Mountain Strategy & Flywheel Deep Dive

A 3 step strategy I’ve been telling brands to do on Amazon for years. 
 
 I call this “The Mountain Strategy”. I then go on to explain my “Flywheel Strategy”, where the flywheel represents your sales velocity. 
 
 In this episode you will learn:
 - a simple blueprint for any Amazon brand owner
 - what drives Amazon sales rank
 - using the data Amazon gives you
 - why Amazon advertising is a waste of time for some brands
 - why you should just copy Amazon 
 
 Everything I talk about ultimately revolves around these 2 simple models. 
 
 If you ever want to chat about them further, message me on LinkedIn

RESOURCES

Read our News Feed.

Book an Amazon Advertising audit.

Follow me on Twitter.

Amazon design examples.

Follow our team.

$85 to $117k in 45 days. 2-minute breakdown of what we did.

Message George.

Transcript

I want to go back to basics today and just look at two simple principles I've had with me since day one, working in Amazon at Amazon to then since leaving, develop these two fundamental concepts mechanisms, whatever label you want to give them. To think about when it comes to Amazon. Now, the first one is my mountain stretch on the left hand side of the screen here other than the second one is the flywheel effect, which we're familiar with when we think about Amazon, but I've kind of built this out slightly.
So first and foremost, we look on the left-hand side of the screen. The mountain strategy premise is quite simple. The premise is you, you can't send to another level on the mountain until you have completed the level you're currently on. So first we have operations. Second, we have brand third. We have advertising.
If we think about our operational base, the primary things to think about here is your delivery process. One of those big components is whether or not you offer prime delivery either. FBI or set up Phil prime and a top of that, your delivery promise as well as what's your merchant fulfilled delivery is actually a quick, fast delivery that you're offering, because that's going to come into kind of the whole mechanism here.
The second big component is how you stay in stock. How are you able to stay in stock for the whole year or you regularly dropping out? These are two big fundamentals that form your operational base, essentially. Can you offer. Can you say in-stock, there are other things that go into it, like your packaging, um, like what goes into your packaging?
These are all parts of your operations, but the crux of it really is those two now lose two and you're doing pretty well. Once you've nailed them. You then of move on to brand. When we think about brand, there are different brand touch points. The main touch points to be aware of. Are you sure what listing the listing is where the conversion happens?
That's where a, customer's going to add your product to baskets and ultimately hopefully go through and check out. So we want to be focusing on that brand touch point because there's an opportunity for us to convert the customers into potential buyers. And for that operational piece to kind of get kicked into kicked into gear.
Other touch points, include your storefront, a massive touch point there and ensure your content is equally good to your listing. And then you've got things like your packaging, your product in search or communications, um, when it comes to customer support, et cetera, all of these are brands sports as are off of ambers and activities as well.
Like with social media, the user-generated content you have going on there because the customers are more likely to obviously be going on social media now and checking out your presence. So ensuring that you've got good touch points across the board, but coming back that main one is the conversion piece, which is the list.
And what's becoming a big conversion piece obviously is your storefront as well. When you have been nailed that you're then in a position to ascend to that final level, which is advertising. Now, Amazon advertising is growing incredibly quick. Right now we saw that Q2 report. I think I heard 88% year on year growth in terms of their revenue from advertising.
We know it's expanding quickly. We know they're investing credibly heavily. Into that platform and it's catchment with Google and Facebook. So this is where we can kind of dial things up and start sending additional traffic. We're going to send it from Amazon itself. We're also going to look to send it from off of Amazon, through social marketing campaigns, as well as email marketing and other influential based things.
So influences or social as a whole. Now, the reason we nail these things in this order is because if you have the best advertising strategy on Amazon, the world, Influenced the pumping loads of engagements. You've got a phenomenal social marketing platform set up where you're pumping traffic light and no other from your Facebook campaigns back to Amazon, all thumbs up.
You're the best teams in the world work in it, but your brand is incredibly poor and you're not able to convert that traffic. Then it's just a complete waste of time. There was no benefit in the same token. If you work really, really hard and your brand, you spend thousands developing your storefront, developing your listing is getting images and videos on a copywriters or do these things.
It's a nail. Those two massive touch points off your listing on your storefront. Right? That's great. You're converse and the traffic. You're also getting organic traffic, big thumbs up. You're doing really, really well, but you're not able to stay in stock and you're not. I competitive delivery through prime, then the operational underbelly, is this going to mean your whole thing falls to pieces essentially, because it's really a matter of how good your conversion rate is or how great your advertising is.
If you're not able to fulfill those orders in a timely manner and stay in stock, you're not going to be able to succeed. So that is why we need to build it in this order of operations, then brand then advertising, because if you remove the order, And say you've got great advertising, great operations. It doesn't work.
You can't convert. If you've got great brand and great operations, you are then in a position you've already got that foundation things already working, and you can dial it up with the advertising. But if you have just two components, other than the bottom two, it's not going to work beautifully. And to really nail it.
It's obviously all three. What then happens then is we flip over to the Farwell on the right-hand side of the screen. For those looking for those listing, go have a look. Essentially what I'm trying to explain with the scent here is the faster that product firewall spins, the more sales we're making.
Okay. So our objective is to continuously push it. We want to push it like a roundabout to make it spin faster, to make the sales go faster and to make our sales rank. Great. So what we first do is we optimize that product page, that listing, like we talked about in the mounts of strategy there with the brand component, that touch point, we're optimizing our content to ensure that we're able to convert it and to ensure that we've got the right keywords in place.
So we can go get some organic ranking from the get-go. We're taking boxes out. That is the first push and the flower starts to spin. The sales starts come in and your organic, organic ranking stocks to improve. Next piece then comes the advertising, the marketing. This is where we start looking at Amazon advertising.
This Robbie started looking at social advertising, like we've discussed over on the amount of strategy piece. This is another big push. As we start sending paid traffic towards a listing. Obviously the flywheels go and spend, spend quicker because we're going in conversions. We're getting sales, we're going up the rankings and it's starting to.
Great. What then happens as the sound coming in is our feedback starts to increase. And if we're doing a great job with the optimization, obviously our feedback is going to be positive because we've explained the product well. And coming back to our operational base, if we delivered on time, create a good experience, the feedback also is going to be great.
So what that creates is a third push for us as those reviews start coming in. We're able to convert customers at a higher rate. We're also able to pay a higher in the rankings because we've got more positive reviews, which in turn is dragging more clicks to our page organically because they're seeing those positive reviews on page 1, 2, 3, 4, and a more likely to click through to, to our listing.
So that acts as an additional push and the flywheel goes again, right. And in theory, we could leave it like this and it would do its job. It would continue to spin because we'd optimize with marketed and we gathered feedback back is part one, but what the top Amazon sellers do, and the top brands and Amazon do is on a regular basis, right in the middle there of that product.
We're collecting shed loads of data. And what we want to be doing is extracting that data. So extracting it from our feedback, we're looking at the customer search terms that you're using. We're looking at the terminology they're using to describe that product. We're looking at the, the negative side use user, perhaps as well.
And we're addressing that where perhaps we've had a communication breakdown and not explain the product or how to use it. We're looking at everything to get rich customer insights from the feedback. What we're also doing is gathering data from our marketing campaigns. We're getting loads of data from that on an hourly basis what's working.
What's not. So we're extracting all of that data out. And one of the first things we'll be doing is we'll be throwing that back into the optimization piece. So we're going to re optimize our listing with this data. We now have, we're going to add new keywords. We're going to explain things differently.
We're going to add new images or new content or new videos. And that is going to act as another optimization push. So it pushed again, another big kind of shunt to get that flywheel spinning faster to everything's uplifted and it starts to get higher organic rank and the sales starts to increase, but we're also doing with that data is with probing it back into the advertising campaigns to make them more refined, to make them more active.
To make them more efficient to cut down the wasted spend and put that spend towards the winners. And that marketing is then pushed again. The advertising lever is and pushed again at the flywheel spins and the feedback increases. Yeah. And this fly will happen over and over and over. Yeah. And the top brands, what they're doing is they're regularly revisiting their feedback.
It is not a one-off task. They're regularly working and investing resources into their marketing. That advertising they're not seeing is a one-off task, the hiring agencies or in-house people to come in and focus on the Amazon advertising because they know the power it brings. And then they're working this flywheel over and over again.
So to reinforce for those, we're just listening and aren't watching right. We've got the optimization. That's the first push. The second push is the advertising. Boom, push it again. The third push is when that feedback comes in and maybe we've got something that inserts in play to encourage that feedback.
And then for the fourth piece that happens is that data starts to build, and we utilize that data to go back to part one re optimize and back the part to work on that marketing work in the appetizer again. And we repeat this process over and over. But these two work well together, the fly will have the amount of stretch you work in tandem.
Now the fly wheel works only if we've got the operational base through the amount of strategy. So this fire will kind of sits on top of the mountain and. You've nailed your operations. You nailed your brand and they're advertising. So they kind of sit one, one, and the same almost. It's just different ways to think about it.
But the premise is still the same in the fact that you need the operational base for the whole thing to work. Otherwise all comes crumbling down. So these two are simple ways you can think about your Amazon brand or Amazon business. And whenever it comes to kind of having conversations with disagreements, with people in your team, always refer back to these core components.
So when someone's push you hard gum, we need to spend more budget on advertising and you're going well, our brand's shit right now. It isn't a very good image. It's a low quality. We haven't got infographics. A plus is lackluster. All of these things just make your really strong arguments go. We shouldn't be doubling down on appetize and just yet we're not.
Yeah. Okay. We're not doing enough with our feedback at the moment. We're not able to stay in stock, you know, and these simple way of thinking about Amazon, it's going to allow you to create sustainable success. If you've got any questions on this, any thoughts or ideas or opinions, send me a message I'm on LinkedIn, more than happy to discuss it.
Further. Hope you enjoyed this hope you enjoy these mini deep dives. I'm going to be exploring a bit more. And if you've got any suggestions of many deep down, she would like me to come in. Ping me a message and I'll get them done. Cheers for now. Bye.