The D2Z Podcast

How to Scale Your Brand on Amazon, Walmart and More! with Will Haire - 121

• Brandon Amoroso • Season 1 • Episode 121

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In this episode of D2Z, join Brandon Amoroso as he chats with Will Haire, co-founder and CEO of BellaVix, a leading agency known for skyrocketing brand growth on platforms like Amazon and Walmart. With over a decade of experience in digital marketing and a deep dive into marketplace dynamics, Will shares invaluable insights on evolving e-commerce strategies, navigating platform complexities, and capitalizing on advertising innovations. Tune in to discover practical tips on expanding your brand's reach and optimizing marketplace performance, making this a must-listen for entrepreneurs aiming to make a significant impact online.


Here's what you'll learn:

🚀 How to Scale Brands on Major Marketplaces

📈 What Changes in Amazon's Platform Mean for Sellers

🔍 Why Understanding Marketplace Evolution is Crucial

🌟 How to Effectively Launch and Grow Your Brand Online

🛒 What Strategies Work Best for Customer Acquisition and Review Generation

🚧 How to Navigate and Overcome Common Marketplace Challenges


Timestamps

🌐 Will's Background and Transition from Google to Amazon (00:00:00)

📊 Evolution of Amazon and Walmart Marketplaces (00:01:40)

📈 Strategies for Brand Growth on Marketplaces (00:03:33)

🎯 Effective Customer Acquisition and Advertising Strategies (00:08:09)

💡 Navigating Amazon's Complex System (00:10:56)

📅 Preparing and Strategizing for Q4 (00:21:26)

🤝 Connecting with Will Haire and Concluding Remarks (00:24:24)


Will Haire

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/willhaire/

BellaVis - https://www.bellavix.com/


Brandon Amoroso:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/

Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/

X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon

Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/

Speaker 1:

I'm Brandon Amoroso, and this is the D2Z Podcast building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning into D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of retention as a service agency Electric, as well as the co-founder of Scaless, and today I'm talking with Will Hare, who's the co-founder and CEO at Bellavix, which is a top agency for growing brands across a variety of marketplaces. Thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 2:

Hey, brandon, thanks for having me. Man, I'm pretty pumped to be here and excited to talk about some of my favorite topics, which is growing brands, on marketplaces and how we scale their agency.

Speaker 1:

Before we jump into all that, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, sure. So I've been in the digital marketing game for probably 13 plus years now. I've always worked in agency life to some degree. My background is advertising. I started out at Google I think Google is the gateway to Amazon so I started off doing a lot of e-commerce brands through Google, seo and PPC, and then eventually got into Amazon, became the Amazon guy, and then, in 2018, I decided to start my own business, and we are hyper-focused on marketplaces, specifically Amazon and Walmart, and we've been doing that for about six years now. So it's been a heck of a journey.

Speaker 1:

How would you say the industry has evolved since you started today? What are some of the biggest changes, both positive and negative, that you've experienced?

Speaker 2:

Great question. I'm going to mainly talk to Amazon. Most of our brands are Amazon, so Walmart is just whatever Amazon is doing About 10 years ago. That's where Walmart is today. They are investing significantly into their e-commerce, but their customer journey is still like order online, pick up in store. So if you're a three-piece seller, Walmart is somewhere you should have a presence, but not where you should put a lot of investment. Walmart is somewhere you should have a presence, but not where you should put a lot of investment.

Speaker 2:

Biggest changes the platforms improved incredibly. When I initially started, they just rolled out advertising on Amazon. They didn't have these pretty graphs and all these targeting capabilities from pay-per-click programmatic advertising, contextual and intent-based ad placements on and off the platform to now streaming TV. As of January, you can now stream on some of the most popular service providers through Amazon and we can use that to really fuel top of the funnel. So, as an advertiser, that's really been some of the most exciting advancements. As an advertiser, that's really been some of the most exciting advancements.

Speaker 2:

Some of the biggest issues have really been around fees. It's getting more expensive to operate on Amazon. Not having reins on your brand causes issues. Knockoff products from China is definitely a problem and for brands that have retail distribution, map policy and map policy violations difficult to enforce and some of the things they can do in affecting your listing in terms of contribution can be really problematic. So there's lots of nuances when it comes to working with brands on Amazon, but it's all good. It's why you work with agencies and why we come up with methodologies to do this effectively.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I feel like Amazon's like the 800-pound gorilla in the room, which comes with its own pros and cons. I've heard great stories and then I've heard horror stories, like if somehow your account gets suspended or banned or you know, maybe you get reviews flagged or something and then you're sort of left to your own means to try and figure out how to work your way through that organization to get things back up and running. Oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

Brendan, there's a crazy. If you read Modern Retail I'm a big proponent of their media they put out they told the story of this married couple that sold diapers and somebody returned a soiled diaper and it got resold. Amazon didn't really check it to put it in the garbage pile, essentially, so it got resold. That person posted a one-star review with the picture of the soiled diaper and this couple scaled their business, where they both quit their jobs and they were doing this full time and that one negative review impacted sales so much that they had to close up the business. So you know, things like that happen and it was an FBA thing, like it was 100% Amazon's fault. They shouldn't have resold the product, but they weren't able to get the review chain. They weren't able to get Amazon to budget anything and ended up having them to close their business. So it's the wild west for sure to some degree, and Amazon can do a better job about protecting sellers, but sometimes they don't.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I think there's really no recourse, though in that case, I mean, what are you going to do? You're not going to, you know, go after, go after amazon? Um, yeah, but how? What do you think about what they're doing when it comes to things like amazon basics and stuff like that, because I've seen a lot of what could potentially be deemed, as you know, anti-competitive behavior on the platform, with some of those like staple products which I know I I buy because they're the cheapest and they have the most reviews, which I think is you know what a lot of people do yeah, yeah, you nailed it.

Speaker 2:

The antitrust lawsuit is definitely something that will come to fruition. I mean, if nina nina I think her name is nina khan that will go miss khan, because I know her last name's khan. Uh. But if continues to push, I think there'll be some changes. A big change that just went through is Amazon is now responsible for any issues in terms of supplement or topical products, so that Amazon can now be sued if a customer gets a bad breakout or it causes some issues.

Speaker 2:

So they're being really strict with their guidelines to let these types of products in. They're being really strict with their guidelines to let these types of products in In terms of Amazon Basics. They haven't confirmed nor denied. But what they have done, they shut a lot of their apparel companies. They stopped doing the mattress company Tuft Needle, for example. So they took about 68 of their brands and they closed them up, essentially saying we're not going to distribute them anymore.

Speaker 2:

They haven't confirmed nor denied that they used inside information to pick the products. I mean, one can extrapolate that. Yeah, they probably did, but I don't think there's any proof that went out yet. But I also look at it as, like you go to Target, you get up and up, you go to Walmart, you get whatever their brand is, so there is a certain place for it and it's like there's nothing illegal about having it. But it's like how they source their products and how they compete in the marketplace and how they make it fair to other sellers is what's going to be kind of fixed, what's going to be uh kind of fixed.

Speaker 2:

So we'll see. We'll see kind of what happens with that. It is really interesting, so we'll see how it plays out. But I mean, this is something that's going to go on for the next five years at least, so we won't probably see any any change that makes a difference for a few years. But the fact that they already shut down a bunch of their, their basic brands, uh, is a pretty good sign that they they realize that they may be in a little bit of trouble, so they're getting ahead of it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I think that's probably the right thing to do I mean, not even getting into the whole different lines of business that they have and the way that they can use profits from other you know completely different entities and essentially companies to be able to, you know, keep afloat some of these other, some of these other uh, you know marketplaces or product lines that they have. It's uh, it's, it's very interesting. But enough about the uh, the big bad, you know, side of of of Amazon when it comes to you know, the way that you think about growing a business on the platform. You know, I'm assuming you don't say yes to every single client that comes through the door. So what are the things that you're looking for that make you feel like, you know, yes, this is somewhere that we'll be able to add value and there's potential here.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, a couple of things that are really key. It's like the brand. Like we don't work with resellers, so like they need to have their own brand. You're working on building their brand. We do take some cold launches, but another big part of it is like do they have the investment necessary to achieve some type of scale? So we're looking for even getting started. Like, if you don't have about a $5,000 a month budget for advertising on a small catalog we have about a $5,000 a month budget for advertising on a small catalog we're not going to be the right organization for you.

Speaker 2:

A lot of our tactics involve advertising and using full funnel tactics to get your customers. So for brands that are potentially running out of their garage or they're not investing that heavy, then they're generally not going to be a good fit. In terms of the categories, it varies Our strong suits we have lots of supplement brands, pet brands and beauty companies, so we've been pretty fortunate. Those are like our three sectors that we specialize in, and the tactics that go into it's going to be different for every brand depending on what they're doing, and some products crush it off the bat and a lot of it's just good product market fit, not a lot of competition and we can research a lot of this ahead of time to understand what the impact of what we'll be doing will have. And then other times it's just a saturated market and we need to invest heavy in order to get that initial market share, in order to get reviews and sales velocity and kind of ramp it up that way.

Speaker 2:

So it varies, but at the minimum we're working with businesses that are doing at least $2 million a year. If they're cold launches, they have some type of investment from private equity or they've raised some type of funding for us to get started, and nine times out of 10, for us to get started and nine times out of 10, there's two ways. They either start on Amazon to prove that it has a unique proposition, they have some type of unique selling proposition and then they roll out to the website. But more often than not I find that companies will start on their website. They'll get initial sales and then they'll want to move over to Amazon, and personally I think that's better, because then we're tapping into something that they're already starting to build the brand. They're already getting a customer base. So it makes cold launches a little easier on the platform instead of doing it the other way around, but there's no right way or wrong way.

Speaker 1:

What are some of the ways that you go about that review generation aspect? Because that would be the most daunting thing for me if I was entering into Amazon, whether with a net new product or, you know, I have a Shopify store. Now I want to go into other channels, um cause, like I don't buy anything on Amazon that doesn't have, at least you know, 105 plus or 105 star reviews. Um, because, especially so many of the product categories are highly competitive. I mean, you have five, 10, 15, 20 competing solutions, all from various brands, depending on what you're purchasing. So how do you go about that initial review generation without also, you know, dipping into the area of some of those gray or black hat tactics that are going to end you up on the wrong side of Amazon?

Speaker 2:

So they will definitely catch you. We are actually like one of like 79 us agencies in the amazon service provider network, so everything we do is within amazon's terms of service. So the reviews are pretty cut dry. Uh, their result the sales velocity. We got to do a weekend to get sales velocity up.

Speaker 2:

They have the vine program so we can get up to 30 reviews on your products by enrolling them into the vine program. It's like two hundred dollars per per parent or per child, but it's $200 per ASIM, we'll just say and that's a great way to get your initial reviews. And then the request a review feature on the back end gives us the ability to solicit messages for emails and it's all through Amazon templates. So we're not doing anything crazy. Package inserts work really well, but you got to be careful of the language. Can't be asking for a positive review, you're just asking for some feedback, and the technology is so much better now you can link a qr code and all that fun stuff and then, outside of that, like so we'll do, we'll put those pieces in place to capture reviews as they come in. There's also the post purchase email sequence, which is another opportunity, and then outside of that you're just, we're going to be advertising.

Speaker 2:

So typically what we do is we run through the vine program and this is something very subjective than like like for a fragrance company, for example. You're probably not going to want to run through Vine because you're probably going to get like mediocre reviews because it's a very subjective type of product. So typically what we do is we would, we would just start advertising to get the initial purchases and we would focus like off amazon tactics in order to get those initial customers, because they're not, we're able to showcase the product at a different light and we're not competing against all the other products. It's a it's a little more of an expensive cost per acquisition, but that's the way to get the initial sales. And, to your point, like technically retail ready is like 15 reviews above four stars is like pretty good to start advertising or you'll start seeing improvement in efficiency in your advertising. But you brought it up earlier like you hit on that, like the goal is to get to like 100 reviews. When you get to 100 reviews, you know, then you could sway somebody from buying that more reviewed product because you're competing on something that might be missing and we'll be able to get traction to the listing.

Speaker 2:

So there are a couple of ways to go about it, but the biggest point is, like you know, don't take any shortcuts and just buy reviews. They will definitely catch you and use the tools that are on Amazon. They give us a lot of tools to get some of these reviews and then you're going to have to leverage some off Amazon tactics. We're an advertising agency, so I'm gonna recommend ads. I'm sure there's other ways you can go about it. And do be careful with friends and family. Like it's crazy how amazon's and it doesn't work 100 of the time. But like we had a brand we work with and they did. They did this without telling us, but the guy had that's always the best.

Speaker 2:

That's always the best when they go off, I know we got it shut down and then he like he didn't even really want to admit it, but he came out clean eventually. But he had his mom purchase a product and leave a review, but somehow the mom's account was connected to his account and then amazon flagged it and then, you know, took away that review and then found out more friends and family did it. So the listing got completely suspended. So we had to do like a plan of action and like go through a whole big song and dance to get them back on the platform.

Speaker 2:

And what was even more challenging it was like it was a new market brand, so like nobody knew this, we didn't have any sales velocity and we pretty much came in the door to say, yeah, amazon, we use unethical business practices. So it was difficult and required us to hire a lawyer to get them back on. There are legal services that specialize in this and we can only do so much. So we wrote the initial plan of action. It got rejected and then we had to bring in a legal service and they they used their scary lawyer language, which they went to school to get really good at that, and then they were able to like clean that up and get. We were able to list the product and start selling it, but yeah, we were out for like six months, like it was.

Speaker 2:

It was a long process to get it going because, like amazon's, in no rush.

Speaker 1:

It's your fault, so it was yeah, they've, they've got, you know, millions of sellers getting yeah, yeah, no, that it feels like Amazon is one of those platforms that you don't want to ask for forgiveness after the fact. You just want to, you know, never be in that situation, whereas typically, in most things, I would act first and then ask for forgiveness later. I would. I would not employ that strategy with uh very entrepreneurial mindset.

Speaker 2:

I tell my people that all the time ask for forgiveness. But to your point, there's certain areas where you're like no, you gotta, we gotta, play by the rules yep, yep, you, you have to ask for permission from from some, from some folks and from some platforms.

Speaker 1:

It seems like amazon is one of those uh platforms that things will just get easier over time as you scale more and more. You know, I'm assuming running ads for a company that has a product with 5,000 reviews is a lot easier than running ads for a company that has 50. So like, do you see sort of as the reviews and the social proof and everything continues to increase, that the cost per acquisition starts to decrease?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you nailed it. I give you guys some rough numbers because we do a decent amount of launches and there's unicorns all over the place. I could tell you about a pet company we just launched, but typically what we're looking at is your first three months. 80% to 100% of your ad spend is going to be to acquire customers. So you may even be acquiring customers. Typically you're acquiring customers that are lost because, like you know, the product has no reviews.

Speaker 2:

Uh, you know we don't really have any traction. Um, who knows what we're competing on? But generally from like the three month mark to that six month mark, we're improving that. So we should expect to be around maybe like 60 to 80. We use tacos total advertising cost to sell, which is just spend divided by your total sales advertising organic because they influence each other. So, like we should to be between 60 and 80. Um, by the time you're like 12 to 18 months, you know if we could be around 30 to 40 tacos like Like that's pretty good, that's average.

Speaker 2:

Mature brands we're typically shooting for like 20%. A mature brand has X amount of reviews, but they're generally over 18 months on the platform. Like every category is different, it could take a lot of reviews to break into a beauty category where a snack food category, for something really niche, you know it'd just be a hundred reviews and you're good. So it varies. But typically for like a brand that's, you know it'd just be 100 reviews and you're good, so it varies.

Speaker 2:

But typically for like a brand that's, you know, a good size brand selling a decent you know, let's say, over $100,000 a month, you know 20% tacos is where to go when we work with enterprise level brands. So now we're talking like when we worked with Instant Pot, for example, or Wilton, which is a huge cooking ware company. You know their tacos is like 5%, maybe 4%, but it's because they have such a large retail distribution People. You know, you know Instant Pot, you recognize it everywhere, so it's just it's synonymous with the category and those. You know we're looking at like under 5% tacos. But you know it varies. It varies on the maturity, it varies on how the customer sentiment towards your product, so a lot goes into it. So, yeah, hopefully that gives you guys some good baseline data to look at if you're launching on the marketplace.

Speaker 1:

What's like the minimum advertising budget that you would recommend for a brand if they're starting that new, like they want to get to that point that you're mentioning. But you know they got to spend to get to that point. So what's like the rough guidelines you would give for that?

Speaker 2:

so it depends how long you want to be in that uh awkward teenage phase. We'll say you know, you know we're talking minimum and it's like one product, like at least a thousand dollars, 1500, and you could probably just do basic pPC and some mid-funnel tactics, mainly conquesting. So going after competitor brands and going after competitor search queries, and that's kind of the minimum, typically because the brands we work with they want sales quick, they want to be profitable within six months, typically within three months. So we'd be looking for like $5,000 on the low end or maybe one to two SKUs to kind of get it going and then scaling it up from there.

Speaker 2:

And the 5K what we do different and what that 5K does, it's PPC, it's bottom of the funnel, it's programmatic advertising through Amazon demand side platform, dsp.

Speaker 2:

So we're going to do mid bottom of funnel retargeting anybody who visited your product page but didn't make a purchase, visited competitors pages but didn't make a purchase, and then catching people who's shown intent so they're either searching in market or they're searching or they've engaged content around what we're actually selling.

Speaker 2:

We're able to do that all through DSP and we could get them on and off the platform so we're able to capture them if they're browsing mobile applications or they're browsing websites. Everybody sees the banner ads when they show up and then we will add in a layer of streaming TV to keep that top of the funnel. But we'll keep it really targeted on a specific demographic or something that's shown intent and retargeting and then keep that going because we got to build that brand awareness and anybody who follows advertising Ogilvy, who's like the godfather of modern day advertising, it's like that exposure technique. They need to see it 20 or 30 times and so by having touch points at every phase of the funnel, gives us the opportunity to kind of pull more of those customers in and that's the most important part early on. And the goal is like how, what's our cost per acquisition? And then how can we get that as low as possible, as fast as possible, and it just takes time. You know repetitions in time.

Speaker 1:

Right, that makes sense. Well, I got one last question for you here. What is like the one tip or trick that you would recommend to anybody going into Q4 this year?

Speaker 2:

Oh, q4. That's a good one. One tip or trick? Okay, I got a couple of good ones but participate in all the holidays. So, like October, you have Amazon Prime Day 2.0, fall Prime Day it's had many names but you'll have Prime Day and it'll actually kick off in the season and it doesn't cannibalize sales from Black Friday Cyber Monday. Even if it's a minimum discount, always participate, because shoppers are going on there expecting some type of discount. So even if you just do a 5% discount, it's something and it will be enough to sway some of these shoppers.

Speaker 2:

The second biggest piece I'd say and I would focus this as November starts and even late October if you have the budgets for it but make sure that you're targeting mid and upper funnel pretty aggressively in the early phases to get shoppers who are going to go online. They're going to add stuff to cart and they're going to wait to see if it goes on sale by black friday and cyber monday. So, like, what a lot of advertisers miss is they just focus on that bottom of the funnel. They advertise, maybe they increase bids because demand increases, but they're not being proactive in their advertising strategies. So a big opportunity is to build that mid and upper funnel so that when it's go time and we get to that week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you have a larger audience of people who've engaged your content, who've engaged the market and who are potentially ready to make a purchase, so you'll be able to have a larger return on your investment. So you're going to eat it for a little bit and we're not talking like a ton, it's just your cost per clicks are going to be higher because demand goes up and your conversion rate is going to be a little lower because you're doing these mid and upper funnel tactics.

Speaker 2:

But, understand, you're going to be able to run that audience from Black Friday, cyber Monday all the way through December 22nd or 23rd and a lot of people don't realize this the week before the 22nd. So, like we'll just say, the 15th to the 22nd is as equal of a holiday as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, because they're all doing that last minute Christmas shopping. They're all trying to get that two-day shipping so that they can have great gifts for their kids. So you know, by fueling that funnel in November is going to give you outstanding opportunities to end your Q4 on a high note. And then don't forget gift card shoppers the last two weeks into January before you start scaling back spend and getting things in a place that's healthy for sure.

Speaker 2:

So hopefully that's a good tip for any of your audience listening and wondering what am I going to do for Q4?

Speaker 1:

Start spending now.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I like that.

Speaker 1:

Well, I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your insights. I know this will definitely be valuable for all the Amazon sellers, especially as they go into Q4 and hopefully don't get their wrists slapped either before before the holiday season starts. But before we hop, can you let everybody know who's listening, where they can find you online or connect with you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, awesome. Thanks again for having me, brennan. This was a lot of fun. It's wool hair like on your head with an E. You can track me down on LinkedIn. I post stuff pretty regularly, so feel free to check that out. And if you go to my website, bellavixcom V-I-Xcom, we have a newsletter you can subscribe to. We post updates on a weekly basis as things change on the backend and its implication to sellers. We have a huge audience that follows that, so it's a great opportunity just to stay ahead of the curve, as Amazon is always changing, which is great, keep me gainfully employed, but it's painful for the sellers we represent. We've got to keep on top of all these changes.

Speaker 1:

Well, again, I appreciate it for everybody listening. As always, this is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom, electricmarketingcom or Scalistai. Thanks everybody for listening and we'll see you next time.