Being Efficient and Finding Success in eCommerce Marketing with Mike Begg

Maya Dolan | May 13, 2021 at 7:30 AM

Marketing That Maximizes Sales

It important to do everything you can to ensure your business is running efficiently and you aren't missing out on any sales, but it can be hard to know where to begin.

Recently, our CEO Stacy Jones sat down with an expert in e-commerce marketing to learn the top suggestions to ensure you have a solid strategy, as well as dived into the mistakes most often made. In this blog post, Hollywood Branded learns how to find success with eCommerce marketing from Mike Begg, the co-founder and chief strategist of AMZ Advisors.

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A Little More About Mike Begg

Mike Begg is a co-founder and chief strategist of AMZ Advisors. A full service e-commerce consultancy that manages over a hundred million dollars in ad spend per year. And he's achieved incredible growth for their clients by optimizing their accounts, creating in-depth content marketing strategies, and running effective off-platform marketing campaigns. Mike also operates AMZ Courses, which educates Amazon sellers on how to maximize sales on the platform.

Interview Transcript Highlights

Question: I love e-commerce and figuring it out and certainly, it's not just the wave of the future. It's the wave of the now, but can you share with our listeners how you got to where you are today? Joining me as this expert guru of all things e-commerce marketing.

Answer: Of course. Well, my agency, I've been running for about six years now, but prior to that, I started as an e-commerce seller. And even prior to that, I started in retail. I actually started working for Sears in real estate development. During that time I saw some interesting trends happening with physical retail, brick and mortar stores compared to what was happening in e-commerce. Myself, and my two partners kind of saw the opportunity there started building our own brands and selling those online. And once we realized that we were competing with a lot of other big brands out there and beating them in a lot of senses, we saw an opportunity to help a lot of other brands succeed specifically on Amazon, but in e-commerce in general. So that's kind of how I got to where I am now. And now we've been running our company, like I said, for six years.

Question: So when we're talking about mistakes, e-commerce is rife with them. So many people are like, "I have a product. I'm going to sell it. I'm going to become a bajillionaire and I'm going to do it all through this giant called Amazon." But where do things start going wrong when people approach this with the mindset that you can just throw their product up there and just become mega millionaires?

Answer: I think that's exactly what the problem is, they think they can just throw it up there and it's going to start selling overnight. I think a lot of people get frustrated with the Amazon platform or the lack of success because they don't understand all the parts that go into it. So when we talk about a broader marketing sense, there's SEO, there's paid advertising, there's all of these different factors that go into building your brand online or whether it's on your own website or anywhere. And all of that exists within the Amazon sphere as well. So, you need to have SEO in line for the Amazon search algorithm. You need to have graphic design optimized to create a good brand experience, to help conversions or increase conversions as much as possible. And then figure out how to implement a paid advertising strategy. And that's very difficult for a lot of brands to manage internally. And it's even more difficult if they've never sold online before.

So kind of pulling that all together, I think is where a lot of brands fail and they just get to that initial point where they're like, "Oh, well the products are there. They're going to start selling on their own." And unless you're, Nike or Adidas or have some massive brand recognition, that's not going to be the case.

Question: So with the sellers that go on to Amazon, you just mentioned SEO and brand awareness and marketing. And so what you're saying is you can't just throw a product onto Amazon and not have an actual strategy with the website, with social media, with brand building, with traditional channels. That you can't just go in and be like, "My product is going to be on the Amazon store and just become number one on its own." Right?

Answer: For sure. I mean, all those other aspects are important, not necessarily to sell on Amazon itself, but it's more of keeping the concept of your branding consistent across all of them. So, using basic things like similar colors, similar imagery between your social media, between your website, between Amazon, it's all going to improve that customer experience over time. And when we're talking about building a brand or building a product or anything, you really need to have that customer experience be consistent, no matter where they're purchasing from you, or the likelihood of them purchasing again is pretty low. That's another big mistake that we see is that, brand loyalty doesn't matter as much to most consumers on the Amazon platform. So really going out of your way.

Ratings and price are the main ones. But the way you get those ratings overtime, the way that you build a brand following within Amazon, and then try to leverage that traffic outside of Amazon is by creating a good shopping experience for your customer on the platform.

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Question: So that good shopping experience, if you had to dial in and tell someone what that means, how would you explain how you get a good shopping experience?

Answer: Well, in a good sense, Amazon does help handle a lot of those aspects for you. Obviously customer service is very important. So if you're selling your products through FBA or Fulfillment by Amazon, Amazon is sending your product to the end consumer. They're going to handle that customer service piece for you. That's extremely important. The other aspect that's very important to consider is shipping times. And with FBA, we know that we can get our prime products in a day, in some cases, two days in others, some even have same day delivery at this point. That's another great aspect of the customer shopping experience, but really it's also about capturing shopper attention. People have less and less of an attention span when they're shopping. So if you don't get them immediately, when they hit your page by leveraging the product imagery that you have on your Amazon listings. To create something that looks attractive, something that's eye catching, to get them to actually engage with that listing immediately, you're probably going to lose them. And it's going to be hard to get them back to the page to purchase in the future.

Question: Okay. So you're adding your products to Amazon. You're on your way to your megamillionaire-ness. Looking at brand consistency and making sure that you have good imagery that you're having good copywriting as well. And I would assume right now that one of the best ways to stand out from a lot of other people is making sure that your English has really honed in because that's going to automatically show that you're different than a lot of the vendors on Amazon instantly.

Answer: Yeah, for sure. I think everyone maybe has experienced this at some point where you search for a product and you just see that the bullet points are poorly written. Or the title doesn't really make sense, or it's jam packed with keywords, or there's other grammatical errors. There are a lot of foreign sellers. So there's a lot of sellers from Asia and from other countries that are on the platform, that are lacking in that sense. And they don't have that ability to really coherently put their brand message across to the client. They're really competing on price point because they're the manufacturer and they can keep it lower. And that's a good opportunity to stand out from them. Yeah. Like you said, if your product doesn't coherently make sense in the copy, then most shoppers are going to assume, "Ah, this product's cheap. It's coming from Asia. Poor quality." Whatever it may be, and that's going to be one way, right off the bat, that your shopper's going to have a negative experience on the platform.

Check Out The Podcast!

Mike has SO MUCH great information from his experience with eCommerce marketing, so check out the full podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business from his advice and expertise!

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