005: Virtual Bundles, Video Content, and Strategic Advertising for Brand Domination

Speaker 1: 0:00

All right, so this is another episode of our Amazon Tactics. Tuesday and today, I think what we're talking about is going to be virtual real estate for Amazon, so I think we had a discussion about this in the chat of. You know, big part of that is virtual bundles. Either one of you guys want to kind of kick us off.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Yeah, no worries, I think I mean we might as well start there. You know virtual bundles. I mean, I assume anybody listening to this knows what virtual bundles are. But in case you don't, essentially you know you're just taking two products that you already have in stock at Amazon FBA warehouses and you create a virtual bundle from them. So in a sense you're not bundling them before you ship them in. You're having Amazon basically just ship the two units together and you're billed accordingly. They're not giving you any special discounts or anything. Doing that, you're still, I believe, getting charged a full fulfillment fee for both items. You guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's true. But it does give you the opportunity number one to test out new bundles that maybe you could eventually start bundling from your manufacturers. So it's a nice test run option. You can test different titles and whatnot that you can't really do, you know, on your main listings normally. So you could, you know, do a little testing on that. But the biggest thing is that when you run even just one virtual bundle, it takes up a massive amount of space on your product detail page, which pushes everything else down the page. So at the base of your bullets section. Essentially down there or shortly after the bullets section, there is a large area that ends up being a list of your virtual bundles. Amazon puts them horizontally across the screen. It fills the entire detail page horizontally and probably about an inch and a half, you know, space where all this shows up is your virtual bundles and you only need one of them to do that, and so it pushes all of the additional content on that page many of the sponsored ads and things like that for other products that might show up there. It pushes them further down the page and it steals that real estate for yourself. So it's obviously one of the one of the big options available to you there for grabbing real estate.

Speaker 3: 2:30

I don't check mobile anywhere near as often as I should. I know what virtual bundles look like on a detail page on desktop. What does it look like on mobile and where does it show up? Yeah that's a fair point.

Speaker 2: 2:45

Actually, I haven't looked at that in a while. Let me see while you guys are talking, since I've already said a little bit, why don't you guys go ahead and continue and I'll check on it?

Speaker 1: 2:53

Yeah, so I think that's you know what you said. It hits the nail on the head. There's a couple of advantages of and really, when we're talking about there's other areas of real estate, I think virtual bundles is probably one of the easiest ones for people to take advantage of that still aren't taking advantage of it. I don't want to lose sight of. Having videos on your listings is another one. Having Amazon influencers upload videos where your asin is tagged is another way that you can get those videos there, because you're going to get between one to three videos on your listing, from what you publish to your listing, and then you're going to get whatever videos that Amazon influencers upload as well. So another important piece to keep in mind here is is that let's say that you have a major competitor that has a bunch of Amazon influencers that have uploaded videos. Those videos, if you there's normally a carousel I think it's still at least on desktop for five videos. If you don't have, let's say, worst case scenario, you have zero listing videos and you don't have any Amazon influencers that have tagged your product, your competitors product shows up in that spot on your listing.

Speaker 2: 4:13

Yeah, and multiple of them, right, because they're going to fill up. Yeah, they're going to fill that carousel, so they're going to have multiple videos of multiple competitors showing up in that carousel on your page. And the easy it's really. It's so important like we had a conversation about this before. It's so important. Not only is video a really good way to sell product and, of course, ugc is extremely useful right now. So you know you want to be doing that, but ultimately, if you don't fill that carousel, amazon is going to fill it with other people. So the more videos you have, the more options you have to keep competitors off your listing, and it's it's incredibly important.

Speaker 1: 4:52

Yeah. So I mean, I wanted to point that out first because I think that, while virtual bundles are, there's a lot of power within virtual bundles and they're very underutilized. I also didn't want to lose sight of the advantage of having listing videos to help protect your listing, and then also Amazon influencers and especially with you know tick talk and you know there's a couple of different services that we're testing out right now in order to get those Amazon influencers to post those videos on your for your product. I think that there's a lot of value out of just getting you know three to four you know maybe even five Amazon influencers to put videos on there from a protecting your real estate on your listing perspective. That goes beyond just you know also all the power that you get from UGC and having Amazon influencers and all everything that's involved in that, which is a completely different discussion.

Speaker 2: 6:00

What do you want? You got anything to share on that, Matt?

Speaker 3: 6:03

Yeah, I mean another way to take a real estate on your own detail page that's kind of what direction we've gone is defensively targeting with PPC campaigns, like the more SKUs that you have, the more ammunition you have to not only offensively target competitors that you have an advantage over, but I mean targeting your own. So I mean you know that sponsored display right underneath the buy box. That's super valuable real estate if someone is in shopping mode. So I like taking those up with sponsored display ads against my own SKUs, but then also as many of those sponsored product slots underneath the description or A plus content wherever you're looking at. That's another good area to take up as many SKUs of your own. And so for me, like you know, I have a couple of variations of products, but I do complimentary type products that I will advertise for. I actually I have multiple brands. They're not in the same category, but I'll even bid on my other SKUs because they're tangentially relevant. You know ones in the barbecue space and other ones in the food container space. So it's not out of the ordinary to see an ad like that, but I like taking up as many of those spots on my own detail pages as I can with paid spots as well.

Speaker 2: 7:12

Well, and I think there's an important piece there that I don't want us to gloss over, and that is because defensive targeting through Amazon PPC is so important. That actually puts you in a situation where it's if you don't have enough products in your catalog to be able to do that, you need to add products to your catalog, like you, literally. I mean there's a billion reasons why you should be adding more products to your catalog. We can give you plenty of them in other, in other conversations, but if you only needed one, this is it because it allows you to take up more real estate you know for all of those products, because if you've got 10 products, then that means every single other detail page that you have. You have nine other products that you can use for defensive targeting on that page, so you can have you know like 10 other ads on that page for your own products, and even if nobody buys those products big deal, at least they're not buying your competitors and those are the ads that are going to show up there if you're not defensively targeting. So it is a huge reason to have you know additional products in your catalog just so that you can do that. And I want to go back and touch on a couple of things. So I said that I was going to look and see what that looked like on mobile for the virtual bundles on mobile, at least on this product that I'm looking at, I assume it's similar but it might be somewhat category dependent on mobile. Right underneath your variations which show up, right beneath your image carousel at the top is where your bundles show up and it takes up a good inch and a half of the screen. And again, and this is a perfect example, I only have one bundle on this product but I take up that entire space of the screen even though I don't have a second bundle or any other bundles, you know, to fill that space.

Speaker 3: 9:10

So that's pretty important. That's before the consumer has ever even seen an ad. Then for the most part, right.

Speaker 2: 9:15

Yes, the only other ad that they would see at that point is that top of page banner. The banner Okay. The headline ad, the headline banner Yep, that's the only other one that they would see. I also want to touch on one more thing about video before we move off of that, and that is one in that carousel. It isn't just influencer videos that show up there alongside of your brand videos, it's also review videos. Review videos can also show up. So if you have people that leave reviews on your product and they have videos in there, those can also show up in that carousel. Also, you don't have to have influencers putting videos Like you can fill that carousel pretty much with your own videos. Like you can upload up to like 10 videos. In fact, I actually had an influencer who asked me if I would remove some of our videos that we had already uploaded because theirs wouldn't show, because we had too many in our own catalog of videos so they couldn't get theirs into the mix. So, like we had had an arrangement with them where they did a video for us it was actually a really good video and they were going to put it up on their influencer thing, which they did, but then it wasn't showing up on our page, and so they asked us if we would change that out. We would remove one of our videos, so theirs would show up. So just so you know you don't have to have influencers. I would recommend it because UGC content is king.

Speaker 1: 10:46

Yeah, so just I think, for you know people that are listening. That's kind of the three main areas that we've touched on so far for just your listing real estate. This isn't even counting search results, just looking at your listing. The first one is virtual bundles, because it shows up so high and it pushes ads so much further down the page and away from your buy box. The second one we talked about were videos on your listing and kind of some different types. So first of all, the list, the videos that you upload to your listing yourself. Secondly, our review videos and then third are influencer videos, so all of those take up space in that carousel. And then the last piece you know, matt, you talked about it talking about video or, excuse me, talking about ads. So defensive targeting for your brand and your products, both with sponsor product and sponsored display ads, in order to protect your brand when it comes to virtual real estate. Beyond kind of those main categories, are there any other things that you think are important for people to know when they're defending their virtual real estate on their Amazon listings?

Speaker 3: 12:02

A plus content is another one. I mean that one should be a given, I think, for most brands nowadays. But again, that just pushes more ads down, further down the page, and on mobile it's even more prominent because it shows up even. I think it even shows up above the bullet points on mobile. So A plus content is, I think most sellers know that that's something that they should be using. But I mean now, with the premium A plus content that most brands have access to now, there's a lot of really cool things that you can do. You know, like cross selling, other products that we talked about, why it's important to have other products. So A plus content, I think, is another one. I think that might be more of a standard for most sellers, but it's worth mentioning for sure.

Speaker 2: 12:43

Yeah, it's actually a big deal, you know, because one if you don't have it, then all you have is that description paragraph that shows up down there and it doesn't take up very much space. So A plus content can take up a huge amount of space. That you know. And so not only is it real estate but of course obviously it's a much better platform on which to be able to do that. It's a platform on which to give you know the benefits of your product and then just that little paragraph description. But also you know that reference to premium A plus. Premium A plus is a big deal because not only now on mobile you get, I believe, both you know A plus and premium A plus of course gives you the whole screen real estate horizontally. It fills that whole space. But on desktop that's not true. Regular A plus content does not take up the full horizontal space on your page in desktop view, but premium A plus content does. It takes up all of that horizontal real estate. So it pushes more content out of the way if you use premium A plus. The other thing about premium A plus is you get more modules. I'm pretty sure in standard A plus you only get five modules, whereas in premium you can put up seven modules. So again now you take up more, more vertical real estate on the page and again that just pushes ads and other you know other competitor products you know out of the way so that they're not visible to customers.

Speaker 1: 14:06

So we talked quite a bit about how to protect your virtual real estate. Do we want to talk about a little bit about how can you grab virtual real estate, especially if you're a challenger brand and maybe there's an established 800-pound gorilla? How do you grab virtual real estate from other brands or other products on Amazon?

Speaker 3: 14:32

Well, it's a lot of the same strategies that we talked about, but in reverse. Mike, one of the things that you did that I really liked was you used videos very creatively and posting them. It wasn't competitors' detail pages, but it was complementary-type products that you posted a video on and you made a review video of their product and then mentioned yours. I mean that was a really cool idea of real estate to take up. But then also we talked about ads. Defensive targeting is super important, but also so is offensive. You can show up on their detail pages too. So if it's a big gorilla that's taken up a bunch of markets here that sends external traffic to their listing, you don't know how that traffic ended up on their listing and that customer might be in shopping mode. So, showing up in those same places, like right under the buy box with that Spontre Display ad and Spontre Product ads If they scroll and they're looking at other similar type of products, you want to be able to show up in those places because that's some really cheap real estate for you to take and steal markets here. I mean that's some of the most incremental sales on all of Amazon is stealing a sale from a competitor while someone was shopping for that competitor. I mean, that's a sale that wouldn't have happened if you weren't advertising, so super valuable sale.

Speaker 1: 15:45

Yeah, and I would add to that that's something that Amazon has added in the last year or so that we've seen work really effective for this, especially if you're a premium brand and maybe you're going up against a bunch of low price competitors that are from overseas or wherever is using Spontre Display video and where that shows up on the competitors. So that way it's not just an ad where they can see the reviews and the pricing, because maybe you don't have I mean, if you don't have thousands of reviews or even hundreds of reviews and you don't have an advantage with pricing, then you need to tell a better story as to why they should buy from you as opposed to the competitor that they came in and the page on and Spontre Display video, at least right now, is the best tool that we've seen so far in order to tell that story so that way you can say why they should buy from your brand over whatever other product that they landed on that listing page for, in order to steal that market share and steal that sale.

Speaker 2: 16:48

Yeah, yeah for sure. I would also say, going back to what Matt was talking about in terms of getting your videos on other product detail pages in their carousel the one that you were trying to protect on your product detail page just giving a little bit more detail on what that strategy looks like. So one of the reasons for not necessarily not that you can't target a competitor of course you could. There's not really any reason that you couldn't and essentially what that looks like in practice is the video that you upload. You can upload those videos in the back end on Amazon and then you just assign ASINs to that video. As long as the video has something to do with that ASIN, you can attach that ASIN and it will show up on that detail page if there's space. Now, if the competitor or this other product that you've reviewed or whatever, if they have their carousel full I'm not sure you get on there maybe you might rotate with them. Just show the video. I'm gonna leave it here. But if they don't and a lot of brands don't have their carousel full and this is something you should look for if they don't have their carousel full, then that's an open opportunity for you. But recording a video where you talk about, show their product, whatever and give it kind of a review and then tag that ace and put you on their detail page. But also if you review another product on Amazon, you can upload that video and write a review of that product. So you don't just get to take space on their video carousel on their product detail page, you also get to take real estate within their review profile. And if you write a really good review with video, like it's really detailed and it's got video, there's a decent chance that enough people click on it as being helpful and it ends up one of the top videos, the top reviews for that product, which gives you extra clout and a lot of visual space there for them to see your product. Because what you're doing is you're reviewing that other product and talking about your product. It's not just one or the other, you're incorporating both so that you're getting visibility on that product detail page or in their reviews. But your product is getting visibility too and that's one of the reasons why using a non-competitor more of a complementary product is nice, because if you review them well, they're going to be happy that you take that top spot in their reviews. They're going to love the fact that you're there. If it's a competitor and somehow you're not reviewing them well and you're trying to promote your product, they're going to try to report you or call an abuse or whatever. They may or may not be able to get you removed, but why deal with using a complementary product instead? They want you to be there so you don't have any problems with them.

Speaker 1: 19:31

then so I think, kind of wrapping this up, and since this is a Tactics Tuesday, of all the different, I feel like we've shared probably five to seven tactics that people could take away in order to protect their virtual real estate, whether it's for their listing, or to try and gain some of that virtual real estate on some competitors or even complementary products. Matt, what is, of all the tips we talked about here today, the one that you think that sellers should test out first?

Speaker 3: 20:07

I would say probably the least expensive of them is probably. Well, virtual bundle is free. That's super easy to do and it's something that you could do right now. I think for me, and what we're looking to do and offer in these Tactical Tuesdays, is something that you can implement right when you get done listening to this. I would say a virtual bundle. As long as you have a product that makes sense in a bundle, that's an easy thing that you can do to take up real estate on your own detail page in the next 20 minutes.

Speaker 2: 20:39

Yeah, I think that's probably the low hanging fruit is definitely the virtual bundles. It's super easy, it's totally free, it doesn't cost you anything and it doesn't take very long to set one up. But you can do a virtual bundle really quick. So that's definitely low hanging fruit. On the other end of the scale, I think the thing that I would mention is probably going for the video. I think, and especially you know, ugc type video or the review video where you're reviewing your product and a complimentary product. I think it gives you the most bang for your buck because if you let's say that review video where there's two products, a complimentary product and your product, you have so many places where that ends up right, there's so much real estate that it gets used for your top video carousel up at the top of your page. That video can be there, it can be down in your bottom carousel, it can be on the product detail page for the other product and it can be in the reviews, technically for both your product and for the other product. So if you're looking at the biggest bang for your buck in terms of how much real estate you can grab, video is where it's at and doing one of those you know. Complimentary two product review videos, I think, is probably the biggest bang Perfect.

Speaker 1: 21:53

So I think those are the two big takeaways or tactics that, if you're not doing them already for listeners. First of all, implement virtual bundles. We talked about it from a real estate perspective, but there's a lot of other benefits from virtual bundles that we'll probably cover in a future episode. So if you don't have virtual bundles, I would say that's probably the best place to start. If you have those, like you said, like those complimentary videos, getting those on your listings and then also with a complimentary product, those two tactics are huge. Obviously, there's five to seven other tactics that we talked about in here that people can take away and implement as well in order to continue to fortify their brands, but those are two great tactics to start with. So I just want to you know at this point we'll wrap up and thanks everybody for listening we're going to have more Tactics Tuesdays kind of episodes like this, where there'll be a number of tips that you can take away in order to continue to fortify your brand as a part of Brand Fortress HQ.