How to Unlock Further Growth Using Off-Amazon Ads & Content to Scale Your Brand

Paul Sonneveld
Hi, everyone. My name is Paul Sonneveld and I'm your host for today. And today's topic is or exploring how off-Amazon advertising can really turbocharge your growth. Now, to help us navigate through this, I am super excited to welcome Sal Conca, the CEO of Amazing Ads, onto our podcast. He runs an internet marketing agency specializing in optimizing all aspects of your client's Amazon advertising, which includes off-Amazon, of course, and it's a certain area that he specializes in. 

Sal started his career as an affiliate relationship specialist and expanded his skill set to plan and manage integrated marketing campaigns that include email marketing, content marketing, social media, mobile and display advertising. Certainly sounds like the right person to have on the podcast for today's topic. Thank you so much for being on today's show, Sal.

Sal Conca
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Paul. Great to be here.

Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic, right. It's a really big topic. So I was thinking, what's the best way to get into this? Why don't I just get to some of the highlights first? So why don't we start off with, You know, you've been in this game for a long time, and this is something that you do day in, day out. So what are some of the biggest wins that you have seen when Amazon brands in particular incorporate off Amazon advertising into their strategy?

Sal Conca
Yeah, you know,  it requires a lot of experimentation and a lot of patience to find the big wins, right? It's marketing and When we're talking about off-Amazon tracking and being able to tie back the dollars that we're spending on video advertising on connected TV or DSPs or social media. Understanding how to track all of that using the Amazon Attribution API, using other methods such as tying your reporting platforms together. 

So to be able to tell data stories, the winds come in our clients range. We have about 80 clients at the agency. Some have deeper pockets than others. And what I would say is there's a strategy for all of them. We've had some examples in the gaming space that have done quite well with off Amazon advertising. I think we're going to kind of talk about the differences between A pure Amazon brand versus what does it look like if they have an Amazon brand and a Shopify store. These strategies vary widely and I don't use the word strategy loosely. It really needs to be calculated to determine where best to spend your dollars, which channels you're gonna do that at, and how effective is your creative. 

So we have a number of seven figure brands that we run advertising for off Amazon. So I hope that answers some of your question there. I mean, you were looking for like a big number in a more like a case study type thing, but I didn't have I didn't have one prepared for today. But we've got tons of clients that are doing off Amazon advertising successfully and they all do it in different ways. I think that's really the interesting part. I don't we're not formulaic in that, Hey this works for one client. Let's keep that's going to work for every client. We go out with and you know marketing just doesn't seem to be that way. 

I think in the early days of digital and how easy some of the wins were when the marketplaces weren't as crowded. It was easy to replicate certain strategies, now it does require, you know, a unique approach, depending on that company's brand awareness level, how much they're doing, you know, off Amazon organically, what do influencers look like in the mix, you know, there's so many things to consider.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah. And I completely understand. And even your example earlier around gaming, obviously, that requires a specific approach. I think the takeaway there is every client here needs to have a very considered strategy in terms of what really works for them. I am going to push you a little bit in terms of like, I'd love to, are you able to expand a little bit on that gaming example? Cause I'd love to just maybe just hear a little bit about an example where you've taken a really unique context, unique brand, unique category. and applied a specific strategy to that. Is there anything there you can talk to? Obviously, I'm conscious of client confidentiality and I'm not asking for a commission.

Sal Conca
Yeah, exactly. I can't really talk about and discuss which client that might be at this time. But the reality is we've been doing a ton of advertising on Google's platforms as well as Meta. And Google's platforms includes not only like Google Search, Performance Max, Pmax, and YouTube advertising. I'm a big proponent of YouTube and connected TV. Those strategies combined to build a big upper-funnel audience, right? And looking at what your CPMs are like to understand how much reach you're getting for the ad dollars you're spending. Tying the audience to the creative contextually has been a big part of that strategy. 

So understanding I can give you a for instance they launched a new product in their line earlier this year and we took this major concerted effort for that product launch to do an exponential amount of off-Amazon advertising. And what we see at Amazon, right? So we're using BRB links, brand referral bonus links. We're using the Amazon attribution API where we can, but ultimately what we're seeing is brand impression levels, brand searches for the product itself, you know, all those sorts of things. So we're measuring metrics in a number of different categories. So we're looking at brand lift. We're looking at the performance of the campaigns themselves if we can track it back using BRB links, brand for our bonus links. 

And then we're looking at the creatives, like from a YouTube perspective, we're running a number of different creatives to a number of different audiences to understand which ones are resonating. And we'll kind of break that down more as well. But that's kind of a summation. It's one of the bigger campaigns that we've run recently. And now we're doing some additional add-ons to that in Q4, where we're actually going to be adding the Amazon DSP on top of that as well.

Paul Sonneveld
Your answer here is a really good segue to my next question here, which was actually around content. So we always talk about like you have these off Amazon channels, you've got Google, Meta, other places, obviously we've got DSP, Amazon DSP. But the other part of this is what content, right? Obviously what audience, what content. 

So the question here specifically on content, what type of content, and I'm particularly interested in like, what's the role of video here is kind of most effective in driving traffic and conversions back to Amazon. And, you know, particularly with that link that you mentioned around  matching the audience with the content. I'd love for you to elaborate a little bit on that.

Sal Conca
Yeah. I mean, I think about it, the word context, contextual advertising, right? So for instance, if the audience, let's say the audience, we know that that audience is playing call of duty, right? Well, we build a unique custom intent audience on YouTube that follows that audience around. And we can identify them specifically, right, by using custom intent audiences on a platform like YouTube. And I can explain further what that looks like. 

But to talk to the creative, we use a partner called Billo to have many of our UGC ads built. So we handle the creative briefs, the ideation. What we're looking at is the hook. So we want to understand if we're doing creative testing, which creative is holding people's attention longest, right? So we're looking at the overall watch time, right? How many people are watching 25% of the video up to the 100% of the video? How many people, how is it holding people's attention? 

And then the next metric we're looking at is interaction rate or click-through rate. Which ad is getting people to actually take an action, right? The next step of that, especially because we're steps away from the transaction, right? I'm on YouTube or connected TV. I'm interrupting somebody's broadcast skippable ads on YouTube. We're all familiar with them. We all hit the skip button many times, I'm sure. But understanding how to create that creative specifically for an audience, right? That's really what we're talking about here. 

I'll give you another example where we have a new startup in the pet treat space. And their audience is very specific. The audience themselves is health conscious. So the owner, right, we're not speaking to the pet, we're speaking to the owner, right? It's like, you know, they're more health conscious. They're the crunchy granola, whole Foods, Trader Joe's audience. We know that those creatives, we can't just go out and build a bunch of creative around dogs getting pet treats. And we know also that the the tree it's it tends to be very crunchy and so little dogs don't appeal to it as much as big dogs. 

So we segment our audiences and create our content around these audiences knowing that we're going after a particular type of pet owner, right? So all this interest-based stuff that we can do in order to talk contextually tie the advertising as much as we can. Now, on Metta and on YouTube and connect the type of audience targeting varies greatly. And this is where I think the the skill set and understanding how to do that. 

I'll give you another example. We're about to onboard a new client here and we just audited them. They're not an Amazon client. I'll caveat with that. They're not an Amazon client, but they're running Meta campaigns to one audience. Females in the United States, they think that their membership and their product is so prevalent that it doesn't need any interest-based targeting or segmentation or retargeting or warm audiences in there. And we're like, wow, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit here. If you're only running this one audience and like a small set of creatives, we can make drastic changes here just by identifying who truly your audience is and matching the creative to that audience to speak to them directly.

Paul Sonneveld
And on that, I mean, it sounds like you do a fair amount of testing upfront in terms of your creative. Like how many, so when you put the briefs together and someone creates, you know, some video content there, how many different versions do you play with initially, kind of the one that works.

Sal Conca
Some of that may come down to their budget. Meaning how much they're willing to spend on a daily monthly basis, right? So, generally speaking, if you're not spending enough to get enough data, so we look for like 30 conversions, 50 conversions in a week to 30 days, right? So, we've got to get enough traffic and conversion data on particular ad assets to know whether it's working or not. You know, if the data set is so limited, we'll just never know if it performed. 

So, but the general rule is like for a particular campaign for a particular audience, we're generally testing between three and five video creatives on there. We try to keep things fairly simple. I know people that test 20. I think, you know, if you can tighten up your messaging well enough, that three to five, and many times we'll do this. This was something that we did when we were doing a lot of lead gen and working with informational clients. 

So again, it also depends on the product. If we're talking about Amazon e-commerce clients, there's probably a little less education that goes into some of these products, right? They're more transactional than an informational, let's say financial services or lead generation client in real estate, right? 

But generally, the format is we'll test a number of different hooks over a piece of the body creative so that content in the middle will look very similar. We're testing the hooks to see which one will hold people's attention. From there, we start to iterate, okay, it's this hook and this creative. Now we start to scale up and take the winning creatives and build new ad sets and test a whole new fresh set of three to five. 

Now we can, again, depending on the budget, if we're spending upwards of 10K a month or something like that on a particular platform, we can start to ramp creative testing on a monthly basis. If they're slower than that, you know, we may only test creative every quarter, let's say.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, it sounds like you're, I mean, you mentioned this earlier, but you're, you're optimizing really for attention and the hook all keeps people watching. And then you're doing the second optimization, which is around what are the click-throughs, the conversion rates, all of that. 

Sal Conca
That's right. 

Paul Sonneveld
So I was just going to add a slight supplementary question there, which is, are there some fundamental checks or things that you're looking for in terms of video advertising, video content? Like over the years, have you just learned, if the video needs to have these three things to at least be effective, are there any kind of rules of thumb to quickly assess whether you should throw out a piece of video before doing anything else?

Sal Conca
Yeah, I'll give a shout out to a colleague, Tom Breeze, who's over across the pond from us. And he was known for his YouTube advertising strategies called the educate method. And that really opened my eyes on how to structure videos properly. A lot of that was for long-form educational content, but you can condense that philosophy down and educate is an acronym for I'm not going to go into it. You can look it up online. Tom Breeze, the Educate Video Methodology. And you can, so you can condense this down. 

And like I said, so you have a hook, you have a piece of education about the product, depending on if we're going to talk about features, benefits, problems, what does it look like in the middle that I need to educate that consumer on? And then some sort of CTA, right? Where am I driving them? Where am I sending them? But it's all about identifying like, it doesn't matter the creative. We're talking a lot about video, but it doesn't matter if we're talking about A-plus content on Amazon. It doesn't matter if I'm talking about a landing page on a Shopify website. Many brands are really good at talking about what they do. And this may sound familiar to people who listen to Simon Sinek or read the book, Start With Why. 

So if you're really good at articulating your benefits or the, I'm sorry, the features of your products, you need to take the features and turn those into benefits, right? So we need to be problem-solving every single product on the planet that sells solves a problem for someone, whether it's as simple as I need a gift for my spouse, right? Or whether I'm buying something more complicated for my health. A supplement or if I'm buying a piece of gaming equipment, a gaming accessory, it's going to improve my ability to play. 

So the features are one thing. Oh, it's got neon lights and fast control buttons and all this stuff. Well, what does that translate to? We actually did a Father's Day campaign for this client that we created UGC videos and we were like, how great would it be around Father's Day to show a father playing with his son? And in order to keep up with son, he needs this accessory so he can crush his son in the game because his son is just, you know, a master because he's sitting there playing 12 hours a day and dad just wants to be able to get in there and jam in. 

And so we created this video concept around that that performed really well for that gaming client. So again, it's about the benefit. What is the net benefit of the product? And so storytelling and you know, video creative that just lists a bunch of features is not going to get you there. It's boring. It doesn't tell a story. It doesn't make the person watching the video feel like the hero in the story, you know?

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. What are the problems you're solving? Right. How does it help me? So, there's sort of a question behind the scenes here, which is around, I mean, we're talking from the context of, you know, brands that operate and probably also advertise on Amazon, right? So, of course, then the question becomes, AdSpense already taking a fair amount of the profit margin on Amazon. 

So what is your steer to brands on balancing off Amazon activities, investment, advertising versus on Amazon? What sort of, is there a ratio? Is there a rule of thumb or even how do you have that? I'm sure your clients ask you all the time, right? So how many we're spending $50,000 a month on Amazon what's the right number or how should we divvy up the 50,000? How do you respond to those questions from clients?

Sal Conca
So I think it's important to know what Amazon is. It's a transactional marketplace, right? If I'm on Amazon already searching for something, Think about your own behavior and how you get there. For instance, if I saw a product on TikTok, and even though it's in the TikTok shop, I'm probably likely to go to Amazon. I know because I've done it. Search for that brand name, that product and price compare it just immediately. I wonder, is the TikTok deal really as good as they say? Is it the same price on Amazon? What does that look like, right? That's a simple example of how transactional Amazon is, right? 

TikTok is the upper funnel showing me and introducing me to these new brands, right? And Amazon is the place I may go purchase it. Even if I saw it on the TikTok shop, even sometimes if the TikTok shop deal is better, I'm like, well, I could throw it on subscribe and save at Amazon. There's a lot of benefits to the marketplace that Amazon has built. We know it's why all these brands are there. You could argue whether it's crowded. Now overly crowded now or not? What does that look like? 

To answer your question about balancing budget, this starts to come down to a fundamental question of the brand. Are they ROAS driven, transactional driven, meaning they're in the stage of their business that every single dollar that goes in needs to turn a profit and a specific return on ad spend? Every client engagement we have starts with budgets and goals. So we're asking them, what's your ACoS goal? What's your budget? And that's specifically for Amazon plus other channels. And what does that look like for them? 

If they have no brand awareness, if they are a startup, any brand that gets started on Amazon, if they don't have traction for somewhere else, they will be fighting a very difficult battle on high CPCs, stiff competition, no reviews, right? And how are they going to build that? So they need off Amazon advertising, right? It would be very difficult for them to buy their way on way in from like Amazon PPC traffic to build the brand transactionally unless you can be the price leader way undercut price. 

I've seen examples of this as well for like supplement brands and other things. Print on demand, wall art, like it depends on your product category, right? If you can be the price leader and build momentum that way, that is certainly an option. And so you could look at that as part of your ad budget, right? Like knowing that early on to build momentum, to get sales momentum and reviews, I'm going to cut my price in order to drive momentum. 

Otherwise, I've got to think about all the things that happen off Amazon. Am I going to employ an influencer program? Am I going to spend money to create UGC ads? Am I going to invest in top-of-funnel marketing like YouTube, Mountain, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok? What is my overall media mix going to look like? 

So again, budgets and goals, understanding what their current business stage is big. Those are all major factors in deciding how to media plan for them. If you're asking about hard and fast rules, the college graduate marketer in me says, look at top-line profit revenue or where you want to be to create a budget for yourself, right? How much do I need to spend? Am I in aggressive growth mode? I may need to spend more than 20% of my anticipated revenue goal to achieve those. You've got to get it. If you're in growth mode, you've got to be completely aggressive. If you're a business that's established and trying to figure out how do I just expand my audience? That's a different question. So I hope that answers it, Paul.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, this is very insightful for me because typically in my mind, I'm always thinking about off Amazon advertising as the thing you do when you feel like you're tapping out on Amazon itself, right? It's like that next evolution. But I think what's really interesting here is you're actually saying, well, actually, If you're a new brand that is emerging and you're trying to get traction on Amazon, actually, maybe starting with off-Amazon advertising is a great way, obviously, to build traffic to your pages, to build conversions or to get conversions, to build reviews. 

So, you know, this as a tool in the early stage of your business or as a growing business, and how this is used in different parts of the life cycle of your business. That's simply a new perspective that I haven't heard before. So that's very interesting. I want to get to Shopify a little bit. We haven't spoken about Shopify. What role does running a Shopify store play in off-Amazon advertising? I've had this debate many times around, oh, it's just too much of a distraction, just focus on Amazon. But particularly, I'm not talking about just driving e-commerce sales, I'm talking about, in the broader advertising strategy, what is the role of Shopify and how have you seen it work well and maybe less well?

Sal Conca
Yeah, so we have a couple of clients with off-Amazon DTC e-commerce sites. The one bonus of having this is that conversion tracking with other channels, right? Google, Meta, YouTube, a lot easier to track on your own website than off Amazon traffic to Amazon, right? So that's the first bit. It gives us much greater insight. 

The big unlock was buy with Prime integrations that started a year or more than a year ago, and buy with Prime was heavily pushing for integrations this earlier this year, right, or late last year. We saw them at the Prosper Show in Las Vegas earlier this year. Installing Buy with Prime on your Shopify store is a huge win towards figuring out how you're going to manage all your off-Amazon advertising, your D2C store like Shopify and building an email list versus only having transactions that take place on Amazon. 

Now, that's all to say, it also starts to dictate what is my merchandising strategy, right? So we, for instance, we've got a client in the barbecue space that sells rubs, sauces, accessories, those types of things. And many times they'll go to Amazon to buy their one-off, like, because they could buy a one-off jar of barbecue rub, right? Dried ingredients or barbecue sauce. Because it's sitting in the Amazon Prime warehouse, I can get it through Prime, not pay any extra for shipping, so on and so forth. 

If the merchant wants to ship onesies, twosies of one unit or two units of something, like let's say the price point is to like $11, $12, it's very difficult for them to do that without incurring major shipping costs, cuts into their margin, so on and so forth, right? So now we're talking about merchandising, not necessarily marketing, right? How do I look at the website compared to the Amazon marketplace, determine how to split my merchandising strategy to increase AOV and loyalty through my Shopify store and push transactional customers directly to Amazon who prefer to shop there, right? 

So that's really in many cases how we look at things. You know, it's not the same. Again, for every brand that's unique in that barbecue space because they have the low AOVs, but we do like gift boxes, other things like that are bespoke or customizable things that you may not be able to achieve via Amazon because that would have to be like an FBM purchase or other hoops you'd have to jump through to be able to satisfy those requirements through Amazon.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, so those products that don't fit neatly into Amazon's FBA model or turn to horribly expensive options there. Yeah. I'm just wondering, you mentioned buy with prime and how to integrate and how it's a bit of a game changer. It's quite a new topic. I'm just wondering, are you able to elaborate a little bit more there in terms of just how does that interplay with advertising and how does that really open up I guess some new leavers for, for Amazon brands running a DTC website or particularly Shopify.

Sal Conca
Right. So the thing that major differential between Amazon and Shopify, right? Amazon says, we own all the customer data. You can use that customer data and put your products here and have access to all of our foot traffic that comes to our portal, our marketplace every day, right? Shopify says, hey, you're the brand, you own the customer. We just help make transactions easy, right? So the Shopify, so those are the two worlds you're living in there just to keep it really simple, right? 

With Buy with Prime, the integration on your Shopify store now, you still keep the customer data and get the benefit of somebody checking out with Prime. I questioned this multiple times. I was like, so you're telling me that Amazon is now, they're allowing you to put this Buy with Prime transaction button on your website, but they're not going to gatekeep the customer. I know that Sal came and bought that accessory, that bar of soap, that barbecue rub, whatever it might be. And the answer is yes. And also conversion tracking. I'm now also able to track conversions through Buy With Prime from my off-Amazon efforts, my other advertising efforts. 

So it is, you know, instrumental in figuring that out, especially for brands, ones that are invested in building a brand. And I've been a brand builder for many years. I buy from brands, I appreciate the brand narrative. And I think brand is where it's going to brands are what are going to win the term terminology brand that was going to change. It has changed because of influencers who are starting brands. Right. And it's not the big conglomerates like, you know, Nike has still continues to do a good job of being able to hold its brand name at cloud, but that is going to get democratize too, right? I mean, you're just, we've seen it already. It's not a new thing that we have independent brands popping up, Shopify store brands popping up all over the place. 

So the question for many of them is, and so some people just have this hard line. I don't want Amazon to have my data. I want to control and own all of the customer data. I'm the one putting in the blood, sweat and tears. I'm the one who's got to do the shipping, all that type of stuff. And then there's others that realize there's a benefit to having a split strategy, whether you can do that through merchandising or whether it just makes sense to have all of your products there. You know, we were talking to a luxury brand recently and they were like, we've not really found a lot of success on Amazon. Well, I was like, you know, they were like, what is the propensity of somebody who's going to spend $350 on a hat or a handbag on Amazon? Will people do that? And so, you know, we don't know that question yet. This was a sales discovery call we were having. 

But my first thought was like, well, there's two things you can do, you can use Amazon to get people introduced to the brand, because you have tons of overstock items sitting on your website that you're selling at a discount already. So let's flip that strategy. Let's put all those things there on Amazon. And now you've got people introduced to the brand who may think the brand is aspirational and they're looking for a deal and want to shop on Amazon. So you're opening up the gateway to them to get introduced to the brand, right? So there's tons of strategies we can come up with to figure out what's the benefit of Shopify for Amazon, buy with Prime, how do we merchandise and market those things, right?

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, very interesting. I'm looking at the clock and we've gone past the half an hour mark. So I do want to throw in one last question here for yourself before we wrap up. And that is, what are the things that brands shouldn't be doing? In other words, where do you see brands make the biggest mistakes when it comes to trying to drive traffic from outside Amazon to their listings? 

Sal Conca
Yeah. 

Paul Sonneveld
What do you see as, as you sort of onboard new clients and you open up the hood and see what they've been doing? What are the things that you see and go, guys, that's not great. And, what advice do you have for our audience?

Sal Conca
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't assume because you ran a small test with one video that off-Amazon advertising doesn't work. Right. I mean, that's just, it's, you know, I've seen this before. It's like, Oh, social media doesn't work for me. Well, let me see your social media. You look and it's like they post once in a blue moon and you know once a week or that, they haven't really developed a strategy around it. So what I would say is most people will start to get into off Amazon advertising with very little strategy because it's easy to create a Facebook account. It's easy to create a YouTube account, but it's not easy to construct the creative. You know, even if you use a platform like below, we found that unless you're really skilled at creating the creative brief, the brand narrative that you want for the campaign, it's also not going to work well. 

So, you know, make sure you've got somebody who really understands how to construct a proper video from beginning to end and understands how these channels all play with each other.You know, those are the biggest mistakes I would say. And the more you light up more channels at once, we call it the halo effect. You're just going to have this, this rising tide because one channel is going to feed another and you're going to have remarketing and you now have an omni-channel presence, right? So relying on one, and I know it's hard, people can't do all things at once, but as you conquer channel by channel, you'll start to get a feel for what's working and how to expand. So.

Paul Sonneveld
Great. We're out of time, Sel, so I'm going to have to wrap up, unfortunately. But thank you so much for joining me today. Your expertise really helped clarify some of the complexities around off-Amazon advertising. Actually, you've changed my perspective on a lot of things or you've added to it. Let's put it that way. So super helpful. And I appreciate you sharing some really practical tips and insights as well. Now, for those audience members that are watching live or maybe watching this on-demand after the fact, What is the best way to get in touch with you if they may want to follow up with you on some of these topics?

Sal Conca
Sure. Well, I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me at Sal Conca or directly at my email address, sal@amazingads.com.

Paul Sonneveld
That's sal@amazingads.com. Great. Thank you so much, Sal. I really appreciate it. You have a wonderful evening.

Sal Conca
You got a call. Take care.

Paul Sonneveld
And that is a wrap for today's episode of Marketplace Masters. Thank you so much for tuning into today's discussion on how you can scale your brand using off Amazon strategies. Now, if you are looking for more insights don't forget to check out our video on demand library at merchantspring.io for a real wealth of content. 

And of course, if you're looking to take your Amazon analytics and advertising analytics to the next level, don't hesitate to reach out to me. And I'd love to direct you to one of my colleagues who can show you how we can support you on that front. Last but not least, if you've got ideas or topics you want to see me cover on this show, please drop me a note on LinkedIn and I will try and find the right speaker expertise and schedule another episode. Until next time, take care. Bye bye.