Ads That Work: How Dr. Yev Marusenko Uses Smart Social Marketing To Sell #BrandBuilderPodcast

Are you going after someone that's more emotional or analytical or they need more like social proof? And then how does your brand or your product fit into? You know that the solution that's going to be in the person's life.

Welcome to the Brand Builder podcast presented by capitalism.com I'm Max Kerwick and I advise physical product brands to find their story.

I'm Ryan Daniel Moran and I invest in physical products brands. A physical products brand is arguably the most predictable path to a seven figure business. And we advise them, build them, buy them and sell them.

The show goes behind them, tracks their success, and hands you the keys to what's working.

Let's dive in.

Hey, guys, welcome back to the Brand Builder podcast. This is Max and I'm here this week with an interview with Yev Marasenko. If you're not familiar with him, he has a company called Zontracker and he's a former head of marketing for a physical product brand called HeroClip, you know, and was successful with that brand, getting it on Good Morning America and getting into physical retail and things like that. So he's got a lot of experience on the brand side. And then his own software company called Zontracker essentially helps Amazon brands who are selling on or who are running Facebook traffic and helps them track those sales and helps with attribution and essentially fulfills the same capabilities as a Facebook pixel. So.

This interview is great, not just because he has those experiences, but, you know, some people kind of jokingly call him Dr. Yev. He is literally could be called Dr. Yev. He has a PhD and he.

Is probably the best person that I know at taking a really rigorous data based approach to social advertising. And I think that's important because a lot of people that I know, I know that I've struggled with this myself earlier in my career, and I know that, you know, from dealing with clients, especially Amazon sellers, right?

Dipping your toe in the waters of running paid traffic on social media can feel incredibly overwhelming. It can feel like you miss the boat, that it is no longer easy enough to be worthwhile, or it can feel like something that you're never going to get the skill set to do effectively. Right? And Yev is a testament to. He is someone who was literally a PhD, a professor working in an academic environment that applied the same type of framework that you do in academic research, right, where you're running tests and you're collecting data and optimizing, you know, making decisions based on that data. And he was able to really Become an expert in this industry. Right. And become a thought leader and be really, really, really effective as a marketer. And so there's a lot in this interview. We go back and forth on a lot of different things. But the thing that I want you to take away the most is when he talks about running tests, right, and being really rigorous and testing 40 pictures at a time and testing 40 audiences and all that kind of stuff. And it can sound overwhelming, but he does a good job of breaking down. If you're just starting out or if you're, you know, kind of a mid level person looking to really become an expert, you know, what are the things that you can do, what are the things that you need to test in order to do that? So, yeah. Anyways, I hope that you enjoy the interview and I hope that it's valuable. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me@maxrambuilderstrategy.com and without further ado, here is my interview with Dr. Yev Marasenko.

Hey, a quick note for you Amazon sellers and brands who want to be on Amazon and haven't made it a priority yet. I am often asked about changes with reviews or changes with Amazon terms of service or changes with what's working with ranking and all of that kind of jazz. And I'm proud that I have partnered with one of our backroom members. His name is Jeff. He runs an agency that specializes specifically in optimizing your Amazon presence. So if you're a brand that is neglecting Amazon and you've heard me talking about and you're like, we know we got to get this together, or if you're an Amazon seller and you know, you need to turn your attention to audience building and funnels and the stuff.

That is really going to grow your.

Company, I would recommend that you give a quick shout to my boy Jeff at Turnkey Product management there@turnkeyproductmanagement.com and as I said, they're in the back room. They work with my team and the rest of the big companies and equity groups that are involved in our little circle. And they're usually ahead of everybody else in terms of what's working, what's compliant, what review strategies are cool and kosher and are actually effective and they're not out there hawking a bunch of info products, they're out there actually doing it. So they're an implementation agency that just handles it for people and they run their own businesses, some of which they have built and sold, kind of like yours truly. So I feel really good about partnering with them and recommending the big companies and the brands that I work with to outsource their Amazon management over to Jeff and his team. So if you're looking to add some automation into your arsenal, I would recommend the good folks@TurnKeyProductManagement.com and Jeff and I are on speed dial with each other and are collaborating on what's working. So you're always getting what's the latest and greatest in the Amazon world. So contact those guys if you're looking to outsource automate and optimize your Amazon.

Presence@Turnkeyproductmanagement.Com hey, and welcome back to this week's episode of the Brand Builder Podcast. I'm Max Kerwick and I'm here with Yev Marasenko, founder of Zontracker and Facebook ads extraordinaire. How are you doing, Yev? Doing well.

Thanks, Max. Glad to be here.

Yeah, yeah, we're psyched to have you on. So we're going to be talking about a lot of different stuff today, but yes, I thought before we dive in, I'd love to give listeners kind of a chance to get to know you a little bit better and your background and all that kind of stuff. So maybe you want to go into. And by the way, I should Preface this is Dr. Yev. He a man with a PhD here.

Yeah.

And well, so it was a couple of years ago where we met. I think it was in the tried summer. I think we were both presenting different sessions. I think the first time I saw you talking about branding, that was really helpful for me. I was involved in a brand Hero clip, so it was like really thinking about branding at that point and awesome. And it's been great just seeing each other in person just over the years at different events. I think that's really kind of where we had a chance to talk and really get into.

Details about branding and Facebook ads. But before getting there, yeah, I'm coming from this background, being very analytical and data driven and being in academia for many years and it really helped me have a very experimental approach. So any type of marketing or whatever I'm testing, it's how do I design it so I can make the best interpretation and that's, that's the mindset that I'm coming from and I think it's being in academia for so long and, and even though I like quit that area, so it was very interesting experience. But four years ago or so got into marketing and business world and now Thinking, how do I apply all of that that I learned and not really using it in some other way. And then I got into marketing. That's where data driven marketing was really important. And you could see this big need for, you know, like not just knowing the marketing side of it and the branding and the content, but how to approach it from a data perspective. Because there's so much data out there, big data. And even for small business, there's so much data, what do you look at and then how do you start advertising?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the things that, you know from the first time that I saw you speak and some of the things that you covered, taking that really, really thorough kind of testing, iterating and optimizing and letting the data kind of guide where you go and guide your actions both from a messaging perspective and a creative perspective and just kind of from how you approach targeting and who your customer is. I really, really identify with that. And it's interesting to see you take that kind of like academic rigor and apply it in a business setting because I think a lot of people struggle combining those two worlds. So, yeah, really, really excited to kind of have this conversation and talk to you in a little bit more detail.

So tell me a little bit about what you're doing now. So you've gone from academia, you spent a lot of time getting your PhD and working in that world and everything. So tell me a little bit about what you're doing now on the software side and what you've been doing the past couple of years in terms of a brand building perspective.

Yeah, too much time in academia. It was one of those career transitions where it was very interesting but very theoretical. And there's some things that I learned that I'm doing today in marketing and I see other people doing this as well. And that's being very integrative. You connect different ideas together, whether it's psychology or different types of marketing. I learned that in academia and again, I was in a discipline and a department where it was very forward thinking. So we kind of had to ask questions in a different way. So it was either a combination of me naturally being like that and being in the environment like that, and then once getting into marketing and this is where I realized that as soon as you start asking questions in a different way, you started getting interesting data. And whether it's about the consumer, the customer or the product itself, or even on the back end just seeing how all of the interactions, how everything plays a role over time as well. Seeing those interactive effects, it really helped me know that that's how I need to push marketing. Kind of ask questions in that way. So basically.

I started my own brand. That did not work out well because I didn't know what I was doing. It was just like the first thing I found out about the Amazon world. Got into it right away and half a year into it where so my wife and I, we had our first baby on the way and she's like, all right, like enough playing around. You're not really making any money doing this. It's not working. Even though that momentum was building. So then I ended up being at a marketing agency for a year and that was really good experience, working with clients, kind of seeing marketing really fast paced. And I'm in Seattle area, so it's around Microsoft and Amazon and Facebook, Google. So kind of like being in this area where it's like very a lot of like tech and startup mindset. So it's kind of like growth mindset.

So being around in a marketing agency from this perspective where startup mode, you kind of like have to do things at a budget or like learn really fast. And that's where my data mindset kicked in where like, oh my gosh, you have to do things really fast and fast or slow is the difference between low or high confidence. So as soon as you're able to make a certain type of interpretation, when can you make that? And again, the longer you wait, the more confidence. But then there's this trade off between taking action and getting data, getting feedback and improving iterating over time. So doing that for a marketing agency and then had a great opportunity to work with HeroClip for a couple of years, leading all of the digital marketing and learn a lot about branding. And I feel like a lot of our discussion today is going to be about like that aspect of, of brand.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think one of the things that I was impressed with with Hero Clip is, you know, you were able to, you guys really were able to have success kind of across channels, right? You guys got featured, you know, you sold into retail, you're in rei, things like that. So testing out strategies to drive people to retail and kind of get that blanket awareness to getting on Good Morning America and doing things like that. And then even from a product development side you had an interesting product and at a surface level it's just another type of carabiner, but functionally it was different, it looked different, it had a great name, all that kind of stuff. And so a lot of things That I think generally physical product sellers, but also people who sell on Amazon more specifically struggle with finding something to highlight about their, their product that makes it different. That makes it, you know, meaningfully different in the eyes of their customers. So a lot of stuff that I enjoyed watching from afar as you kind of built that company up. So yeah, so as, as we kind of dive into it today, the topic that I wanted to talk about with you was establishing a brand in advance and then going and marketing that brand versus kind of building your brand by testing and putting something out in the world and kind of seeing how people respond to it. And testing, iterating, testing, iterating, testing, iterating until you get to that place. So when you were going through the experience with HeroClip, which approach did you take?

Yeah, that's a great question. And this comes back to this culture we were in and testing and figuring things out and at the same time having a foundation where we know how, how the product is different, how the team, how we're, how we're unique. So it's this combination. And you've met the CEO Mina Yu, so she's like, she had this very great thing I love about her is that it's like very aggressive goal of growth. And by doing that, you have to kind of have both pieces in place. Where it's. The branding is so important because it comes down to like what you stand for, what the product is, like how it stands out, how the customer uses. And it's about the customer, like not just about you. And like the branding is all of that. But, but at the same time with the growth, you kind of have to, you have to need to figure that out over time and iterate on it. So the approach that we took was, well, it was both of those. And I think that's an interesting topic where it's the branding. But because we had marketing and we were all of these channels, we always had to iterate on it because we had big growth goals. And if we would have stayed with the same branding, whatever it is, at a stage where we had that from the beginning, but we're not sure how much it would have grown. And whether we're talking about conversion rates or purchases or getting into retail, what the success rate would have been with old type of branding, and not just the logo or the visuals, but who's our consumer, what do we stand for? And it's one of those things that we had to figure out over time and improve over time.

Yeah, okay, cool. So just walk me, tell me the story of that.

The experience of you had some stuff that you're starting with some stuff of figuring out, okay, what is different about our product, what are the things that we're going to highlight or whatever. How did you do that part? And then how did you work the testing and iterating in on that?

Yeah. And so earlier you said specifically for a hero clip, it's a carabiner. So with or without branding, we could have been selling it as a carabiner, but we put a lot of thought into what does it do. It helps people free their hands and help people enjoy their adventure. It helps the person be.

A better dad if they're out in the forest with their sons or they're spending time doing the activity rather than worrying about gear, worrying about stuff. So there's all of these discussions where we had internally where we know what the product is and we could have sold it out. And that would have been really hard to compete on because there's a lot of $1 carabiners out there, right?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Every carabiner out there is a dollar, right?

Yeah. So selling something that's $20, and again, there's the unique functionality, but someone that doesn't understand it, they look at it and they're like, well, why is it different? So we had that piece in place and we were pushing that forward. How is it different than just the features that it does? So we had that from the beginning. And so specifically to answer your question, I think this is because we were able to have sessions as a team over time. We were always, you know, whether it was, you know, I would say like a couple of times a year, you know, like, like plus or minus, where, you know, like we would all read a branding book. Yeah. We would discuss it, like as a team, you know, not just like, oh, yeah, I read an article about branding and then forget about it because I'm already reading an article about Facebook, discussed it. We had people come in, do like a half day workshop, multiple times, you know, different advisors. So those are the sessions where we like wrote out, like what the branding is and exactly, you know, what's like the mission, what's the feature like, all of those different levels. So that's one of those things where, you know, that applies to a lot of companies. And.

That'S where we started with and also had those sessions over time. So then the other part, the iteration and the data and the ads, it was kind of like throughout. So it's hard to say that there was a process. They were Both happening at the same time. Got it from different team members where some were maybe more conscious of the brand and the customer compared to some more about.

Testing and getting sales. Because you could go one way, you could be so spammy, sell so much, but not really have a good customer experience. We were trying to find the balance between that.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's. That's a really great way of phrasing it. And the way, like the clients that I work with that are most successful, right. Kind of take a similar approach. You know, you have the strategy session where everyone comes together and you come up with like, okay, we need to plant our flag in the ground about something, right? We need to be someone, we need to appeal to a certain type of person and we need to make a decision about that. Ideally, you do that with some data already in hand, right? About who those customers are and what they want and, you know, what people are responding to or whatever. But regardless, even if you're just starting out and you have none of that data and you can only go off social listening and seeing what reviews on other people's products look like and things like that, I think you still need to like set some sort of direction, right? And then from there you can test like, okay, specifically what do people respond to most? Right? Like, okay, we're having this high level message. I'm using the example that you just gave here with Hero Clip, right? Where it's like, okay, you know, it could be about dad spending time in the woods with his kids, right? And being a hero because he's got this functionality that he didn't have before and you know, he's taking his kids out into nature and all that kind of stuff. From there you can then test like, okay, there's a lot of specific messages that come out of that overall higher level promise, right? A lot of ways to say that, a lot of ways to show that with creative, a lot of different offers that you can pair it with, right? And so from there, you're kind of testing and seeing what people respond to most. Is that a fair way to describe it?

Yeah, exactly. And that's where you need that foundation to at least know what direction to go. Like, exactly how you said what direction, what you start off with. Because then the testing is where you like change out one word, you know, because like one word at a time. For branding, it may not matter. Maybe like a certain word, it like really matters what you're saying. But generally, you know, if you use the word like hang or free or like Hands or you know, like singular, like hand or those things that you test where in the form of ads it might make a difference. Like someone will just, it'll catch someone's attention better or it'll make someone click or take an action just because of those word differences. But like for branding, like you need to have to figure that out. Like before that when you go into the testing and then you test 10 versions of that one, you know, tagline.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay. So I love that and I think that's a great way of, you know, a lot of people come from a direct response marketing background or a digital marketing background and they're not, you know, they have a hard time wrapping their head around brand. At the same time, a lot of brand marketers have a hard time wrapping their head around like a, you know, a data based strategy and being able to test it. Right. And all that kind of stuff. So tell me, on a standard campaign, when you're running in this setting, what kind of data are you looking to collect? How are you setting up your campaigns so that you can take advantage of them from a data collection standpoint versus purely just driving sales?

Yeah, there's two parts and you can tell me which direction to go. One is whenever it's branding type of campaigns, not for awareness, but when we need to figure out branding better, there's those campaigns and then there's everything else. Like you kind of figure it out and then you're like, you're getting sales, you're testing, optimizing, scaling. There's that part that's more of just like a Facebook ads discussion. But I think in the context of branding, this is where.

One, you need diversity of what that content is. So first you have to have that variety, whether it's from you and team members, you know what you're testing. There's the foundation we talked about. It's like the general direction, you know, the audience or the lifestyle or how your product or service helps them. And once you have that, so we still want to figure out like the message is going to be everywhere on the website. There's going to be the tagline, you know, there's all of this copy. So first you do the testing that like one, it has to catch attention and two, have someone take action. It doesn't necessarily mean sales yet, that's later. First you just want them to engage and take the micro commitment and make some action. So this is where the metrics I'm paying attention and this is usually in that earlier stage of helping with the branding, it's kind of like testing your way into the branding. Knowing some of it beforehand helps. But this is where engagement based metrics, where like you actually don't use these for sales because it's going to be really hard to test all kinds of branding and getting sales at the edge.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

It doesn't work. Right. You need to, you need to have a specific goal that you're setting out for. Right. And in this case we're trying to collect data and we're trying to optimize the brand.

Yep. Yeah. So in this scenario where it's optimizing and like figuring out and optimizing for the brand and knowing how to use it later, then it comes down to two parts within that one is the actual metrics that I'm measuring, I'll mention those. And then the second part, how I'm interpreting the data. So, so one, you want to have the variety. So let's say, just say with the example of taglines, where you have 10 different taglines of your product or your service, what it is you're trying to do just 10 variants, but then you have to know how to interpret them. So you can look at all kinds of metrics. And it could be initially as simple as clicks because that's a first level engagement and it depends on the platform that you're on. And it may be low quality clicks, but still, you know, clicks is better than no click. So that's kind of your first level. If you have data beyond that, then that's much better. That's engagement after that, whether someone engages with that and comments or shares or even things like the ratio of shares to likes. I really love that one because it gets kind of more of some sort of virality component, like where people compelled enough buyer to actually share it and not just the total number of shares, but relative to the other reactions or comments.

And then engagement on the website. So it's just the amount of pages people are visiting. But these metrics, they're basic metrics. But I think what's more important is that you look at them in a relative context. That's where you have the 10 variants and everything else is the same. You keep everything constant. This is where you get very experimental where let's say you already have an image or a logo. So it's the same images everywhere, the same website, the same audience you're targeting. But the only thing that varies is that tagline, 10 taglines. Then you look at those metrics and it's a relative comparison because let's say all 10 of them are kind of bad. Let's say you look at click through rates and they're all like half a percent, which, I mean, that's not good. But let's say one of them is like 0.6% and all the others are like 0.5, 0.4. You kind of take the best that you have. Your overall branding isn't that good yet, but you just ran a test, that one is better than the rest. So okay, good, you have a direction to go forward. Like maybe you need to revisit your entire branding because your overall click through rates are low, but at least you have a relative comparison, knowing which one is better than the rest. So you kind of just like, I always look at the top 10%, whatever I test, what are the top 10% of that? And it may be one or two, depending how many you test. And then move those into the next stage.

Yeah, I think that's a great way to do it because, you know, I love that example because a lot of people, that is their experience, the first time they run a test, right? First time they're running emails or whatever, the first time you're running traffic, it's not something you're going to be naturally good at. Right. So when as you're setting it up, you're, you don't have to get it 100% right and hit it out of the park the first time, but you do take the best of what you tested and then you look at, okay, what like why do we think the audience is responding better to that one? And what are those, what are elements of that that we can then kind of carry forward in the brand? Right. Is it one specific word that's different that people are responding positively to that we can then play off of when we create creative or we can then play off of when we create those kind of more, other, more specific messages that aren't taglines but are more product related or whatever. So those are the conversations that I love to have kind of coming out of these, these types of processes. But that's great when it comes to.

Using that data. Right? So you're using the tagline kind of as an example. What other things kind of besides tagline do you look at as kind of like brand assets that you can test this way?

Yeah, there's the ones that are easier, what people think of. I'll mention those and then some that are much harder to get at, but very interesting ones, probably the ones that get deep down into like actually making a difference for the consumer and your product. But the easier ones are where it's taglines or sub taglines, headlines. It's the actual copy in shorter format. It's like the first thing that someone experiences and then longer form content. So it's just. And it may be, let's say, if it's in the ad where the headline might be the tagline, but then the body or the copy is more description about the product or the service or the lifestyle of the person. So again, not like a long sales form letter where it takes you 10 minutes to read it. But that's still a branding element. You could test what are you putting in that short little paragraph. And then obvious things like the images. So I think that's.

Those are the ones where I know you have a lot of insight about the images. So for me it's just, well, let's just test a lot of images. And one is the content of the image, and then two, the visual aspect of the image.

Yeah, kind of the look and feel.

One, what's actually in it? And then two, do we add a border? The essence of it is the same, but it's in other visual things too stand out in the newsfeed. Then it's kind of more like algorithmic about how can we get more people engaging with it. And if you're repurposing that on your website or on a flyer or wherever it is, it's going to be same psychological principles where it's just going to catch someone's attention more. So there's those two aspects, like the actual content, what's in it for your logo? Do you use an elephant or a fox? It's like those things you kind of have to figure out, those are the big things. But then visually, how does it seem? So there's two aspects of, I think the common things that people think of, you know, like the copy, the taglines, the images, and then the one that's harder, the testing, where it's about the customer journey. So this is where it's more of an iterative testing process. And this the closest that the easiest to explain is navigation on the website. So that's part of the journey where, you know, somebody sees an ad, they go to a homepage or a landing page and they go to some secondary page. So then it's not about just the ad or just the homepage or just that whatever the call to action is on that third or second page someone visited, but the connection between those pages. Because you could have different types of audiences, different types of people experiencing that. And the order of those, the order of the content is going to have some sort of branding aspect. How are you telling that story? And are you going after someone that's more emotional or analytical, or they need more like social proof? And then how does your, Your, your brand or your product fit into. You know that the solution that's going to be in the person's life so that it's. There's heavy branding in there, but it's more of the journey rather than these static elements of just the image. Yes.

Okay, this is where I was hoping you were going to go. So it's really easy to think of brand as those elements that you're talking about. Right. Of as tagline, logo, visual look. And it is all of those things. Right. But at a high level, brand is much more than that. Brand is kind of the relationship that you have with the customer and a thing that a lot of people, especially people. And again, I always pick on Amazon sellers. But the thing that Amazon sellers don't really understand is that outside of Amazon's ecosystem, people very rarely buy something the very first time they see it. Right. And so this idea of the customer journey, your customer needs to go on some sort of conceptual journey before they buy your product.

Right.

You can't just slap the product up in their newsfeed and say, buy now and expect that they're going to do that.

Right.

Even if Facebook says that they're a person that's likely to want to see that ad or whatever. And so this idea of taking them on a journey and showing them with the ad, with what they see when they land on the homepage, with what they see when they land on the product page and click into second, third level pages or whatever is really. That bonds with me. But I can also see how it would be a lot more complicated to test because there's so many more variables there than, oh, I'm just going to test, switching out the last word in my tagline and we're going to test 10 different words and pick a winner. That's more of like a Bake off scenario. Right. Which one tastes better?

So how does someone who is fairly, you know, unsophisticated or, you know, is just kind of starting to scale up Facebook ads. How do they integrate this kind of strategy into what they're doing?

Yeah. And since you brought up Amazon sellers, I think that's a perfect example where you start, like, losing the disadvantages because of this power of, you know, like, retargeting our customer journey. Or being able to have multiple touch points with your potential customer or, or your existing customer. So with Amazon sellers where like, yes, you're on Amazon, you have little control of the brand and you could have the enhanced content, but the communication is where things fall through. You aren't able to do that. But if you are able to, you know, take those customers off of Amazon or have a communication too, then whether it's amplifying back to Amazon or continuing that communication, this is where there's so much power. And you know, people say like retargeting is so effective and, and that's still true and that's where you could have that messaging. So in the context of Amazon sellers, this would be very simple example where it's simply your content and whether it's a website or like a chatbot or an email, just that one piece of content and then some sort of retargeting ad or a follow up content, whether it's a chatbot follow up message or an email. So that's two touch points. So if you want to think a bit easier, it's just the initial part, someone sees, they go to your website or any one of those other channels and then the follow up after that. So this is where you can get very strategic or you could be as simple as you want, but also you can get very complex. It's just those two touch points, it's already different than what's on Amazon. Amazon has their own advertising and they have control of that. So it's effective in its own different ways. But you don't have any control of that really. So for someone not sophisticated or easy example, it's just thinking like what are two touch points? So then this starts to make you thinking about the long term. And I don't mean long term as in like 12 months, I just mean even like tomorrow could be long term. Because what is the first piece of content? They see you position it in a way where you're more worried about that second piece of content. How can that first piece of content be leveraged to make that second piece of content more effective? So it's not like, all right, I'm going to get an ad and they better sell or I lose them. No, it's more about having a good experience. And then when someone psychologically has that good experience about the brand or the product or you or whatever the content is on the website, they're more likely to be receptive to that follow up content in the form of retargeting ad or other ways.

Yeah, exactly. And I love that even as a simple, like, okay, two touch points, right, Right. Like, I think a lot of people really, really sophisticated brands, and I'm sure some of the stuff that you're doing, right, Is taking people through sequences that have dozens of touch points, right? And all of these different paths. And you see the diagram and like, even for me, it's kind of visually overwhelming. I'm like, oh, my God, I don't want anything to do with that.

Right?

But something as simple as introducing a piece of valuable content, right? I just did a podcast with Stephen Black, right, Where we talked about social listening and how to use content in your business and things like that. And so. But introducing that piece of valuable content or something, that kind of adds value. And then following that up with, okay, here's a product that we have or whatever, and it's about that retargeting, getting people to.

Purchase at that point, rather than leading with the, hey, buy my shit. Hey, buy my shit. Hey, buy my shit. Right? Oh, it's not working. Facebook ads don't work anymore, right? It's like, no, that's probably not true, but okay, cool. And then from there, is there testing that you can do in there as well? I'm thinking of maybe you offer three different types of content and you see which people respond to the best, or you see which you lead with a different type of problem. Maybe let's say in this two touch point thing, your first touch point is some sort of problem solution framework, and you see which problem your audience is, you know, most feels most acutely, you know, measured by which one they respond to most. Is that. Is that an example of something that would. Of how you would do that, or can you have something else?

Absolutely. But this is where it becomes vital again, thinking it from an experimental standpoint and interpretations. So you have to think of the content or the touchpoints you're testing as these experiments where it's like one experiment at a time. So one thing a lot of people do is they start adding all kinds of content on their website. And all of this content, it creates all kinds of pathways of the customer journey, while at the same time testing all kinds of.

Multivariate analysis or multifactor analysis. It makes sense, but you need a lot of data and you need the tools to process that. But a simple version of that is.

Hold the other factors constant. So if it's.

One way of doing this, and it's whatever is simpler for you is just having one ad where you're sending everybody to your website, but on the website have different split tests, or whether you're using Google Optimize or vwo, just have the different elements there of what's clickable. So one is that's gonna lead to different journeys. You know, the ad is the same as bringing all of the same people, but then it's the type of content. Is there even, like, the structure of the format of the content? Does somebody see three options right away, or do they kind of like scroll and kind of like, see one after the other option? And are the options themselves more about, like they're all product heavy, or they're all feature heavy or benefit heavy? Where your three tests could be testing that factor. So you could have three different features. That's what's different. And you'll know which feature people click more. But then you do a different test. Is three benefits heavy, Whether it's like bullet points or a clickable item? So you're kind of doing two tests at the same time. One, which of the three features is the best within there? And then the other test is like, well, which of the benefits is better within there? But then you're also knowing as a whole the total, the absolute magnitude, how many people made it to the next page, the feature heavy or the bullet or the.

Got it. Got it.

That one. So.

Got it. So just to clarify, it's like, okay, I'm driving people to the website. When they get to the website, I've got page A, which has got three features. Right? People are clicking on that. I get to see which feature people like the best, which one people respond to. Page B has got three benefits. I get to see which benefit people respond to. But I'm also getting to see and answer the question, do people respond better to features or do they respond better to benefits? Right. Which is a more interesting strategic question than which of these do they respond better to?

Yep, exactly. And then this is one of the initial phases where later on, once you have that data, you might know just like everybody clicks the one out of the two features. So there's something about that feature. People love that compared to the other features. But you also find out that overall, people engage more when you show the benefits. So you still want to take that one feature and then use that in a later test where here's the benefits, because there's just more engagement on that page. But now let's add that one top feature somehow throughout that. That's kind of like a more iterative approach versus, like, do I list features or benefits? And then after that, which ones or iterating after that, but yeah, exactly.

Okay, cool. So one of the things that I think is interesting, you know, dealing with Amazon based businesses and everything.

You know, fundamentally E commerce, like a scalable E commerce business, comes down to a simple equation, right? Which is how much does it cost to bring people in the door and then how much money do those people spend once they're, you know, once they're in the door? Right. And you can argue all businesses boils down to that same equation. But for E commerce, specifically, traditional E commerce, you know, how much it costs you to bring someone to the website and then you know how much they spend. Right. Because you have control of the cart, you have access to their email address and all that kind of stuff. One of the things that makes Amazon so difficult is you don't really know how much it's costing you to bring someone in the door and you definitely don't know how much they're spending with you.

So one of the things that you've been doing more recently that I've been following is you've created software that actually helps track attributions or attribute sales to people and figure out how much they're spending based on how much you spent to bring them in. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that and what you're doing in Zontracker.

Yeah.

I guess I'm thinking about it two ways. One is the software itself and what it does and how it helps brands and also my own overall experience of like branding. Overall, you're coming from like running like a physical ads for like physical product and then kind of switching more into like a software world and also, you know, like kind of going to events and podcasts and then seeing like, what do people resonate with Amazon sellers? There are different types of sellers or Amazon brands or you know, there's like agencies, contractors and like the actual founders of the brand. So there's so many different journeys of Amazon sellers at different levels of when do they need Facebook ads or like when do they need branding and like, and what's, what's the trade off? So it's been interesting for me, even from like marketing or advertising the software, seeing like what I'm testing and seeing what people resonate with to know that oh my gosh, there's like this big need for, it's really going to help for these types of sellers. They just have to find out about it. While for these other ones, I don't know if it's going to help you Know, like they kind of have some have something figured out or it's like too early for them. So that could be an interesting discussion on its own on like the branding for like this Amazon kind of seller audience.

And that, yeah, that would be very interesting and I think maybe you and I can talk about that offline. But I think for the purposes of this conversation I'm definitely interested and just you know, for people listening, probably most of whom have an Amazon based business that's either Amazon first or Amazon only and probably just very kind of typical of.

Amazon sellers where they're trying to scale up other customer acquisition channels either to help with their ranking on Amazon or to push people to their website or whatever. So yeah, so we'd love to hear about Zontracker from that perspective. From the perspective of someone in that position. Yeah.

So there's three things on tracker does. One is it tracks your Amazon sales that are coming from Facebook ads and it's directly in your Facebook ad manager. So you see a column just like you would website purchases. You see another column that says Amazon sales and it's pulling Amazon data and it's going through the Amazon API. Facebook API. So you're able to see that. And you can do this in other ways. You can use coupon codes and tons of coupon codes to track to know who's actually buying from an ad or from a landing page or from a chatbot. But then one of the things that in ads, and kind of like alluded to it earlier, is that you need like testing variety. Like unless you know your brand perfect, your customer voice and the audience, where you just like run with one ad and it's perfect, you're going to need ads and the ones that are scaling, it's tens like dozens, hundreds of ads that are always like iterating and running over time. So you need to keep track of that to know what to turn off, what to scale. So then some of the other methods like using like, you know, coupon codes, it breaks down at some point. So that's one of the features. The other one is it pulls in Amazon customer data into Facebook. So you could do either retargeting ads or build lookalike audience and that's extending that communication from Amazon off of Amazon and Amazon doesn't like that part. But again the goal is to kind of bring the customers back to Amazon amplify. It's just extending that communication further. And then a third feature, perfect time we're talking now because this was like just a couple of days Ago we announced it and that's again, you kind of have to be more advanced in Facebook to like really appreciate it. But you're able to optimize for Amazon purchases.

Within Facebook. So when you're running ads, if you have your own website, you can tell Facebook, you know, optimize your purchases, you know, find people that are going to be, you know, like the purchasers or like actively optimize the ad. Give me more purchases. You're telling that to Facebook. We can't do that on Amazon. We can't really do any of that. We could optimize for people that are visiting Amazon and that's as far as we have the data. So this newer feature you're telling Facebook where the conversion, the optimization event is Amazon purchase, that's our goal. So Facebook do your thing and then drive more of that. So that's the newer feature and it's really trying to. This is where the branding fits in on the customer journey. It allows you to just have so much communication and test more and actually work on your branding or your content, your voice outside of Amazon. So those three features help in different ways for that?

Yeah, for sure. As a brand guy, I can see huge value in all of those. One, you have a better idea of how to track that equation and make sure that you know you're spending the right amount of money based on how much people are spending. And if they're not spending enough, then you can have levers to pull on that point and get them to spend more. Or if they're too expensive.

Right.

You have levers to pull there. And from a messaging, creative targeting perspective, see if you can get cheaper people to be buying. But that idea of being able to maintain the relationship with them off of Amazon. Right. And being able to target them and optimize for your best customers. Right. The people who are going to be spending money with you and all that kind of stuff seems, seems really huge. And so I think that's pretty cool and something that's been missing in the Amazon tool belt for a long time.

Yeah, and I'm curious your perspective too. So it was also fairly recently, it was probably like yesterday where Amazon released different level of brand analytics. It's the one where they're actually showing the demographics so the age and the gender. They released brand analytics I think a couple of weeks ago. So now with this, it may be hard to use that data within Amazon. You actually know who's buying within Amazon, but in Facebook ask that there could be so much gold in that, where you could actually set up your test in a way where you're breaking down all of those ages and genders and have different messaging. Because I know a lot of websites and brands, they have different demographics of purchase on their website compared to Amazon. And I already see that with this new data where the Amazon customers are different than the website customers. So your ads will reflect that. So if you want to amplify your Amazon and get more customers there, you could. It's like one way of using that feature is like, you know, segmenting and digging deeper in your branding. But how does it fit into within those demographics?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's something, I think that's a really interesting conversation to have, that, you know, that idea of who are your customers on Amazon, who are your customers on your website, how are they similar, how are they different? Right. I'm a big proponent of, you know, you build your brand around the customers that are going to be most predictive of your success long term. Right. So you don't build your brand for everyone. You build it for really like this single person that may or may not exist. But if all of your customers look like that, you'd be successful beyond your wildest dreams. And so for me, demographic information is interesting and it's definitely helpful from targeting perspective when it comes to some of the creative and how am I attracting those people and that kind of thing.

I'm much more interested in lifestyle and interests and things like that, which some of that stuff. If you've got an 18 year old versus a 60 year old, then yeah, you can parse some stuff through that. But this is where I always get on people for the idea of a busy mom, because every mom's busy. Right. So tell me more about what that woman is interested in and what the story she's telling about her life. But I do, I mean, just the start of having access to that information is a game changer. And I think over time, you know, hopefully Amazon will continue to kind of make, you know, see other things that they purchase and, you know, kind of like show behavioral information and stuff like that in addition to just the demographics. Because.

It'S a start, but there's a lot to go there.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. Well, where can people follow you to get more information? I know you've been doing a lot of podcasts recently since you had this latest kind of feature announcement, but I also know that you've got some groups and things like that that people can use to follow you.

Yeah. On Facebook would be best. And in one of The Facebook groups has dawn tracker in the name of the Facebook group. Cool. Outside of their LinkedIn is good to connect with me there.

Okay. Sweet. Awesome. Well, anything else you want to cover today? Yeah.

Final point would be that. And again, this is like maybe for either like more of beginners are trying to figure out the branding and even for advanced there's still like iterations on the branding that could happen. Is that with data it could be so overwhelming. But you have to have a starting point. So I just suggest just like have a little experiment. You know, just like two things. Like just do that first see what data practice your interpretation skills where you know, like how is your confidence improving if you let another $5 per day go to kind of like get more data on Is this one better? This better? So just like start very small with the data and then later you're going to see like if you get to more advanced where you have to have a certain percentage of the budget for experiments all of the time. Even if you have success with ads, just have that budget always iterate, always improve or have different sub segments because it's going to translate and be repurposed into other channels and assets.

Cool. Yeah, I like that a lot. And just the testing philosophy.

We should be testing everything. You should be testing, you know, your products, you should be testing ads. And I love the reserving a percentage so that you can always be running experiments and always kind of pushing the envelope there. So I think that's, that's really good advice and you can use that at any level. Right? Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the time. Yeah.

Hey brand builders. We hope you enjoyed this podcast by capitalism.com. check out our website for other upcoming events and additional content about building businesses, building brands and investing. My name is Max Berwick and my mission in life is to transform businesses into brands. If you have any feedback about the show, any guests you want to see, case studies covered, topics explored, or frankly just any questions about branding in general, just shoot me an email@maxmaxrandbuilderstrategy.com again, that's maxrandbuilderstrategy.com and I'd love to hear from you. One quick note, if you could subscribe to the podcast or even leave us a review on itunes. These things really do make a big difference in helping us book amazing guests and then also helping people just like you find the podcast. So thanks and we'll see you next time.

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