What's up, DTC pod? Today we've got Mina elias back on the show and we're going to be talking about Amazon today. We're really excited to have Mina back because last time we covered everything and what it takes to launch a successful brand on Amazon. So if you're just getting started, definitely encourage you to go back and check out that previous episode that we ran with Mina. We'll link it in the show notes. But for this one, the topic of the show is going to be all about how do you scale on Amazon? What does it take? What do you need to do as a brand? So, Mina, why don't you kick us off, give our listeners who maybe didn't tune into the last one, why don't you give us a little bit of background about yourself, what you've done in the Amazon space, and then we'll jump right into it and what it takes to scale a brand. So, yeah, why don't you kick us off?

Awesome. Yeah, this is basically like v two or part two of the last episode, so definitely watch the last one. If you're a D to C founder, I think we talked about how to assess if your product would work on Amazon or wouldn't work, what to look for, search volume, all that kind of stuff, and how to get it set up. My background, I was working corporate nine to five chemical engineer up until 2018. And then in 2018, I started a supplement company because of my passion for supplements. The plan wasn't to get it on Amazon initially, but it was very difficult for me to sell it in gyms and supplement stores. Being kind of like a solo founder, I didn't know how to do anything. I was just an engineer.

And so I decided to get it on Amazon, became obsessed with Amazon, made it work. Six months later, I was making like four k a month in profits, grew that brand, scaled it to seven figures by 2019, and then in 2020, hit Covid hit. So I started getting on podcasts like this, sharing my knowledge, and everyone started knowing who I was. I was approached by an aggregator to help them build their team up and train them on Amazon and advertising, things like that. I outperformed six other agencies that they had hired, sort of when I ran one of their brands and decided to start an agency. And so now I created my agency, Trivium in 2021. We run about 170 brands right now and 83 employees or so. And I'm just like all in on Amazon and just live and breathe Amazon pretty much.

So I'm here to share in this episode everything that I think you should know about how to scale your brand on Amazon. Yeah.

And I love that. And one of the reasons we love having these conversations, especially with you, is it's not just like you have one perspective from one brand. You're overseeing the operations of not only a ton of ad spend, but you're seeing what's working across a whole bunch of different brands. So without any further ado, let's get into it. So for brands who maybe have already gotten their storefront set up on Amazon and are starting to sell, why don't you just talk us through? How do you think about traffic? What do you need to know? What do we need to know to start growing our traffic and growing our sales in Amazon?

Yeah. So the way that Amazon works is like a funnel, essentially like anything else, right? Like if your Facebook ads, like the funnel is pretty simple, you're creating ads, you're getting impressions, you're getting clicks from those ads. They're going to a landing page, a certain percentage of those people are converting. That's your conversion rate. Amazon is very, very similar, except we don't have as much control on our ad creative. And on our landing page, all of our ad creative is the same. It's just our know the main image, the price and the reviews and all of our landing pages are the same. It's your product detail page.

So that's basically if you want to compare Facebook with Amazon for the D to C founders, I think that's a good analogy. So with the funnel being you're launching ads and when you launch ads, you're basically showing up your listing as sponsored. In all of those search results, the ads are all search based. Like keyword based. There's some product targeting based which we'll cover in a second. But the majority of them, like someone types in the keyword electrolyte powder, you see a bunch of results. The top four are sponsored. After that there's organic and a little bit more organic, and then there's a video and then there's some more sponsored and then organic and so on.

And so you, when you create campaigns, add campaigns on Amazon, you're showing up there and you're getting impressions. So that's the first step of the funnel is impressions. Now, a certain number of those impressions will turn into clicks and people coming into the listing. And that is dependent on your click through rate, which is dependent on the main factors that affect that are your main image, your price, your reviews, your star rating. If you're prime, like FBA versus FBM and if you have discounts or coupons, badges, et cetera. So there's only like a few factors, I think seven total factors that affect your click through rate. Having a better main image, more attractive main image. We'll cover all that stuff in a second.

So now that the people are in the listing, there's two things that you need to take into account. There's clicks and there's sessions. Clicks is someone that clicked on your ad sessions is a unique Amazon account that visited your listing. And so the reason that there's a difference between the two is because me, Mina, I'm a shopper. I can type in electrolyte powder, click on my product, electrolyte supplement, click on my product, electrolyte powder for men, click on my product. And that's three clicks and one session only. So it's important to understand the distinction. And then once the people are into the listing or in the product detail page, a certain percentage of them will convert.

And that's dependent on your conversion rate, which the factors that affect that are the rest of your images on the listing. The videos on the listing, the title, the bullet points, the reviews obviously in the star rating and the discounts and coupons. If you have a brand story, if you have premium a plus content, that is that nice landing page looking thing that's visually selling your product. If you have images in the reviews, if you have Amazon posts, if you have UGC videos, there's a certain number of things that you can change to affect your product detail page. The more that you take advantage of those things, obviously the better your conversion rate is going to be. And I think the biggest, biggest things that affect conversion rate, in my opinion, are price reviews and your creatives. If you focus on those three things, if you have creative that sells, the difference between D to C creative and Amazon creative is huge. D to c creative, you're just like, you're putting the side of the product, the back of the product, someone like taking a pill or someone holding a wallet.

That doesn't fly on Amazon because Amazon is like a bodybuilding show. Like you need to come in and you have six poses, and in those six poses you have to show why you're better than everyone else. And it's the same thing. You have five images, and in those five images you have to say, okay, here's how we're better than everyone else. And the second one, you're like, here's how we have all the good stuff of everyone and none of the bad stuff of everyone and the image after here's how we have social proof. We're in Forbes, we're in shark tank, we're in Business Insider, we're in, you know, and it's just like every single image is like you saying, clearly communicating why your product is better than everyone else and why it solves the problem. Like if I'm looking for a credit card holder, my problem is I need something to hold my cards. So how are you the best one? And how do you solve my problem the most? Well, I can carry the most cards.

I have RFID protection, whatever it may be, like all the things that people are looking for for a credit card that's sleek, it's stylish, lifetime warranty, et cetera. So that is essentially the funnel on Amazon. So I just want to take a second to explain that, because everything else is going to work off of that. The way that the funnel works is it's not actually one funnel, it's a thousand different funnels. Every keyword is a like the way that Amazon works is Amazon is a bunch of shelves, right? It's like a store with a bunch of shelves. But all of those shelves, don't think about them as aisles. Think about them as keywords. And so I'm going to whole foods, and aisle one is electrolyte powder.

Aisle two is electrolyte supplement. Aisle three is electrolyte powder for men. And then every single search result is unique. And you're going to get a certain number of impressions in those search results, certain number of click through rate in that search result, a certain number of conversion rate based on that search result. So it's all of those funnels combined that create the big funnel. So the game of Amazon is how do I show up in the most amount of places as possible, profitably? Because some places I'm going to launch an ad and I'm going to get a lot of clicks with no sales. In other places, I'm going to launch an ad, get like one click and one sale. So how do I show up in the most amount of places to get the maximum amount of impressions profitably? By looking at one keyword at a time and saying, okay, I'm profitable here, not profitable there.

How do I maximize my click through rate so that from those impressions, I'm getting the most number of people coming into the listing. And then how do I maximize my conversion rate so that the most number of people that are in my listing convert into a sale? And then there's obviously the extra nuances of getting people to become subscribers, increasing average order value by having frequently bought together or virtual bundles, things like this. These are all like small nuances, but the general kind of foundation of the business is traffic and conversions show up in the most amount of places, get the most number of impressions as profitably as possible, improve your click through rate, improve your conversion rate, and then make the most number of sales. So pause there for some questions.

Yeah, no, I love that. And instantly, what your description is really making me think of is there's a lot of overlap with how you think about Amazon and how you might think about SEO. Right at the end of the day, these are keywords and then you have different attributes that you can control on your product page and on your listing. So your listing is going to be kind of like what is going to show up in your Google search result, the meta description, all of that, and then the product like you're saying you need to have. That's like your landing page. And what's going to make people to convert? One question that I have is shopping on Amazon is inherently a different process than shopping on d to C. Because when you're in shopping on d to C, a lot of time you've got brand recognition, you've driven the traffic. It's your job to now convert someone who's on their page, but they're not comparing your brand necessarily with all these different brands.

Whereas in Amazon, like you said, you're intent based shopping a lot of the time. So now you're comparing one brand to a whole bunch of either other related brands or even almost like unbranded sort of products that are going after one specific thing. So my question is, let's talk about some of those levers that you described, right? Like the sponsored post. So that's like how do we get the listing as high up to the search result as possible? Let's talk about the image and let's talk about the ratings, the number of ratings and the stars and how do all of these factor into conversion? And how does a brand really optimize these to give themselves the best chance at conversion?

Yeah, so the first thing that I want to cover is I'm going to get into the ads. But before I get into the ads, sales based on ads, it's like a 50 50. If you guys have ever run paid traffic, you know that it's like half of it is your creative or whatever, like getting the person to the landing page and then the other half is the landing page. So anything that you do to improve click through and conversion rate will affect your ad's performance. So just putting that out there so that we all know, like, if you just launch on Amazon and you have ten reviews and all of your ad performance is bad, it's okay because it's your landing page, it doesn't have enough reviews, so it's not converting. And as you get more reviews, all of your ads are going to start performing better. So how do I look at ads? My goal, I know that let's say there's 1 million people total a month that are looking for electrolyte powders. And so my goal is to show up the 1 million people are using 1000 different keywords to find those electrolyte powders.

So my goal is to show up under all of those 1000 keywords. But we need to think about it more logistically. Like, okay, the goal is I want to show up under all of those keywords in front of all of those people, but financially it's not going to work. So what do I do? I first start by saying, okay, which keywords do I think? If you look at my YouTube, right, Mina lice. I have a lot of keyword research videos and stuff if you want to get like nitty gritty. But I'm like, okay, let's take the top ten keywords. These are the same keywords that all of my competitors are ranking very high for. Let's start there and let's run an auto campaign.

And so what I'm going to start doing is let's say I have $100 a day budget. My initial $100 a day, that's all test ad spend, right? It's all tested. Like, I don't know if it's going to work or not. And so I go after those ten keywords, two of those keywords. Let's say when I'm in the top position, I'm converting profitably. Great. So I keep those. Now I have $20 of profitable ad spend, $80 of not profitable ad spend.

So I have two options. With the $80, I can either try to lower my position in the ads. So when I launch the keyword, I'm like, okay, I'm going to spend a dollar. It's a bidding system. So at a dollar I'm maybe position ten, $2, I'm position one. So let's say I start at position one, $2, I'm not profitable, I'm spending $10 or let's say $50 in one sale. And I have a $20 product. So I'm going to start lowering the bids, let's say down to a dollar.

Now I'm position 15. And again, the bid changes are going to happen gradually, not like a big jump. This is going to be like from $2 to 195, 191, 85 and so on. And I'm going down the positions until I find a spot where I'm either converting profitably or I'm not getting any more clicks. And it's fine, we're not spending anymore. The reason that as you lower the bids, you start converting more profitably is there's more buyer intent. Like someone who types in electrolyte powder and sees you on page one, the top and clicks on you. Maybe they're just browsing someone who found you in the bottom of page one and decided to click on you.

They have more buyer intent. So that's kind of the first part is, okay, all of our budget is test. Now we have $20 that's working, 80 that's not working. Let's say we were able to get another $10 that's working after lowering the bids. So now we have $30 that's working, 70 not working. So at 70 that's not working. We scrap it and we start using it on another set of keywords. Right? And we keep doing it.

And again, the performance of those keywords is also dependent on conversion rate. So maybe this week it didn't work, but six months from now you have 1000 more reviews, it's going to work profitably. And so that's the system of when I'm running ads is how do I test all of the different keywords in a systematic way? Because if I had a million dollars that I could spend on ads in the first week, I would set every single keyword, maximum budget, maximum bid, blow the money, spend a million dollars in the first week, get all the data and make the decisions. And then obviously I'm going to keep having to make decisions again and again because as my conversion rate changes, my performance of the ad is going to change. So maybe I have now new keywords that I can start spending more money on. So that's kind of, in terms of paid track, that's the goal. The goal is to identify as many keywords as possible. Launch ads, show up on those keywords.

If it's working, keep spending, if it's not working, lower the bids, add them as negatives, launch more campaigns.

So real quick, Mina, just to kind of jump in there, how would you recommend a brand that's like looking to scale? How many keywords do you recommend they go after in the first place? Is it just based on budget or is there because managing a process, like if you have budget spending on 500 different keywords, that's a lot to manage from a process point of view. So how do you think about it when you're starting to look to scale? How do you determine how many keywords you're going after? And how do you determine, how do you run that process?

Yeah, it's 100% dependent on your budget. So inch your way up. Let's say you want to spend $100 a day more, launch five keywords. Let's say it's all dollar 50 bid. So have five keywords, dollar 50 bid, different match types. So five keywords, broad, five keywords, phrase, five keywords, exact, and you launch them in those different campaigns. And now how much are you ended up spending? Okay, I'm spending 25 more. Great, I have $75 more.

Let's do another five keywords. Another five keywords. Another five keywords until you get to that $100 mark. Amazon is very dynamic because it's human behavior. So it's like how much you spend depends on the number of people and who are shopping that day. So it's impossible to predict. But you can iterate fast enough. You can say, okay, I'm going to put ten keywords out there.

Did I spend 100 or did I not? I didn't. Okay, launch more. I did. Okay, let's cut down some of the keywords or lower the bids or maybe pause some of the keywords until I have a little bit more budget. That's the way that I would look at it. And over time, you start accumulating more and more and more keywords that are working profitably. And let's say after a month or so, you have $100 that's profitable. And the $100 is generating $600 in sales.

So then you launch another $100 worth of keywords. That $100 is not profitable, but you keep churning it. And then maybe another month later, now you have $200 generating you one $200 in sales and so on. And that's essentially the journey of running ads I can jump into. Now the other factors. So that's the ad section side of it. Sales come in two ways on Amazon, or traffic comes in two ways, paid, which we covered. And then organic.

Organic essentially depends on. Amazon sees the journey of shoppers from that keyword for your product. How is it going? So people who search electrolyte powder, they see your product. Are they clicking on it, yes or no? And once they do click on it, are they converting yes or no? And the people that get the most clicks and conversions, the best conversion rate basically on that keyword, start getting ranked higher because Amazon's saying, okay, and we know this because we used to do something called search, find, buy, which is manipulating the ranking where we'd make people, we'd force people to search a keyword, find our product, click on it and buy it. And then Amazon would say, oh, wow, this product is converting really well for that keyword. Show it up higher so it can get more people. So if Amazon sees that someone who types in the keyword electrolyte powder, finds your product, clicks on it and then converts, it's going to rank you better. So obviously, as your click through rate and your conversion rate improves for a certain keyword, you start getting ranked higher.

That's how organic ranking works. And organic ranking is amazing because that's where you finally start taking advantage of the Amazon algorithm. It's bringing those hundreds of thousands, millions of people a month typing keywords and searching for keywords. And if you don't have to pay for it and you're ranked organically, that's amazing. You're making a shitload of money. And then the other thing that we've started noticing is improving organic ranking and has nothing to do with any of that stuff is how much external traffic your product is bringing into Amazon. So we've noticed with a few brands that we've worked with, one of them being celebrity, a few of them being heavy TikTok influencer based, and some of them actually also mentioned on Joe Rogan, like stuff like, like a lot of external stuff like that drives to Amazon. We've noticed that people will come in, they'll search for their brand name and they'll find the product and they'll buy it.

And Amazon decides to increase the organic rank across the board. So for completely non branded keywords that have nothing to do with the brand, like electrolyte powder, like, let's say a lot of people were typing MMA nutrition. Like all of a sudden I was mentioned on, you know, so many people are typing in MMA nutrition. Amazon increases the organic rank for all of the keywords, electrolyte powder, electrolyte supplement. And my theory is that it looks as like to reward people that are bringing outside people into the platform because.

If so, you're basically saying that one of the things that you want to be doing as a brand is you want a high level of branded search as well. Because when you can bring branded search into, you know, new customer comes into Amazon, empty search box types in your name of your brand. Exactly. And lands on your page and converts, they're going to see that as a great signal to start improving your keyword rankings across the board for all those other subspecific keywords that you're ranking for.

Is that right? Exactly, yeah. Because it sees you as a good brand. It sees you as a good brand that is driving branded search. You're basically bringing people to their platform and they want to reward you for that. But obviously that doesn't mean that you can just have great Facebook ads and TikTok ads and not do any of the Amazon stuff. You have to be good on both sides. But it's just saying like if you're doing well on the Amazon side and you also drive a lot of branded traffic, it will be synergistic, you'll get a lot more sales, especially like more free sales. Yeah.

And I think that's a great thing for d to C brands because one of the things that d to C is so good at is building brand and brand notoriety, whereas there's a lot of brands that will just pop up on Amazon to play the Amazon game without being worried about branded. So if you do have a branded entity and you are building a brand on your direct channels and your omnichannel things, you want to parlay that back into your Amazon strategy for sure.

Right? 100%. That's exactly it. The second one is click through rate. Right. How do we maximize click through rate? And here's the cool thing. We notice that as your click through rate improves, your cost per click goes down. So not only are you getting more people into the listing based on the same number of impressions that you're getting, but also it's costing you less on the ad side. And obviously if you have better click through rate, it's not just coming from ads, it's also coming from organic.

So you're getting more people in through organic that are going to convert for free and then you're going to get more people through paid that are going to convert at a lower cost because the cost per click goes down. And I think this is Amazon's way of rewarding, you know, having a better click through rate. So the factors that affect click through rate, main image, the main image, you have to think about it as not only being like a very sharp and beautiful main image, but know having eye candy. And then if you can sell the product through the label, through the boxing, through the packaging, that kind of stuff. At the end of the day, I'm typing in a keyword like credit card holder and then I'm going to see a bunch of credit card holders. I'm going to have to make a decision with my eyes. So if I see two credit card holders, one of them is just a credit card holder and the other one is a credit card holder on top of a box. And that box happens to mention that there's a lifetime warranty and that it is like RFID technology or some shit like that.

I don't know, whatever credit card holders have like the RFID protection, I'm going to look and notice that one and I'm going to see that it's a good image, but also I'm going to be quickly sold on the spot and be like, okay, let me click on that one. Because it just convinced me in two other ways that this is why I should click on this product. So that's in terms of the main image. Reviews are always going to be reviews, right? If you have a shit product with 100,000 reviews, you're selling like hotcakes. That's how Amazon works. And that's why so many people are doing review manipulation and insert cards and all of that stuff, because it works. It works very effectively. So make sure you have a review strategy.

And the ultimate way to get reviews is basically for people to buy your product and then for you to identify them. So whether you tell them to buy or you identify them after the fact through an opt in, and then after that, incentivize them, or you shouldn't incentivize them because it's against terms of service. But most people incentivize them for review.

Yeah, can we talk about that a little bit? Because I know how important reviews are through click through rate. Even when I go shopping, I'm literally doing exactly what you said. I'm looking at the pictures, I'm looking at the average customer reviews. If I don't see anything I like on the first page, I go up to the toggle and I'm like sort by average customer reviews. And then I see some four sevens or four eights and I go down the rabbit hole there a little bit. So what is inbounds? What's against terms of service? What do successful brands do? How do you incentivize? Are a lot of these brands doing fake reviews? What's happening? And what do brands that win at Amazon and scaling, how do they build up reviews beyond the obvious? Oh, have a great product, get a great review sort of strategy.

Yeah. So obviously the have a great product, get a great review. I don't know if I really believe that. I've never left a product review without it being like a friend's product or something. So I don't know if I believe that. I think what is white hat and what Amazon allows you to do is just to ask for a review. So if I know that you bought my product, I can just say, hey, Blaine, can you leave me a review? That's the only thing that I can do. I can't say, good review.

Don't leave me a bad review. I can't say, I'll give you a free gift if you leave me a review. Any of that stuff is against terms of service. So I think the game becomes okay. How do you identify everyone who's buying your products? There needs to be some sort of opt in. So if you have a product and you need to scan a QR code and enter information to activate a certain thing or get a certain thing, now you're getting access to that customer data, which Amazon doesn't give you. If it was easy and Amazon gave us everyone's emails, then we'd start some sort of email marketing and start to get reviews. But they know that that's going to happen, so they prevent you from getting the customer data.

So it's up to you on how can you get someone to opt in? By seeing something on your product packaging, a QR code, and it being compelling. Like opt in to activate a lifetime warranty or get like a library of recipes or something like that. Something that's compelling. Not just like activate to get our newsletter, or activate to be the first to know when we have a discount. I don't care when you have a discount. If you're a brand that I'm using, religious. Like, if you're a gym shark and I have like a thousand gymshark shirts. Okay, maybe I'll opt in for discounts.

But besides that, no one's opting in, so something compelling. And then once you have the customer information, you can ask for a review, or you can incentivize for a review. It's up to you. You can pick. If you want to go completely white hat, you're probably going to have much less results than if you go a little bit gray hat and say, try and find a way to give someone something and use the law of reciprocation where you give them something for free and they're like, okay, fine, I'll leave your review sort of thing. That's, I think one of the biggest ways, and the other way is how do you get a bunch of people to, I think, creating community. How do you get a bunch of people in a community buying your product, using your product to reviewing your product? And I think that's what a lot of the really big brands do, is that they have community involved and they kind of motivate the community to leave reviews and the community leaves reviews. And I don't think that's against terms of service because you're basically like nurturing the people and saying, you're giving them all this value and saying, hey, it would help us out a lot if you left us reviews, but you're not really incentivizing anything.

So that's kind of the way that I've seen big brands succeed.

Two other questions I have to follow up on that. One is it basically sounds like you're saying you want to have a really solid, almost like lead magnet sort of strategy that ties into your product, where you're giving something of value that people could opt into, whether it's QR code or something else. And you're getting people in. Like you're saying, I think if you're lazy about it and you're just like, oh, subscribe to my newsletter or subscribe for a next discount, people are like, okay, I've seen a million of that. But if you can provide something that aligns, makes sense with your product and you can draw them in and you get the first party data that way, then you can build them, nurture them and ask for the review. My other question was going to be, talk to me about the more gray black hat sort of area of Amazon. I know when I look on products, I see products where I'm like, okay, it has like five stars. It's got like 85 star reviews.

These are clearly fake because I don't know what's happening there. Or is that something that can really kill a brand? Is this something that you really don't want to do? What's, I guess, happening behind the scenes for those? Are they like buying their own products and reviewing them themselves? What's happening? What are we seeing and how bad is it?

Yeah, I think that there's a few things. There's like the insert cards that say, get a free product. So as soon as you get the thing, like you get the product, you scan the QR code to get a free product. It says, okay, what's your information? What's your address for us to send you a free product and then say, okay, can you leave us a review? So that is one of the ways that is considered more black hat. There's also like, I think review groups. So a lot of burner accounts that you just pay to get reviews, I would stay away from that stuff. And I'll tell you the way that Amazon works. If a computer can detect it, Amazon can detect it.

And so when you're thinking about reviews and you're thinking about the community, or if you're a d to C brand and you decide to do like a promo, and that promo is basically like for the first ten people that leave a product, that buy our product on Amazon, we're going to give you this thing for free. And you have a bunch of people just from your email going to buy the product. And then you nurture them and you say, hey, it would help us out if you left their review. You can't really detect that with an algorithm, right? But if you start noticing like there's a large number of people that are leaving a review all at once, or a lot of people that have left reviews on 50 other products, leave a review on your product, things like that, that are algorithmically detectable, that's when Amazon catches you. It's almost like it's only wrong if you get caught. Like that sort of thing, that saying it's only wrong if you get caught. Nothing's going to happen if you're stealing money, unless you get caught. And so it's the same thing.

You can get reviews. It's just like, how do you not get caught doing it? Obviously, everyone should stay relatively as close to white hat as possible, but a lot of us have to go a little bit gray because it's like, that's, I mean, how else are you going to get reviews? I've never left a review before. Unless someone's like, hey, I'll give you something for free. And I'm like, okay, fine, I'll leave you a review because I want this second thing for free. So how do you do that and not get caught by an algorithm? And that's what everyone just has to think.

Yeah, and I think another great point there is you also always want to think about what the downside is, right? There's probably a lot of brand list sort of products that are popping up that might go after this. Because in their worst case scenario, all they do is they spin up another seller account and they don't care because they're a product, they're not tied to a brand. So if they get shut down, it doesn't matter. But if you're a d to c brand and you have a reputation and brand is one of the things that you're building, you're better off going to white or maybe some of these grayer hat sort of areas. But like you're saying you don't want to be spammy and try to get your actual branded account banned. That would just be totally counterproductive.

Yeah. And the way that I like to do it the most is through outbound. So finding people on Instagram or anywhere, essentially, and then offering to give them the product for free in exchange for feedback, reimbursing them off platform, like no coupons, no gift cards, straight up like PayPal or Venmo. They get the money, they buy the product. We ask them for their feedback first they like the product, and then we ask them for a review. And then it's very hard to detect by Amazon. It's a lot more work, but it's also real because I'm going after people that would naturally buy the product. Like if I'm an electrolyte powder, I'm going after hot yoga pages, spinning pages, cycling pages, running pages, people that would naturally buy electrolytes.

I'm not going after like, oh, why did this 50 year old mom that only buys random things buy, isolate, way, isolate and leave a review? So it's like trying to be as natural as possible, undetectable as possible. It takes a little bit more work, but it's doable. Cool.

And then other things that I want to talk about is what other trends.

Are you seeing as we look to.

The rest of 2024? What are some other things on your mind for a brand that's scaling, that they want to get right?

Yeah, I think 2024 is the year that everyone needs to become lean. And profit is like the top of mind for everyone. So when you're on Amazon, you really need to, number one, maximize click through rate and conversion, right. So I think a lot of people, because we're an agency, right? And a lot of people come to us and they're looking for our ads to solve the problem. And it's not the ads that's going to solve the problem. The ads are going to be one piece of the problem. The biggest thing that's going to solve the problem is if you have a really good conversion rate and really good click through rate, everything else works easier. So if you want more profitability on Amazon, you need a better click through rate, you need better conversion rate, you need better images, you need to sell the product through images.

You need that landing page, the premium a plus content. You need the brand story, the mission, vision, values, all of that stuff like founder story, all of those sorts of things. You need to focus there. And when it comes to, I think, leaving no stone unturned when it comes to profitability on Amazon, what are all of the ways that you can increase average order value if you can get, subscribe and save frequently bought together so that you pay for one customer and get two sales instead of one or multiple products instead of one? I think those are the big things to take into account. And I think no wasted spend. So if you're advertising on Amazon, you really need to have good systems. Like you need to understand, okay, I'm spending $100 a day. I have exactly $20 a day for test budget.

I have a cap of $13 in spending, no sales. I'm going to add as negatives. If I hit 85% or let's say like a 2.2 roas, I'm going to add that keyword as a negative because that's too low. My threshold is 2.2. So you need those systems and those processes. You need to kind of have your guardrails and you to follow that. But on Amazon, generally, they're increasing their fees. They're taking all of these actions.

Now, if you have little inventory, you get penalized, and if you have too much inventory, you get penalized. So you literally have to be in a perfect range of like 30 to 60 days of stock at all times. And if it's too low, they're going to be like, well, this is annoying, right? Because it's bad for the customer experience. And we could have allocated more inventory to a better shopper, a better seller than you. And so if you just play by the rules of like, Amazon's number one thing is how do we maximize the shopper experience? And if you follow that, you're like, okay, how do I maximize the shopper experience? Always have inventory, never run out of stock, have good reviews, have beautiful creatives, use everything that they give us. So fill out all of the things. If you look into one of the listings, there's like the weight and the dimensions and is it like for an adult or child use or whatever, fill all of that stuff out and then just be careful with your ad spend, maximize, click through conversion rate. And I think you should do fine on Amazon.

You'll succeed. Amazon is bigger than ever. It's growing faster than ever. It's just 2024 is going to be a tough year. Yeah.

This was a question that I was really excited to ask you because you get to see all the keywords, all the search volumes, all the products. So what are some trends or like niches or different sort of types of products that you think are going to be successful this year and beyond?

I think single serve packets across the board I'm seeing for supplements are going to be successful. What do you mean by that? Protein comes in like a tub, but like single serve, like a packet of protein that you can take with you and mix, I think, electrolytes, a packet of pre workout packet of whatever, multivitamin. So things like that. Instead of being like, for your multivitamin, you have to open up a bottle and take a pill. It's like, oh, here is a system. They have this box and it has 30 packets and you just take a packet and take it with you. So love it. I think, yeah, single serve packets have definitely become a trend.

What else did I notice are trends? I don't know, man. I'm having a hard time remembering really any other trends. I think single serve packets is the one thing that I noticed.

And then anything particular in terms of product categories that you see sort of taking off, whether it's in the supplement space or in other spaces, like any sort of hot industries, I guess.

Yeah. Berberine, I would say Berberine is taking off significantly. That basically like that glucose control, like Ozempic type of products that sell themselves as. They'll have similar kind of response as Ozempic. I think that's blowing up. I think it's very easy to just notice what are the things that celebrities are talking about in terms of products. And that's usually what ends up scaling on Amazon. So Ozempic is a big one that all the celebrities are using.

And I can tell you right off the bat that any supplement that's going to start promoting that you're going to be less hungry or your food is going to have a less impact on your weight and things like that, that stuff's going to move like hotcakes, dude.

Another fun one might be like the supplements for the anti ozempic supplements. So after all the crap happens with Ozempic, maybe you launch a supplement brand to counteract all the counter.

Maybe. Maybe.

We've got a couple years for that. But anyway, Mina, I want to thank you for coming on today. Had a bunch of fun chatting with you for our audience who's listening, where can we connect with you? Where can we follow along? Where can we learn more?

Yeah, so definitely check out my YouTube for more, like, tactical information. It's Mina Elias. I-N-A-E-L-I-A-S. My LinkedIn is Mina Elias. And my Instagram is at the Mina Elias. I'm pretty accessible everywhere, so hit me up if you have questions. I'm happy to help. Sweet.

Thanks for coming on the show.

Awesome. Talk to you guys soon.