84. Driving Clicks & Conversions On Amazon w/ Daniela Bolzmann

Ben Donovan  00:00
Hey folks! Welcome back to another episode of The Brand Builder Show and today, we’re going to be talking about how to build a successful brand. We’ve got Daniella on the show today and she’s got some exciting brands that she’s been working on, which we’re going to talk about, and then a whole load of brand optimization stuff that will geek out on as well. Daniela, welcome to the show today.

Daniela Bolzmann  00:21
Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Ben Donovan  00:24
Nice. It’s an honor to have you. I asked you before we started recording where you’re from. And obviously, if you could tell the audience that would be great.

Daniela Bolzmann  00:32
Sure. I’m actually from California. I grew up there, then lived in Chicago for eight years and more recently have become a transplant to Peru and South America.

Ben Donovan  00:43
As I said to you before we started recording I feel like that is definitely the most exotic location of a podcast guests so far. Yeah, all the other guys, I love them. You know, the guys and girls. You know, but they come from boring places like Florida. 

Daniela Bolzmann  01:00
Oh. Chicago is definitely not boring. If anybody from Chicago is listening. I love Chicago. Chicago, for me was the first place that felt like home even though I grew up in SoCal. I love Chicago.

Ben Donovan  01:14
To be fair, I’ve only spent two hours in Chicago, and it was the. 

Ben Donovan  01:17
You’re missing out. 

Ben Donovan  01:18
We never so much snow that we actually slid sideways in the Boeing airplane as it taxi down the runway. So wow, some memories of Chicago. It was just the first location that came to mind. 

Daniela Bolzmann  01:29
A little bit frightening. 

Ben Donovan  01:31
Exactly, yeah. But it’s great to have you here. And I’m excited for all we’re going to talk through on the show today. And but I’d love for you to kind of catch us up what have you been up to over the recent years, what has got you to the point of your eCommerce expertise that you carry, share a bit of that with us and then we’ll dive into the topic here.

Daniela Bolzmann  01:49
So in a nutshell, I’m the founder of Mindful Goods, which is a listing optimization service where we help brands improve their creative and their content for Amazon. So everything from graphics, SEO, on their product pages, and on their storefronts, we service at this point about 150 brands every year. And we do that with a team of 12 freelancing females, which I’m very proud of. And it’s a bunch of women that come together and support these brands to optimize their product pages. And right now over 50% of our brands are seeing increases in sales from 60 to 600% so that’s. I’m pretty proud of that at the moment.

Ben Donovan  02:31
Yeah, absolutely. Was the female lead side of it. Was that something that you consciously went about to build?

Daniela Bolzmann  02:39
Pretty much? Yeah. I, formerly before this, I had a tech startup. And we had investors and I went that whole route. And it showed me a different side of things. And I realized that for me, personally, that wasn’t the way I wanted to build a business. And I think we’ve come into an era now where people can pick up their laptops and work from anywhere. And I did have a very fortunate circumstance where I was able to work for another tech company after exiting my own, and I got to see how they ran a remote environment, and how I thrived in that environment. And I just thought, you know, if I could do it all over again, that’s what I’m gonna do. And so that’s what I did.

Ben Donovan  03:23
Yeah. Awesome. Very cool. And you got a couple, you got some eCommerce brand kind of journey of your own. Can you talk to us a bit about that as well?

Daniela Bolzmann  03:31
Sure. Yeah. So in in creating mindful goods and helping brands. You know, it’s always been a passion of mine to launch my own products. So I have a jigsaw puzzle brand in the States. And we do sell that on Amazon, and on our own DTC website on Shopify, and that one’s called last walls.com. And then here in Peru, I got the itch again. And with my husband, we started a tortilla chip company. So that one is not sold online. It is basically just sold in gourmet shops around Peru. 

Ben Donovan  04:05
Very cool. What makes a good tortilla chip,

Daniela Bolzmann  04:08
Making it with organic non GMO corn and handmade tortillas and making sure you’re using the best quality materials. Here actually fun fact. And the reason why we decided to start this business is if you grew up in the States, tortilla chips are normal. You find them at every single grocery store salted and unsalted. Here in Peru, they don’t exist. People don’t know what a tortilla chip there. They were, they’re made in Mexico. Peruvians is they don’t even know what a tortilla chip is. They actually call tortilla chips, nachos, which, if you know Mexican food nachos is the actual chips with the cheese and the meat and all that stuff on top. So our brand is actually called Chaka Nachos. Funny enough.

Ben Donovan  04:53
Did you have any sort of unique challenges with it being a food-based thing?

Daniela Bolzmann  05:00
In what way? No, not really

Ben Donovan  05:02
Like manufacturing, obviously, I don’t know how what it’s like in Peru. But if you make something that’s edible, in the States or in Europe, there’s so many certifications, testing all those kinds of challenges that often put people off a consumable.

Daniela Bolzmann  05:14
You’d be surprised here, it’s actually very easy. And I was fortunate that, you know, I have a family, my family has a catering business here. So they have a facility where we were able to just get up and running really quickly. And the rest of it, which was harder to navigate is that I’m not fluent in Spanish, and I didn’t grow up here. So for me, learning the lingo of business talk here. And culturally, how you do business here was probably the hardest part. Because in the States, you know, I know how to how things work, whereas here, it’s it’s a little bit different. So that’s been the harder part is understanding how the culture works here.

Ben Donovan  05:57
Sure. And with a lot of your business taking place in the States, how have you found that not living?

Daniela Bolzmann  06:03
How have I found what? 

Ben Donovan  06:04
You’ve got a lot of business happening in the States, your brand, your your clients, etc? You’re not living in the States? How have you found that dynamic?

Daniela Bolzmann  06:12
Yeah, that’s interesting, right? Because I’ve always advised clients on how they should be handling their eCommerce businesses based on what we see working well with across all of our clients, right. And so when it came to launching the puzzles, for instance, I literally forced myself to take my own advice every step of the way so that I can hold myself accountable to all the advice that we were giving. And one of those things was initially do you keep product in your house and ship it yourself? Or do you use something like Amazon FBA and use that to ship to clients from an Amazon warehouse direct to them. And so what I realized is, not only do I need Amazon FBA, but I need another warehouse as well. And so I got those up and running immediately. From day one. Well, I was never shipping out a puzzle out of my own house. And what that allowed me to do was focus more on marketing and actually run my own business the way that I intended to write like, I don’t spend, I spent 90% of my time on mindful goods, helping other brands, I don’t spend nearly enough time focused on my own brands, because the way that I view my brands is that I’m slowly growing them over time. And I’m not trying to just, you know, pump and dump a bunch of cash in there and make a quick buck. You know, I’m looking at those as, as long term brands that are going to provide other revenue streams in the future.

Ben Donovan  07:33
Yeah, definitely. No, that’s cool. Very cool. I love the fact of, you know, doing them both together, you know, I’m the same, we do sort of like the content stuff, podcasts, etc. And then do some on the brand side as well. And I think that helps you stay really sharp, but at the same time, I totally get what you’re saying, because it’s so easy for you A – to, like teach all of the best principles, but then get a little bit lazy when you actually implement it, and then B – you know, run out of time. You know, as entrepreneurs, we take on so many things, it’s trying to spin plates at times, isn’t it? But how do you deal with that sort of overwhelm? Or maybe you don’t struggle with it? Maybe it’s just me, but do you feel like you’re kind of having to prioritize, and how do you prioritize between those?

Daniela Bolzmann  08:14
It’s funny I was I was just talking about this to somebody else the other day, too, is that I think it’s an issue of delegation, rather than anything else, right? Because we think we’re busy. But the reality is that we’re still trying to do everything ourselves or take or we take it on ourselves, as opposed to giving it to those around us, or finding someone around us who can possibly do some of the work so that you don’t feel that heavy burden. And maybe that heavy burden is a good thing for you to experience and realize, “Oh, okay, it’s time for me to delegate again”, right? And then looking because I have read every week, you could look at your list, and it gets longer and longer. And if it keeps getting longer and longer, it means you’re not delegating. So I’ve had to basically teach myself this. I don’t know if you had the same experience. But growing up in the States, I had a really interesting perspective when I would come visit family in Peru, and see how my siblings who grew up in Peru tackle things as they were entering adulthood. We, in the states are taught, if something needs to be done, you do it. So laundry needs to be done, you do it. Dishes need to be done, you do it. Your parents teach you how to do these things, right? So you can take care of yourself when you eventually move out of the house, hopefully a young age. Children in Peru, they don’t move out of the house a lot of times or oftentimes at a young age 18. They stay many more years. It allows them to end up buying a house in their adult life and all of these other things right? Culturally, it’s just very different. But in addition, a lot of wealthier families or even middle class families grew up with help in the house. And so the kids are not taught to do it for themselves. They’re taught to delegate and that’s a totally different skill and it is a skill that we need to practice in order to become good at it and to remember that it’s not all about doing it’s about doing and delegating and understanding when is the right time to do versus delegate, so that you don’t end up overwhelmed and, and burnt out and stressed. And I saw that with my siblings where I was able to talk to them about their business. Ask them, you know, they said they wanted to do, you know, a new product, and they had all these ideas that enter that, and I was like, Okay, great. So how are you going to do the graphic design? Like, oh, we already got somebody. Okay, how are you going to do this? Oh, we already got some, it was never like, oh, I worked on these ideas on my computer. And here’s what I’m. No, no. Oh, I got somebody working on that. I got somebody working on that. And just the way that they were just like, Nope, I found somebody to do that. They’re just on it, you know? Yeah. So 

Ben Donovan  10:41
What would you say? What would you say to the control freaks that like to have everything perfect? 

Daniela Bolzmann  10:48
Good luck. 

Ben Donovan  10:51
Good answer.

Daniela Bolzmann  10:53
That’s been a that’s been a hard one for me to learn, because there was pieces of my business where I thought I was the only one that could do it. Yeah. At first I thought I could, I was the only one who could do our many audits that are on our website right now where like, I look at the listing, I give you all the top level, like, here’s how we would handle your listing A to Z, here’s all the things I recommend. And then I realized I have this incredibly talented team of creative directors that watch all my videos that know exactly, that took my mini course that know, they have their own ideas of how they would approach that specific brand. And, wow, I can tap into them and their talents. And oftentimes, they do an even better job than me at doing those many audits. So I’ve now realized if they can do that, the thing that I thought I had to do forever, then there’s, you know, the world is abundant. There’s so many people out there that can help you in every single capacity of your business.

Ben Donovan  11:48
Yeah, for sure, for sure. loads more we could talk about on that. But I do want to get into some Amazon stuff. And that’s a good segue into it with your. I want to get back to that you’ve talked about doing a mini audit. So I’d love to talk about what you look for in a minute. But the first thing is just a more of a timely thing. I mentioned to you before the episode talking about the review changes that Amazon are doing right now. And for anybody that’s listening, that’s not sure what that means is Amazon are really changing the way the review count, the review badges look in search results. It used to be all five stars highlighted however many word it was if it was five stars, or full 4.54 and a half or full. And then also the review count, you know the numbers. So it would be like if it was a four digit review count that would all show five digit would all show. Whereas they tested a lot of things, it’s feels like in the last couple of weeks, just showing one star and the number rating next to it. And just that and then they’ve also added in the count. But sometimes if it’s 1000, it might be 1k, rather than the four numbers. And just It might sound a little things. But I’ve noticed on my end, it has actually impacted click through rate on our highest review count items. And so the newer items, we just recently launched a product, hardly got any reviews, but it’s coming right out the gate, and we’re getting 20 sales a day, and it’s great. But for the more established products with loads of reviews, we’re seeing a drop. I looked at my stats in the last two weeks, we’ve had a 25% drop in the click through rate of one of our main products. And so the traffic is down. And I only put that down really to the change because it did have quite a good review mode, initially in search results. That’s the big thing that I put it down to but you’re saying that you haven’t really seen as much of that with your clients? What’s your kind of take? 

Daniela Bolzmann  13:36
That’s what you’d expect to see, right? Like you would expect for the reviews to be. I mean, it’s kind of a good thing if you think about it, because initially, everyone’s just trying to get to page one. But there’s so many great products beyond page one. And I think as a shopper, when you think about looking at page one, I kind of feel like I’m looking at the same thing over and over and over again. And I bet you Amazon’s trying to get away from that. Right. They’re trying to give everyone a fair play at grabbing the attention based on having a different product, right? Like, I don’t want to look at 20 of the same product. I’m looking for a very specific thing. And even though I’m searching in the search box for a very specific thing, sometimes doesn’t even show me that. An example this week, I was looking for a I don’t even know what kind of travel bag it was I was looking for a travel bag that was neoprene material. And specifically I want to neoprene material. What showed up on page one, zero. It was like one one out of all the options was neoprene, when that was the specific thing that I was putting in it. Why? Because all of these brands are putting the word neoprene in the back end of their listing, and then they’re just pumping sales. And they’re getting all these reviews and showing up at the top, right? And so I bet you Amazon is seeing that data and trying to figure out a way that they can allow new entry level brands to compete a little bit more and that’s what’s been so great about Amazon from day one is the fact that these smaller up and coming brands can actually rival the big Procter and Gamble brands of the world right? 

Ben Donovan  14:57
Yeah, I think you’re you’ve nailed it. It is so good for new brands, new products. There was talk of them doing something like this a few years ago, and I thought, gosh, if that ever happens, that’s going to be a big blow to the the old stalwarts, you know, that have been there a long time with their big review moat, because that’s so much of what drives their sales. But this does open up the playing field. And I’ve said that to our community is like, this is the time to launch a product, because you’ve got less of that challenge there. And you’ve got more opportunity. And yeah, I agree it’s a great play from Amazon. Because otherwise, it’s just products from seven, eight years ago, that have never been improved, because nobody wants to have to create a new listing. So they just either don’t improve it or completely change the product and use the same listing, which is kind of against Terms of Service. And, you know, so there’s lots going on there, isn’t there? But yeah, I think it’s really positive for new sellers, new products.

Daniela Bolzmann  15:48
Yeah, there’s actually a few other updates that that I’ve seen recently as well. Have you seen the image tag testing and Amazon experiments? 

Ben Donovan  15:56
No.

Daniela Bolzmann  15:58
So if you have a parent ASIN without any variants, any child, so variations in that same listing, and you do an Amazon experiment, which is a free tool for brands that have brand registry, so you can split test different content. Now you can you can split test, image stack, so all of your product images against your original your new product images against your original product images.

Ben Donovan  16:22
Very cool. Very cool.

Daniela Bolzmann  16:23
Yeah, so that’s a big one. Another one I saw this week is a pilot. Well, the Amazon creator program is now being released to more and more accounts, so that brands can actually go inside, it’s inside the advertising panels. So you probably if you’re listening to this, you will check and see if you have access, not all brands have access. But it’ll say creator program, something like that. And within there, you can actually work with different Amazon creators who will post on their social medias your product, little videos or photos of your product. And they will get a commission from Amazon and from you, if you want to give them an extra Commission, which is amazing, right? Because some of the top brands on Amazon have run their own affiliate programs completely separate from Amazon and what they like one of the top olive oil companies, for instance, they told me firsthand what they were doing from day one is only working with influencers. And they were telling them whatever Amazon is paying you for your commission we’ll double it, and someone say they would triple it. And someone’s someone’s going to do more than that and give big bonuses to get them to be long term brand ambassadors for the brand. And that’s how, that’s the only thing they did to consistently stay top three on Amazon.

Ben Donovan  17:35
Yeah, I think it’s a great tip. We’ve just started actually reaching out to a bunch of different bloggers and influencers in our niches to try and do a similar thing, because we’ve tried, rather unsuccessfully in the past to get them just to be an affiliate to our own website. But when you combine it with Amazon, because they love the conversion rate of Amazon. You send traffic to Amazon, it converts so well, Amazon will pay them on not just the your product that they buy, but whatever they buy in a 24-hour period. So they love Amazon, but the the actual commission rate is not great. So yeah, we’re doing that trying to offer them an extra bonus on top of it so that they will prioritize our products, but also get that Amazon goodness as well. So I think, yeah, some real exciting opportunities coming up with Amazon, they continue to innovate, aren’t they?

Daniela Bolzmann  18:17
I think they’re getting ready for their conference, they’re gonna release a bunch of updates for their conference. That’s what I’m seeing.

Ben Donovan  18:22
Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely know, it’s exciting. So that you would do a mini audit, you said on a listing, let’s kind of play through one for a moment the client sends you a listing, you go look through it, what are the most common things right now in 2023, you are seeing that sellers are still getting wrong, and are the major needle movers for bigger sales.

Daniela Bolzmann  18:42
Okay, there’s a few of the getting wrongs that I’ll just highlight upfront. One of the things that I still see today is having the same image in the product images just rotated at a different angle. So like taking a product on white image, turning it like this, then turning it like this. We need to get more creative than that. That’s not going to get people to stay engaged with your content. And remember, Amazon is tracking every single thing that happens once a shopper is on your page, even before I mean, obviously before they get into your page. So every single interaction matters. So with that in mind, we want to we want to remember that every image needs to serve a function, right? So the way that I look at a listing overall, is three steps. 

Daniela Bolzmann  19:29
The first step is how do you get found via SEO so that you show up in those search results. Right? The second step is once we’re showing up in the search results, aside from reviews, which we know is big, aside from your offer, which you can you can flex a little bit up and down. How else do we get them to click on your listing versus your competitors? Right? And assuming we’ve done those first two steps once they’re inside of our listing, what else can we do to get them to convert? Like what what is, what are the things that we can do, right? That first piece, looking at your SEO, what I don’t want to see if I’m looking at your listing is I don’t want to see over the top keyword stuffing. I want it to make sense for me. But I also don’t want to see not using all the characters. Like you’d be surprised how many titles just have like eight words. And I’m like “why? this is crazy”. And then bullets, we actually just did our first Amazon experiment bullet tests because I just thought it was funny and didn’t think that it would matter to do one. Because, you know, bullets are secondary to title. And you just, you know, it’s just kind of why would you test that when you get test a main image or A+ content and other things that seem to impact things more. But one test that we just did showed 500% increase in sales by changing the bullets. Yeah, I know. It’s insane. Insane. And that’s for an established seller, seven figure seller, I was just like, mind blown, right? So testable. It’s all I can say.

Ben Donovan  21:00
My obvious question with that is what did you do? 

Daniela Bolzmann  21:02
Test your bullets? Okay, so in terms of SEO, we have like a in depth six step process that we actually walk you through in the mini audit, but it just shows like all the six best practices, all the things you would think about, right, it’s like, reverse asin of your competitors, it’s making sure that you’ve thought through all the different angles of how people may or may not search, in addition to languages, in addition to just the strategy of main product versus variant products, and how you’re distributing your keywords, and just all of all of those, like nitty gritty things that you need to be considering. That’s kind of the the lens that we look through in those steps. Yeah. Also cross referencing off Amazon data. So like the data that we’re pulling from a third party like a Helium 10, or a DataDive, versus your own internal data, your PPC reports, your brand analytics, like, we need to be cross referencing all of that data to make sure that we’re putting in the best of the best, right? And then making sure it has the right tone and the right positioning, and that you’re using every single bullet in a meaningful way, in a structured way that actually makes sense for your product. So from there, that’s SEO, it can get, I mean, you could do a whole course on SEO. But in a nutshell, we’re really wanting to make sure that you’ve maximized all of that critical space, because that’s what’s gonna get you that step number one, which is getting found. And then once once you’re showing up, though, that’s where like, my favorite step comes in, is the main image. So for me, this is like, where I think still, there’s like the lowest hanging fruit, there’s not enough brands doing this. And if they are doing it, they’re really not doing it well. They’re just like slapping text on it and trying to like do little janky maneuvers. But really what you can do with your main image is get creative and think through different. Look at your competitive set of your product and how you’re showing up against competitors. And then say, okay, what are all these guys doing well? What are they not doing so well? And then go look at a different category, different from yours. Similar, but different. And get ideas, get the wheels spinning, and come up with like three different options of like, okay, we could show, we can show this product at this angle with a shadow with this kind of post edit, we can make this high res and do a render, we can make it glossy, like all all these different ideas. Take three completely different concepts for what you want to test that can help you get more clicks, They should be totally different from one another. Once you have those concepts, you test them in a tool like pick food to understand what’s working, what’s not working, what are they saying? What’s the why behind people’s choices? You can make the images even better. And once you have one that you’re very confident in, then you run your Amazon experiment and validate it on Amazon. And that’s where we’re seeing really incredible results. I’m just going to pull up this really quick so I can tell you what the actual results are for. For these tests right now, which is crazy.

Ben Donovan  23:57
Yeah, very cool. There’s a lot more creativity that you can apply to a main image. I think that a lot of people will realize they kind of get limited to think well, there’s only so many angles I can show my product in but yeah, as you said, if you look through search results, look through categories. There are ways that you can position use packaging, use colors, use props, there’s there’s lots more you can do as in there than the most.

Daniela Bolzmann  24:21
So for reference, title tests right now our brands are seeing anywhere from 25% increase to 589% increase in sales. For main images, though, which I think is the lowest hanging fruit remember, like changing the title is easy. It like that’s okay, that’s. Of all the things, it’s super easy. The next easiest thing is the main image, which not a lot of people are doing, and that we’re seeing 10% to 160% increase in sales. And I think that number is going to go up even higher like this is we’re just like the tip of the iceberg, right? And remember, each one of these changes that you’re making to increase your sales, they stack one on top of the next. Right? So let’s say you see 500% increase with your title, and then you see another 150 with your main image. And then you see, you know, like, these are the incremental changes that you need to be thinking about throughout the year to make sure that your content is staying above the competition.

Ben Donovan  25:13
Yeah, you sound like you’re testing more than a lot of other people I would speak to, which is, obviously, while you’re getting good results, because it’s so important. But how much are you, how frequently changing something? How much is too much? Is there such a thing?

Daniela Bolzmann  25:27
So I look at it as like, for most brands, when they’re starting out, it’s really an 8020, like, you can do 80% of the lift upfront. And then the 20%, you’re going to be doing throughout the year, when you notice, you notice something comes in with the reviews, and you need to fix that on one of your images. So people understand it better, or you realize that some word is converting really well. And you need to move that into your listing from your PPC or different insights. So you’re going to pick up as you as you go on and time, right. But as brands start to develop a catalogue, they go into a different category of testing, right. And those are the brands that we work with that are basically, they’re always testing, like they are testing nonstop throughout the year. So by the time their busy season comes, they are ready, nobody can touch them. And so an example of a brand we just worked with recently, we basically gave them like this is your whole whole setup that we gave you right now. But because they’re an established seller, and they have a full slew of products, we’re basically building out this is version two of what it should look like in the next few months after you guys get a few more content pieces that were missing. And this will be version three in the next quarter after that, once you’re done testing these elements, and we know the winning the winning elements from here, you’re going to do these changes. And so they have their whole roadmap of testing for the next two quarters, or even more. You know, that’s that’s the kind of detail that you should be doing in terms of testing, when you have a catalog of products. If you have less than five products, you probably don’t need to be as granular as that. Or if your products are not in the million dollar range, it’s probably you don’t need to be spending your time there. It’s like do the 80% and move on to traffic. You know,

Ben Donovan  27:11
Yeah, some really good context. I think it’s really important for people to get that mindset, though of B testing throughout the year where it’s applicable. Because a lot of people will wait until a few weeks before Q4 Or Black Friday’s coming up, you know, prime days coming up. What do I, what I do to my list? It’s already too late you should have been doiing this.

Daniela Bolzmann  27:31
Don’t even, don’t touch it. Yeah, well. If you’re, if you, we don’t recommend changing if you’re within a week of the holidays, that’s for sure. Because the last thing you want to do is break something on your listing, and be running to Amazon begging for them to fix it before the holidays and they’re not going to pay attention to that. They’re working on other things, you know, so you definitely don’t want to be messing around with your listing and do something that could jeopardize your sales. Now, if you have nothing to lose by updating your listing Sure, by all means go for it, you know, like if your listing’s down anyways, and you need to fix it or if your listing isn’t getting any sales, and you need to fix it, go for it, you know. But right before the holidays, no. You should be preparing literally right now in this moment is when you should be preparing for it. You should be preparing for Q4 and Q3. And if it’s already Q4, by the time you’re watching this, run. You should be you should be getting all your content ASAP. And I will say this, for a lot of brands, they still see sales in January, February. So like a lot of wellness brands, they’ll see things pick up well into January, February, because people are getting into their like post holiday mode of wanting to be healthy and buy wellness oriented products so you still have time.

Ben Donovan  28:51
Yeah, and I tend to every year say to our community once. Either at the start of the season for people that feel like they’ve missed it, and they’re not quite ready, or at the end of the season. Listen it comes around real quick again. So the time to start preparing for it is right now whenever whatever time of the year it is, start preparing, start getting ready because it comes around again. And you know, I think was it Picasso he said that, you know, the great art is not never completed, only abandoned. And I think that’s the same with a good listing, a good business, is you got to continue to test and evolve that listing. You don’t want to ever get to the point where you say, “Okay, my listings done, my business is fully optimized”. You got to always be ready to keep optimizing it.

Daniela Bolzmann  29:31
One great way that you can think about optimizing your content is a lot of brands are getting into UGC content now, so user generated content, if you’re getting into using influencers or user generated content, that is great pieces of content that you can be adding to your listings, whether that’s in your storefront on different sub pages or on your homepage of your storefront, or whether that’s in your video shorts that are on your listing or on your product page. So I definitely think that there’s ways that you can keep your content fresh. And like 1.0 is just getting all of the basics in place. 2.0 is, is making that even better? It’s like, it’s like, how do we make sure that our content is is attracting attention and engaging and informing. And if we’re not doing those three things, you’re just not getting sales?

Ben Donovan  30:21
Yeah. And thinking like a real brand owner, you know, I think that a lot of. Five years ago, if you just said UGC, and putting on Amazon, people would have just looked at you strange and thought, “Well, I’m just want to make sales on Amazon, why am I going to bother with all that kind of stuff?” But the the brands that I see having the most success at the moment are those that see Amazon as a sales channel, you know. You’re not running an Amazon business. Amazon is a sales channel. And you need to do all of the things collecting UGC, like you said. You’re building an audience, all of that stuff. And, you know, make it your Amazon just part of that bigger ecosystem. And it sounds like that’s kind of what you’re working on as well. 

Daniela Bolzmann  30:58
Totally. 

Ben Donovan  30:59
You mentioned there, Helium 10. And Data Dive, are you still using both? 

Daniela Bolzmann  31:04
Yeah, we use both. 

Ben Donovan  31:05
Yeah, because Data Dive is definitely becoming stronger. And it’s almost like it could replace Helium 10. And they started using Jungle Scout data, etc, etc. So just wondered if you’re still still using both of us? Yes. Good to know. 

Daniela Bolzmann  31:17
Yeah, we use both. 

Ben Donovan  31:19
Yeah, good stuff. Okay. And then final question, then obviously, once someone’s on the page, you mentioned, you know, improving clicks.

Daniela Bolzmann  31:27
Yeah, third step. 

Ben Donovan  31:28
But once we get to that final step, and they’re ready, they’re ready with a credit card loaded up? How do we get them to make the decision?

Daniela Bolzmann  31:34
Were people worried we were going to leave them hanging? Go to part two to learn the third step. Okay, so third step, you’ve gotten found there, they’re inside, you’re listening, they clicked on your main image, because it’s amazing because it has some eye candy on it, and you got them in there. Once they’re in your listing, I’ll say it again, every single image should be serving assumption. So if you think through, what are the top selling points, you know, you need to get across in five seconds, before they bounce from your page. Like, let’s say they’re going to spend a maximum of like 20 seconds on your page, and they have a chance to just skim things. What are the main things that need to happen? Because I think where a lot of brands go wrong to go back to the point of what I see things, what I see brands making mistakes on is they try to stuff every single detail about their product in these images, and then it ends up just looking like a hodgepodge of different fonts, different colors, different different things that they’re trying to say all at once. And really, we need to think about hierarchy on our images, like having really big headers, a few tiny things were pointing out in the image. And that’s it, you know, a beautiful image that actually conveys shows the product in use, shows the product. You know, there’s really like, I have a list of like the types of images that perform well on Amazon. I don’t know if there’s a download for that on my website. But anyways, every image you should be thinking through like, could it be an us versus them? Like, how does your product differentiate from the competitors? How do people mostly use our product? What are the top questions they have about our product? What are the what are those selling points and make sure that you do one selling point per image, that’s it. Not not five, not six, like one thing that you’re trying to convey per image. And we’re doing that across your product images, and you’re doing that in your A plus content. 

Daniela Bolzmann  31:36
One big mistake I see with A plus content. A plus content is the section that’s below the fold that has that has, like different images once you scroll down on the product page, right. And what you’ll see with a lot of brands that did their 1.0 of A plus content is it almost looks like they copy and pasted things. And they just like picked random modules. And by modules, I mean, like the templates that Amazon gives you, and you upload the images to these templates, or these shapes. And the Amazon gives you all these different shapes that you can use. So why not, right? Well, what happens with a lot of brands is they end up just piecing together all of these different things that don’t really go together in the first place. And so all the shopper sees is just a bunch like just a hot mess of like text and like squares, and you’re just like, What am I looking at? You know, and I don’t want to read this, and then you just go down to the reviews, right? So really the A plus content, if you think about it, is the last chance that you have to convert the shopper before they get to the reviews, it’s your last chance. So if that’s your last chance, rather than overwhelm them with a bunch of texts, we should be thinking about that section as a landing page. And you can do this with basic and premium A plus content. Our strategy for this is that you stack just big banners one on top of the next make it look like one big large image. If you have basic A plus content you would put a three part an SEO module is what we call it. Underneath those stack banners. So that you do get some text in there for SEO relevance, and then anchor your content with a cross sell comparison grid, right? So you have three different types of modules. Let’s say you have up to seven is the max, five of them are stackable banners. So you’re just like creating this huge image that takes up the whole screen. And that gets them to stop and take in two or three more points before they get to your reviews. And if you have premium A plus content, you do the same thing. But it’s even better because you have scrolling carousels, and hotspots and different things, different videos you can put in there. So yes, really?

Ben Donovan  35:42
That was going to be my question, but you’ve answered it for me already is how do you differentiate between the images and the a plus content? Because exactly that I see so many people just copy over and you’ve answered it. Powerful, there’s some really, really helpful and, and also answers. Another question is because we sort of flip flopped at times back between those kind of stacked images, and then the more sort of written content because you want all the keywords in there, but you give a perfect solution there. And so you kind of just nailed it all on the head, really. 

Daniela Bolzmann  36:10
I think you you have to remember to if you have a highly technical product, I wouldn’t do the stackable banner. So if you have like an electronics product that maybe maybe needs more SEO keywords, or more explanation on the details and the specs, maybe you do want to have a couple more of those banners that have specs listed out. But again, specs can even be designed into your creative, you can use with every image that you’re uploading, you can use the alt text to put in your SEO keywords. And for a lot of brands, that’s all they need. You know, they don’t need to I mean, I look at the it’s like weighing searchability versus converting, right? And so once they’re in your listing, we obviously want to convert. So we don’t want to, like you want to figure out that balance for your products? 

Ben Donovan  36:58
For sure. Yeah, that’s good. I’m putting you on the spot here. But have you got any brands that you look to as an inspiration, if you’ve got a new project, new client, or there’s some go to brands you look at and think, oh, man, these guys are nailing their creators on Amazon?

Daniela Bolzmann  37:13
That’s a good question. That’s a good question. I mean, it’s fine. You know, no, there’s not one I’ll tell you why. Because so what we have is we have like a swipe file, which if you follow me on tick tock, you can download the swipe file, I believe, which has, like all the favorite pieces that we found from brands. What I’ve noticed is that most brands, they have like either amazing A plus content, but then their product images are lackluster, or vice versa. Or they have like a really killer brand story section. And then they like, it’s like they forgot about their A plus content or it’s like one piece of it right? So what we do is we kind of take the best of the brand stories and we put them all in a swipe file so that our creative directors can see like what are the we all share this with each other to like they find ones I find ones and we all have like our favorites listed in this document where we can kind of see, okay, these are the best across lots of different categories and all the different ideas and that’s what gets the wheels spinning. So I don’t think that one brand is necessarily doing the best job. I will also say that if you Google best storefronts on Amazon, or best April’s content on Amazon, you will see the worst examples. Like they show like Sony and like these, like big brands that like literally their teams have not invested time and effort into Amazon as much as they have on their own websites. So I just don’t even think they’re good examples to use in the first place. But in general, I would say pet category and CPG category are probably leading the charge when it comes to creative content. CPG it’s like food products specifically. If you can’t smell it and you can’t taste it, you need to have amazing packaging, amazing visuals like people need to really understand it to buy it whether it’s going to go in their household, in their kitchen and feed their family, right? So I think that that category is always pushing the limits and pets as well.

Ben Donovan  39:09
Yeah, definitely. Huge great thoughts. Is there anything, I feel like we’ve covered a lot today but is there anything that I haven’t asked that you feel would be good to add before we finish

Daniela Bolzmann  39:19
No. Go check out our work at mindfulgoods.co

Ben Donovan  39:21
That was going to be my next question? Yeah.

Daniela Bolzmann  39:25
Yeah, they could go to mindful goods. Dotco follow us on Instagram, Tik Tok LinkedIn. And yeah, we have we actually on our website right now, there is a tutorial showing you how to unlock premium A plus content. If you haven’t unlocked premium A plus content and your brand registered. You should have it unlocked by now. And it’s actually if you don’t, it’s actually really easy. It’s really really easy two step work around. And so I just shared in a video tutorial exactly how to do it. You don’t pay for it. It’s totally free. Just go to my website and you’ll see a pop up that says unlock your premium A plus content, it’ll show you the videos. And you can do that.

Ben Donovan  40:02
Very cool. That’s super useful resource so thank you for that. And thank you for coming on the show. It’s been a great episode where you demonstrate that you clearly got a lot of skin in the game here. So thank you for taking the time out.

Daniela Bolzmann  40:14
Of course, thanks for having me. 

Ben Donovan  40:16
No, it’s a pleasure looking forward to following your journey as well and seeing seeing it continue to grow. So yeah, appreciate you coming on. 

Daniela Bolzmann  40:22
Likewise. Thanks, Ben. 

Ben Donovan  40:24
Good stuff. Well, thanks, guys for listening. I show you you got a lot of value out of that. Daniela really knows her stuff and some actionable tips to go away and implement in your business, I’m sure. Thanks for being with us. If you have enjoyed this episode, as always, please do give it a like, subscribe, all that good stuff. And I will see you in the next episode. Same time next week. Take care, bye bye!