Honest Marketing

Mike Begg: Tapping into Amazon to Grow Your Business

• Honest Podcasts • Episode 44

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Amazon, the e-commerce giant, has become more than just a marketplace for products; it's a vast ecosystem of opportunities for businesses. 

If you're looking to expand your brand and grow your business, understanding how to leverage the power of Amazon can be a game-changer. 

Our special guest, Mike Begg, the CEO of AMZ Advisers, is no stranger to the Amazon game. He's helped over 300 brands and manufacturers maximize their sales on this platform, making him a true expert in the field.

During our conversation, we'll deep dive into the art of understanding your customers' pain points, creating offers that hit the bullseye, and using platforms like TikTok to boost your traffic and sales. 

We’ll also explore the key steps to assess a company's potential for growth on Amazon and how to view Amazon as a brand discovery platform within the broader marketing funnel.

So, don't forget to tune in to this episode – there are some golden insights waiting for you that can seriously rev up your e-commerce success. 

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • Leveraging the power of Amazon and TikTok for business growth
  • Optimizing Amazon listings for higher conversion rates
  • Creating irresistible offers that solve those problems

Links from this episode:

Mike Begg [00:00:00]:

When it comes to creating content for TikTok, I think you need to test a variety of things. But I think what people are looking for is not stuff that is overly produced. If you're coming at it from that angle, you're approaching it the wrong way. I think creating as much user generated content as possible at the, I don't want to say lowest quality, but at the most organic looking way as possible. And testing what's working is probably going to be the best strategy for a TikTok.

Travis Albritton [00:00:26]:

Welcome back to the Honest Marketing podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton, and maybe you noticed, but with the colder weather, got a nice little frog in my throat, but that's not going to stop us from having a great podcast today. And my guest today, Mike, is just phenomenal. So the reason I was really excited about having this conversation and sharing it with you is because most of the conversations I have are around digital products, softwares, different offers like that. But Mike and his team at AMC Advisors, they specialize specifically in e commerce brands and their expertise is really strong. They're one of the initial Amazon marketing agencies, like way back in the day and had just a ton of experience and a wealth of knowledge when it comes to e commerce. Building an e commerce brand, building out a full funnel not just with Amazon to sell your services, but how to leverage Amazon to get in front of your ideal customers and clients with your products and then leading them into a long term relationship. So that was phenomenal.

Travis Albritton [00:01:29]:

We talked about TikTok and how they're using TikTok ads and their strategy for TikTok for driving traffic to Amazon and then ultimately back to the mothership, the e commerce brams websites. And then we talked about some of the things that you need to think about and consider if you want to expand your business overseas. There were some things I didn't even know about that I'm glad that he brought up and educated me on when it comes to regulatory environments or things like that. And I think on a big picture, my big takeaway from this was just what an incredible opportunity there still is in the e commerce space that it doesn't have to just be direct to consumer, build an Instagram account and then try know, do everything by your own steam. But there still is a huge opportunity to leverage these mega platforms to make money for your business and then drive long term results as well. Make sure you stick around to the very end where I'll give you my number one takeaway from my conversation with Mike. But here it is. Let's dive in.

Travis Albritton [00:02:23]:

Well, Mike, welcome to the Honest Marketing Podcast. Happy to have you here today.

Mike Begg [00:02:26]:

Hey, Travis, thanks for the invitation. I'm really excited to be here talking with you today.

Travis Albritton [00:02:31]:

Awesome. So before we dive into the meat of the episode, can you just take a moment to introduce yourself and specifically the work that you do with AMC advisors and the other companies that you have for different verticals and markets.

Mike Begg [00:02:43]:

Of Course. So, as you said, I'm Mike. I'm originally from Connecticut. I live in Guadalajara, Mexico. I've been in Guadalajara for six years. My wife is actually from here, which is part of the reason I'm down here. I'm the CEO of AMZ Advisors. What we do at AMZ Advisors is we partner with brands and manufacturers that are looking to sell more on the Amazon platform, and we help them manage their advertising, their marketing strategy, and pretty much everything they need to do to maximize their sales there.

Mike Begg [00:03:11]:

I also run a variety of other companies. AMZ Global, where we help brands expand from the US. To Europe or the US. To Asia and vice versa, as well as Go of Ants, where we are specifically focused on bringing us and foreign brands into Latin America, where I live. So that is high level. Everything that I'm doing, everything I'm involved in. And, yeah, it's been a great ride. Kind of helping.

Mike Begg [00:03:36]:

At this point, over 300 brands maximize their sales on the Amazon platform.

Travis Albritton [00:03:40]:

That's Fantastic. Now, before I dig into my first question, do you have a personal stake in the kind of brands that you pursue to bring into the Mexican market? Like, man, I really wish I could buy this here. Let me approach this brand and see if I can get them to sell stuff over here.

Mike Begg [00:03:57]:

I would say, well, no, we haven't gotten that far yet. I will say that there are definitely brands I want to get here, but I haven't gotten that particular with it. I would say it's more of just consumer choice in general. I mean, the options I have to buy certain products or certain brands in Mexico is limited for a variety of different reasons. A lot of it's regulatory. A lot of it's. Like business practices. But it also just kind of sucks.

Mike Begg [00:04:24]:

Because it's like if I'm going to buy something from the US. A lot of times it's going to show up and there's going to be an import tariff Bill, and I'm going to have to pay the tariff before I can even get the product released. And that tariff can be anywhere from 60% to 100% of the price of the goods. So it kind of just sucks buying stuff on Amazon from here because you never know what you're actually going to.

Travis Albritton [00:04:44]:

End up paying, man. Problems you didn't know existed in the world until you live it and experience it.

Mike Begg [00:04:51]:

And that's why we're trying to solve it.

Travis Albritton [00:04:53]:

That's Right. That's why you're trying to solve it. So I want to break up this interview into two halves. The first half I want to focus on is Amazon and specifically e commerce brands that want to sell on Amazon because it can be this really scary idea of we're going to put most of our eggs in this basket of the world's number one store. Which makes sense. But then you hear stories about Amazon scraping data and then creating competitive products. The risk of building on somebody else's platform instead of creating your own platform and controlling your own kind of destiny, but without the traffic and having to generate that yourself. So what are some best practices? Or maybe let's start here.

Travis Albritton [00:05:30]:

What are some myths that a lot of e commerce brands believe about Amazon that aren't true or aren't true to the extent that people maybe make them out to be?

Mike Begg [00:05:40]:

I would say that I would say the first one is that you can't make money on Amazon. It's definitely possible. It depends on your product, it depends on your goals. Obviously the cost of advertising is higher. It has its own fees, which makes it more challenging, but it's still possible to do. I would say another that's not really a myth, but it's true, is that you don't get access to customer data. Amazon doesn't give you the information itself, but there are ways and techniques that you can start creating processes to capture emails and start building lists and other things. I think that's where a lot of the value is for brands that control their own channels, is that once they start looking at how they can leverage Amazon to capture more consumers, bring them to other platforms in the future, is where they really start seeing like, oh, this makes a lot of sense for me to be there.

Travis Albritton [00:06:34]:

Well, and it's very similar know brands that advertise on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, it's like you're starting on somebody else's platform and you're trying to bring them over to a place where you can control that connection. You have that person's information. You can reach out to them directly, service them directly, but for whatever reason think Amazon can be made out as the boogeyman of they're just going to use you and abuse you and then leave you on the roadside. But there is opportunity. There's a reason people sell on Amazon because you could still make money there. So what are some of the best practices that you've seen just across the board with the brands that you work with that either already have an Amazon presence and want to expand it, or they've started direct to consumer and they want to shift into using Amazon to grow their business? What are the different things that you do when you're first assessing a company and the potential for growth on Amazon?

Mike Begg [00:07:25]:

For sure. And just to highlight another point of what you mentioned there is that it's over 70% of all online products hurt you start on Amazon. So when we start with that information, it makes more sense. Like this is a brand discovery platform, so I need to be on amazon to be discovered. I would say the initial first, best practices you can do is to consider Amazon as a sales funnel itself. I mean, you're going to have middle of the funnel for people that are ready to buy sorry, bottom of the funnel for people that are ready to buy, middle funnel for people that are considering different brands, and then top of the funnel for awareness. And then when you think of Amazon for being a brand awareness tool, it fits within your broader funnel of your business of like, how do I get people to find me on Amazon? How do I get them to find me on my website? So on and so forth. When you start shifting the way you look at it, then you start seeing more opportunities.

Mike Begg [00:08:17]:

So initially, when you're first coming to Amazon, you really want to focus on that. Bottom of the Amazon funnel is, how do I get people that are searching for a product to buy my product? Sponsored products helps with that. Focusing on the main keywords that are related to your products with sponsored product ads is going to show your product in those top three search results. When people come to Amazon to buy the product, if your product is relevant for those keywords and you have good looking content, you have a good looking listing, you're probably going to convert, and immediately you're going to start seeing a return on advertising. So focusing the bottom of the funnel is obviously a very key aspect. Merchandising your products correctly is another really important aspect. If you have product variations, if you could potentially do multi pack bundles, so two, three packs of one unit, those are all ways that we can increase average order value as well. So that's another way to maximize the actual return that you're getting from your advertising or the initial purchase of the consumer.

Mike Begg [00:09:16]:

You can expose them to different products. You can get them to spend more with you. All those things are beneficial. I would say another key aspect that a lot of brands don't consider is utilizing product inserts or some type of way to drive consumers to a different site. So a good example of this could be creating digital assets. It could be creating warranties, a lot of different things where someone needs to go somewhere else to register for something. And that's how you start capturing the emails, and then you can start leveraging them. So once you start building the system, you can see that you can add more and more pieces on.

Mike Begg [00:09:52]:

And as you move further up the funnel into brand awareness, you're starting to advertise on competitor products. Sorry, on consideration, starting to advertise on competitor products, brand awareness, you can actually leverage Amazon's programmatic side, the DSP platform, to create, lookalike and custom audiences based on the people that have already purchased your product. So now we're talking about how do we find more people similar to facebook that are already purchasing that are similar to the people that are already purchasing my product. And we're exposing them to the product inserts, and we're giving the potential for them to opt in and build an email list somewhere else. And you can kind of see how powerful that can get over time, especially when 70% of all on searches are starting there. Now we're talking about reaching a massive audience and really working it into the funnel.

Travis Albritton [00:10:38]:

So a couple of things. One. The thing that stands out to me is just not only how big of an opportunity there is with Amazon, which that makes sense, but thinking about the potential for building this really well done, thorough sales funnel reaching the whole person at every stage of the buyer's journey and having specific strategies for shifting them away from an Amazon buyer to someone that's more direct to consumer, where you have that connection. Do you have any examples that you can share from your own client list of case studies of companies that have come through that you've kind of installed this whole process for and maybe what a before and after could look like? Just so someone listening that maybe has an ecommerce product or brand is wondering what's possible. If I were to implement all these different steps, what would that look like?

Mike Begg [00:11:28]:

I can't go into specifics about the brand, but I can talk about how it works. So again, when we're talking about on platform stuff to begin with, first the main focus is get the listings, ranking well and indexing well. For SEO, that's the most important thing, starting to run the advertising. As the initial testing, you're going to identify what the highest converting keywords are. From there, you're going to be able to start scaling up based on those keywords, use the keywords in your content. As we've built out these funnels, we've taken some brands from doing on the Amazon platform zero initially, starting to the point where they're now doing an $11 million run rate per year on Amazon. And now the thing beyond that is that once this specific brand that I'm referring to is as they've started to scale sales, we included a product insert for their product. It's an accessory for shoes, essentially.

Mike Begg [00:12:24]:

So there was a lot of digital assets we were able to create for them to opt in and get about how to take care of shoes, how to value shoes, how to clean shoes, all these types of things that are relevant for the product. From there, they started actually seeing about a 60% capture rate on every purchase. So every purchase that was coming through, they were six out of ten were actually opting in for whatever the offer was and signing up on their list. And then from there, they started scaling. So they've been able to get to a point where they've built their email list now to over 20,000 subscribers. They're generating, I think, like 100,000 or more through their website per month, in addition to the 11 million we're already doing on Amazon. And it just keeps continuing to scale from there. So that is really where you see everything coming together.

Mike Begg [00:13:15]:

Obviously, the more emails that they continue to acquire, the number on their website is just going to keep going exponentially and then they're going to be able to leverage those audiences for other things. We also help them with a lot of other brand awareness and other aspects. So one of the reasons that we saw so much success on Amazon is that we were running TikTok ads and TikTok videos. We were pushing TikTok traffic to Amazon, which has a higher conversion rate than your website. So we're acquiring more customers that way. They also got into TikTok shops, which was generating a ton of revenue for them. So all of these things really tie Together, and it's Important To look at the bigger picture instead of seeing a lot of Brands get so focused on, I'm not making money on this sale or My margin is too low on this sale, or whatever it is. But the reality is it's going to have a massive impact on your brand in the long run when you start looking at how everything fits together.

Travis Albritton [00:14:05]:

Yeah. Once you have that perspective of the true lifetime value of a consumer or a new customer, and that Amazon might just be the first date, it's the first handshake. Right. And then you're transitioning them to a longer term relationship in the context of digital marketing and funnels, another term that might be used is like a self liquidating offer or tripwire funnel or whatever, where you're basically paying for whatever advertising spend that you have. There's a breakeven point, and the quicker you get over that to then continue to service that customer on the back end, all of that is profit because you've paid to acquire this customer, whether it's through Amazon or a Facebook ad or something like so. So seeing Amazon not necessarily as like, this is our whole business, just selling stuff on Amazon to Amazon as a key cog in the machine that we're building for a sustainable business, utilizing the number one search platform for shopping in the world.

Mike Begg [00:15:01]:

Exactly. And I think that's one of the areas where most brands don't think of it is Amazon is just a tool. It's a tool that you're going to leverage. The on platform advertising is obviously keeping people on platform, but all the other aspects that you can run from product inserts, the DSP side, all these things are going to help acquire more customers for your brand in the long run. So it's massively beneficial to be on Amazon.

Travis Albritton [00:15:26]:

Now you brought up TikTok, so I have to ask because there aren't a lot of people that I know. It's still very new as an ad platform, a lot of experimentation going on. So walk me through what is working with TikTok ads specifically for e commerce and maybe how it's different than Instagram, because Instagram for the longest was kind of the greatest of all time when it came to e commerce DTC brands. But I imagine TikTok is starting to eat into, like, what are the strategies you're using there and what are you seeing that it's successful?

Mike Begg [00:15:56]:

So we continue to test different things, but we've seen a really interesting trend in that the lowest quality production actually does the best. When we try to overproduce content on TikTok, it comes off fake and ingenuine and it honestly has done not so well. We did for this one brand. It is probably the lowest quality video we've ever seen. I forgot exactly what we did, but it was a video of their warehouse in the background on a green screen with the guy standing in front of it and talking about the brand. And that ad, or that video in particular generated close to half a million dollars in sales. And we were like, how is this possible? So when it comes to creating content for TikTok, I think you need to test a variety of things. But I think what people are looking for is not stuff that is overly produced or highly produced.

Mike Begg [00:16:55]:

I think if you're coming at it from that angle, you're approaching it the wrong way. I think creating as much UGC content, user generated content, as possible at the I don't want to say lowest quality, but at the most organic looking way as possible. And testing what's working is probably going to be the best strategy for TikTok.

Travis Albritton [00:17:14]:

Yeah, well, everyone's got their antennas up looking for those ads, looking for those little sponsor tags. I was going to ask you about that branded content versus user generated content because my hunch was similar to what you said, which is when it comes to TikTok, if you want to be hip with the kids, you got to do what the kids are doing. Not that it's a kids platform anymore, it's certainly aged up very quickly, but creating content that's relevant to the platform you're using. So a video that you'd make for Instagram is different than a video that you'd make for TikTok, which is different than a video you'd make for Facebook, because they each have their own kind of rules that they play by. And so if you want to succeed on anyone, you have to really lean into what works there. Now, if you had any arm wrestling matches with brands that aren't super fired up about the kinds of videos you're using to promote their stuff on TikTok, wanting it to be more polished, wanting it to be more brand aligned, or are they like, you know what, Mike, we trust you. If you say it's going to make us more money, we'll go for it. What are those conversations like?

Mike Begg [00:18:11]:

I mean, that's more or less how we approach it. Is that we're not going to bring it to brands that are super protective of how everything looks. We want brands that are flexible, open to ideas, because at the end of the day, ecommerce is just about being as flexible and as adaptable as possible. And if you're very stuck in a mold of how your business should be run or is going to be run, then you're not going to be open to new ideas. And at the same time, it's not going to be worth the energy and time on our part. We have fun when we get to test out new things. And when we got to test out these TikTok ads with this client, we were pretty excited about it. We were like, you know what, let's just give it a try.

Mike Begg [00:18:52]:

This is what we see working or what's getting the most engagement, the most views. Let's try something similar. And with the hypothesis we had, we were actually able to test it and get results. So it's a big game for us. At the end of the day, it's like, we want to come up with new ideas, we want to try new things, and some of them are going to work, some of them are going to fail. But at the end the day, we're all going to learn, and it's going to help us as a company improve and it's going to help the brands get better results.

Travis Albritton [00:19:15]:

Now, I'm thinking again, specifically with TikTok, how much of the advertising that you're doing or testing there is just within the ads platform and how much of it is partnering with accounts and influencers that are in the space that you're trying to target. The niche and the audience.

Mike Begg [00:19:29]:

The way we're doing it, or the way that we've been doing it historically, is that we will partner with people in the niche or people that have an audience that we are trying to market to and have them produce the UGC content from. The best producing UGC content or the best performing UGC content. We will either edit it into a video for an ad or we will use that video itself to promote as the ad. So it really depends on what's performing, what's not performing. But the majority of the initial spend is on just the partnership stuff to find the right audiences or to find the influencers that have the right audiences we can market to. And then from there, we start looking at how we can scale up the outside.

Travis Albritton [00:20:11]:

And then when you're these are all selfish questions. These are things that I just want to know, that I imagine maybe a couple of people will want to know as well. What's your process for researching and approaching those partnerships and for qualifying the quality of the accounts and the people that you're partnering with? Because I know with Instagram, it became this huge thing where anyone who had a quote unquote audience was like looking for brand deals. It's like, yeah, well, how many of these people are from Bangladesh that are just, like, made up accounts on iPhones in a factory somewhere? Like, how many of these are actual real, engaged people? What are the factors that you look for specifically on TikTok, but just in general, influencer marketing and partnering with the right people that can not just be beneficial in creating that user generated content, but hopefully turn into a long term partnership where you're not just churning through all these different influencers and always going back on the hamster wheel of well, we got to find some more people to make some more account, some more videos, but finding those handful that really drive exceptional results for the brand.

Mike Begg [00:21:10]:

My TikTok team can get more into the details here. I can say generally, the way that we approach it, generally the way we approach influencer marketing, is that we focus on micro influencers. So people that have less than 10,000 followers, and the reason being that they tend to have good engagement if they have less than 10,000 followers. So the engagement rates are higher. The videos they're showing are going to people that actually care about it. When you start getting over that 10,000 mark is where people start trying to monetize it, or people in Bangladesh are having fake followers and fake engagement and all these things. So we really focus on micro influencers and reaching as many micro influencers as we can at once, and then seeing what performs, because videos that get higher engagement within a certain audience are then going to be shown to other audiences that are related. So it's really a testing game, and it's really a numbers game.

Mike Begg [00:22:02]:

So at the beginning, we might work with 100 micro influencers to see which ones are working, which ones aren't, that'll help us get the exposure from there. And then we leverage what is working in different video content. Could be video ads, both on the platforms as well as on Amazon and other platforms, product reviews, a lot of different ways that we will leverage that content in different platforms.

Travis Albritton [00:22:26]:

Nice. All right, so now I want to shift to global reach and global expansion, because most companies start local, they start national. It's simple shipping works. Everyone uses the same currency. Everyone, for the most part, speaks the same quote unquote language as far as, like, culturally and things like that. But then when you want to shift into an international national market and grow into that, I imagine there are some hurdles and some obstacles and pivots that need to be made to speak well into each of those markets. So when you have a brand or a company that comes in and they want to expand internationally, what does that initial onboarding look like? To kind of let them know what to expect? And what can a company expect if they want to scale, let's say, from US. And Canada over to the European market or to the Australian market or Latin America, and they want to start targeting Spanish speakers with their products.

Travis Albritton [00:23:20]:

What does that pivot look like? What's involved in that shift?

Mike Begg [00:23:23]:

So, first of all, it's going to be different for each marketplace. And the way that we kind of approach this conversation is that the US and Canada, those are similar markets. The European marketplaces are all somewhat similar, even though that there's language differences. The fact that they're in the European Union means that there's regulatory requirements that exist across all of the platforms. So addressing them in one country usually means you can address them in all of them. Australia is a separate conversation in that it is somewhat similar to the US and the UK because of common law. But it does have its own challenges as well. And then you're looking at Latin America and the rules completely go out the window.

Mike Begg [00:24:02]:

Latin America is the most complex one to expand into, so the conversation will really depend on where they want to start going. When it comes to the EU, it's usually the easiest move to make. Canada is usually the easiest. After Canada, the EU is usually the easiest mainly because, like I said, the regulations are the same market to market. If you have a VAT registration in one country, you are typically VAT registered in all the countries, or you can get onto Amazon in all the countries. So that's one of the benefits of it. There's some logistical issues that came up because of Brexit. So right now, like inventory management wise, the UK and the European Union is considered different markets.

Mike Begg [00:24:44]:

However, if you send inventory to the European Union, for example, you can have your inventory warehoused across the entire European Union. So it allows you to get a lot faster last mile delivery to the end consumer. And that's how we kind of approach that conversation, get that registration, make sure we have all the product compliance we need. There's no ingredients or anything that we need to be aware of. How do we deal with the last mile fulfillment? And then from there it's more of how do we translate the content, how do we make sure that's localized for the markets that we're selling in Australia, like I said, similar to the US. Obviously we want to localize the content as well to make sure that it makes sense. We need to have a three PL partner in third party logistics, partner in Australia to actually fulfill the inventory. Again, it's not that much of a challenge because it is similar to US.

Mike Begg [00:25:32]:

Canadian and UK law. So if you understand law on one of them, you can more or less figure out everything else you need to do there. Latin America, each market is different. So I'm in Mexico. Mexico has its own set of laws. We also do work in Colombia and Brazil. Brazil is a nightmare to do business in. Mainly each country is very protectionist and there's different ways that it's protectionist.

Mike Begg [00:25:55]:

So for example, in Colombia and Brazil, you can't import products directly from China. In Mexico, there's tariffs on products from China and there's tariffs for products in the US. Even though it's supposed to be we have a free trade agreement. The free trade is mainly products going from Mexico to the US. Not products coming from US to Mexico. So that's another big challenge. Dealing with fiscal registrations in each country are extremely difficult. I've set up businesses in Mexico before.

Mike Begg [00:26:27]:

Just setting up the business takes about four months. Getting a tax ID takes about there's about a two month wait just to get an appointment to get a tax ID. So you have to get an appointment, then you have to go in person to get the tax ID. The online platforms for tax filings very rarely ever work, which is a whole nother nightmare. So there's a lot of challenges from those perspectives. Brazil taxes are insane. Foreign products come in, they're paying anywhere between 60% to 96% of the value of the product coming in. You need to have your own business.

Mike Begg [00:26:58]:

There business registrations, take business registrations from start to finish, take anywhere from twelve to 18 months. And obviously we're talking about language differences as well in all these countries. So we've got Spanish, we've got Brazilian, Portuguese. So when the conversations come to Latin America, it is usually the most complex and difficult to deal with. And we've kind of created other solutions for that because of those challenges.

Travis Albritton [00:27:24]:

Sure, well, and I imagine that's why a business say like, you know what Mike, you guys just take care of this. We want to get in Brazil. You tell us how long it takes, you take care of the details and make it happen for us. I imagine that's the value proposition that you have, right, that you have figured out that whole process and how to.

Mike Begg [00:27:42]:

Do it from start to mean that's it's taken a long time to figure this all out. A lot of it was personal learning from starting businesses down here, other was just helping other brands do it and then figuring it out ourselves. So we've really gotten to a point where if a brand wants to get into the markets, we can get them up and running without dealing with all the fiscal legal compliance issues within a month. So a brand coming to us can get into Mexico almost immediately and not have to deal with all the brain damage and the headaches that come with it. So it's one of the things that I believe, just in general, is that for us as a company, when we're solving a lot of these barriers to entry or a lot of these problems that the other brands are, going to have we're able to provide a lot more value and then be able to create a better partnership on actually delivering results in those markets.

Travis Albritton [00:28:37]:

Well, and I imagine that so much of marketing and sales, which is we talk about on the podcast here, is product Market fit and knowing what the problems are that your customers are facing and creating the best solution possible for that. Right? And the magic wand is always the fictitious. Like, if you could make this go away instantly with no work wave, a magic wand, what would that solution look like? And it sounds like that's been your approach to cracking this particular problem. It's like, traditionally, this is what it would take to get into these markets, but we've created an offer that basically does it in a fraction of the time and we do it all for you. And you just keep making your product and we'll sell it for you. When you are thinking through product development, offer development for each of the things that you do, whether it's AMC Advisors or breaking in the Latin market, American market, things like that, how do you think about structuring your offer? In a way that is both profitable for you so you can continue to grow and invest in your team and expand and reach all your business goals, but also make it really viable for the companies that you work with that are at a scale where they have some internal teams and systems. And so whereas one company might be tempted to say, well, we'll just figure it out in house because we already got a marketing team, or we already got a team that does this, what is that differentiating proposition that you always put into your offers to really make it feel like a slam dunk? Like, we'd be stupid not to work with you guys.

Mike Begg [00:30:08]:

Well, I think it starts before that, and it really comes down to understanding your customers problems or the challenges that they're facing. So what we do from our standpoint is we have a lot of interviews, a lot of conversations throughout the year with each of our clients about what they're facing, what challenges they have, what they're seeing, what they're afraid of, where their biggest pain points are. And from there, we leverage a lot of that information to figure out ways that we could help them. From a strategic standpoint, I always believe in iterating around your main businesses or the products that are most successful for you, or services in this instance. And because we are uniquely positioned at AMZ Advisors, that is uniquely positioned as one of the original, one of the largest Amazon marketing agencies, we are getting exposure to a lot of other brands that need help in other aspects of e commerce or global expansion, whatever it may be. It could even know operations when it comes to building a brand. All of these present new opportunities for us to provide additional services that provide value to them. And iterate from there when it comes to developing the offer itself, because we understand the pain points so well.

Mike Begg [00:31:20]:

We can really use that information to really talk to them and really speak to them in the language that they're using to really connect with them and the problems they're having and to reach them at the right time. So once we know that companies in this size range are looking for this type of service, or companies that have these internal teams need this or don't have these internal teams need this, we're really able to start catering the offers more to what their specific problem is. And I think that's the key is if you go super broad with what your offer is, you're not going to get the consumers you want, versus if you go super narrow and solve directly the problem that this type of customer is having, it's very repeatable and the offer becomes very attractive. And this is exactly what we see with our offer in Latin America, is that brands that have interest in Latin America, they sign up for calls like that. We send emails, we get people book calls, we start getting them signed up. It's very simple because they have a very big pain point in figuring out how to deal with Latin America. And we have a very simple, direct offer that deals with that pain point. And I think that is the important thing, learning what your consumer wants, developing the services that they're asking for, and then helping them understand how it's solving the domain pain point that they're having.

Travis Albritton [00:32:33]:

Yeah, that's fantastic advice. And the riches are certainly in the niches. It's proven true time and time again, so I'm glad it's proven true once again. Mike, where can people go to find you to learn more about what you do at AMZ Advisors to connect with your team and potentially pursue a business relationship? If it makes sense for them, where's the best place to send people?

Mike Begg [00:32:54]:

So they can either reach out directly to me at my email it's Mike@amzadvisors.com, or you can reach us at the website amzadvisors.com. I'm glad to speak with you about any of the aspects that we've talked here, whether it's building your Amazon funnel, whether it's global expansion or getting into Latin America, I can help you through that email and through that website on whatever challenges you're facing.

Travis Albritton [00:33:15]:

Perfect. Well, Mike, thank you so much for breaking down Amazon, breaking down TikTok, that was a special bonus. Wasn't expecting that. And Google expansion. I definitely know that. I learned a lot and just really grateful for all the things you shared.

Mike Begg [00:33:25]:

Awesome. Thank you for having me here, Travis. I hope it was valuable to your audience.

Travis Albritton [00:33:29]:

Oh, no doubt, no doubt. So I would say that my number one takeaway from that interview that I just had with Mike was really shifting the way that we can think about Amazon when it comes to selling products and services. So if you sell a physical product, something that ships, there can often be this hesitancy of using Amazon because of the fees that you pay, the profit margins, and the threat of competitors jumping in or things like that. But I Think The way that Mike laid It out, really seeing Amazon As Just A tool, one place that you can list Your product to reach people that Are looking for Things Like yours, whether they Know About you. Or not. And then using that as a starting point, a launching point for a more cohesive, long term strategy for serving that client, I think, was absolutely incredible. And so if you sell a product and you've been hesitant about Amazon or you're currently using Amazon, but know that you could be doing more to leverage that platform and the audience there, I definitely think that you got a ton out of this episode. Make sure you reach out to Mike.

Travis Albritton [00:34:31]:

He's very generous giving us his email, letting us know about the website where you can get in touch with him and ask him questions about your product and how they could potentially partner with you. So I'll leave those in the show notes below for you to click on. But guys, this was a great episode. I was really pumped about landing Mike as a guest, and I hope that you got a lot out of it. Until next time, be honest.