Seller Performance Solutions
Scale Your Brand Series: Bringing External Traffic to Amazon
April 12, 2022
When it comes to growing your ecommerce business, Helium 10 are experts in the field. In part of our Scale Your Brand series we talk to Carrie Miller about expanding your business to different marketplaces & the importance of social media outreach.
[00:00:07] Leah: Hi, Amazon sellers, I am Leah McHugh with ecommerceChris and the Seller Velocity Conference. And I'm here with the ecommerceChris, Chris McCabe, also of the Seller Velocity Conference.. And today we have Carrie Miller from Helium 10 joining us to talk about top tips for scaling your brand and scaling your business this year. Thank you so much for joining us, Carrie.

[00:00:29] Carrie: Yeah, you're welcome. I'm excited to be here.

[00:00:31] Leah: Yeah. We're looking forward to seeing you in Bend as well at the end of the month.

That's going to be really fun. I'm excited for that too.

So we usually like to start these off with a case study, good or bad. We make that dealer's choice, of something you've seen brands do right or wrong with scaling their brand.

[00:00:48] Chris: Yeah. I'd imagine this comes up a lot in the Facebook group too. I see a lot of questions posted on there, kind of those types of things.

[00:00:53] Carrie: So I think this year I've been kind of reading a lot of stats and just looking around at what people are kind of focused on in scaling the brand and it's Walmart. So I think that that is the best way that people are expanding their customer reach and scaling their business is by expanding out to other marketplaces like Walmart. So basically, you know, people have been able to increase, you know, at least 10 to 15% their business by just moving some of their products or adding them to the Walmart marketplace.

There's a different customer base there and so it's definitely a whole audience that people that are sellers on Amazon haven't necessarily reached all of them. So Walmart's also set up Walmart Plus, which is similar to prime on Amazon, which makes it, very enticing for those Walmart buyers to go and purchase more products and be a consistent purchaser on Walmart.

So that's the way I've been seeing a lot of people scale their business. I also think that social media is a huge part of growing and sellers are focusing on that this year as well with influencers and TikTok has been a huge growth opportunity over the last year. And I don't know if everyone even realized the potential of it, but you know, people can get on there and become influencers really quickly with good content.

And the algorithm is really, really good. So it targets exact audiences. I don't know if anyone else has gone on as a consumer of content, but they definitely know everything that I like and they present all the material that I like, so they can keep you hooked. So I read a data point that said adults are spending an average of 80 minutes on TikTok. And so people are finding things, you know, there's search terms all over the place, like TikTok leggings, or TikTok anything because people are finding products on TikTok. So I think that's a huge opportunity and it's not very expensive right now. A lot of the influencers on there don't know how much to charge, so it's definitely something I think that people aren't really focusing on and maybe we should focus on.

[00:02:50] Leah: Yeah, it's funny. I saw an ad for something and it was like, Instagram is the marketplace of the future. And I was like, it's really? Okay sure.

[00:02:59] Chris: Instagram as a kind of marketplace for the present. But I think I agree with what you're saying, Carrie. I mean, I think people have heard about these things. They're aware of them. Some are slow to react and some have underestimated the potential there. While Facebook's doing reels, Tiktok's kind of miles and miles ahead. Right?

[00:03:16] Carrie: So, yeah. And the reels on Tiktok are often on Instagram, like a week or two later.

[00:03:22] Leah: Right exactly.

[00:03:26] Chris: I think we've talked about doing that too, those are things that you have to understand, you know, influencers. Brand's used to be so dependent on the let's make sure we get X number of positive reviews a week or a month. And they were hiring services that they were doing strange offers or discounts or whatever. And there's just other places where that battle needs to be fought in terms of marketing brand awareness and I think that some of the slower to react brands, like you said, might be left behind.

[00:03:55] Carrie: Right, Exactly. Something else that I can add too, is I actually have a friend who did some live selling on Instagram. She lost her job during quarantine time, and she decided to just start building an audience on Instagram and started selling live and sells kind of unique products and She made a hundred grand in six months just doing that. So I'm thinking out of the box like that, just creating a community and selling to them exactly what they want and those loyal communities, if you see them on Instagram, they buy over and over and over. I follow some people that I buy from and I just keep wanting to buy their products. So that live selling is definitely something also to consider if sellers have time or if they want to pay somebody else to do it.

[00:04:42] Leah: Yeah, I think that user generated content is a really big thing. Even on Amazon, you know, I've seen some really effective unboxing videos that are posted just on Amazon and some of the stats on conversion rates when people watch the video are pretty crazy when they're like already on there, they already aware of the product, but watching somebody take it out of the box for whatever reason.

[00:05:03] Chris: Who knew?

[00:05:04] Leah: Eight year old kids knew about 10 years ago, millionaires playing with toys. Yeah, wish that was available when I was a kid.

Doing the wrong jobs.

[00:05:19] Chris: We've always counted on Helium for great advice to young and growing brands. And especially this conversation, which is the theme of our Seller Velocity Conference, of course, is revenue growth in revenue and brand expansion. So it's great to have ideas like this to present to our audience in Bend, but even just generally to brands who maybe are catching up with some of these techniques. So you're in California. Have you been to Bend before? It's not that far away.

[00:05:44] Carrie:
I have not. I've been to Portland and I really liked Portland. I went to a wedding a few years ago and it was summertime. It was kind of hot, but it was really beautiful. So it was really fun.

[00:05:55] Chris:
Yeah. Bend gets super hot in the summer. Central Oregon is kind of like central California in the summer.

[00:06:00] Carrie: Yeah. Yeah. So, well, I'm excited. I'm actually staying an extra day. I'm going to go skiing at not Mt. Bachelor.

[00:06:07] Chris: We were Just up there recording some videos, getting the word out about Mount Bachelor.

[00:06:11] Leah: Yeah. We actually just decided to include a ski pass in the VIP tickets.

[00:06:15] Carrie: Oh, very nice.

[00:06:18] Chris: I mean, there's a wide variety. One of the reasons we picked Bend is there's a wide variety of things to do when you're not networking. You can, you can network and do an activity that's not just filling your face with food. I mean, that's fine, always important, but, Oregon's got Pinot noir, and Bend has the microbreweries. So there's lots of that too, but Mt Bachelors. I think it took us 20 minutes to drive there.

[00:06:41] Leah: It's a 20 minute drive from the VIP venue.

[00:06:44] Carrie: I think I saw that there's a shuttle too. That goes up there from there.

[00:06:48] Leah:
Yeah. Yeah. It's actually probably cause parking fills up fast. You have to get in early.

[00:06:55] Carrie: Well, that's really good to know. Hopefully I can talk in network with some people while I'm skiing as well.

[00:07:00] Leah: You never know who you'll meet on the ski lift. Right?

[00:07:02] Chris: Bring the business cards when you're skiing there, Handy.

Yeah. Well, thanks for taking time to talk to us today. Look forward to seeing you and everyone else in Bend.

[00:07:12] Carrie: Yeah. I'm very excited. I'll see you then.