How To Beat Pesky Amazon Competitors #BrandBuilderPodcast

If you do a couple things differently, you'll build a more impactful company and make way more sales on Amazon. And probably as a byproduct, you'll beat your competitors. Just like these three companies have beat all of their competitors. Not by focusing on ranking or even beating the next guy, they focused on a few things that we're going to go into. So let's jump into it.

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 gang. I'm interrupting you briefly to talk about cash flow and investing. My strategy for financial independence for the rest of my life is to build businesses and invest the profits. But the investing piece can be confusing sometimes. Where do you start if you're just starting out in your journey? I always suggest looking into dividend paying stock. It's an easy way to generate cash flow, but if you're further along in your journey, the foundation of my strategy is by setting up a wealth warehouse. A wealth warehouse is kind of like a second bank account except it's tied to the market so it goes up in value, but it does not go down in value. It's a really cool strategy that a lot of my really wealthy friends use and Tony Robbins recommends this in his book Money Master the Game as well. And the team that I use to set this up is wealthwarehouse.com it's run by my buddy Sam Prentice. He is the sharpest person that I have met on this topic. He also has access to some really cool investment opportunities to buy cash flow as well. He shares them in some of the podcasts that we've done. But if you go over to wealthwarehouse.com or if you search for my name and Sam Prentice, you'll find any of the podcasts that we have done together as well as some of the opportunities that are available when you deploy this strategy and it's who I use. He's one of our backroom partners and it's the team that I go to for some insider investment recommendations as well as setting up my wealth warehouse which is the foundation of my strategy. That's wealthwarehouse.com.

What's up everybody? This is Ryan Daniel Moran with capitalism.com for those of you who sell physical products specifically on Amazon.com we're going to be going through how to beat Amazon competitors. I get this a lot from people who are following some sort of a system or a plan. A lot of times it's my own work on how to build a successful business and sell it. Sell the products on Amazon.com I've kind of popularized the idea that if you just run the numbers, three to five products selling an average of 20 to 35 sales a day at an average price point of 25 to $35 is $1 million business. And so what a lot of people do is they will just look for the, the opportunity to sell on Amazon.com try to outrank their competitors and try to sustain that momentum. There's a problem with this and the problem is simply that when your business depends on where you rank on Amazon, you're going to be following the same strategies as everybody else unless you do something different. We're going to talk a few things differently. So we're not going to talk about discounting your product or doing mass giveaways for your product. We're not going to talk about Amazon pay per click. We're not even going to talk about follow up strategies for getting reviews. And the reason we're not going to talk about any of those is because that's not how you win, that's how you get in the game. That those things are the ways that, that you get enough momentum to have 20 or 30 sales a day on a product. But if you want to win, if you want to beat your Amazon competitors, you have to play a different game. Because if you are following the same game as everybody else, then all it's going to come down to is who's the most aggressive, who has the most money, who has the right copy or who targeted the right audience. And these are things that are somewhat outside of your control. Some of those things you can raise money and deploy it into a business. But if you're the one or two person show who's doing less than 100 grand a month in product sales, then you're bootstrapping this thing. So that means you've gotta do things differently if you wanna get extraordinary results. And that's what we're gonna talk about. And to kick things off, I want to give you three examples. And these are just the examples that were in my kitchen here in my home and they are quest on it and four sigmatic. These are three examples that if you will look them up on Amazon. They move a lot of product. They move. If you know anything about how to evaluate how much a product is selling, these three companies move a tremendous amount of volume. But Amazon is not their primary game. Does that mean they've won? Does that mean they're not winning? It's an interesting conversation. What do we consider beating our competitors? Do we really want to beat our competitors or do we want to make more sales? And when we reframe it that way, I think we can have a few braingasms here that will help you achieve that goal. Because if it's always about just outranking him or her or beating that person, that we're always going to be competing for a fixed amount of pie. Now that's great if you found a secret niche where there are very few competitors. But as the Amazon platform has opened up more and more and you have more doofuses like me talking about it on the Internet, you have more people coming into the space, which means you have to adapt and be a better business owner. So these three companies have all done things differently and the spillover effect is that they sell a whack ton of volume on Amazon. Now some of these products or some of their products don't even maintain four and a half stars on Amazon. They have four stars, sometimes less than that. One of my favorite companies is called Julian Bakery. They rarely have more than three and a half stars. Amazon like maximization for them is even a focus for them. In fact, if you're a business owner, if you're thinking about this like a business, then one of the things that I'm doing is outsourcing a lot of my Amazon optimization. I have a partnership with a company called Turnkey Product Management over in San Diego. They've been on the podcast, you can just google them. But Turnkey is a management company like a VaynerMedia for Amazon specifically. Right. A full service agency. And the reason I work with them is because I like for entrepreneurs to be building a business, not building an Amazon presence. They're different. So I'm an investor in this company. This is Onnit, run by my buddy Aubrey Marcus. Aubrey ain't tweaking Amazon listings. He's busy building a really big company.

This is Quest Nutrition funded by Tom Bilyeu. They've been on the podcast and they've come to the Capitalism conference. Tom is not in there split test Amazon prices or worried about what copy to put into reviews or like review getting sequences. It's worried about building a real company. So if you do a couple things differently, you'll build a more impactful company and make way more sales on Amazon. And probably as a byproduct, you'll beat your competitors. Just like these three companies have beat all of their competitors. Not by focusing on ranking or even beating the next guy, they focused on a few things that we're going to go into. So let's jump into them now. First, the foundation of a successful product on Amazon or anywhere else is a really great fricking product. If your product sucks, so are your reviews. If your product sucks, forcing it to the top of Amazon is just going to break the system. If your customer experience doesn't feel premium, if your customers feel like they've been had, you are not going to sell much for very long. You are going to be trying to hack the system, which means you're not building anything that is sustainable in the eyes of the customer. They don't want to buy from you again, they don't want to talk about you to their friends. So is your product referable? Are people talking about you? Do people like it? Do people use it on a daily basis? Is there something about your product that connects with the customer so that they want to share it and naturally leave a review? Do you have a good product with good branding? If not, we gotta go back to the fundamentals, otherwise you are going to waste your time. It is a waste of your focus to think about optimizing before you've optimized the product. You know, there are smarter business people than me who all their attention goes to. Where all their attention goes is split testing product because if they get the right product, everything else is easier or unnecessary. Now I want to go to a few tactical things that I think will really help you out. Assuming that you've got a product that you're proud of and that you're willing to stand on. There's a few things you can do to accelerate your growth and continue momentum on Amazon. And number one, we'll go over to the whiteboard. Advertise two.

Audiences.

An audience is a centralized group of customers that meet certain criteria that are hanging out in one place. That is advertising on podcasts, it's sponsoring YouTube channels, it's reaching out to influencers. You know, Quest launched with Facebook groups. Four Sigmatic launched by sponsoring the Tim Ferriss podcast on it. Advertise on the Joe Rogan podcast. What was same across the board. They advertised to specific groups that were the right type of person for their product and their brand and they went all in on that audience. So that is LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, any influencer, any email list, having a centralized group of ideal customers, taking your advertising dollars and putting them into, putting your product in front of them. There's a lot of white space in that world. There are a lot of underutilized audiences out there that buy physical products. And if you make your product a match for that audience, very few people are doing that. And there's a lot of upside there. And if your product is good, your review systems will kick in and people will naturally want to talk about it. So that's number one. Number two, build a tribe.

Here's what I mean by this example that comes to mind is Rogue Fitness. They're a CrossFit company. So Rogue sells products that are basically the same as Everybody else. It's CrossFit today I was at the gym and they had.

They called this, obviously CrossFit isn't my primary fitness regimen, but they had the sit up bar waving. You put it on the ground, you do sit ups on it. Well, we were using it for lunges, for weighted lunges, right. And Rogue Fitness on there, it's just a, you know, it's just a pad. It's not like Rogue invented some crazy amazing thing. It's just a white labeled probably, you know, pad that you use for working out. But their community, their tribe is CrossFitters. So their language is positioned at CrossFitters. The people they work with are CrossFitters. Their advertisements are specifically tailored to CrossFitters. And now they can sell all kinds of things to CrossFit. Boxes and gyms all over the world and all over the country because they've got the tribe. They have people who buy into the message that they represent. And so in your world, is there a place where your community hangs out? Do you have a Facebook group? Do you have an email list? Do you have some place where you are having regular conversations and communicating a message to your customers? If not, then you are responding by what Amazon does rather than building something, building any type of sounding board for you to communicate with customers and direct their activities. So it's part of your job to build a culture and a community and a tribe for your people. There's another example of this is Yeti. Yeti, the, the cooler company, right? The people who buy this feel like they're part of this tribe, this culture. And who would have thought that coolers and stuff like that would have any sort of like pop culture appeal? It's because they cared about the person behind the purchase, not Just selling product on the Internet. When you know who the product or the person is behind the product, you can communicate directly to them and build a tripod of that. That's number two. Let's move on to the final one. Number three, define that person's journey.

What I mean by this is your customer has a story going on in their mind. Your customer has a journey that they're on. They're on a path. They're pursuing goals themselves. They don't care about you. They don't want your thing. They want to go on their own journey. Their journey as a mom, their journey as an entrepreneur, their journey in fitness, their journey as a boss, their journey as a video gamer. Everyone is on a journey. Everyone is figuring out life. They don't want to buy products. They want to buy things that express something about themselves and carry them on their journey. So if you're able to map out, okay, the mom is going to go on this journey for this, she's going to buy these products. What does that say about her? What does she want it to say about her? In this period from six to 12 months, she's going to buy these products. What does that say about her? Now, it makes it really easy for you to create content and for you to create products that connect with your customer's entire life cycle. So instead of guessing or thinking or inventing, you just pursue the customer that's already on their journey and serve them along the path. And when you're serving them on their journey and they feel like they're part of something, and you can amplify all that with audiences and you've got a great product, they're in. Anybody who can compete with you, there's very few people who put in the work to build real brands with a real message with real customers and good products that people want to talk about. And if you do that, you not only beat your pesky Amazon competitors, you build a really meaningful business that could be scaled or even sold for millions and millions of dollars. That's what a lot of our students have done. That's what a lot of our people have done, because we're constantly pounding it in their head that they're building more than an Amazon business. They're building more than a physical products business. They're building something that is meaningful and sustainable and scalable and sellable. And when you're surrounded by people who remind you of that and can show you the way and are running along the side of running alongside with you, that's when you're empowered to build a really impactful company. So make sure you're subscribed to the channel because we put a lot of this stuff here on the channel and we also feature case studies and what's working right now on our podcasts. Over@Capitalism.com we've also got a monthly newsletter which is featuring the products and the case studies are working well in our community as well as what's coming down the pike so that you are always ahead of the curve. And that's@capitalism.com that group is called the 1%. Thanks for watching. Let me know in the comments what you thought of this and share this with somebody who's selling on Amazon, who's selling for less than what they could be doing because this will fix all their problems and give them superpowers. Thanks. See you soon.

Hey Brand Builders, we hope you enjoyed this podcast by capitalism.com check out our website for upcoming events and additional content about building businesses, building brands and investing. My name is Max Perwick 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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