PODCAST: Tapping Ecom Clients for Mega Growth with Norman Farrar

In Episode 28 of The Marketing Umbrella Podcast, we interview ecommerce and Amazon Marketplace expert Norman Farrar. If you have a digital marketing agency that works in ecommerce, this podcast is for you.

Norm is a nationally recognized speaker and thought leader who has championed a variety of products and brands to generate sales of over $1 million in monthly sales.

Throughout his career, Norm has generated over $100 million dollars in sales.

Norm runs a diverse catalog of companies including AMZ Club and PRReach (The world’s first video press release company), as well as  guiding individual sellers, brands, and manufacturers to top-earning sales both on Amazon and other ecommerce sites.

Listen in, watch or read the transcript for a cornucopia of practical advice that will help you dramatically increase online sales.

Listen to the podcast or Watch the video

The transcript is below. Scroll to the end if you would like to subscribe to The Marketing Umbrella Podcast.

Transcript

Itamar Shafir:

Welcome to the Marketing Umbrella Podcast where we talk with successful marketing experts about ways to build and grow your digital marketing agency. Our guest today is an eCommerce marketing expert who generated more than $100 million on Amazon marketplace. He helped global brands such as Mercedes, Coke, Dell, Microsoft, Target, and Hershey’s develop their eCommerce marketing strategy. He is the founder of AMZ Club, PR reach and [inaudible 00:00:29]. I’m excited to sell out to Mr. Norman, the beard guy, Farrar. I won.

Norman Farrar:

I have no idea why people call me the beard guy.

Itamar Shafir:

Well, for those of you who are listening on the podcast, not on YouTube, he actually has a very impressive beard. So that’s where it comes from. So Norman, you’re doing amazing stuff in eCommerce. Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about what your background and how you got into doing this?

Norman Farrar:

Sure. So, eCommerce came by, like it was complete fluke. So I had a company that was doing promotional marketing and one of the things we learned in that business was all about vertical integration. So if you had a promotions company, to get the best return, you had that on screening company, the embroidery company, the fulfillment center, even the courier company at that time. And through that, we ended up getting some really great and they were mostly Fortune 500 companies.

Norman Farrar:

One Fortune 500 company came up and asked if I could do a co-op program where this new thing called the worldwide web, they could take the dealer, match it with their logo, and put it on pens, and key chains, and mugs, and all that, which is normal nowadays. But back then, it was very expensive, nobody was doing it, nobody even heard of it and we took it on, I had no idea what they were talking about, but I knew where to get the answers.

Norman Farrar:

They paid for, like I paid them… I got paid by this company and that’s how it started. And other Fortune 500 companies said, “Wow, this is really cool. Who can we contact?” They contacted us of course, because we had our little thing on the bottom and that’s how I got launched into it. And then from that, we were one of the first print on demand, corporate identity sites on the internet. I think there was five companies out there at the time. Five.

Itamar Shafir:

Wow.

Norman Farrar:

And we would go outsource, create logos, create print on demand with letterhead and envelopes. I don’t know if you remember that, but that was actually paper products, none of this digital stuff. And then I got into all sorts of different things, which kind of led me to this, which was, opening up two factories in Taiwan, opening for factory in China, which is still in existence. We sold the others. Fulfillment centers, getting involved with contract manufacturing, specialty packaging, all this stuff.

Norman Farrar:

Well, back in 2013, 20114, Amazon came my way. I went to just a webinar or not a webinar, but an actual event and went, wow, I could do this. Keep my eyes closed and I can do this. That’s why I got into it. And then the whole thought vertical integration came in, if you really want to do Amazon right, like for me, I thought, okay, agency, manage people’s products because nobody wants to do that. Get the sourcing done. Okay. Find out the product opportunities and offer it within and then, well, here’s influencers or content marketing or press releases. And then now with chat agencies and then mentoring. So it all kind of came in. There are different companies, but it’s all in one complete vertical and integration, so we can handle whatever you need.

Itamar Shafir:

So, okay. So that’s quite a road and it seems like also that you kind of start from the product and logistics side, moved into the on and integration and then moving into the online marketing. Or did you actually start always from the marketing side and you had the logistics partner kind of guy that does the logistic product?

Norman Farrar:

I was into everything at the beginning, but what I really loved was this promotional marketing and whole thought process, which is what I do right now, is I take a look at a product. Can it be automated and scalable? I don’t care if it’s a product or a service and can you beat the competition? So in the products, like when I was selling a coffee mug, how can I make this coffee mug? Maybe it’s a buck 50, or let’s say it’s three bucks. Okay? How can I make that $4 and 50 cents? And people would be gladly give me their money for it? And this is what we were able to do. We were able to take a business that had… There was thousands and thousands of people. I think there was 23,000 people at the time in promotional marketing. The average person had 300, the thousand in sales, they had 23% in gross margins and it was squat.

Norman Farrar:

I was not interested in making pennies and I had a partner. So I had to split the penny with my partner. And what we did is we created perceived value. Everything that came into our facility, we created specialty packaging. So the mug would go into a box that would have styrofoam around it, but all cut out. We would have a little inspection certificate. Shirts, we would have our tags and poly bag. People were paying us way more, so the industry average was $23. We got it up to 45 and we grew like in months up to two and a half million dollars. So this is what I do now. I’m taking a look at how can I take a brand and I can give you an example if this isn’t too long winded, but I’ve got a knife and that knife is a beautiful chef’s knife that you get for $16 in China, it was packaged and it was a clamshell, just a cheap plastic, horrible kind of clamshell, we all know them. And it was selling for $49, and this is a client that came to us.

Norman Farrar:

I looked at it and I said, you got a great product, but packaging sucks. Let me have it. I took it. I created about a buck 25 in a package, made it magnetic open, had a little warm message, an insert. And we took that from $49 up to $79, up to $99, up to $124, all remaining at 16 bucks. Right? Except for the cost of the extra $25. And then now it teeters back and forth between $99 and $124, depending on the season. Then this is crazy, I saw a wooden case and I said, “Wow, this wooden case is going to be $3 more.” And if we can package it, and it already came packaged like an iPhone, really beautifully packaged with an outer package and an inner package. But if we could just increase the perception with this wooden and have it laser engraved, and we call it the premium edition, it’s the same knife, except we hammered it, which is the same cost. Now it’s $224.

Itamar Shafir:

That’s a true marketer. So that’s definitely 150% marketing. And I think people that are listening to this can resonate with what you’re saying, because it’s marketing, it’s across whatever product or business you would go to. As you stated initially, that’s what you’re looking at to create that additional perceived value would what you have. So I want to go back into the listeners that are small marketing agencies or people starting a marketing agency. And I know personally from experience working with a lot of them, I think there is, for some reason and a lot of it goes to what you’re describing, there is a fear tackling eCommerce for clients. Most of the agencies that I know, work with bricks and mortars, they work with service providers, they work with maybe some of them work with high tech companies and B2B, but it’s very Legion, offline-ish situation that does require a lot of funnels in a lot of work.

Itamar Shafir:

But I think when agencies are looking at eCommerce, they’re saying, “Okay, hold on a second. This is an ecosystem that operates a little bit different.” So for you doing offline back in the day and doing eCommerce today, how much of it is true? Is it just fear or is it really working? Is it different workings? If I want to help a business grow their eCommerce store, other than building them, that eCommerce store, actually promoting it. Is it completely different mechanics than regular marketing for offline businesses?

Norman Farrar:

Well, this is a different approach. As for fear, I don’t think, once you have the certain mindset about moving forward with eCommerce, it’s very similar to traditional marketing. If you’re going, let’s take an Amazon play. Amazon, it’s the largest product search engine in the world. People go there to buy products. Very easy to sell on there as long as you have qual… Like if you go there with iPhone pictures and your listing is crappy, you’re going to get what you pay for. But if you have something that’s really good and it’s engaging and the quality looks there, then you’re going to gain authority and trust, that equals sales. And that’s the same with anything on eCommerce. If you put up a really crappy website, or if you have a really crappy social media, or if your brand isn’t consistent, doesn’t take too long before somebody just goes up, “This is just a fly by night person.”

Norman Farrar:

Spend a little bit of money and if you don’t have it, for example, “I’m not an expert in everything. I have to get experts to do my stuff. So what do I do?” I’ll go out. And I have people, like we have about 55 people on our team. We have writers, we have all the… I’m not the copywriter, I probably suck it in it, you know, they do, that’s their job, or email marketing campaign, somebody that knows that or creating sales funnels, I don’t touch that, they do. And we’ll hire, like these people are on board contractors that do this. Now probably the most difficult part of all is creating a system where you have that one main person that can help you. Get a VA, get a contractor, get somebody that is your assistant, that can understand the most repetitive tasks that you do in the marketplace.

Norman Farrar:

So on Amazon, for example, it might be feedback, it might be keyword monitoring, it might be keyword research. Take a course if you want, but you can also get, like taking a course is good and that’s why I tell everybody, take a course that you understand it, but then hire somebody that knows it better than you and that’s probably the easiest thing as for eCommerce sites. If you’re doing Shopify, there’s an added issue and that is you have to create the traffic, you have to create an audience and you have to know your audience. So that’s the difference between just going in and throwing something up against the wall and wanting it to sell. I know that chefs or people want this high end knife and I can target specific audiences and drive them over to Shopify or drive them over to Walmart or take the cheaper knife, which is a $40, this is a whole other $49 knife.

Norman Farrar:

This is a knife that we get for three bucks and we throw it onto Walmart. I know the audiences. And so, one thing I can say, to get to know these personas, that’s the difficult part a lot of the time. Go to an app like SparkToro, T-O-R-O. Everything you need in eight minutes is there, everything you need. [crosstalk 00:12:11]

Itamar Shafir:

It’s Rand Fishkin’s tool, right?

Norman Farrar:

Ran Fishkin. Yep. Does a great job with it. So, it’s as difficult as you want for agencies that are out there, go one step at a time, offer and learn A service, then feel comfortable with it or if you go out there and there’s other agencies, for example, you might have a social media person. Okay. So social media is my Achilles’ heel. I can never find somebody that can hit it out of the park. I can find somebody that’s creative that can do the comment in the posting that can do the copy and then somebody that does the engagement. I can always find two out of the three, I can never find three. Well, that’s the same thing here. If I’m going out and trying to find a social media person or an eCommerce, that something to do with eCommerce might be Facebook, I might take an individual, but I might look at an individual that’s in an agency. So you could work off of the agency as well. And there’s lots of options.

Itamar Shafir:

Okay. So you’re saying they shouldn’t be afraid, say mechanics, take a course. That’s a great idea. And also you don’t have to provide all the gamut of services on day one. Provide one type of service for eCommerce clients if you’re very good at maybe already with other clients and take it from there. I think that’s very, very good advice. So, when you are an offline agency, you many times start nicheing when you’re small, right? Because you want to develop a brand in a specific niche, then you kind of start expanding. How does eCommerce clients look like? You told me before the podcast, I don’t want to touch these products that, 50,000 of them, but on the flip side, you take something like a knife, which is very mundane and turn it into a big success. So how do you choose your clients?

Norman Farrar:

Well, the client has to be willing, first of all, if it’s a “Me too” product, if you’re going out there and you’re trying, I use the example of plastic shoe stretcher, if you go and try, you can get them for under a dollar and you’ll get the same plastic shoe stretcher that everybody else is failing with. And you’ll see, and this is a true example, by the way, that there were seven of these people selling the same plastic shoe stretcher that the highest review rating on average was three and a half star, but people were still buying or trying to get that plastic shoe stretcher. That’s why I was researching it. They wanted it. And yet, if you went to a wooden shoe stretcher, I didn’t tell you this part, the average sales that came in on a plastic shoe stretcher that fell apart had rotten metal, it was crappy.

Norman Farrar:

All the reviews led to US` was crappy. But if you went to a wooden shoes stretcher, that cost you $3 instead of, I think this was like 49 cents or something, but you spent, a buck or two, the wooden one could sell for a hundred or sorry, the, the wooden one could sell for up to a 100 dollars and it was getting a hundred thousand dollars in sales a month, not 3000. And I got to tell you this, the client that I was doing, or the prospect that I was doing this for, wanted that plastic shoes, stretcher. I came back with all the research and said, look, you can make a hundred thousand dollars over here on a $3 product. He went with the plastic, the shoe stretcher. Wow. Because in his mind, that’s what he wanted. He was stuck and that’s another entrepreneurial. You can’t fall in love with your product.

Norman Farrar:

You have to be open to suggestions. And when you are working with an expert or a consultant, you got to check your ego. And the consultant does too. But if you’re listening to somebody, if you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re listening to something in a Facebook group, that’s credible, or in a course, you can’t say, “Oh yeah” but you know, soon as I hear that, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, that client shouldn’t be in it” because you know, but there’s a lot of really great small, I would call it people that want to get off the traditional marketplace or out of retail, push a product into eCommerce and they have good products. And all they need to do is pay the money to keep the perception. And sometimes you can’t do that yourself. Some marketing agencies are incredible, small marketing agencies, right? With branding and all that. But that’s, if that’s not your bag, like I’m a creative guy. Don’t tell me to do accounting.

Norman Farrar:

I hire people to do accounting. And I’m hoping like it’s right. You know? Yeah. But I do know how to read a financial statement, even though that sucks. For me, I don’t want that. That’s the same thing with small agencies. If there’s something that you have a great product, you have passion in the product. One thing that you need to do, this comes from Michael Gerber out of the myth academy. Okay. And he was the one that taught me and he taught me not himself, but the academy did about perception.

Norman Farrar:

We had a hyper growth company at the time. That was the promotions company I was going. Absolutely. That’s I think when I lost my hair, but I didn’t know processes and procedures. And one of the things that I was able to do is I would train somebody, sorry, I would get an assistant to help me. I wouldn’t train them properly. I would get angry and stressed I out I’m frustrated and fire the person. Yeah. And then do it myself because I’m the only one that could do it, I thought. And then I hire another person. And the same, it was, it’s a sales roller coaster for an entrepreneur.

Norman Farrar:

Yeah. I learned through Michael Gerber E-Myth academy that sit down, create your first process. Take that one process. First of all, train the person properly, create an SOP, a standard operating procedure, make sure that you have, buy-in like, why do you need this? We start everybody in our company on why do we or how to make a cup of coffee. Sounds stupid? After you read the SOP people realize, “Oh my gosh, I had had no idea.” You know, something so simple would have an impact. And it sounds crazy. And that’s a whole other story in itself. But once you have that, SOP and once you tell people the definitions, somebody has acronyms, a lot of new people will just smile and wave and they have no idea what ASIN is or skew or F and skew. They have to learn, what are the prerequisites? What do you have to learn? And then a step by step process quantifiable, like, how is it quantified? Who do they report to? And then the next step is templates and then training.

Itamar Shafir:

Yep. Yeah.

Norman Farrar:

If you want to like, really move ahead in this, you have somebody that can go and have multiple steps, like 20, 30 steps, not three. And then when somebody comes back and says, “Oh man, I messed up.” You go back. You. “Well, which step?” “Oh, step 19.” Yeah. Okay. Probably I messed that up. I’m not going to scream and yell. And they’re going to come back to me, like rule in the company for our us to have a performance based culture is for them to come back to us with the solutions. If the solution is wrong, we can correct them. But I don’t want everybody asking me, what’s the answer.

Itamar Shafir:

Yeah. But let’s… I agree with you completely. This is critical to build those processes. As you are trying to help a client with repeating tasks, obviously very critical, but let’s go back a second and look at the clients, many clients that I have products today that the agencies are working with. And I want to ask you does small retail have a chance online? And remember, these are not product owners usually. Let’s say I’m a toy store, right? Somewhere in New York, doesn’t matter, Atlanta. And it’s not my toys, right? I’m not the product owner, I’m a retailer. I’m a retailer offline. Maybe I get good prices because I’ve been a retailer for 10, 20 years. Do I have a place on Amazon? Should I sell my Legos on Amazon? Being that I’m not Lego?

Norman Farrar:

Well, there is product arbitrary or retail arbitrage, which is not what you’re talking about. If you do have a store, you can be competitive, but I don’t know if you saw the press release, but this is very timely. Amazon’s come up… Walmart has come up with this new Omni channel. They’re using all of their stores, 5,000 stores. You can either go and pick it up, in house, you can either have it delivered from the local store to you in an hour or so, or you can order it from WFS, Walmart fulfillment service. So now when you go to walmart.com, you can just go in there and you can place in a order. It is the new world of e-tail. Amazon just announced this week that exactly what you’re talking about. And I don’t have a lot of information, but they’re saying, “Hey, if you’re a local retailer, join our group, sign up and you can be a retailer in the Amazon partnership group.”

Itamar Shafir:

Wow.

Norman Farrar:

Yeah, a local retailer, not a white, you can be a white label. Like you could be XYZ shoes or whatever, but now you could link up. Somebody goes on orders, those shoes, and you can deliver it in one hour to the person locally. That’s a flip that’s crazy.

Itamar Shafir:

That’s a complete flip that the way they were going, they were killing small retail. They were absolutely [crosstalk 00:22:37]

Norman Farrar:

It’s crazy. When I heard that, what they were doing, they announced it at their accelerate conference this week. And I went, wow. I didn’t know how they were going to combat. It’s called project glass in Walmart. I don’t know how they were going to combat that, but I’m sitting there going, oh my gosh, what an incredible, think what it does for retail. And by the way, there’s another, there’s another hidden little gem in Amazon that most people don’t know about called explorer, amazon.com/explorer.

Norman Farrar:

Did you know, you can set up this virtual retail store outside in like behind me in this wall, in my garage. And what happens is somebody comes to your store. So all of your retail products could be in your garage without even a location and people would contact you and say, “Oh, I’m interested in this pair of shoes.” Okay. It’d be one way communication, one way video for privacy. And you can show the wall and then each one would be labeled. And then when you move in on it, it’ll show you a, like, if you want to buy it, all the information the person’s talking to you about it, like a retail person. And then you can buy it right from there.

Itamar Shafir:

Very nice. Wow. So you know what? This is extremely timely. As you said, this is a leap frog into a local retail and offline retail basically. It’s not even retail, like you said, if some guy in the garage or somewhere that you’re selling, and now you can be in partnership with Amazon, enjoy their insane traffic to something a small agencies must get into. I’m going to read after our podcast, I’m going to read out on it.

Norman Farrar:

There’s not a lot of information out there yet, but this is rolling out right now. And if you just Google, Amazon accelerate, you’ll see the press release on it. Really cool. Oh,

Itamar Shafir:

I’ll read it. So this actually takes me to another thing that Amazon tried, stopped and I know long launched again a couple of years ago, which is Amazon services, right? They’re actually drop shipping humans, now we’re calling it where you can buy TV and you can add somebody to install it or you can buy… and they work with all these different service providers in that specific area and you can buy directly the service from them. They basically productized services. How is that going? If you know, I don’t know how entrenched are you on that side of the business? And are you doing something with it?

Norman Farrar:

Yes and no. So I don’t know a lot about, but I am working. One of my clients have these huge, it’s almost like an Ikea cat stand. Okay. The problem is it ships like an Ikea product, right? It’s flat, you open it up and it’s like, how the heck am I going to put this together? Well now for like 45 bucks, you can have somebody come out and install it. And I think that’s another area, which is fabulous. If you want somebody to install something, click the button on the product listing page and you can have that done. I’ve never used it, but I like it and I think there’s lots that people can do, especially, let’s say that you’re in the appliance game, or if you’re selling wooden sheds, now doesn’t matter where you sell it. Somebody can go and install it for them.

Itamar Shafir:

Yeah. I worked for a while with the guy that had a big garage in installation company, and they were starting to utilize it with service providers that do installations and you can book, you can buy it via Amazon. And they come and install it for you. So I think that’s also the service providers, because agencies are used to working with service providers. They should check that out and maybe help service providers get on Amazon. That’s a service in of itself. I imagine it’s not easy. Like Google local lead Ads that they don’t accept everybody. So, well, that’s on the retail side, on the service side, there’s a lot that they can do. So talk to me first for a few minutes about product launches. Everybody hears it, that you need to do a product launch on Amazon. Otherwise, it’s not going to succeed. What is it? What’s the secret behind it.

Norman Farrar:

Okay. So the biggest secret, very simple, old traditional marketing. If you want perceived value, you’ll get it. If you want garbage and you want to do it yourself and you want it done for free and cost effective, not really cost effective, but you do it with your iPhone, you do it all yourself and you think you’re a graphic artist, or you think you’re a photographer because you have an iPhone. Usually those will fail. It’s so important that you understand how to navigate Amazon’s TOS, so their terms of service. Okay, so let’s back up. What’s the anatomy of a product listing? So you’ve got your prime image. It’s not a white background. It’s got to stand out if it’s blurry or if it doesn’t look good or if you’re shooting it at the wrong angle or the lighting’s not there, like I see a lot of people that launch supplements and you’ve got the ones that really pop.

Norman Farrar:

It’s almost like some R 3D renderings, but others, all you need to do has got a graphic artist to put a beam of light, going down the sides to make it look like a cylinder, and it pops that much more. So, that’s the first thing is the quality. With our knives, everybody with the knives and it’s hilarious, because I have this in a presentation where everyone is going bottom to top, right? Okay. Angle. All I did was turn it the other way. And then for our box, I just put a splash of like, everybody else is black. Everybody’s black. I put a hint of yellow in there and all of a sudden, boom, every time I tell people, what knife are you going to check out first? It’s going to be ours, because there’s that all of a sudden you’re drying the eye on the search page that has everybody else doing the same boring thing.

Norman Farrar:

Now when they get to my page, then I have to create a storyboard. I don’t want to have, okay. Let’s go back to the supplement, supplement front shot, supplement back shot, supplement on its side with its label, supplement with the cap off, lying down. Couple of capsules out. And this happens all the time. Have a storyboard. Why is it better? What’s the benefit. Don’t write a novel, write a couple of bullet points. The instructions. It could be the ingredients. It could be whatever. It could be lifestyle, lifestyle images are very important. Influencers are very important right now. So if you can show people not a stock photo with somebody holding a bar of soap, that’s five times bigger than their hand, a real lifestyle photo. And then now they have videos. Video, this is where I change.

Norman Farrar:

You don’t have to have an incredible video. You just have to have, you know, the product even rotating on a turntable, nice lighting and you can have this side, like it could start off with a product name, feature or benefit. I always lead with benefits features and just have a very short 30 second video. It’s all you need. You don’t have to go [inaudible 00:30:35] Titles, there’s a lot of different ways of doing it. The simplest way is just to make sure your brand’s in the front, the main keyword phrase a longer [inaudible 00:30:50] have about five from brand name to the end of the phrase and then make it engaging. For example, XYZ soap and then it would be like, or XYZ would be like Dove, handmade, natural cold press soap infused with lavender essential oils. That sounds better than just cold press or handmade soap or natural soap with not infused with lavender oil.

Itamar Shafir:

Copywriting. Yeah.

Norman Farrar:

So copywriting. Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be that difficult again, a good training program, which you pay for like a lot of this free stuff is worth about what you get. You know, 2016 things have changed but get a good course and it’ll show you the basics of copywriting to do. That’s not hard quality bullet… Don’t do what a lot of people are saying and make it all upper caps. A lot of emojis, no, just keep it short. They’re called bullets for a reason and put keywords into those but make it engaging then with your backend, the backend is where you can put some search terms. You got 149 characters that you can put in there. Again, going back onto the listing for a second.

Norman Farrar:

I don’t want to get too complicated with this, but there is something everybody’s seen it if they’re on Amazon frequently bought together. If you’ve got two products, you want to get someone to buy your product and cross promote the other products, so buy two products, so you can get the frequently bought together box. That gives you about 33% more sales. But if you let your competitor buy your product and they show up, they’re going to get that extra portion. Then you’ve got you scroll down a bit further and you’ll see a plus content. A plus content is like a mini website where again, you don’t want to write a book, you want to talk, like have really beautiful pictures, you want to have bullet points, it might be those features again, it might be, it’s some… If you want to, let’s say we want to talk about that lavender oil, it might be the aroma therapeutic advantages of smelling of lavender oil and you have to be careful. You don’t want to make claims because you’ll get suspended.

Itamar Shafir:

And okay, so we’re talking a lot about what’s going on in Amazon and how are we getting traffic? I know you have a PR agency that does that. What goes on into that? Maybe you could tell us a little about what that agency does.

Norman Farrar:

Sure. So one thing. So I went on this spiel about making sure that your listing’s okay. I didn’t get to the launch. So on the launch, one of the things that you need to be able to do is have some keyboard research done, but set up your PPC. So you want to go in there and you want to do some simple PPC, just automatic campaigns, bid double or triple what it tells you to bid.

Norman Farrar:

So you can gather the search terms, what Amazon wants. There’s other things that you can do as well. There you can go and you can create, or you can target influencers and get influencers to promote your product. You can go over and this goes into the external traffic we were just talking about, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, right now, if you have brand registry. So if you have a trademark and you give it to Amazon, you get brand registry.

Norman Farrar:

If you in brand registry, you have something that allows you to get paid for driving traffic. They’ll pay an average of around 10% on the traffic that you drive over. So instead of their referral fees are roughly 15%, you just saved. You just saved 10% on that referral fee. Now you did pay for the ad, but if you do it properly and you know your audience, those like Google ads are very inexpensive right now, or Pinterest Ads or, and you can track all of this and I’m going to go over everybody’s head who knows nothing about Amazon, but they have another product, another app called brand service or brand analytics or brand attribution program, which allows you to put a piece of code and track what traffic came over from Pinterest or Facebook or wherever.

Norman Farrar:

So, you know what’s working or not. The last thing that we can talk about it about getting that authority is we can either get some form of external buzz, which could be, it could be either through a press release. So you’re announcing that something’s happened and maybe not at launch time, but two weeks earlier, you could have something done within the media. So with us, it’s earned media. We’ll try to get into a magazine or we’ll try to get into a TV show for them to talk about a product like Food Morning America or something like that, we can get that kind of exposure, that that gives us a bump. Or if we can get into gift guides, gift guides like wire cutter, for example, now this is the extreme, but we have a product that was the number one betting. I’ll just put betting product.

Norman Farrar:

Every time that that betting product was shown on wire cutter, we had no idea you that they were even doing this, but we won this award or my client did every time they did it once a quarter, there was a hundred thousand dollars bump in sales for that month. And it was wire cutter. And so they were owned by the New York times. Now there are all sorts of other gift guides. So you can go into niche markets, like let’s say it men’s health or GQ. Every magazine, every website that’s Etel oriented, Oprah probably has it. Field and stream for hunters. They have gift guides and they’re easy to find. You can go into Google, you can type pet gift guides or dog gift guides. And there you go. They’re all there right in front of start calling them. You know, we do it as a service advice, but you can all do this for yourself and they’ll either be free. You might have to give them what you will have to give them your product. Some of them are paid. Wire cutter, like at the time, when we got into wire cutter, we had no idea. They bought random pillows. And we were given that award Arthur there. I said the betting pro product. I was like, you [crosstalk 00:37:59]

Itamar Shafir:

What is going on in my head? He’s saying betting? Is he saying betting? Can’t be that he’s selling betting. Like what? And I was like, what [crosstalk 00:38:06]

Norman Farrar:

[crosstalk 00:38:08] that’s what it was.

Itamar Shafir:

Yeah. Pillows. So, that’s fun making a lot of money with pillows. So I look so much amazing advice. We covered how you launch, how you list a little bit, obviously a more goes into it, how you can drive more traffic. You’re saying influencer traffic is very important, because it also comes with social proof. Also happens for other, in other areas of marketing. And I think a lot of what you’re saying minus the mechanics and technicalities, as you just described that are specific for Amazon, I agree are kind of marketing that everybody use that you need to ask the right questions and do things a little bit different and craft the right copy and everything that is related to that.

Itamar Shafir:

And also I’m very excited by the announcement of the working with small retail by Amazon, that’s something. So this is amazing advice. Now, if somebody wants to work with you Norman, let’s say we have a lot of agencies listening and they’re saying, “Okay, I know to do the branding part, let’s say, or I know to drive traffic from Google, like I’m kick as and PPC, but everything else that you just said norm, I don’t know how to do. And I have some retail co clients. Can I come to you?

Norman Farrar:

Absolutely. So we have a complete managed service division from product opportunity to exit, so everything in between.

Itamar Shafir:

Okay, perfect. So I can just say, “Okay, Norman I just need help with PR or just need help with sourcing.”

Norman Farrar:

Yep, absolutely. It’s all card as well.

Itamar Shafir:

Yep. Awesome. And they can find it at normanfarrar.com?

Norman Farrar:

Well, that shows the services, but they could probably go to go there normanfarrar.com. But if they email me at norm@AMZ.club, I also can be reached, and this is a bit longer, at privatelabellegion.com, which is more of a mentoring group, it’s free. You just go there and you check it out. There’s a lot of content over there if you like.

Itamar Shafir:

That’s perfect. And we have a last segment for the show. It’s a rapid Q&A. The questions are no way edgy. They’re really not. But if you feel uncomfortable with any of them, you just pass. Okay?

Norman Farrar:

All right.

Itamar Shafir:

Cool. They’re not it don’t worry. Did you get along with your parents growing up?

Norman Farrar:

100%.

Itamar Shafir:

Do you have siblings?

Norman Farrar:

I do.

Itamar Shafir:

Do you have a pet?

Norman Farrar:

I do.

Itamar Shafir:

You have kids?

Norman Farrar:

Yes I do.

Itamar Shafir:

How old were you when your first kid was born?

Norman Farrar:

I was 24.

Itamar Shafir:

Young. When do you wake up?

Norman Farrar:

I usually wake up late because I work late. So I wake up around 8:30 to 9.

Itamar Shafir:

It’s not late. We had people here waking up at 11. When do you go to bed?

Norman Farrar:

Oh gosh, between 1 and 4.

Itamar Shafir:

Wow. Ideal vacation?

Norman Farrar:

You know what? I really love Hawaii.

Itamar Shafir:

Nice. Are you a man of faith?

Norman Farrar:

I am.

Itamar Shafir:

Okay. Perfect. Excellent Norman. This has been wonderful. And you have officially kick started our first session diving into eCommerce with amazing advice. I really appreciate it. And guys, you can find Norman lunch with Norman podcast where you can get more free advice, and I know you need it, on doing some eCommerce marketing. You can find on the clubhouse, startup club, Thursdays, 1:00 PM ET is room called eCommerce weekly and Norman, you’ve been awesome. Thank you very much.

Norman Farrar:

Hey, you’re really? Yeah, this is awesome. It is great. Those rapid questions started to get me a little nervous though.

Itamar Shafir:

Oh, it was [inaudible 00:42:14] though, right? It was, it was [crosstalk 00:42:16] Thank you Norman.

Norman Farrar:

Hey, no problem. Thank you for having me.

Subscribe to The Marketing Umbrella Podcast

Each week, we interview some of the world’s leading marketing experts on The Marketing Umbrella Podcast. Keep your digital marketing agency on the cutting edge and subscribe.