The D2Z Podcast

Mastering Amazon - 138

• Brandon Amoroso • Episode 138

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In this episode of D2Z, host Brandon Amoroso speaks with Daniela Bolesman, CEO of Mindful Goods, about the intricacies of navigating the Amazon marketplace. Daniela shares her journey from a marketing background to establishing a niche agency focused on optimizing Amazon product listings. The conversation delves into the importance of specialization, the evolution of Amazon's ecosystem, and strategies for new brands to succeed on the platform. Daniela emphasizes the need for continuous testing and adaptation in a rapidly changing environment, as well as the significance of maintaining a focused approach to service offerings. The episode concludes with practical tips for brands looking to enhance their presence on Amazon and insights into the future of social commerce.

Here's What You'll Learn:
❗Narrowing down to a niche can lead to greater success.
❗Staying focused on your core competencies is crucial.
❗Testing creatives on Amazon is essential for optimization.
❗Brands should not rely solely on paid advertising for success.
❗Understanding SEO is key to getting found on Amazon.
❗The landscape of Amazon is constantly evolving with new tools.
❗Brands can still succeed on Amazon without a large budget.
❗Social commerce is an area Amazon is working to improve.
❗Maintaining multiple sales channels is important for stability.
❗Clear and appealing product listings drive conversions.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to E-commerce and Amazon
02:57 Narrowing Down to a Niche
06:07 Staying in Your Lane: The Importance of Focus
09:02 Adapting to Changes in Amazon's Ecosystem
11:47 The Evolution of Amazon Listings
14:59 Strategies for New Brands on Amazon
17:53 Navigating Challenges in E-commerce
20:59 The Future of Social Commerce on Amazon
23:58 Final Tips for Amazon Success

Daniela Bolzmann:
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dbolzmann/
Mindful Goods - https://mindfulgoods.co/

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:

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm a Gen Z entrepreneur, a former founder of Electric and now the co-founder of Scaless, and today I'm talking with Danielle Bolesman, who's the CEO and founder of Mindful Goods, which is a go-to one-stop shop for high-quality Amazon product pages and storefronts for e-commerce brands. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, pleasure to be here. So, before we dive into things, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself and how you got into the exciting world of Amazon?

Speaker 2:

Sure. So my background is actually more on the marketing and tech side and after exiting my last startup, I was very interested in getting into the e-com space and was trying to decide if I wanted to go more of the D2C route or the Amazon route and ultimately ended up going down the Amazon route and, as you know, that is its own beast in itself. So once I did that, I started off actually this agency as a full service Amazon agency, actually this agency as a full service Amazon agency. After a couple years of pulling my hair out, I realized that we needed to niche down and really specialize in one piece of the puzzle which became our zone of genius, and that is the SEO and creative optimization to help brands convert better on Amazon.

Speaker 1:

What was the process like for you to sort of come upon that realization and then decide you know, this is what it is that we're going to hone in on within the Amazon ecosystem?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the process for me because I have a marketing background was I was realizing we were creating unique strategies for every single client. Every client, every product is in kind of a different category. There's different budgets, there's different stages that they're at, and we realize that not every brand should be doing everything at once. There's different things that they have bandwidth for, there's things that they have budget for and there's things that they don't, and so that becomes a really hard thing to do at scale and I realized we were just capping ourselves at the number of clients we could bring on and stressing ourselves out. To be honest, we were doing all the things and I can't say we were doing anything. Well, our clients loved us because we were very hands-on, but that can only take you so far. So in that realization, I started really just figuring out what are all the things that we've taken on, because we were a yes team. We would say yes to everything. They wanted a landing page? We would build a landing page. They needed help on their Shopify? We would help with the Shopify. They needed help with, you know, running ads we would run ads. Needed help prep and ship. We would say, yes, we'll do that. Need a chat bot We'll build that were just doing all the things and that really stretched our bandwidth and once I realized that we know how to do all of these things. It doesn't mean that every client needs all these things or we should be doing all these things, but what is the common thing that every brand needs and they need to be doing well on Amazon and within that, what is the piece of the pie that actually brings our team joy that we could do day in and day out for the next 10 years and still be satisfied and fulfilled and happy. So it was just as much like a personal introspection as it was a skill evaluation, a team evaluation, a strategy evaluation, all of that.

Speaker 2:

And initially I didn't offer that piece of it publicly. I started offering it to our retainer clients and then actually clients that came to us and they couldn't afford our retainers, but I knew that they were a good fit for that specific offer. I would say you know what? You don't have the budget for our retainer. I get that, but one of the things that you absolutely need to do is make sure that your listings are top-notch and converting before you go and spend all this money on ads. If you want, we can help you with just that one piece at this one set price, no retainer obligation. So we started kind of the training wheels of doing that and building the process behind that right when we're about six months into that before COVID hit.

Speaker 2:

We were about six months into that before COVID hit and when COVID hit, all of our retainer clients wanted out of their contracts because everyone needed to stay cash liquid. Everyone was changing their strategy, scared about their money, scared about everything, and I completely understood where everybody was at. So I basically just said, you know what I get it? Totally fine, I let anybody who wanted out of their contract out of their contract. And I realized, you know, totally fine, I let anybody who wanted out of their contract out of their contract. And I realized we need to just flip our model at this time and we went from offering retainer on our website to turning that off and just straight offering listing optimization services, just flat rate. And so all of those tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of brands that had their retail doors close on them had to be selling on Amazon almost immediately, and so we were, within 30 days, just flooded with orders that ended up being, you know, 3x what our retainer clients were paying us. So after that moment we just never went back, you know.

Speaker 1:

That definitely helps with the decision-making process.

Speaker 2:

Mm-hmm yeah.

Speaker 1:

But it was.

Speaker 2:

I'm glad we had already thought through that and had already built out the process before we like decided to make this the change.

Speaker 1:

You know it really helped us that we were prepared for that moment, how do you deal with not getting pulled in directions that you might not want to go but could be the next shiny object or the next revenue that you could take on?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Because I remember finally being able to say no took a while, it took a long time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean almost immediately when I made that decision, we were able to start saying no, and I mean we still get asked today do you do Walmart, do you do Shopify? Do you do all these other things where it's like, yes, we very easily. Could you know whether it's us doing it internally or we have very strategic partners that could do it? We could outsource it, but it's not our bread and butter and it's not how we market ourselves, and I've noticed we've become so, so good at staying in our lane and staying in our zone of genius. It's allowed us to become experts, and so anytime that we stray away from that, the experience for the client declines. Right, like we don't have a process built out for it. It's not our zone of genius. We're kind of, we're trying to help them, but it's not our our zone of genius. We're we're kind of, we're trying to help them, but it's not where we, where we have built our process to be. So, in that sense, we mostly say no to everything, um, unless it's within our sweet spot of listings.

Speaker 2:

What we used to say no to within listings, though, has changed, so we used to only work with brands that have, let say, less than 50 SKUs, even less than 20 SKUs. It was very niche, mostly CPG, but because of AI we've been able to kind of scale that quite a bit. Now we can work with brands that have hundreds or thousands of SKUs. We used to not offer retainer. Now we do offer retainer for those larger brands that have, let's say, three, five, 10 brands under their umbrella and they want us to be consistently optimizing all of their SKUs every month. That's something that we offer by invitation only. So I think those are the kinds of things that we're more interested in saying yes to as we grow.

Speaker 1:

Got it, so it's more within the actual category itself. You can expand or contract based off of yeah, that makes sense. It's kind of like how, when we started to do direct mail, it was all under the post-purchase customer retention and messaging umbrella, and so there's email, there's SMS as a channel and direct mail is another channel within there, but we weren't touching direct mail as an acquisition channel or anything.

Speaker 2:

Everything was under that retention umbrella.

Speaker 1:

So that's at least how I rationalized us starting to offer them as a service.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. I mean I've been searching for a back-end offer for a while because so many of our clients they work with us and they say, okay, what else do you have? How do we keep working with you guys? And for the most part we're kind of like a one and done. For these brands that have like less than 20 SKUs, we optimize their whole portfolio, we're done in a few months and they really enjoy the experience and they look at us as a really powerful marketing element and they want to keep working with us creatively. But we just don't have that back end offer. So where it does make sense for us is those umbrella companies that have larger sets of brands, larger sets of SKUs, and so for them.

Speaker 1:

We can work with them longer, and I think part of it is just like pushing back on the client and explaining to them. You know, part of the reason why we're actually so good is because we're not doing what it is that you're asking us to do now and so let's keep the relationship this way versus.

Speaker 1:

You know, I definitely have relationships early on where we had a very strong, uh sort of rapport with the client and then we try to expand into other areas and then it didn't pan out and so now we're out both of the services versus just being happy with that one yeah, and they would have had such a good experience.

Speaker 2:

And now they have a bad taste in their mouth, you know exactly, exactly, yeah yeah, we love to end there too, and we've had brands that come back to us year after year because they had a good experience the first time. They let's say they went off and they did a rebranding. And then they come back to us the next year and they're like we got this fresh rebranding, can you roll it out on amazon? We're like, yes, we got you. So like that is that's really special when brands come back to us year after year and want to keep working with us because they realize that, like they, they don't have to teach their, their branding team or their other team how to, you know, scale the creatives on amazon. They just come to us, we roll it out and it's done, you know yeah, when it comes to amazon, how has it changed?

Speaker 1:

you know the, the areas that you're focused on. You know since you started to to today, when it comes to those storefronts and the types of creatives that's a great question.

Speaker 2:

So I feel like we've been through a few different phases of Amazon. One, more notably, is that there were so many sellers that were on Amazon in the beginning that it was still very early days of Amazon. They had it so easy. So when they set up their listings, they kind of set them and forget them. They didn't have to do too much, they were just raking it in, and they still have this historical preference in Amazon's algorithm. So they still do quite well, right? But now those same brands are noticing that more brands are entering the market, eating away at their market share, and they're coming in with fresh, creatives, better products, all of these things that are kind of slowly eating away, and they're saying like, oh shoot, we got to upgrade our listings. And then the second thing that we've noticed is Amazon is giving more and more access to different tools. So one of the biggest shifts for us was realizing that split testing is one of the key things that we need to be doing. It's not something that customers or clients or brands come to us asking us to do. They, quite frankly, don't even know that we're doing it most of the time, and we just know we have to be doing it because they're not going to ask for it, they don't want to pay for it. I don't want to sit there having to sell them on why it's so important. So what we've started to do is just say, look, this is our package that we sell. It includes this and you don't really need to know much more than that. It's just part of our process. And when they see the results and we explain to them in a Loom video the types of tests that we ran and why we are so certain that this creative is going to perform better than what they have, and they see the data for themselves and they see a little Loom video from us, they're just like, wow, I cannot believe we've worked with other agencies that are not doing this. And then couple that with Amazon's own internal tool for split testing and being able to use that for free. That's been a huge shift in what we do, and we actually offer that as a courtesy of working with us. We don't charge extra for it. We don't charge a monthly retainer. We just say you're working with us, probably one to three months. We're going to try to run at least two to three tests during that time.

Speaker 2:

On Amazon. First we test our creatives off of Amazon using tools like PickFu. Then we're going to test it on Amazon to show you if things are working. If they're not working, we're not going to leave you hanging. We want to know why it's not working too. We need to try to troubleshoot this. So that's the second big phase that I've seen is shifting into that mentality of we're going from set and forget mode to now we need to be actively testing our creatives on Amazon. And then the third, which we're entering into right now. This third phase is this whole Rufus technology that's coming out that's really going to change the algorithm of search on Amazon. It's going to fundamentally change how we search on Amazon. It's going to fundamentally change how we search on Amazon, and so that's something we're into the early days of. We're paying attention to every day at this point to see what's going on.

Speaker 1:

What are?

Speaker 2:

the processes that we need to be considering. What are the things that we need to be paying attention to, as Amazon is tweaking this and developing it even further and that's the next thing that I think everybody's paying attention to so we will be moving in that direction as well.

Speaker 1:

Got it. Yeah, I think there's so much that's going to change just in every industry with AI and a lot of research capabilities, etc. And it'll be fascinating. I mean, even just within Google alone, for brands who are trying to invest in SEO and content, you are getting significantly less traffic to your website because you're having these search-generated results at the top of the page that are combining information from multiple sources, and so somebody could just stop their search right there, versus wanting to click into, you know, the first link, the second link, the third link, et cetera. So it'd be interesting to see how that all pans out.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. I'm actually here for it. I'm really excited that. I mean, if you think about the way we search on Amazon right now, I think it's really behind the times. It's really frustrating as a consumer to find the things that you're looking for. You search for something. You see the same things over and over again. You change your search same things. Maybe it tweaks it a little bit, but it's the same. It's the top sellers, it's the guys who are paying to be at the top. It's the same things over and over again. And now that Amazon's pulling in our own data and trying to understand our personal preferences, I think we're going to see better, more accurate, curated results for the individual, as opposed to just everything for the masses. I think it's going to help aid in the buying experience for consumers. And as we start to think about listings, we also need to be thinking about that as well, like how are we changing our content to make sure we, too, are including that information so that Amazon picks it up and serves it to the right audience?

Speaker 1:

Do you think that this will help with more organic discovery for brands? And because when I go on Amazon, I see just the ones with 10,000 reviews, five stars and like that's obviously people have been there for a while.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's the hope, although, in all fairness, it's organic has been declining and declining and declining on Amazon. It's pay to play. That being said, there's there's definitely a myth that every everyone likes to say that, like Amazon is only pay to play, you should only be on Amazon if you're advertising. We've helped so many brands that didn't have money for advertising yet get up and running and get started and they went to launch on Amazon and they had just like an awful start, like they just weren't getting any sales and they didn't know what they did wrong. It was just a. They just set up their listing wrong completely. That's really what was happening.

Speaker 2:

But when we went in and updated refresh the SEO copy, refresh the creatives like within 48 hours they were seeing sales through the roof because they were in a hot niche that was selling really well right after COVID. There's no reason why they shouldn't have been getting sales because there wasn't even that many products in their category selling what they were selling at the quality. They were selling it with the packaging that they had, and so it was just getting in there and fixing things, you know, and doing it right and elevating their creatives and making sure that all the SEO keywords were where they needed to be, not just copy pasting things from Shopify, you know.

Speaker 1:

Yeah no. So they sort of got. They lucked into their initial success and then they had to refine and tailor the strategy once the COVID boom was on its tail ends.

Speaker 2:

And I think there's two ways of selling on Amazon, right? Or there's two ways to think about it from an entrepreneurial perspective. There's I'm going to go with, maybe, vc capital, or I'm going to you know, we have a huge budget we're just going to blast ads and get to the top and start selling and then we'll kind of refine it over time, and you have to have some room in your timeline to be able to do that. Right, you have to have some budget and you have to be able to do that. Then there's another set of entrepreneurs that they're in a different stage of their growth. They're hustling, they're doing the things that they can do.

Speaker 2:

They know they need to be on Amazon because people keep asking them are you on Amazon? Are you on Amazon? Are you on Amazon? Because 60% of that online buying behavior is buying on Amazon. So they know they need to be there and if they were just there, they would capture some organic sales. Still, Even though they're not pushing to the top, spending tons of money on ads, they are going to capture some sales on Amazon and it can be viable for them. So I'm definitely not one of those people that's in the camp of like you should only be on Amazon if you're going to just have money to go through the roof. That's just not everybody's reality. There's so many amazing products in this world that absolutely should be selling on Amazon that don't need to go that route.

Speaker 1:

Are there products that shouldn't be? You'd be like no, this doesn't make sense. Or maybe it's less about the product and more about the company itself, or do you think really everybody should be on Amazon?

Speaker 2:

Most products do pretty well on Amazon. I would say the ones that have the hardest time are the ones that there's no demand for, and usually that falls into the bucket of new inventions, and it's because people just don't know that it exists, right? So if people don't know that it exists, they don't know what to search for. But if it's similar enough to something else, there can be a way to pull in some of those keywords and kind of get in the right demand channels on Amazon. It's just when there's nobody searching for that thing, because they don't know it even exists. It's an education thing. So that does take money and it's hard. It's a long path.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and then maybe it makes more sense to go the Shopify route because if you're having to do the education and you know getting in front of customers who aren't looking for you to begin with, then you know maybe that's a path. I have been seeing though more and more companies depending on the product type, especially like a CPG you know hard to ship goods with a low cost per unit that they don't even have a Shopify storefront anymore. They will just have an Amazon storefront. Like I get my poppy in the mail every month but it's coming from Amazon, I can't even buy it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of brands that are going Amazon first, cause there's there's more and more examples popping up as as successful case studies of Amazon first, and I think Amazon sees that and they're trying to promote that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it was like the blessing and the curse of FBA, because I've heard horror stories about FBA, especially with brands like the holiday season's coming up and then all of a sudden you can't get any sales because they did something with the inventory or whatever it may be, and it's a black, it's a black box and you're sort of screwed.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you should never have all your eggs in one basket. I'm definitely a fan of having your Shopify and your Amazon channels up and both running at the same time, although FBA, I will say is is one of those first big leaps that I think entrepreneurs could and should make, because they start to realize what their time is worth when they start sending their products to a fulfillment center versus trying to ship from home. I think that's something that everyone should make the leap for as soon as possible. You know, and once you do that, you realize oh my gosh man, I should be spending all my time on marketing and strategy and these other areas of my business, not sitting at home putting things in a box to ship to customers. You know, yeah that's fair.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that is a big leap. Whether it's amazon or if it's 3pl, you know, sending your, your product elsewhere and having somebody else be responsible for that delivery is definitely like a a big. What do you think of Amazon's like social commerce initiatives and like Amazon Live and some of these things? Do you think it's more, you know, gimmicky and not necessarily you know something of the level of like a TikTok shop which blew up and has had a lot of successful stories.

Speaker 2:

We are. I think Amazon is not there yet. On that, I think TikTok did a really great job of showing Amazon what's possible and I'm hoping it goes in that direction. I know that Amazon behind the scenes is working to make that experience better, to make video better both on product page and on storefront, but it's not there yet. But they are actively testing and building that, so I think it will get better over time for sure.

Speaker 1:

Got it. Yeah, it also feels a little bit cultural as well, too. Doesn't seem like live shopping, and some of those things have gotten as much adoption in the US as they have internationally.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's interesting. I think that we've become primed for more of the influencer content. We're almost expected at this point and look for it. I personally look for it. I'm like I just need an influencer to show me the one, two, threes of this to see if I want to buy it. I'm just like I'm here for it. Show me why I should be buying this. I'm like, okay, cool, you convinced me. Like I want that Um, but it's not something that is um in your face yet.

Speaker 2:

On Amazon, I think that in the future it will be um, especially if, if there's more data coming out of how effective it is on DTC sites, I think that Amazon will push in that direction. Um, right now, the only places really, where you see videos, like in the carousel of the product images at the top, and you have to kind of like fish for them it's not the first thing you see or if you have premium a plus content, which most brands should have access to, premium a plus content at this time if they're selling on seller central, then they have the ability to do a full scale video within their a plus content, which kind of like gives you that landing page takeover effect on Amazon, which is very similar. I mean, we designed it very similar to a DTC landing page.

Speaker 1:

So if you, if you do that strategy, you should be able to increase your conversion rate tremendously when it so, if, if, to step back a little bit, if you're a brand, you're, you're just getting started, obviously they should work with you, but let's say they want to. You know, give it their own, their own world, or a good old college try, or the expression is what would be like three things that they need to keep in mind, or tips or tricks that you would, you know, give somebody who is just starting out and wants to give it a crack for themselves, getting started with yeah, so I break it down into three steps.

Speaker 2:

I have videos of this on YouTube and on my website at mindfulgoodsco, but it's three steps and it's it's so simple. It really is like just going back to basics and and really just thinking through these three steps. Um, if we think about-consumer marketing, there's a funnel, right? It's the same thing on Amazon. So if we broke down what that funnel would look like, it's these three steps.

Speaker 2:

The first is getting found through your SEO. The second is making sure that your main image, the product on white image that shows up in the search results, is click-worthy and makes people want to click on your image instead of everyone else's. And then the third step is, once they're inside the listing so they've already found you in the search results, they've clicked on your image because it looks amazing and they're inside your listing. Every single image, top to bottom, needs to be visually appealing and selling. It needs. Every image has to have a function.

Speaker 2:

And so if you just do those three steps, you know, do your SEO great in your listing and get found, have an amazing main image, split test those main images so that you can see how you're going to stand out above the competition in the search results and know that that's working. And then, once you're in there and there's traffic coming in, get them to convert, and get them to convert with the things that you know about your customers. You know they need to know these top three to five things. And if you just say those things as quickly as possible in those images and make it very clear, without overwhelming them, without too much text, answer the questions that are in their head, get them to check those boxes, then you're going to see the conversions. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 1:

Well, if I ever decide to start my own brand which I never will, by the way I think brand owners are crazy. It's a very difficult thing to do. There's so many different components that go into it. I always thought my business was so much easier than the people I was actually working with who had to deal with sourcing and logistics and customer success, and there's just so many different things going on, but if I do, I'll be watching those YouTube videos and logistics and customer success, and there's just so many different things going on.

Speaker 1:

But if I do, I'll be watching those YouTube videos, but I'll make sure to include them in the show notes too, for anybody who wants to check it out and get in contact with you. But thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insights, but before we hop, can you let people know where they can connect with you online?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I'm most active on LinkedIn these days, so you can find me just by searching Daniela Bolesman. Or you can check out our website at mindfulgoodsco, and on there we also have what we call like a mini audit, where you submit your link to us and we can walk you through those three steps on your listing and give you a hit list of all the things that we would tackle if we were working with you. And that way you can take that list, take that video and give it to your designer and have them or your team and have them execute on that, or you can decide to work with us if you want.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. Well, again, thank you for coming on for everybody listening, as always. This is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at BrandonAmorosocom or Scalistai. Thank you for listening and