not going to cover, sourcing FBA products, no policy violating hacks, everything we do is in line with Amazon TOS. We don't really cover anything with retail arbitrage, and it's not a get rich quick scheme. It's foundational principles to launch, grow, and protect your brand and business on the Amazon.

Shannon: A little bit of background about me, as Becky and I were talking, I actually started my Amazon journey about 10 years ago. My wife and I had recently come back from Africa, we'd spent about 15 months there, volunteering with an NGO. And this is us in front of the incredible crater there. Before we left, I had developed this product, and my one goal when I got back, I'd said, "I want to get this on Amazon." I had no idea how to do it, I had no idea what a skew was, I didn't know what a UPC code was, but I piecemealed it together and I put the product up and I just lost money the first year. And this is a niche product, very low search volume, but I was very excited to finally get on the platform. The second year, I started to gain a little bit of traction, got a couple of sales, first couple product reviews, and actually made $115 as of my first profitable year.

Shannon: And it was in the third year that I was also learning SEO, that I had this epiphany. I said, "I wonder if SEO works on Amazon the same way it does on Google." And so, I did the keyword research and I realized there was one keyword that my product was missing, one keyword. And I added that keyword to the title, and then next year I did 1,500 dollars in net revenue. Again, it's pretty niche product, pretty low search volume, but it's continued to double or increase every single year since then. So, this applies to you because, for me, I decided I never wanted to venture into a new business without having somebody who'd already been successful, show me how to be successful as well. So, there's two things you guys have to know about Amazon, especially if you're new.

Shannon: Number one, Amazon's goal is to be the most consumer-centric company in the world. That means, by default, it is not the most seller-centric. You know that if you've called customer service as a customer, versus a seller, different experience. The second thing is that the reason most brands fail selling on Amazon is because they don't know what they don't know. I call this the piecemeal approach. They got a little bit of information from YouTube, and from a conference, and a webinar. And those are great for additional information. But the problem is, without all the information, you're typically not going to succeed because it leaves gaps. And so, I find that for the most of the brand owners that I consult with, they're making Amazon decisions based on partial information, bad information, or in some cases, no information at all.

Shannon: So, my goal is to provide brand owners with all of the information they need to be successful. Hey, does that sound good? Now, some of you guys might be thinking, "What's the difference between a private label and a brand?" Because I know there's a lot of private labels, and a lot of people are looking to scale to the brand level. So, what does that mean? Number one, investing in intellectual property. So, trademarks, patents, developing new products. Expanding into other e-commerce channels and retail, as well as building a social media presence. This gives you off Amazon brand awareness, that can be so critical to help launch or grow your brand.

Shannon: Today, we're going to cover how to launch your brand, effectively researching and integrating SEO keywords to increase what we call discoverability. Number two, we're going to cover growing your brand, how to leverage Amazon advertising to organically rank your products and increased profit. And then lastly, how a registered trademark can help protect your brand from competitors. So, with that said, I need everybody to buckle in. We're going to take questions at the end. So, if you have those, you can put those in the questions section, and Becky's going to be fielding those at the end. Put them in there, but strap in because we're going to go through this, and it's going to be a lot of really fun, really good information.

Shannon: How to launch your brand using SEO research and implementation. The key to success on Amazon, the goal of pretty much every brand is to be able to organically rank for your products' top converting keywords. That means, if a customer searches a term, that you're going to show up at the top. And we start by discussing this concept of the Amazon flywheel. And basically, you just do this over and over again. You start by optimizing your listings, and then you launch your products by driving targeted traffic to your listings, and then you analyze the results. And you take the analysis from those results and put it back into optimization, as well as your advertising. So, we're going to be looking at your sessions, we're going to be looking at your conversion rate, we're going to be looking at click-through rate.

Shannon: You're going to be going through the product reviews to see what customers like about the product or don't like, the questions they ask, the seller feedback, the customer service messages, what are they not understanding or getting about the product that you can include and incorporate into the listings, and then drive more traffic and analyze from there? We're going to start with a term that I coined a couple years ago called the Amazon Trifecta, and the Amazon Trifecta is this, discoverability plus viability equals rankability. Discoverability has to do with the SEO keywords in your listing. And for those of you who are not familiar, SEO just means search engine optimization. So, the SEO keywords that you include in your listing, plus buy ability, which means an optimized Detail page, equals rankability, the organic rank of your product.

Shannon: And here's how that works. If we've got our product, our MaxBlastr Air Purifier, and somebody searches air purifier, finds our product, and then adds to cart and buys that product, over time, our product will organically rank higher for the term, air purifier. It's really that simple. So, in order to start the keyword research strategy, the first thing we're going to do is you've got to research your SEO keyword terms. Next, you're going to determine the keyword relevance. And lastly, we're going to integrate those SEO terms into our listings. A great tool to do this, Helium 10, they've got a great keyword research tool, definitely one of the best, and we can start by putting our initial seed terms in there, air purifier.

Shannon: We can see the estimated monthly search volume, we can also see the keyword frequency that are associated with that search volume, like purifiers, home, smoke, we can even see like room, large, that sort of thing. And it's going to give us tons and tons of keywords that we can determine if they're relevant for our listing. You can even filter by specific SEO term. For example, we've got air purifiers if we add allergies in there. We can see all the search terms that have allergies in them. So, air purifiers for allergies and pets, or air purifiers for allergies and pets large room. These are all keywords that have great search volume. And the goal is to just download all this information, I like using Excel, and what we're going to do is we're going to sort by search volume.

Shannon: Now, some of you guys might be thinking, "I don't even know how to come up with my initial terms for the product." If that's the case, you can actually start by doing competitor keyword research. So, if you don't know the exact terms to start with for your product, if there are similar products on Amazon or competitor products, you can actually do what's called a reverse ASIN lookup, and put the competitor's ASIN into this keyword tool with Helium 10, and you can get all the search terms that they organically rank for. Now, just because they organically rank for, it doesn't mean it's relevant, but it's going to give you those starting search terms.

Shannon: Another cool thing that you can do is use Amazon's Smart-Complete. So, if we just go into amazon.com, I like to typically be logged out when I do this, and just put in, "Air purifier," and it's going to make suggestions based on other customers' high volume searches. So, if I put in, "Air purifier," we've got air purifiers for home, air purifiers for bedroom, for large room, air purifier HEPA, and so forth. So, this can give us some great keyword data to incorporate into our research, to see if we want to add this to our listing. So, we're going to end up with a pretty big list like this. Obviously, this is truncated for this example. But we've got all these keywords, and what we've done is we've sorted them by search volume.

Shannon: Now, here's the key. The goal is not to just go after the highest search volume terms, the goal is to find the search terms that intersect search volume and relevance. Here's what I mean by that. You can go after a really high search volume term like air purifier, 650,000 searches a month, but it's not the perfect relevance per se. So, the higher the search volume, the less relevant is probably going to be. At the same time, you can go after a very relevant term with a very low search volume. And even if you rank for it, it's great, but you're not going to get a lot of sales. So, you're really looking for those search terms in the middle, that you have a good chance of ranking for high relevance, high search volume intersection.

Shannon: Some of you guys might be thinking, "That's great, but I'm not sure how to determine which keywords are relevant for my product." Very easy, I'm going to show you. You just put them back into Amazon. So, what we do is, we take that search term, and we're not looking at the advertised results at the top, typically, we get brand ads and sponsored product listings, you're going to scroll down to view the organic search results. Because that's going to show you what customers actually determine are the most relevant products for that search term, not what sellers are willing to bid on. People will advertise on anything, we want to see what the organic search results are, because that's customer verification.

Shannon: Now, we also want to determine a relevant search term. So, we might think, air purifier, odor eliminator. That sounds good and it's a great keyword, it's got tons of search volume, but when we put that into Amazon and we look at the products that show up, we can see that first of all, none of them are air purifiers. And that gives us a pretty good indication that it's not going to be a keyword that we want to target in our listing. Now, we can add it maybe and try advertising on it, but what we're allowing ourselves to do is get the validation of customers that this is not a good search term for our product if we're trying to go after air purifiers.

Shannon: So, what we do is, we then take this list, and what I've done is, I've highlighted the most important keywords that we still want to include in our listing, whether or not we're targeting them specifically. But obviously, we have to include air purifier because that's what it is. So, we've included some of the main ones in blue, but the ones we really want to target for this listing, this is a true HEPA air purifier, so, I put that in green, that's the search term that I really want to target in the listing. And this is how we're going to take all these search terms and put them into it.

Shannon: So, we're going to start by integrating our top SEO terms into the product title. And typically, the goal is to put the initial search term, your most highly searched relevant term as close to the front of the title as you possibly can. So, MaxBlastr, that's our brand name, and then immediately put that high search volume relevant term, "True HEPA air purifier." And then throughout the rest of the title, we can add our additional search terms like home, and office, et cetera. You don't necessarily want to keep keyword stuff, it has to be readable for customers, as well as for the Amazon algorithm.

Shannon: But what we can see is, beyond the keywords, pretty much all we're doing is talking about the unique value proposition, sleek design, removes 99.9% of allergens and odors, et cetera, but the goal is for it to be clean, readable, and make a customer want to buy it, in addition to including some of those highly searched relevant terms. Next up, we have our product features, also referred to as the product bullet points. And again, we're going to start with our true HEPA air purifier. Now, you don't have to include that at the top, there's no benefit to putting it in your first product feature, but it is important, if a customer is searching for that, that they see it as the first product feature or one of the first few product features. Because we need to convince them that they have found the product that they were looking for.

Shannon: So, it's as much for conversion as it is for discoverability. And then you can see we've used these other additional terms like germs, and air purifier, and allergens, sprinkled throughout the product features so that we can reinforce with the A9 algorithm, letting them know that yes, this is a relevant product for those search terms. Now, this is something that 90% or more of all sellers do wrong on Amazon. So, I want you to pay attention to this section, I'll try to make it really, really clear. What I've done is there's a search term section in your back end called generic search terms or search terms. What I've done is, I've highlighted in blue, all the search terms that are already being used in our product title. So, air purifier, and air purifier for home, and all those different ones, we don't have to put those in search terms in the back end.

Shannon: Your title is your most heavily weighted search field, so, you don't have to duplicate those keywords in your search terms. What we're going to do is highlight all the other keywords in our search results, our SEO keyword research, that aren't in the title, and those are then going to make up the relevant keywords for search terms in the back end. So, things like allergies, and pets, or large room. In this case, we have house. So, even if they search for home, if they search for house instead, we're going to show up. And what Amazon's A9 search algorithm is going to do is it's going to compile and combine these search terms. So, if somebody searches for true HEPA air purifier for pet dander, for example, we can still show up because we have those search terms in the title, and the search terms in the back end. Making sense?

Shannon: If it doesn't make sense, put it in the questions. But overall, did you guys find that helpful? Give Becky some feedback, let her know in the chat box, if this is valuable for you guys so far. Number two, growing your brand using advertising to organically rank your product. Now, what we're going to talk about here is, we're going to talk about Amazon advertising. I had this graphic made, because I really wanted to create a visual representation of what advertising really looked like. So, what I've done is, I've gone ahead and created this graphic and shown in blue, your branded search terms. So, this castle in the middle, this is medieval times, with the blue flags and the blue moat, that's your branded search terms.

Shannon: That's the first thing that you want to do is make sure that you are defending your castle, your turf, by advertising on your branded search terms. Now, everything else is green, all the pasture in the middle, that is unclaimed territory, those are generic keywords. And depending on the category, approximately 80% of all searches on Amazon are going to be unbranded or generics. That's your greatest opportunity for growth, is going after those generic terms. Once you've fully built out that and you're advertising on all your generic terms, then you can actually be even more aggressive and actually go after competitor search terms. Actually invading their castle or territory as it were.

Shannon: And that's the same reason why you want to bid on your own brand name, to keep other people from stealing branded sales from you. Now, the last section is sort of the sand trap, if you will, that's wasted ad spend, that's bidding on keywords that simply don't convert, that are just wasting money. So, that's kind of high level visual. In terms of defining advertising efficiency, Amazon uses this term called ACoS, acquired cost of sale. And ACoS is really simple, it's just taking your ad spend, divide it by your revenue, and that's what equals your ACoS. So, if you spend $200, and you make $1,000 in gross revenue, that's 20% ACoS. Pretty straightforward. And a lot of brand owners are asking the question, "What should my target ACoS be?" We get this all the time, "What's my target Acos?"

Shannon: There's not one answer, but I want to break it down by those categories that we just talked about. Branded terms, for example, typically, you're going to want or see a five to 10% ACoS. Lowest cost per click and lowest ACoS, because it's very easy to retain your own customers. And that's going after, in this case, MaxBlastr HEPA Air Purifiers, for example. We want to bid on those. Those are branded terms. Generic terms, anywhere between 10 to 30%, it can be higher or lower, and vary based on, again, on the category and level of competition. And those are the generic unbranded terms just like air purifier and HEPA air purifier, et cetera. And the last, we've got the competitor terms, 30 to 50% ACoS, in some cases, it's much higher. Again, depend on how well the brand is known.

Shannon: And this is actually going after a specific brand, like Honeywell Air Purifier, Honeywell Air Filter, et cetera. So, those are the general ACoS sort of boundaries that you're going to typically deal with. So, target ACoS depends on level of competition, how competitive the keywords of the category is, the price and profitability of your products. If you have more profit margin, you can afford a higher ACoS. And your target growth strategy. In some cases, people say, "We want to do minimal advertising, let's be really profitable and just grow slowly." Other people are in huge growth mode, "Let's acquire customers, we know the long-term value," et cetera. And that's going to determine your target ACoS.

Shannon: So, this may seem like an over-simplistic concept, it's not, I promise you, it's so critical, and you'll understand why as we talk about the specific mistakes that we see a lot of brands make. The key to Amazon advertising is to advertise specific products for specific search terms. That's it. Specific products for specific search terms. And so, what I mean by that is, here's our MaxBlastr Air Purifier, and we're going to now start by advertising all the keywords that we just determined were relevant, in addition to the ones that we are going to include in our listing and in our title, we're going to just target all of them. And this is a really important part and goes beyond the aspect of just organically ranking, because advertising keywords impacts your organic rank. Just like we talked about at the beginning.

Shannon: So, if somebody searches for true HEPA air purifier, and I'm specifically bidding on that term, and my product comes up as a sponsored product listing at the top, and that customer buys that product and adds it to their cart and checks out, over time, my product is going to organically increase in rank for the term, "True HEPA air purifier." That's basically it. It's as simple as it is. Now, ACoS is not the only metric. A lot of people would just go off ACoS, but I want to take this and expand this to the next level. So, this is where we get a term called TACoS. I was told this was coined by a Teikametrics employee. Teikametrics does Amazon advertising, and they do software solutions, as well as done-for-you services. And the idea of TACoS is, your total acquired cost of sale.

Shannon: In this case, we look at our ad spend of $200, but our total revenue of our paid sales and organic sales of $2,000, and that gives us a 10% ACoS. And the reason, again, for that is, we're taking into account not just the direct sales that we're getting from advertising, but, as our products are advertised for specific keywords and they rank higher for those keywords, it's also helping generate organic sales. And that's why we look at TACoS as a holistic measure. So, that's why we say the best Amazon advertising strategy is to optimize keyword advertising for either profitability or ranking. So, you're going to advertise for profitability or ranking.

Shannon: And so, that's why it's so important to track the organic ranking for your products, so that you can circle back and see how effective it is. I love Jungle Scout, they've got a great tool to be able to track the product's organic rank for specific keywords. Again, you can just take all those search terms from our keyword research, dump them into Jungle Scout with your ASIN, and Jungle Scout will track the organic rank over time. Now, this is a pretty typical Amazon advertising structure. Again, if maybe you're not advertising, or you're already advertising, this is going to make a ton of sense to you. At the top level, we have a campaign, underneath, you've got ad groups, and then in each ad group, you've got products and keywords. Pretty simple structure.

Shannon: That said, the three biggest advertising mistakes that I see most brand owners make, is, number one, putting multiple products into one ad group. I see it all the time. We were helping a client last week, and just looking at all of these products, all just thrown into one ad group. And the problem is, you can't determine which product is being advertised for which keywords, or which product converted for which keywords. It gives you bad data. The second one that we see most commonly is putting multiple ad groups into a single campaign. And the reason for that is because Amazon does not equally distribute or allocate your budget amongst multiple ad groups. So, Amazon may take your $100 budget and spend 90% of it in one ad group, and only 10% in another, and you can't tell Amazon that you want to spend more in one ad group than another.

Shannon: And so, again, you may not be able to advertise the products that you want to, in those other ad groups. Lastly, so critical, again, putting branded, generic, and competitor terms all together. Now, if you go back to that original slide, it's going to make sense. We want to see what our branded search terms are, our generic, and our competitor. And when we put them all in the same ad group, we can't see that data. And so, the key is, as a brand owner, to know the percentage of sales coming from my branded terms, which are retaining my current existing clients or customers, generic terms, which represents growth, and then competitor terms, which really represents aggressive growth. And be able to bid and budget appropriately for those three different categories. Does that make sense?

Shannon: Here's why Amazon advertising best practices are, number one, one product per ad group, even for multi-packs. Because if you've got a one-pack and a six-pack, those are different average order values. You can afford to spend more on the multi-pack than the single. So, separate them into separate ad groups. One ad group per campaign, and then separate your branded, generic, and competitor campaigns, so that you know what your conversion and your cost is for each of those. Are you guys getting this? Is this making sense? I'd love to get feedback. I'm sorry, I can't see all of you. Wish this was live in a big auditorium. But here we are on Zoom, and we're going to keep going. So, get to any questions at the end, if you guys have them.

Shannon: Last section, number three, protecting your brand using a trademark to protect your brand from competitors. So, we're going to talk about the benefits of this. Some of you guys may very rightly be thinking, "I don't know if I need a trademark." But I want to tell you a true story, my dad worked for a company, a real estate company for many, many years when I was growing up, and 10 years into the business, they never got a trademark for their company, they never got a trademark for the brand. And another company came along and said, "Hey, by the way, we got the trademark on your company name, and you have to change it." And they had to rebrand everything. I mean, every business card, every legal document, all their marketing materials, all their signage. Everything was incredibly expensive, and they had to redo everything and start over from scratch. You've got to protect your brand.

Shannon: And even if you're a private label looking to go to the brand level, it's absolutely essential. Benefits of a trademark, number one, you get access to Amazon Brand Registry. This gives you three primary things. Number one, it gives you Detail page control. This means you can control the content on the Detail page, the product images, the features, the title, A+ content, and the videos, especially if other people have been selling your product on Amazon before you got there. Number two, trademark enforcement. It keeps other people from using your brand name in their products. If you don't have a registered trademark, they can do whatever they want, and there's nothing you can do to stop them. Lastly, brand registered benefits, which I'll cover here briefly.

Shannon: So, A+ plus content, 60% of people scroll down and read the description, beautiful landing page style graphics that you can include here. If not, otherwise, you're just stuck with HTML text descriptions. You can do an Amazon storefront for your brand. So, if somebody clicks on your brand, instead of just seeing a generic search results of all your products on Amazon, you can take them to this beautiful mini-website, where you can have videos, and you can have call-outs and information, tell them your brand story, engage them, show them your full product line. For a lot of brands, it drastically increases their average order value. You can only get that if you've got a registered trademark.

Shannon: Brand ads, which give you premium real estate right at the top. Again, in conjunction with your sponsored product listings, really, really critical. Copyright enforcement. Nobody wants to spend hours scrolling through Amazon, trying to see if somebody else is using their images. You can upload your primary product images to Amazon's copyright infringement image search, and Amazon will search the entire Amazon database and pull up any listings that are using your copyrighted images. So, you can use their infringement tool in Brand Registry to file copyright infringements, trademark infringements, right inside the tool, super fast, super easy, but you've got to have a registered trademark.

Shannon: Some of you guys were thinking, "That's great, but I've got a problem with unauthorized resellers. So, can a trademark help me get rid of unauthorized resellers?" And the answer is yes. Using a trademark plus a warranty, you can create a material difference between your product and a product that a reseller is selling using a warranty. So, even though the products look exactly the same, you can create what's called the material difference, and that allows you to legally remove unauthorized resellers so that you can control the platform and you can continue advertising and winning the buy box on the platform. We did this a couple years ago, worked with a company called Table-Mate. They had not been on Amazon, and ignored the Amazon presence of the brand. And we got on there and it was just a complete mess, but they had a registered trademark.

Shannon: We got Brand Registry, we were able to kick off, I think, something like 135 unauthorized resellers, we were able to remove over 50 or 60 listings selling counterfeit products that had our trademark, using our copyrighted images. And we were basically able to take all the benefits of Brand Registry, our A+ content, storefronts and brand ads, and we took them to a million dollars the first year. And it all was because they had a registered trademark and Brand Registry. Now, some of you guys might be thinking, "That's great, but I don't know what kind of trademark to get." I'll outline it for you, no problem. There's two kinds of trademarks. The first is called a word mark. This is typically your brand name. In this case or example, Amazon. And then a design mark, which is your brand logo. In this case, Amazon with the little amazon smile.

Shannon: And ideally, you want to get both. But if you're limited on budget or just want to start with one, typically, an attorney is going to recommend you start with a word mark. You can talk to your IP attorney about that. Now, I know what you're just thinking, some brands are also thinking, "I don't know where to get started registering a trademark for our brand." You can use Amazon's IP accelerator to easily register your trademark with one of their pre-vetted IP accelerator attorneys. Just go to brandservices.amazon.com/ipaccelerator. And the cool thing about this is, if you register through IP accelerator, you're going to get access to Brand Registry benefits typically within 30 days, as opposed to the nine to 12 months that it may take a typical attorney to get your trademark fully registered.

Shannon: Are you guys enjoying the webinar so far? Again, throw it up in the chat bar, we'd love to hear what you guys are thinking, if you've gotten some really cool value out of it. We've covered launching your brand, again, using SEO, and integrating them to your listing, growing the brand using Amazon advertising, and how to protect your brand using a registered trademark. Now what I'd like to do is I'd like to share something really special with you guys. If you guys aren't interested, that's totally fine, I'll skip it. But if you are, just put yes or yes please or whatever in the chat box, and let us know that you guys would like to hear more. I see those popping up right now. I'll go ahead and do this.

Shannon: This is something that I've been working on the last five years, and it's called the Amazon Brand Success Academy. I spent five years of my life building and developing the most comprehensive online course for brand owners, and I'm going to really quickly take you guys through what this looks like and what it covers, just give you a little insight, and still drop some Amazon nuggets along the way. It's all about helping you optimize your listings, launch your products, increase sales, and retain control of your brand, again, without violating Amazon policy. Everything's in line with TOS. And real quick, high level, what you get. We've got six courses in the Amazon Brand Success Academy, you get access to all of them.

Shannon: Intro to Selling on Amazon. If you're not yet on Amazon, or just getting started, this is a great mini-course to go through, understand Amazon, how they think, how they operate, some fulfillment options and fees, there's also some market and competitor research. Setting Up your Storefront, which is not just about your seller bio, it's about building the whole infrastructure of your account, making sure that you've got all the tools and resources integrated so that you can be scalable. We cover health metrics and customer service training, tools to scale your business, really, really critical for growth. Amazon Listing Optimization. Obviously, the sexy one that everybody wants to get to first, but make sure you go through in order. SEO keyword research, titles, features, images, videos.

Shannon: And we also teach you how to do something that most brand owners don't know how to do, which is how to analyze your sessions and conversion. Most people don't even know where to find that report. You've got to be able to understand what's working, what's not working, and why. Our Launching New Products course, we cover campaigns and promotions, getting product reviews, obviously mentioning tools like FeedbackFive, as well as partnership and affiliate marketing using some off-Amazon marketing strategies to drive traffic and sales to your Amazon listing. This is a really, really valuable course, Amazon Professional Seller Issues. We talk about distribution enforcement in length, trademark and copyright infringement, as well as probably one of the most critical ones, suspension prevention and reinstatement.

Shannon: You've got to be prepared and do everything you can to prevent suspension. It happens to almost everybody. And for manufacturers, the number one reason that we see is late shipping, late merchant shipping. So, make sure you've got infrastructure in place to prevent that. The last course is just Amazon Flat File Templates. Sounds simple enough, but I don't think there's any other courses out there about it. Really complicated if you ever have used these Excel flat file templates, I'm going to walk you through exactly how to use them. You can activate Brand Registry, download a category listing report, which is a full download of all of your current Amazon listings that you're selling, as well as how to contact the catalog department or Brand Registry support when you're having issues escalating some of those problems.

Shannon: And the other cool thing that you get access to is our eComBootcamps. This is actually a fun event that we put together with eComEngine. It was sponsored by Payability last year. And we've got six incredible talks by some incredible Amazon experts, social media experts. It was focused on food brands, but I promise you, it will be relevant to any brand on Amazon. So, distribution enforcement, again, I spoke about customer service, we've got social media growth. Free access to the eComBootcamps. It's six hours of talks and Q&A sessions with Amazon and SEO experts. This is a really cool testimonial by Tammo Heeren, where he just said, "When we started to launch NAPGEAR, we had no idea what we needed to do to be successful on Amazon. Shannon's course on launching new products provides a great overview of the steps that needed to be taken so that an Amazon newcomer can be as successful as possible with their listing."

Shannon: So, just a really cool testimonial that it really works for anybody, whether you're an established brand or just getting started. This is one from George Clark, a manufacturer, really understanding the platform. And then, this is Nadia Khan, an incredible product and brand called Wabry Syrup. Her child cannot pronounce the word strawberry, he called it wabry, and so, she named it after that. But I just love these testimonials because it shows me the impact that it can make and difference in somebody's business, who's frustrated in trying to deal with Amazon or feels overwhelmed. Real quick, what you get, Amazon strategy training videos. So, we go through this and we teach you the strategies critical for success, everything from listing optimization, advertising, and building brand equity, which is a customer's perceived value of your brand on Amazon.

Shannon: And I think Amazon is a lot like a chess game. It's basically equal. The same rules, the same pieces, whoever has a better strategy is going to win. That's it. And so, the Amazon strategy training videos is the first piece that you get. We've got six courses, 30 lessons throughout all the six courses. And the first thing you get in every lesson is a strategy training video. You're also going to get access to Amazon seller resources. And these are going to help you do things like perform better SEO keyword research. I've walked through high level today, but show you a little more in depth, other strategies that you can use. Getting high quality product photos and writing copy that actually sells. So critical. It took me years to figure out all these different resources and tools, and you're going to get access to them in the course where you need them.

Shannon: So, we've got Amazon seller resources, the second part of it, and then our action steps to success. I've spent, again, years learning all the exact steps that you need to take to be successful, and I'm going to give you those action steps you need in sequential order. If you do it out of order, it's like changing the oil in your car and skipping steps, or doing it backwards. It's going to be a bad, bad news. There are certain things on Amazon that you want to do in a specific order in order to make sure things get set up correctly. Action steps to success. Lastly, or almost lastly, we've got access to a private Facebook group. So, you can get inside the Facebook group, ask questions, and there's even a Q&A section right inside the course, where you can pause the video or ask a question to get your answers that you need and the help you need.

Shannon: Becky, Avila had asked a question on a Facebook group, and she said, "I wasn't expecting all of my questions to be addressed, so thank you so much for the reply." This speaks volumes to this group's value. A lot of Facebook groups, you're going to get random answers, in this Facebook group, you're going to get access to me and other Amazon experts that we tag in the group to answer your specific questions. So, you know you're getting reliable, credible information. So, access to private Facebook group and Q&A section. And the last part is the over shoulder tutorial video tips. This is where we actually do a screen-share, narrative screen-share, showing you how to do the things that we just talked about doing. Amazon is a maze, 100%, and the narrative video screen-shares and the video tips are going to give you shortcuts to be able to achieve your goals quickly. So, huge value with the over the shoulder tutorial video tips.

Shannon: You'll also get access for a free additional employee. So, if you've got another employee with an email address at the same domain, you can actually give them free access to the course as well. Because we don't allow course sharing basically. If that wasn't enough, we're going to finish it up. I'm going to just going to try to make this as easy as I can for you guys, strategy training videos, Amazon seller resources, action steps to success, private Facebook group and a Q&A section, over the shoulder tutorial, video tips, and access for free additional employee for free. And basically, it's a one-time payment of 997, or even have an option that we just introduced a few months ago, you can do for monthly payments of 297, if that works out better for you.

Shannon: I think Colleen or Becky will go ahead and throw up the link to go ahead and get started on that. What I love about this is, it's a one-time purchase. Lifetime access, as long as the course is available online, you get access to all the new videos that we add to those courses, all the new resources. As Amazon makes updates, we make updates to the course, and it's like this living organism. So, it's like a live active subscription, but you only have to pay one time. This is really the most important part. Because of the time I spent in East Africa, we're actually committed to donating 10%, we donate 10% of all Amazon Brand Success Academy course sales to some of the organizations and individuals in East Africa that we worked with. And it helps empower them with things like microloans, and business skills, and higher education.

Shannon: This is Eric Mollel and Eric Kisivan, and I can tell you right now what they're facing with COVID. They are basically in the tourism business, and it's basically shut down. Amazon Brand Success Course Academy sales are essentially helping put food on the table right now, in this sort of dire emergency. It's so cool to see them also be empowered with that higher education and ability to grow their business. So, if you guys, for any reason, aren't satisfied, you get 30 days, go through the whole course, if you're not happy, just email us back, we'll send you a link, refund your money. So, literally, no risk, you can go through it and get all the information that you need and decide if it's a good fit for you.

Shannon: So, here's my promise to you guys, if you're a brand owner selling on Amazon, I guarantee that this will be the best investment you'll ever make. And again, if you're not happy, no problem, you can just grab that refund. The first three attendees to purchase, I'm going to give a free 60-minute Amazon coaching session, we charge $250 an hour for this. So, I'm just going to be watching the inbox once the webinar is over, the first three people who get their credit card out and are able to go ahead and purchase, you get a free coaching session, we'll go ahead and email you the link later to go ahead and get that booked. I know some of you guys are thinking, "Look, selling on Amazon is too complicated." It's true, it is, but the Amazon Brand Success Academy, you're really going to make it really easy. That's what we've worked really hard to do.

Shannon: I'd say, if anything, my talent is just taking lots of really complicated information, and organizing it and making it really simple for other people to understand. So, if you found this webinar helpful, and found that I was able to explain, whether it was SEO or advertising, in a way that really made sense for you, just imagine that sort of the courses of that on steroids. So, again, the link will be in the chat bar, but you can go to marketplacesellercourses.com/ecomengine. Again, 997, or you guys can do the four-month payment option. But we have crammed through some incredible content, and now I'm excited to get into some of the questions for the Q&A. So, Becky, thanks for jumping back on, and do you want to talk about the free brand monitoring checklist?

Becky: Sure. This is just a resource that we've created at eComEngine to help you monitor everything that you need to be paying attention to for your brand online. It's just a really simple checklist that you can download. And Colleen has got the link to that in the chat, my colleague there. And then, yeah, Shannon's told you a lot about the Amazon Brand Success Academy, and it's an awesome opportunity. So, I don't know if we want to get into Q&A, or if you had anything else to cover there, Shannon.

Shannon: Yeah, let's see what questions people had. I'd love to spend the next 15 or so minutes before we wrap up, with any questions that anybody has either about the course, Amazon, SEO, advertising. I know there's usually ton of follow-up. So, yeah, let's go ahead and dive in.

Becky: Yeah. The first one you got was, "What is the back end of search terms?"

Shannon: What is the back end of search terms. If you're going into your listing and interactive listing tool, there's a section, I believe it's called Search or Keywords, and you'll see a field marked Search Terms in there. And that's where you're going to find that section. It's a little confusing that we use the term Search Terms to identify a field in Amazon, as well as just the keywords that you're ranking for, but that's kind of it. In a flat file template in an Excel template, it's actually called, I think, Generic Search, or Generic Keywords. There's a section that people see called Platinum Keywords, and I usually go into seller accounts and just see tons of keywords in there. It doesn't do anything, so, ignore the Platinum Keywords, just put them in the Search Terms.

Shannon: And a really important note on that, Amazon caps it out at 250 characters, including spaces. If you go over that Amazon, will not index anything. So, make sure that you stay within that limit. And if you want to have your auto campaigns for advertising be really relevant, excuse me, then make sure that you're not putting in any other sort of irrelevant terms or whatever. You can't put in a competitor brand terms or anything like that. But make sure that you are using best practices for search terms for sure.

Becky: Great. And then we got, "What is the maximum keyword we should put in an ad group?" I think it's the maximum number of keywords.

Shannon: Yeah, there isn't a maximum keyword. Destaney Wishon at BetterAMS is a great thought leader. You can follow them, they just are revamping their YouTube channel. So, just search BetterAMS. And they were the ones who really talked about this idea, as long as you're separating the categories of the keywords that you're trying to go after, they can put hundreds or thousands. Because, again, as long as they're all in one ad group and you can allocate 100% of your campaign budget to the ad group, Amazon will show it all day long. One side note about that with advertising is, Amazon likes momentum. I see sellers, again, create campaigns called October 2018, and then Fall 2020, and they just run that campaign for like a month or two. It doesn't have time to build up steam and get data.

Shannon: So, you want to make sure that you're really running your campaigns long term. Let's say, for example, if we were going after air purifier, and then there was a tangential term that we want to go after that was maybe a little more risky, we would want to put those in a different campaign. But there's really no maximum that you can put in a single ad group or campaign, it's just about the budget that gets allocated to that campaign. And as long as you got budget, Amazon will show the ads and the products.

Becky: Great. Let's see, "With TACoS, does it mean I should spend 10% of my revenue for advertising on average?"

Shannon: No. Again, it totally depends on, again, what the profit level or margin of your product is, the level of competition for your category, and what your growth strategy is. In a lot of cases, generally speaking, most brands are going to say, "I don't want more than 30 to 40% of my sales coming in from ads, I want to be able to get a certain amount that's generic. Because if I decrease advertising or anything happens, I don't want my sales to just tank." So, the goal is, you want to have a percentage of organic sales certainly. And a lot of brands, again, are targeting maybe a 30% ACoS. But within that 30% ACoS, some keywords are going to convert at 10%. So, it means, if you want to, you can include keywords that convert at 60%, as long as you're getting sales.

Shannon: And if at any point you feel like a keyword is just too high ACoS, just decrease your bid on the keyword. You don't have to pause it or stop it. If it's generating sales, it means it's a relevant keyword. If you're not getting the ACoS you want, just decrease the bid until you're able to match it up. You're going to get fewer sales, but you'll show up on page two or three, and your conversion rate should still be the same.

Becky: Great. And then someone asked about the Facebook group, I believe that's part of your course. Right?

Shannon: Right. It's exclusive to customers who purchase the Amazon Brand Success Academy. And like Becky and other Amazon experts from different fields, from customer service, and accounting, are all in that group, and we'll tag them if a question comes up. But, yeah, that is a invite-only with course purchase approval, if that was part of the question.

Becky: Yep. All right. "If my organic sales and conversions are already very high, do you think PPC is still valuable to grow?"

Shannon: Yeah, that's a good question. Amazon, more and more, is becoming a pay-to-play platform. So, again, it depends on the category. In some cases, you don't have a lot of competition, that's fine, or you're happy with your current sales and you don't really care to grow. That's fine. Make sure that if somebody searches for the brand name, that you don't have a ton of competitors doing advertising at the top, and it's always worth testing. I think some brand owners are concerned that if they advertise in their own brand name, they're going to cannibalize their organic sales, which, yes, can happen to some extent, but it's going to be a really, really low ACoS.

Shannon: What I encourage the company that came to me with this exact question a month ago or so was, we used Helium 10 to use a reverse ASIN lookup of the keywords that they were organically ranking for, but in positions like between 12 and 18. So, basically at the bottom of page one. 66 or so percent of sales come to the top three listings for an organic search. So, we said, "Look, target the terms that you're pretty far down on the page for, and if you can drive additional sales using that keyword, you should be able to track it again using Jungle Scout, the increase rank organically. And then you're going to really be able to see, 'Okay, is the advertising actually making a difference in my organic sales and my organic ranking?'" So, I'd say that's probably a pretty safe recommendation.

Shannon: If you're already ranking for it, Amazon already knows the product is relevant for that search term, but it doesn't mean you should just, again, turn on ads and throw tons of money at it, it has to be done very smartly and calculated. And again, it just depends on your growth strategy. If you're happy with sales, great. If you want to grow, then advertise.

Becky: Yeah. And then we got, "We shouldn't duplicate the keywords in our title in the Search Term section, but can we duplicate it on the Features section?"

Shannon: Yes. Yeah, you can definitely reinforce. Now, this is another really cool point. For example, A9 algorithm says you don't need to duplicate keywords in your listings. That's fine. But Google likes to see what they call reinforced keywords. So, they like seeing it in your title, and in your product features, and in your description. And you'll notice, if you do A+ content, when you upload an image, it asks for an image keyword. That's also called an alt text or alt tag. And Google indexes that. And what we see is, more and more companies and brands, their Amazon listings are ranking for organic search terms on Google, and Google's actually driving tons of organic traffic to their listing, if they've optimized their SEO with a sort of reinforced strategy, repeating keywords throughout the page.

Shannon: And there's a really cool tool I posted on LinkedIn the other day, it's called Traffic Insights, and it's a tool called Sellerly by SEMrush. And you can actually put in your ASINs and see where that traffic is coming from. So, you can look at competitors' listings and see where they're getting their Google traffic from, you can put it in your own listings and see if you're getting organic traffic from Google, and that can be a really cool insight to help you optimize your listings not just to rank in Amazon, but to rank your Amazon listings in Google, based on their domain authority.

Becky: Very cool. And then switching gears a little bit, Coleen answered this, but I want to give you the chance to speak to it a bit. Someone said they were having issues submitting their Brand Registry application. They did what you said, and it says there's one under review, but they can't see a status at all, and there are no cases. They're not sure what to do, whether they should retry or get on and walk through it with you, or if you have any recommendations. And Colleen had pointed out your Amazon Brand Registry blog post, which I think is really helpful. I don't know if there's any more insight you want to share there.

Shannon: Yeah, that's pretty strange. Typically, if you have a registered trademark, and you have the registered trademark number, not just a serial number, but a trademark number, and it has the word mark for your brand in that trademark, then you should be able to see that pretty quick. We usually see Brand Registry turn around pretty quickly, in three or four days. If it takes longer, in some cases, we've seen it take up to a week, you might be able to reach out to Brand Registry support, but I think they limit it until you actually get a brand enrolled. So, it's the whole chicken and egg challenge. I would say, if you haven't heard anything in a week, you could, at bare minimum, open up a case with seller support and ask them to pass it to Brain Registry and see if they're able to do that.

Shannon: If not, Brand Registry support, there is an email address for them, and maybe we can get that information to that person later. But there's not a direct way to telephone Brand Registry support. But typically within a week, if you don't see anything happening, you might want to follow up on that.

Becky: Okay, great. And then someone asked if this applies to vendors rather than sellers. So, your course is really designed for sellers, can vendors benefit?

Shannon: Yeah, great question, and something we didn't have a full chance to cover today. The Amazon Brand Success Academy is primarily focused on Seller Central. The only things that are really going to be relevant are some of the listing optimization, and some of the advertising pieces. Distribution enforcement can as well, but in terms of the benefits that we've seen been migrated from Vendor Central to Seller Central over the last couple of years with Brand Registry, we've seen a massive migration of a lot of brands saying, "Hey, let's migrate from Vendor Central to Seller Central," and there's three primary reasons for that. Number one, they can control their pricing better. They can set their own pricing. Two, they control their inventory. And three, they can control the customer experience better.

Shannon: So, you can't send feedback five emails if you're using Vendor Central, you can't regulate what Amazon sells your product at using Vendor Central. Seller Central, you set the prices, you set whatever the price is for the product, and you control the inventory, and you can do everything now in Seller Central that you couldn't in Vendor Central with Brand Registry. So, all the A+ content, your brand ad, storefronts, it's available across for both of them. So, something to consider, but the courses are primarily for sellers and brands using Seller Central.

Becky: Okay, great. And then, back to keywords, there's a lot of questions about that.

Shannon: Yeah, that's good.

Becky: "In your example of the air purifier product, you said not to include keywords in the search terms, if they were already included in the product title. Can you expand on why that is, why not include the keyword, air purifier, in the search terms also?

Shannon: Two reasons for that. Number one, the title is actually just the most highly weighted search field. So, think of that as your primary search field, and then the search terms in the back end are additional. That's why you want your most important keywords in the title. Number two, Amazon tells you not to do it. So, if you look at their policy and best practices, they tell you not to do it. And number three, it's typically taking up space for other keywords that you could be including in your search term. And because you're capped on that 250 character limit, you don't want to put keywords that are already in your title. A quick note on that, you don't have to do stemming. So, purifier, purified, purifies, Amazon knows those are all the same keywords. You don't have to do that.

Shannon: But, if you do a different word like house or home, you can put the alternate keyword in your search terms and it's going to help, it's going to help. Don't do typos as well. I see a lot of people saying, "Oh, do typos." Amazon knows what a typo is. They're going to find the keyword.

Becky: They're not fans, based on the new updates, the communication guidelines. All right. And then someone asked, "What do you recommend for a brand who is listing a product in a new market that doesn't get much generic volume?"

Shannon: Yes. Okay, listing a new product in a category market that doesn't have a lot of generic volume. This is true for a lot of innovative products. And the key to this, if there's no SEO, you've got to focus on off-Amazon marketing and partnership marketing. So, if I've got a cool baby product that nobody's ever seen before, nobody's searching for. It's amazing, it's going to really help moms, but they don't know it exists, so, they're not going to search for it. So, this is where like, going after affiliates, mommy bloggers, influencers, YouTube, Facebook, really, really critical to introduce them to your product, and then use Amazon as the preferred sales platform. Why? Because Amazon already has everybody's address and credit card information stored, right?

Shannon: People convert higher on Amazon than any other website. So, I think basically, the goal is to go through and make sure that you can figure out where your audience is, and get in front of them. But video is almost always a critical aspect of that, and would highly recommend companies, if you've got an innovative product, you've got to invest in video. Because people have to see it to believe it, you've got to show them how it works, and then get those videos in front of influencers, affiliates, and partners who have your audience, that they can share it with them, and then just drive that traffic to Amazon.

Becky: Awesome. And then another Brand Registry question, someone says, "I publish niche products, and would want maybe 10 to 20 products on Amazon. Does it make sense to do Brand Registry for a small number of products?"

Shannon: Absolutely. I mean, again, if you don't, anybody can just take whatever your brand name is and use it on their product. There's literally nothing stopping them. And again, depending on how serious you are, making the investment in brand registering or trademark, you get access to all these benefits that are going to be able to increase your sales that you otherwise wouldn't have access to. So, if you're serious about growing it and building it, you want to make the investment. Again, if somebody else buys your trademark first, you're going to have to get kicked off. So, again, that example that I gave about my dad's company, very real, depends on how serious you are and the investment that you make, but it's probably going to, if you leverage it correctly, should generate increased sales, just by using the benefits of Brand Registry for sure.

Becky: Great. So then, next up, "If I'm ranked in the 12 to 18 positions for a keyword that I'm very relevant for and want to grow organically, do you recommend running an exact match campaign to grow my organic ranking, or something else like branded ads, video ads, phrase ads, broad, or another type?"

Shannon: Yeah. I would say, because 70% of sponsored sales or advertised sales are sponsored product listings, and it again, goes back to specific product, specific keyword, I would, at minimum, do phrase and exact, you could also include some broad match as well. But again, if they searched that exact term, but add on a couple additional words, it's still going to help you rank better for that term. So, there's nothing wrong with doing broad. But always bid higher for exact than phrase, and higher for phrase than broad. And using that strategy going after those keywords, again, same ad group, you should be able to quantify the impact that it's making.

Shannon: And in some cases, people will create a whole separate campaign just called ranking campaign. And in some case, you could say, "Okay, this campaign is just set up to track ranking for this keyword," and see how that impacts it. But you could probably put several in there. But again, if somebody doesn't search that exact term, then it's not going to show up at all. So, using the phrase and broad can help that, but make sure you're bidding more on the exact than phrase, and more on phrase than broad.

Becky: All right. And then I think, one final question, I know it's three o'clock and some people have to jump off. "Can you advertise your Amazon listing on other paid social media ads?"

Shannon: Yes, yeah. And I've checked that both with Google and Amazon and Facebook, no issue doing that. There's actually a really cool tool called LandingCube, if you want an intermediary. And what LandingCube does is, you put in your ASIN, and it builds out basically a landing page for it. And you can add additional videos, if you're launching a new product. And you've got product reviews from your website, you can add that to the landing page. And instead of driving traffic to an Amazon listing, where the customer is going to see all of the other sponsored products and other ads and related products and stuff and may very quickly click away, LandingCube is going to give them a landing page for that product, and then they can, from there, once they're committed, make the decision to buy the product on Amazon.

Shannon: You can include coupon codes, you can ask for email address opt-ins or that kind of thing, but you're driving that traffic off Amazon to an intermediary. But, yeah, people do it all the time. And in fact, the Amazon storefronts, you can actually create what's called a custom tag, to be able to track incoming sales and revenue from third party channels like Facebook.

Becky: Cool. Well, this was fantastic. Thank you, Shannon, so much for sharing your expertise with all of us today. I know people had a lot of questions, and I expect you'll get some follow-up in your inbox. Thank you to everyone for attending, we appreciate you spending the time with us, and we'll see you next time.

Shannon: Yeah. Thank you, guys, so much for having me. Thank you, everybody, for attending.