E171: Optimizing for Engagement on Facebook with Dave Huss
When you’re just starting as an ecommerce seller, do you improve your Amazon listing first or get started on Facebook ads? There’s no right or wrong order here. The main thing to remember is that you need to plan out how you can get both done at some point. In this episode, we’re gonna tackle the Facebook side of things.
As you may recall, I had my good friend Dave Huss join me in a previous podcast to talk about building a Facebook audience. I’ve had the chance to sit and have a chat with him again. And this time around, we’ll be focusing on creating a Facebook page and being able to optimize it for engagement.
If you’re new to Facebook, find the quickest way you can earn from it. Remember, it’s always good to have another revenue stream outside of Amazon.
Here are some detailed steps you can follow.
ENGAGEMENT
1. Ask yourself why people should care about your page. Based on your answer, pick the best niche that represents your product. Don’t be afraid to go really specific, like creating a page dedicated to French cooking.
2. Select about 30 pieces of relevant content. You can use a tool like Buzzsumo to do this. If it's too costly a tool, you can do the research yourself.
BUILDING THE MESSENGER LIST
3. Post or schedule posts 2-3 times initially. If you don’t see traction on your posts within a couple of days, change something up.
4. Boost some of the posts to your core audience.
5. Try to get people to like the page.
6. Do a giveaway to get people on your Messenger list.
Other Useful Resources:
Thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!
Full Audio Transcript
Mike: This is Mike, and welcome to episode number 171 of the EcomCrew Podcast. You can go to EcomCrew.com/171 to get to the show notes for this episode. And today I brought back Dave Huss. It was funny; we were at the end of our recording. He was just on the podcast obviously a couple days ago. But let me set up the scene here. We were recording at a restaurant here called Montanez. We were sitting up on this patio having lunch. I broke out the microphone and started talking to him.
We wrapped up the episode, and as soon as we said our goodbyes as far as wrapping up the episode, literally the first thing in his mouth was, I was just getting started. And later that night we went up, I don't know what it is in California. We're always doing these on a balcony somewhere. We went out on the balcony at our house and recorded another episode. And the reason being as we were going through it, we realized that Dave is just a wealth of knowledge, we started digging into things. And I thought that we could go over some of the stuff he talked about in more depth. I also thought that he could talk about some other things that we had discussed in private but hadn't gotten on the podcast yet. And so that's exactly what we did.
So, and I'm glad that we did it because actually since that episode came out with Dave, we've had amazing response. A lot of emails come in asking questions about how he did this, how he did that. And a lot of those questions actually get answered in this second part. So, we have been trying to stay away from two part episodes, but it kind of worked out this way. And it's not quite a second part as much as a follow on to Dave. So, I want to thank Dave again for coming out to visit and hanging out. It's always good seeing him super smart guy, and also thank him for coming and doing this episode. So, right after the introduction, we're going to jump right into it with Dave.
Mike: Hey, Dave, welcome back to the EcomCrew Podcast.
Dave: It's good to be back.
Mike: So, as soon as I hit the stop button on the other one, you're like, I was just getting started man, I mean we…
Dave: [Overlapping 00:03:13]
Mike: So, we've switched locations. We moved from the patio at Ventana where we had lunch to my deck, so there might be some cricket noises in the background I hear.
Dave: Or coyotes.
Mike: Coyotes howling, probably actually hear some coyotes in the middle of this. And there's a little bit of traffic noise. But it's a beautiful San Diego night. It's my favorite time of year. I love sitting out our balcony. We have a beautiful view here. But I know that this time of year, the summertime is a little bit warm. But the night…
Dave: The nights are cool, the nights are cold.
Mike: Yeah. It’s gorgeous here. But yeah, you're leaving tomorrow. But like, seriously, we got done with the other podcast you were like; I have so much stuff I want to talk about. And we were just talking about it. And I actually think that this might even be more valuable to allow the people listening because I think that what ends up happening is a few things number one, this stuff seems overwhelming.
Dave: It is analysis paralysis.
Mike: Yeah and it’s just like where do I even start and — so we got a jet in the background. So, I think the question we kind of had is role playing, if you're a solopreneur, which I think most people that probably listen this podcast are…
Dave: Yeah, and maybe a few VAs.
Mike: We have a couple of VAs, your team, you’re a small team, or solo where do you start and when should you start? What level — if you're like just selling on Amazon or you're just like, if you're just kind of getting started, when does it make sense to even bother with this crap? And is it going to make enough impact in your business to make it worthwhile that that's the thing that you should focus on versus one of the other 8 million things on your to do list?
Dave: Yeah. Are you going to improve your Amazon listing or are you going to start testing Facebook ads? Because your time is limited, your employees’ time is limited. So how do that it's worthwhile to even bother with this?
Mike: So if you are just an Amazon seller which by the way for a lot of people I actually recommend as a starting point. If you're just getting started in e-commerce, as much as we've talked about Amazon bashing over the last couple days and I've done a podcast about it, it still is like the easiest way to get started because I mean like they handle so much of the process that if you're doing it on Shopify or anything off Amazon, it just it requires a lot more manpower and brainpower. So, let's just assume you're just selling on Amazon, how can the stuff that we talked about in the last episode help you in Amazon land? And kind of focus it with that.
And we've done a lot of podcasts, a lot of talking about, and I really think that, to me, the future of being able to sell on Amazon, or just whatever you're doing in e-commerce, the more that you can control the process in that you have an audience and a following, the better chances you're going to have for success. If you have everything in Amazon's hands where you can't control any part of the process, the chances of something bad happening to you to where you can't pivot are much greater.
So let's talk about — and again, every niche is different, everybody is different. But just basic building blocks, like you're just selling on Amazon that means you probably don't even have a social page yet. And like, let's talk about like, just getting started, you create the social page. And what's like, the first thing you would do to like — it's like, hello, world, this is my first post. Let's kind of break it down like that basic.
Dave: So, for Facebook, as we mentioned in the first episode, it's much more about the activity or what they like, whether that's from others, like their kids, or it's their pets, like I love my dog. Facebook is very focused on those kinds of activities or hobbies. Whereas Amazon is very much like, I want this product. So that's a really important distinction that I see trip up a lot of Amazon sellers, is they go into Facebook in a transactional way. And they're doomed from the start because that's not how Facebook works. And it's much more a longer game.
But what you can do when starting a Facebook page is — and again, this doesn't work for all sellers because if you have products that aren't cohesive, like they don't work together, it's a lot harder to start five different Facebook pages for five totally different products. And you talk a lot about your product should be related. And like, this is why because when you go to build the brand, if you're in five different categories, it makes it almost impossible to get your pages off the ground.
Mike: Yeah, and I think the other thing which we also talk about in our courses, I think I've talked about several times on the podcast, having some level of passion is really important.
Dave: Exactly. Why should people give a crap about your Facebook page? Like, they could be looking at pictures of cats, talking to their friends, so how can you hook them into something that they want to see and they want to be a part of? So again…
Mike: It's a whole interruption marketing thing.
Dave: Exactly.
Mike: They weren't expecting the CEO…
Dave: No one types in the Facebook; I want to buy your garlic press.
Mike: Right exactly.
Dave: That's the huge difference. And so, let's say you're selling kitchen utensils; you would have to make your Facebook page not someone selling garlic press. No one is going to like that Facebook page, nobody. But what someone might like if they're really into high end cooking is my chef or like I love cooking, or whatever may make sense that's focused on the activity rather than the product that you're selling.
Mike: So what would your product be used for? What's the closest niche that people would have an interest or passion for?
Dave: It's a group of people who have a shared activity or value. So, people like us do things like this. So, people who like cooking buy these certain types of products, or they go to these certain types of meetups, or they watch these certain types of TV shows. And that all ties together into who is this person, it defines them.
Mike: So let's get some examples. I always love examples. I'll start with the easiest ones that people always know about like ColorIt. So it's like, you showed a group about a Facebook page about…
Dave: I love coloring.
Mike: Literally, like I love coloring, and you would post things on there about how to blend in shape with colored pencils, or a link to someone that's giving away some free coloring pages or things of that nature. And with what you’ve done with holding a very similar thing. Let's take it to something like tactical, it's like, well, there's all kinds of things you could do. You could have a page about camping.
Dave: I love guns.
Mike: I love guns or the world or like how to prep [inaudible 00:10:10]. You could even in that case; we don't like to talk about politics on the podcast. But you could interject like, right wing politics into that because I mean…
Dave: If that is a big part of the audience that makes sense. And you may want to have a different page for more political stuff. I wouldn't mix them too much.
Mike: Yeah, definitely don't mix such stuff.
Dave: But you could have one page for political and then one for guns, and then one for…
Mike: Camping.
Dave: Prepping or fishing.
Mike: Or back packing.
Dave: That's really good, because that's a little more advanced. But you can really focus down on that subgroup of customers and each of those pages. And so, if someone likes a page about I love camping, maybe they don't want to hear about the gun stuff.
Mike: Yeah, I would say they most definitely wouldn't exact match directly. Not always but I mean, definitely those are the types of — but the thing that's cool about like those push button type issues is those are the ones that typically get shared more. Those things can go really viral. But you definitely want to be careful with making sure you're separating out that audience from other [overlapping 00:11:16]. But what I wouldn't do because we're talking about creating multiple pages here, if you're just getting started, I would just pick one.
Dave: Yes? Pick the best one that covers the most of your product. What is the most promising group of people to go after first? So okay, you have this idea for Facebook page. Let's say I love cooking, so you want to find what are a couple of good pieces of content that other people have posted, and you can kind of get started with that. When you want to start promoting the Facebook page; you just need a couple of pieces of content so people don't see an empty page.
Mike: Try to seed it or whatever.
Dave: Yeah, you can't see them with good content.
Mike: And we talked about BuzzSumo on the last episode. It is a little bit of an expensive product, but it can really help jumpstart that search because you can type in the BuzzSumo best recipes or whatever search you want. And it'll show you the most popular content around that subject. So it does all the work for you. And then you can basically what you're putting on your Facebook channel is regurgitating all that popular content.
So like, BuzzSumo is telling you, hey dummy, this is the most popular recipes and the most popular cooking utensils, and the most popular demonstration videos, or whatever the keywords are that you're typing into. So, you already know, you're kind of cheating that this kind of thing did well, it was good. And then you could just put that on your Facebook page.
Dave: And, and one of the things that trips up like, I'd say Amazon sellers or people new to social is you have to get every piece right or else you end up with nothing. So, the piece of content itself has to be good and the targeting has to be good. And like you have to be consistent about posting it. And s, if you miss any of those, you end up with nothing.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, no doubt. And we were actually talking about this right after we signed off on the last episode, that this is like one of these weird situations where, like, one plus one plus one equals seven.
Dave: Yes, absolutely. And so in the beginning, I think for a solo Amazon seller, you want to find the quickest way to getting any income coming off of Facebook. So, the things that Mike, and I do require a lot of investment, a lot of time. And sometimes they don't work, honestly. Like you've had some stuff network out, we've done lots of niches and pages that have been mediocre at best.
Mike: And I talk about this all the time. I mean, I think that it's a very important attribute to have as an entrepreneur just is not to give up.
Dave: Yes.
Mike: And I talk about also, like, when I speak at events, it's like, look, people will come up to me, and talk about like, how I'm a genius, which is like really awkward when someone says stuff like that. And I immediately stop them. I'm like, look, I'm not here talking about the 10 things I did that didn't work. And I always like really open about the fact that it takes that kind of thing. It's fun sharing the thing that did work, because I want people to be able to easily go do that and I have to go do the 10 things I did that didn't work. But you have to have the ability.
I can't reach to this podcast and hold your hand, and make you post all the right content, or pick the right exact niche. You may have to do with the wrong way on your own the first time but like, not just be like, well, that didn't work. And it wasn't like this — this is not going to be like an instant shot in the arm. This isn't magic pixie dust. This is going to take some effort over the next three, six, 12 months to like really see the reward. But the reward, again, it's like one of these like one plus one equals plus one equals seven kind of things, it’s like the sum of all this gives you such an unfair advantage to the people that don't have that audience.
Dave: Yeah, I think that's a really key point is when you do have a group of products with a similar shared hobby or interest, and you build an audience around that, it gives a real power when trying to launch new Amazon products. And so, we've seen some of our Facebook competitors recently started launching Amazon products, and we've been thinking about that for a while as well. And they went into some of these categories, and within a couple of months had over 100 reviews and like they were at the top of these categories. And I can just imagine the other Amazon sellers are like, what are these guys doing? Where are they coming from?
Mike: They must be cheating.
Dave: They might, yeah, they must be. No, they're not. They have an audience of 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 people. And they come up with a really solid product, maybe the same quality level as the other one or slightly better, but they throw their audience at it. And so, this is the direction that Amazon is moving already, it's happening right now. And so, you can either do nothing and get left behind, or you can start to integrate some pieces of this into your own marketing to keep up. I mean, it is what it is. And this is one of the reasons that you've had so much success on Amazon is because one, you have amazing products. But two you have an amazing audience.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, it's just a numbers game.
Dave: And it's one plus one equals seven.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, it's a total numbers game. I mean, we have 80,000, you have 150,000 fans, plus we have an equal number of email addresses, and ManyChat subscribers. Some percentage of them are going to buy any product if you're up there. Like you could sell poop in a bag and they'll like, they'll buy that. Someone is going to buy even as a gimmick.
Dave: They like you like.
Mike: They like you and trust your products. And obviously, you'll sell them that once and they will never buy from you again. But like you develop a certain level of trust. And so I mean, we definitely have that now, because we've done this multiple times, and people trust our products, [inaudible 00:16:54]. But no matter what we launched, some percentage of our audience is going to buy it. Our latest product, we've talked about this in some podcasts, there is a watercolor, it's a brush pen, its water color.
This is something that we haven't ever done before. We've done, in air quotes up here I will say “traditional” coloring supply. So it's pencils. Everybody knows colored pencils, gel pens, markers, but watercolor is a departure. It's kind of like in the same sphere but it's different. But like even still, some percentage of people did buy it. We launched as a number one new bestseller, and we're selling through this product ahead of schedule. It's been a really good success, because we have the audience.
Dave: And the existing sellers are probably like, what happened? Where did this ColorIt come from? How did they rank so fast? What review club were they using? They're not. They have an audience of real people that buy stuff.
Mike: And we never use any coupons or any…
Dave: That's the real power. And I think that's why it's so worth it to at least give it a shot and see if you get any traction at all because once you start getting even a few sales, and you don't necessarily have to go the route of, and I see a lot of sellers doing this, oh, I need a Shopify store. Oh, I need to do all this email stuff. Oh, I need to do all the Messenger — like pick like one or two things that you want to focus on. And if you want to point people from your email back to Amazon, that's totally okay. You don't have to set up a Shopify store in the beginning. You just need to get some extra sales to prove to yourself that it's worth it to do all the work.
Mike: We have a Shopify store and we still we still send the traffic…
Dave: Exactly right. And your Shopify store is five times more work than Amazon and makes half the money.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think that this can be done in almost any niche. There's definitely things I can think of that would be a challenge. But even like, I always use treadmill.com is our example of like the hardest thing to do because it's so hard to — it's a tough niche. But with that, if someone said, okay, the only thing you can do is have treadmill.com and you got to make this business work. What I would do in that case is I would start a page about fitness. So, it's like I love fitness.
And that's another because it's the passion angle. You want to find something that is in the sphere of what you sell that people have a passion for. There is a segment of population that's really passionate about fitness. And you could put really amazing content up there about fitness. And yeah, it's a niche that has a longer sales cycle. And it's harder to sell people a treadmill spontaneously than a sewing product or a coloring product, but some percentage of those people still are going to buy.
Dave: And the cool thing is, if you have trouble selling them treadmills, well, if you have a Facebook page about I love fitness, or I love running, you can pivot into other products. You're not just selling treadmills. You're like, oh, these treadmills are expensive, they're heavy. Well, you have all these runners on your email list. How about you ask them what they want? So, one thing that we've gotten so much value out of, especially with Facebook Messenger is we get people on our list and we ask them a series of three or four questions.
We’ll say, hey, this product that we're thinking of launching on Amazon, where do you buy this right now? And so people say, oh, I buy from this retail store. Oh, I buy from Amazon. Like how much do you paid for it? Or we'll have like a range of prices. And like what would you think if we did this? Included a bag or did something else with it? So, you can collect all that data in Facebook Messenger from the people who are going to be buying your products, like that is gold. It really is.
And so I think that's a huge value for Amazon sellers too, is when you start running these campaigns, think about that from a product development perspective, is you're connecting directly with the customer, and you're getting feedback directly from them. And those people will be your biggest fans. So, when you launch new products, you can be like, hey, thanks for your feedback. Here's a coupon. Or don't give them a coupon, like you get an early access. Of course, they're going to buy your stuff and leave a good review because they were part of the creation process.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. We've done that similar thing and it worked phenomenally. So, backing up just a little bit here because we're getting off on a little bit of a tangent and getting ahead of ourselves. Let's go back again to those basic building blocks, so we always use the garlic presses as the favorite thing on the broadcast. Just to mess with Steve or Scott I mean, I always got to do that and hopefully he didn't listen to this. He always gives me; I get a backlash all the time.
So, let's just say you sell kitchen utensils. Those aren't really all that exciting. But the passion audience is I love cooking. So you would start a page, I love cooking on Facebook, use something like BuzzSumo. Even if you don't want to afford it, you can go out and find the content yourself.
Dave: Or you could even go one step deeper where if your utensils have a certain type, I love French cooking.
Mike: Right be specific.
Dave: So, every level that you go deeper, it does narrow the audience but it also makes your targeting much easier.
Mike: It increases the passion.
Dave: Exactly.
Dave: So you kind of have to find the balance of how small you want to go.
Mike: Let's say this French cooking, let’s use that. So I love French cooking. So, step one, make the page. Step two I think is finding the content. You want to find probably I would say at least 100 pieces of content out there, throw it in a spreadsheet just to have it ready so you can be able to kind of basically have your first month kind of planned out. I mean, that would be the way – you’re looking at me like that's may be too much.
Dave: That’s too much, let’s say like maybe 30 people.
Mike: So 30 pieces.
Dave: Spend may be maybe two or three hours on it. Don't over think it, because if you get any traction early, you can always have more content later.
Mike: Okay, so you're saying you want to — if you don't see any initial traction, you would just give up and move on to the next page kind of thing.
Dave: Yeah.
Mike: Okay. So let's say you find…
Dave: Especially if you're already selling products in that area and you have some knowledge of it. If you start targeting, and you get nothing, like crickets after a couple of weeks of doing that, you got to change something. Yeah.
Mike: So, let's say you find 30 pieces of content that are related to French cooking. And this would be French recipes, or YouTube videos, or maybe there's someone else doing a giveaway on their site that you point to or there's like a good meme that you saw, or you maybe have a piece of content that you've written yourself potentially, that's one of the things that we would do, or you've created a piece of content. It doesn't have to be your content, and you have these posts ready to go just so like they're being done on a schedule. And I think that you had mentioned earlier that you should post five times a day.
Dave: In the beginning, you can probably do two or three.
Mike: Two or three. So let's say you're posting three times a day. So you can schedule posts in advance on Facebook.
Dave: Yes, yeah.
Mike: So I would have that done so you're doing in advance. But just posting isn't going to get you to where you're like…
Dave: That's enough content. So it looks like something is going on the page. So then you go back to what are the best target audiences that you want to go after? And we mentioned in the first episode like the bull’s-eye approach, here’s the craziest people that love French cooking. Well, there's probably other brands that sell French cooking equipment like maybe your competitors. I would start there. Do they have Facebook pages?
Mike: Like someone that's into Sous-vide cooking I think would be…
Dave: Yeah, there's all these little keywords.
Mike: Or what else is French, maybe like French pastries, or something like that.
Dave: Like we have French baking.
Mike: There's definitely sub niches in food culture. And I'm a little bit ignorant because I don't really — I'm a foodie but like, I don't know enough about French cuisine even though I've been there. But how do — they serve way too little food on the plate or something like that.
Dave: Yeah, it’s probably too much.
Mike: It’s probably too much for it.
Dave: Yeah. So, you will test those different audiences again, and again, in different ways. So, one is like, can we get likes from them at a reasonable cost? The other one is, can we get them to sign up for Facebook Messenger? And I think for Amazon sellers, Facebook Messenger is a really nice match, because it's a lot less work than doing email, but gives as much if not more of the benefit. And so I would actually focus on how could we build — in addition to the Facebook page, how do we build our Facebook Messenger list?
Mike: Yeah, maintaining a Messenger subscriber is worth more than email subscriber.
Dave: Oh, yeah, for sure. And it's a lot less work to set up in my opinion.
Mike: But going through stuff, but just because I want to make sure that we aren't — because what ends up happening is, I think we take things for granted, because we've been doing this for so long that we don't think so. Like you make a post on…
Dave: You want the page to look real because the people you're targeting for Facebook Messenger, some of them will like the page also. And so…
Mike: But before even talking about Messenger, like you got this content, you're going to make a post on your timeline.
Dave: Yes.
Mike: On your Facebook page, the new Facebook, I love a French cooking Facebook page. I would think and maybe I'm incorrect in this. I would think that the first step after doing that, after making a few posts, so it looks like there's 10 posts or some history or something for people to scroll through, what I would do is just simply click on the boost button on that page, and target people who like one of these things, just to get the engagement.
Dave: So you take those core audiences. And so, one thing you can do is boost your articles to them. That's a good start.
Mike: To me that would be the first step or maybe that isn't the first?
Dave: Well, you kind of do all of them. I would boost some of the posts to try and get some engagement and see what works. I would also try to get people to like the page directly with a light campaign. And then the third thing I would do is have some kind of offer to get them on Facebook Messenger. So ManyChat is a good software. And you can say, hey, Amazon sellers can do lots of giveaways. So it could be like, hey, we're doing a giveaway of this product, click here to enter. And it's a lot more appealing if it's a page about I love French cooking than like garlic press page. [Overlapping 00:27:01]
So yeah, I love French cooking, or French, whatever. And so then inside of Facebook Messenger, you can have, you can facilitate that giveaway. And you can also take them to a landing page, like, there's different landing page software's out there to do like the coupon giveaway, and that sort of thing. Like LandingCube is a good one. And so, you don't really know which of those is going to work, but you only need one of them to work really. If you can get people to enter your giveaways by itself, which a lot of Amazon sellers start with that, that's fine, great, you're making money, right?
Or if you can get people to like the page, once you get 1000, a couple of thousand fans, then you can turn around and post on your page, hey, we're launching this product or you can target those people. Or if you have a post that gets a lot of traction, you can use that as the frontend of your funnel. And like you said, there is no real like process like this works for everybody. It's very niche specific. But I think those three ways of both testing the offer and trying to test what's the best audience, is the way to move forward with that.
Mike: So just to recap, because again, I think people that are just hearing this stuff for the first time are probably like, oh my God, like my head is going to explode. So, just trying to keep it as basic as possible, you're making these posts on your new Facebook page.
Dave: Yes.
Mike: You're going to boost that content to those core audience that you identified.
Dave: Yes. So let's say you come up with five to 10 different audiences.
Mike: So you can do small budgets, $5 a day for your audience and just see which one seems to be getting the most engagement. You would look at…
Dave: You'll see even among like five audiences, the amount of engagement that you'll get will be wildly different, even for what seemed like very similar target audiences. So, you might find if you go after a look alike, which is people similar to your buyers, that it works really well, or maybe it doesn't. And then targeting a specific Facebook page of a competitor works really well, or maybe a French cooking magazine works really well. I can't tell you what that is right now.
Mike: You got to try them all, it’s a point.
Dave: It's a process.
Mike: Right. And in these cases, you're going to be — when you click the boost button, you're going to be optimizing for engagement because you're not optimizing for a conversion of any kind, or anything like that. So that's compartment number one. Compartment number two is you're going to then go on the Facebook Ads Manager and launch an ad for likes. You're going to be – you’re going to do a light campaign, which is specifically, it's always going to be as like the title of your page, I love French cooking. And like…
Dave: Yes, and the text will be something like click like if you love French cooking, or yeah, you can probably make that more specific. But that's the gist of it.
Mike: You're just trying to get likes. And so what you're looking for here is to be getting likes for a dime or less is kind of the number…
Dave: If you end up spending more than that, most of the time, it's not worth it.
Mike: Right? So you're not – so what you want to be doing at that point basically, is the same test that you were doing with engagement campaign.
Dave: So it's the same group of audiences. So, you're not only testing which audience works the best, you're also testing which offer whether that's showing them a Facebook post or the light campaign, or trying to get them on Messenger works the best.
Mike: Yeah. And for the Messenger campaign, like a lot of times what we'll do is we advertise that to people who like our page.
Dave: Exactly, yeah, so they all feed into each other.
Mike: That's why one plus one plus one equals seven.
Dave: Exactly, yeah.
Mike: And that's why it's really important if you're doing this, you got to make sure you do have your basis cover. But like, it isn't as complicated. It doesn't need — we don't need to make it like ultra complicated.
Dave: Yeah, and the cool thing about this approach is you don't have to go through the trouble of setting up a whole Shopify store. And you can always do that later. But what this does do is it gives you a little bit of traction, hopefully, a few sales, and some data on what are the best audiences to go after? And then you can send them to like ClickFunnels, or LandingCube or whatever landing page software you want, and then it becomes a lot easier to make that leap and investment when you're already getting sales.
Mike: Yeah, no doubt. And it doesn't — the thing that's like what I found from selling on Amazon now for a few years is it doesn't take a lot. It doesn't take a lot of outside traffic or influence to really move the needle on Amazon because it's a flywheel platform. So like, if you send an extra two sales per day, which is something as small as two sales per day, from the stuff that you're doing on Facebook over to Amazon, and are able to move the needle 60 units a month, that's a lot.
Even in a high volume — even in a product that sells 1,000 units a month let's say to get on the first page, like something ultra competitive, that's a 6% difference, 6% edge over your competition, that they just can't compete with. They're only been in PPC land or on headline search ads, they're doing things on the Amazon platform, or they're doing black hat stuff off Amazon to be able to compete by offering these 99% off coupons and trying to incentivize them to leave a review or doing super URLs or all these things that I think eventually going to catch up with them, and they're going to wake up and have a very bad day.
Versus this way, where you're actually doing it the incredibly white hat way and you're building yourself an asset that is valuable long term to you off Amazon because you never know. Like, I actually I do think that they're like, this just happens through history. I think that the bigger you are, the harder you fall, like there's been some giant things in the tech space that have just been the biggest thing, like Yahoo was the biggest thing at one time and it just went away. And Alta Vista was like the biggest thing and just Amazon is definitely creating — as awesome as it is, is creating a platform where customers are now starting to feel the repercussions of some of the dirty things that are happening there.
Counterfeit goods are like legitimately a problem; fake reviews are legitimately a problem and like competition of people passing off. It's not quite counterfeit, but they're selling a cheaper version of the more expensive thing and kind of trying to pass off as the same and like all these different things. And it's starting to get like mainstream publicity. There's been the Wall Street Journal just published a crazy article about this, and there was a really big podcast that just was out about this or probably [inaudible 00:33:54]. This is mainstream stuff that's like talking about; all the dirty stuff that's happening on Amazon and it doesn't take much for people to lose confidence and go shop somewhere else.
So, if you have something off Amazon, this Facebook group or a Facebook page, Messenger, this asset can be point anywhere you want, like all you have to do is change the URL from Amazon to myShopifystore.com or to eBay or to the next new shop, next new selling platform or whatever it is, Wal-Mart maybe becomes the next big thing online or whatever. You actually have some resource that you have clawed back some of Amazon's territory in your business that you can put them on your turf. And I think that that ultimately makes the effort of doing this worth it.
Dave: Absolutely. Because when you have fans and customers that know like and trust you, you can sell them whatever channel you want. Amazon is a channel, an amazing channel, but it's a channel. And a lot of sellers forget that the business is not selling on Amazon, the business is you're selling a product to people who happen to be on Amazon to purchase. And so, if you get banned, or Amazon doesn't work anymore, if you put all your eggs in that basket, you have no recourse. But if you have an audience, you could do a Shopify store, you could sell on eBay, you could sell somewhere else, you could sell info products. There's so many more options that are available to you.
And even if you don't want to do all that stuff, it makes your Amazon so much better, like you even putting a small amount of effort in the off Amazon will run circles around people who do just to only Amazon stuff.
Mike: And the reason you're doing it again, we realize that Amazon is an intent based search platform. So someone — and these are sales that you would never get, like you're not cannibalizing future efforts off Amazon, because like people are searching for garlic press, we're going to stick on that theme so much typing in the Amazon search box, like black garlic press, or stainless steel garlic press, or whatever the search that they're making. They're like 50% of the search, e-commerce searches start on Amazon, and Amazon has like 51% or whatever, of all e-commerce sales now. People are going to buy the garlic press off of Amazon.
You need to have a presence there and be able to rank to compete, to be able to sell garlic presses just as much as you can build that business off Amazon. But you want to be able to have I think an e-commerce to be able to participate in that in such a big pool of customers and eyeballs. You don't have to, you can certainly build the business all 100% away from Amazon. But you're missing out on sales that you would never — I mean if you're an Amazon Prime member, it's very tough to get someone to like not buy on Amazon. I mean, they're going to buy someone's garlic press right then and there. There's too many options, so you want to be able to participate in that circle.
All right, well, we've come to the end I think of another part two. We're going to part three someday or?
Dave: Maybe.
Mike: We're 35 minutes or test two but I think another really good episode. This definitely builds on part one that we did. So we'll probably put these back to back just to kind of keep — we try to stay away from a two part episode. Now Dave Bryant gives me a hard time, he's like they're too confusing and people can't find, they can't listen to all at once. But I definitely think that it was worth coming back and doing a part two. I think that we broke it down into a simpler bite sized chunk and hopefully this stuff makes sense to everyone out there and I definitely appreciate you coming on.
Dave: Thanks Mike.
Mike: Cool.
And that's a wrap folks. If you have any questions about this episode, you can go to EcomCrew.com/171. Just as a reminder, it really does help if you leave a review for us in iTunes. It's actually — iTunes is – is that the right way to say that iTunes is? iTunes with apostrophe at the end of it I guess way of ranking podcasts, and having reviews really helps us especially the frequency. So, if you got a second, I know it's a pain in the butt and I feel a little hypocritical asking for this because I very rarely leave reviews as well.
But we try to give a bunch of free content and help here. And if you could just take a minute to help us back by leaving a review, I would really appreciate it and so would Dave Bryant and the rest of the team here at EcomCrew. So, besides that guys, you know what I'm going to say next, happy selling, we'll talk to you next time.
