Podcast transcript
Introduction
Hi, and welcome to this special live broadcast of Marketplace Masters, brought to you by MerchantSpring, your leading platform for Amazon Vendor Insights.
Paul Sonneveld
I am Paul Sonneveld, your guide through today's exploration of marketing metrics within the Amazon Vendor landscape. And of course, the frequent disconnect between the sales organizations and the marketing teams observed in the FMCG and CPG sectors.
Joining us today is Alex Karagiannis, the visionary Managing Director of Lezzat, an Amazon full-service Marketing Agency recognized for elevating major FMCG and beauty brands on the global stage. Armed with multiple degrees in marketing, Alex brings over a decade of marketing savvy to the table, dedicating the past eight years to mastering the e-commerce domain. He is renowned for his knack for nurturing business ties and engaging in meaningful dialogues about industry challenges and marketing breakthroughs. Alex, a very warm welcome to the show.
Alexandros Karagiannis
Thank you very much, Paul, for having me. Thank you.
Paul Sonneveld
It's I think you are probably the most qualified marketing person I've ever had on the show.
Alexandros Karagiannis
Okay. Let’s go.
Paul Sonneveld
So it's an absolute, absolute privilege. But let's maybe just kick off the conversation. I mean, particularly for those that are more like used to the Amazon seller space, perhaps where marketing is always at the forefront. It's so integrated into kind of running your business on Amazon on a day to day basis. That's not the case when it comes to Amazon vendors. So I'd love to just maybe talk at a higher level, why we're even talking about this, right? Why, what are you seeing? And why did you and I even decide to get together and talk about this particular topic?
Alexandros Karagiannis
Yeah, I mean, so I guess the latter part of your question, why we decided to have this topic is you can find a lot of information about how to optimize, see or how to drive more sales on Amazon and so on. But something we tend to see, especially with the bigger companies, the household names that do sell on Amazon, and most of them tend to sell via Amazon vendor, is that there's a big disconnect between what the marketing teams want to do and how much influence they have over Amazon and what the sales or business development or territory managers see.
So I thought it would be a good topic to just bring it to life a bit more into how non-Amazon businesses, let's say, would normally see marketing and when there is a vendor involved, an Amazon vendor, how that can come into play and how there's a plethora of information and data that would be very useful to marketing teams in those companies.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, absolutely. So I know you've worked with a lot of Amazon vendors, and we'll go a bit deeper into that in a sec. But if, if you were to let's say you're working with a new vendor client tomorrow, right, nothing about the organization, what are the likely kind of disconnects you're going to walk into between the Amazon between the sales organization to an Amazon vendor in the marketing team? I mean, what extent does the marketing team understand the Amazon vendor channel. Maybe let's start there.
Alexandros Karagiannis
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Paul Sonneveld
And I appreciate, I don't want to do a disservice to the vendors listening because I appreciate there are some vendors here. I know they tune into every episode and they're on their game. So this doesn't apply to you, but what do you find Alex kind of as you, as you sort of talk to the average Amazon vendor out there?
Alexandros Karagiannis
Okay. Well, uh, so I guess, just to answer this question, Paul, so my background comes from traditional marketing. So, I used to do traditional marketing, digital marketing for B2B services, companies and tech companies and so on. So then about eight years ago, I got involved into the Amazon world as an Amazon seller and later founded Lezzat. So why I say this is because I've been on the other side, let's say, of the traditional marketing. So you've got your marketing plans, your budgets, what's the business direction, the business plan. the new products that the company wants to launch or the new demographics they want to grab, the videos, the influences, the whole shebang.
So usually on Amazon what happens is it's either for many companies left as a channel that they don't put the attention and love they deserve especially that was the case eight years ago that was the majority of companies would be there. Now we're just catching up to the fact that Actually, Amazon should be one of our main channels that we optimize for YouTube brand audiences, for feedback from many, many vendors.
So I would say probably the most common one would be the utilization of content. So I'm sure you've heard this from other speakers as well on this show, that content is extremely important on Amazon. What I mean by content, I mean things like your images, your graphics, your videos, your promotional material, what you're playing on the TV, for example, in commercial. Well, you should have a version for Amazon. Ideally you should have subtitles so you can localize it in the EU countries as well in local content and so on. So that's one of the main ones I would say that I see a lot not being utilized. The content is there but it's in silos and not being used on Amazon for example.
Paul Sonneveld
So you're saying, are you saying actually that the content exists. They've got big budgets, they probably spent media agencies, probably way more than the average Amazon seller. Of course, they would. They've got big above the line budgets. But it's not brought to bear on the Amazon channel.
Alexandros Karagiannis
Exactly. Exactly. And it's usually the case of having done so with just some small edits. You know, it could be the size, for example. So we don't want anything, obviously, under 45 seconds on Amazon Ads. Or ideally, you want to be around 30. Have music and ideally some captions that can easily be edited. So things like this means that you've done 99% of the work already. It's just that 1%, guess what? That 1% can actually make the difference between the market share, your growth, in each of the Amazon territories that you're selling. And obviously, how important that is to your overall sales and brand presence, both in Amazon and outside of Amazon in those countries.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, yeah. And is it just about the content itself or about who owns the content and the process and the relationships with external parties?
Alexandros Karagiannis
There seems to be, yeah, there's, Paul, there seems to be something, sometimes an issue like this. So, for very, very big companies, usually the content is not run centrally from the brand or marketing team, but it's, there's marketing budgets that go for each territory, UK, France, Spain, US, and so on. And then they do their own kind of thing. So therefore, a content that could easily be used from UK, for example, Mother's Day, could easily be used in US. It's going to have obviously different dates. But then UK doesn't talk to US, let's say. So therefore, there's silos of this content.
Let alone, if US has been on Amazon, for example, for 34 years, and UK is the first time, they're launching on Amazon or putting the love and attention to Amazon, how about the videos and things that worked well in US? Can we get that data? Can we see which headlines work better or which videos or which other marketing assets like brand creatives work better so that we can do the transition more effectively and spend better our advertising content.
Paul Sonneveld
That prompted me a follow-up question. I certainly here in Australia have done a lot of work many years ago with some of the really large global FMCG brands and Amazon Australia was fairly new at the time. And as I was talking to the team here on the ground, their question, whenever we ask content, they go, Oh, Paul, don't worry. We have this global center of excellence, Amazon team based in Chicago, or Singapore, or, you know, this global team of Amazon experts that was going to make everything perfect, right? In my experience, it very rarely ended up being the case. A lot of times it was around, well, actually, nobody cares about Australia, nobody cares about localizing content,
Alexandros Karagiannis
Yeah, I understand that.
Paul Sonneveld
And things just take way too long. What models have you seen that work well? I don't have to name names, but particularly for those businesses that are kind of medium to large in this space, what are the best organizational structures that you've seen around sharing great content and making the most out of it across countries?
Alexandros Karagiannis
So a good way of seeing and having this argument seeing both ends of this equation. Obviously, from one end you've got marketing teams which year after year they get bombarded with new tech, new technologies, new platforms. You know 10 years ago there was you would say TikTok or AI. No one would know anything about those, right? Well, now, marketing not only has to know a bit about Amazon, online, offline, events, AI, et cetera, content, all of this, design. So I can understand why there is an issue of bandwidth. Let's just put it very simply. Bandwidth is the issue here. It's not something else.
On the other hand side, this is overcome when you're able to show results, tangible results. So one example that we had, for example, is we were working with a very, very big FMCG household brand that essentially they needed support with Amazon. They were with an agency that did everything, SEO, design, PPC. The PPC was in a mess. For two years, they were hitting a ROAS of 2.5 and below in a household item where you wouldn't really want to have 2.5 ROAS and below. It doesn't make sense. There's huge brand recognition.
So long story short, Q1 and Q2, when the first results came in, and there was the Q1 results and Q2 results came in also. And then all of a sudden, Amazon started moving from position 8 retailer in the UK to position 6. And by the end of the year, it was position 1 biggest retailer for that brand. Then all of a sudden, it got the attention and love of the senior leadership and obviously the marketing team that followed. So that's usually how that is pushed from that side, right? It's like, you cannot be, hey, we're opening Australia. Now I need this, this, this, this, this for 400 SKUs and localize it and translate it. They're going to tell you, well, show me the growth and why, and then let's go with it. So I can understand that element.
The other side where something that potentially is much easier and a tip for the marketeers listening or the people within those organizations is, well, the content, as with any really design content, you should be having your source files and you should be having the content in a way that it's easily editable. So, you don't just have to think about it as today, but what if I want to move this in a different platform? What if I want to use it for mobile? What if I want to change, for example, a link that is in there? Obviously, I'm not talking about Amazon because it's not allowed, but maybe a CTA or something in there that I might want to change it in the future. Maybe it's a package of the product.
So therefore, having a clean library, an organized library of these assets with the respective source files means that then the workload is shifted from the central repository team, the brand asset in Chicago, as you said, to the localized team in Australia, where it's like, oh, well, OK, I can go in and find my, I don't know, anti-wrinkle cream, let's say, assets here. Here's the source files. So I can take those and my local team design can do an edit of those, for example. So that is some fix for you.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Which actually brings me to a much broader question. And it's outside of scope with this podcast. But I'm going to ask it anyway.
Alexandros Karagiannis
Go for it. Sure.
Paul Sonneveld
Because I know you have the… Who owns… Let me ask the question, then I'll pad it out a bit. In these bigger organizations, who owns the Amazon vendor channel? And I'm saying that because really two things I want to throw in there. One, Amazon themselves, particularly say in Europe, they're going to go from a country model to more, you know, a pan-European model with their account management structure. So there's a kind of a geographical overlay there.
But then of course, like any brand selling to any retailer, you always have like the sales teams and the account managers, and you've got the marketing teams, the category teams, and it's always like a bit of a matrix structure. But Amazon is a little bit different to like your average retailer too, right? So, and I'm sure there's no single answer here, but what is the model that you like the most right now in terms of ownership? Who owns and who's responsible for Amazon? Is it a global ownership? Is it with sales or marketing or what does it look like?
Alexandros Karagiannis
Yeah, so I think the language
Paul Sonneveld
Completely, just for the audience, completely out of the scope of what we agreed to talk about.
Alexandros Karagiannis
It's true, yes. So, no, it's good that you do. So, from my experience, maybe it's because of my marketing background, but we tend to speak better and communicate better with marketing teams. So, when Amazon is owned by teams who have to do around branding or marketing, which does make sense because the face of the business, the world's biggest retailer, arguably, then you should have your marketing and brand team know how your brand is appearing there. Whereas if it's just sales, then there is this information and mismatches that happen when it comes to what content do we have, what demographics do we want to be going after, what assets do we have of those demographics, and how we want to be positioning promotions and things like that.
From my experience, I know organizations that either have said, you know what, Amazon is just so complicated. I'm just going to make a department within my company called Amazon. And they have like 25 or 28 people literally like an agency within the conglomerate. I know others that obviously work with agencies like us and then they appoint sort of account managers that we report to and give them all the information and reporting etc and it varies to the degree of details that they need. Most of the times we kind of tell them this is what we can give you and they're like oh really we can also have this and that yeah and then this expands. So I would say it's usually these models that I see.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, that's great. Appreciate you taking that slightly off-piste question there. So let's go back to the heart of this podcast, which is about marketing. So we talk about structures and ownership. Let's talk about data, right? Most marketeers, they love data, right?
Alexandros Karagiannis
Absolutely.
Paul Sonneveld
But I'm sure all the data they they're used to seeing that may not be able to get and vice versa. Amazon probably provides a whole range of data that they typically don't get from other retail channels.
Alexandros Karagiannis
Yeah. Sure.
Paul Sonneveld
Where do you see both ways? Where do you see the biggest gaps?
Alexandros Karagiannis
I mean, so there's I guess there's, first of all, there's an element of understanding the differences between, just going back a bit, between seller central and vendor central. Okay, so as I'm sure a lot of your listeners also know, there's very different information being given from each. So it's a bit more limited, I would say, info on vendor as opposed to seller. However, on the advertising side, which is the beauty of it, you actually get similar results and similar data.
So when it comes to metrics around advertising, which are the things that marketers do love, because, again, going on the other side, putting my marketing hat on, if I could, instead of the Amazon one, it's September, October 2024, I need to create the marketing plan for, let's say, Lezzat. And let's say Lazat sells anti-wrinkle creams and whatever. So therefore, I need to budget for it. And the budget, I have to have shown that I've spent it wisely last year into all these things that gave me good ROI, not only Amazon, but events and TikTok and other things. So therefore, when it comes to make a decision, I need to have access to data.
So I need to know, well, we spent, I don't know, let's say 10,000 on Amazon last year for advertising and having an agency, let's say, whatever that number could be. Well, What was the growth? How many new impressions did we get? How many new-to-brand audiences did we get? What was the ROAS? What was the ACOS of this? TACOS and stuff like that tend to be more on the sales side. They like that. So profit, gross profit, more business development team would like this.
But impression, brand share percentage, conversion rate, click-through rate, BCPM, CPM, all of these are very important metrics that marketeers need in order to be able to do their jobs better and be able to say what they want to do next year. So those are extremely important metrics that I would highly advise marketing departments even if they don't want to have any any talk with Amazon or talk to the agency or even see it, they should know at least on a basic level how to obtain that information and because it will actually influence how they're going to be going forwards with their marketing campaigns.
Paul Sonneveld
Is there a metric that you know, based on your experience, marketers just love to see but very rarely or can't get out of the Amazon platform.
Alexandros Karagiannis
So, here's an interesting one. So, we started with a client, again, another very big client in the beauty space, a global brand. First year we started just with UK and managing vendor UK. Next year we got the whole of Europe as well and UK. So what happened there is at the beginning our KPIs were what you would expect them to be. So you're a vendor account, so you're talking about ACOS, Ad spend, keywords, impressions, etc. No talk about new-to-brand audiences at all. They didn't even know it existed.
So then first quarter results come in. We saw, OK, January was a social month. February was very good. March was extremely good, was a record for them in terms of ROAS and sales, et cetera, and really good. They could also see their POs raise on Amazon, et cetera. So all really good there. So when we did our reporting, we also put in there new-to-brand audiences. And we said, well, look, look at this. Now, why is that important? Because it is important because one of the cheeky ways in our industry, agencies can overinflate ROAS, is spending a lot of money on branded keywords, which doesn't make sense.
It's like having a bar that says beer, and then you drink your own beer. Well, it doesn't make sense. So therefore, new to brand audiences is extremely important metric. And it's something that is rarely looked at from marketing teams and something which I think is extremely important to be looked at going forward and extremely easy to get.
Paul Sonneveld
I was going to ask a follow-up question and I don't want to get too deep into LTV calculations and all of that, but clearly on in the agency world, there's a lot of talk about looking at the acquisition costs in the context of the LTV and as a substitute measure for just a raw ACOS around that, particularly if you have a product with a frequent purchase pattern, right? Like in health and beauty regimes and the like, particularly in grocery, are like, where are FMCG businesses on this journey? Are they starting to think like that? Or is it more still in is that discussion still happening in the agency space and hasn't completely flown down, sort of filtered down yet to to the clients?
Alexandros Karagiannis
Yeah, I would say it's still a an ongoing conversation on education. And, and obviously to their sort of just going with their side for a bit. There's a lot of things that change on Amazon. So a year ago, we wouldn't be talking about the emphasis that is being put right now on subscribe and save, for example. There were no vouchers for subscribe and save a year ago. Abandoned cart, not many people know that you can actually target abandoned cart, do promotions on that.
So it's very normal to see, how can I call this, new tactics that Amazon brings, a new initiatives that it brings that affect the way we see customers. Obviously, moving forward, one thing is very important, that advertising is becoming more complicated. More and more companies are using agencies and then those agencies are using leading tools to extract keywords and so on. So, therefore, competing a lot on the same type of placements, let's just call it for simplicity, in which case, really, you have to find other ways of increasing your market share, not only through what used to work in the past, exact main keywords, let's say, and going forward. So things like subscribe and save, for example, are extremely important in increasing your LTV going forwards and looking at it from that sense.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, yeah, great. Appreciate that. Let me, I want to cover on one other sort of topic here that we haven't spoken about, which is really just, I guess, internal training, knowledge building, awareness building. I know you do a lot of training and you've run courses for Amazon vendor marketing teams as well. I'd love to, I'd be super interested, you know, can you share with us like any examples from your agency's experience that where you've helped marketing teams to better understand kind of the Amazon vendor channel. what are those things that make the penny drop things that help clarify things?
Alexandros Karagiannis
Yeah. Okay, well, interestingly enough, there's been a few different delivery methods, you could say, we've been asked in the past, to do training. So do like formal training, in which case, The first thing we ask is, who are we talking to? Marketing, sales, what is it? So we can put the context. And then it usually goes into how to navigate Vendor Central or Seller Central, how to look at PPC and key metrics around that. Even DSP is something that I haven't really touched on here. But obviously, the big FMCG and brands, they do use DSP a whole lot other aspect into marketing and the demographics and placements and so on and content, but let's not go there for the sake of time.
So yeah, we've been asked to do training in the form of PowerPoint and recordings. And then that is kept from the marketing teams and in a central repository that they have for training and then given globally access. We've audited accounts in the past to see, well, we need to know what we don't know kind of thing. So the US is advanced on Amazon, but maybe there's things I don't know. UK, they're OK. France, they just started, for example. So that also changes. We've been asked to do booklets, so manual, old school way. So some companies which have been around for hundred years and more.
Paul Sonneveld
A good old binder on someone's desk on the shelf.
Alexandros Karagiannis
Exactly. Which is cool because you can actually have a hard copy yourself and it's like how often do you see a project that you've done on your desk like physically you can take the project with you if you like. So yeah yeah so this is some things that we do see and obviously there's a very big incentive for companies to do that. Because that knowledge is extremely valuable, extremely important to them. And whether they use agencies such as ours, or whether they go into using their own teams to do it, it does pay off in the long term.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah.
Alexandros Karagiannis
In the short term, really, I would say.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Oh, that's great. No, look, there must be a wealth of content there. And probably it means it's appropriate for me to try and bring two topics together, which is really around data and knowledge, which is, when you're doing these, these courses, when you're training your clients, what are the practical tips that you focus on to help those marketers, as well as the Amazon account managers, and we haven't really spoken in much a minute and much about them actually, what are those practical tips that you encourage them to use so that can actually make better use out of the data that comes out of the Amazon platform?
Alexandros Karagiannis
I guess the first thing is understanding a bit from their side what are the important metrics for them. So they're doing this training, why? To run it in the future themselves, to understand a bit better so that then they can enhance the reporting that they do to corporate or to HQ. What is it? So therefore, when we start, we always want to start to understand in an ideal world, if you have, you've heard this many times, a magic wand that could give you all the info that you wanted, what would that info be? Okay, so that then we start this conversation.
And then in there, we can gauge the sort of insights that we're looking to get. So then we can help them. We can say, well, you cannot get this, but actually you can get this. Also, you might not know, but your magic wand can also give you this, new to brand, for example. So these are some very practical things, I would say. So when you want to understand a bit more about Amazon, is understand what are the key metrics that I need to know that's going to help me make better decisions in the future.
Those key metrics tend to be very similar in other channels as well. So, a marketing person should actually know how to get bounce rates or traffic or conversion rate from their website. It's very common for these things to be known. Google Analytics, you go in there, usually it's on your bookmark somewhere. But then when you go to Amazon, it's like, I don't even know the login. I don't even know who it is. Or maybe you log in with the wrong credentials, and then you've got Section 3, and it causes a whole lot of lag. So that's something pretty common that I see in terms of data.
Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. That's great. Thank you for those practical tips. We are running out of time, so we don't have much time for questions, but I, so I'm just going to give you one. I heard that earlier today. It's got to do with the brand store, right? And I'm going to put it to you straight. So, brand store, is it a vanity exercise or is it a good investment? From the perspective of a well-known FMCG brand, right?
Alexandros Karagiannis
Okay, yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
Do you tell your clients to invest in it heavily? I mean, I think there's always a minimum hygiene factor here, right? But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about here is, do you really invest in this and see it as a key lever or is it a vanity exercise?
Alexandros Karagiannis
Yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
And apologies for the un-fan tee-up of the question
*(both laugh)*
Alexandros Karagiannis
It's okay, it's good. So, Okay. So what I would say is the following, right? The way I like to see Amazon accounts is I like to see, obviously, start from low-hanging fruit, as they say, and then walk the way up into more advanced. So if we look at an account that actually we see there's many more photos, A-plus content is not there, or A-plus content premium is not there, or the keywords are not wrong, that should be the emphasis.
Further down the line, because you usually are on a journey with these, especially with our better clients, we like to have long-term relationships so that we can grow them step by step and do each step correctly. So in this case then, when you're looking at Amazon Store, something that people do not know, and I see this, actually this is a tip for your audience, which I've seen go wrong. That's why I advise not to do it.
A lot of people think that if you have an influencer to send traffic, for example, to Amazon or from Google Ads, let's say, or YouTube Ads, and you send it onto a listing, that it's good. It's actually not good. It's actually the exact opposite of good. You all of a sudden spike sessions up, drop conversions down because you're doing upper funnel marketing, whereas in Amazon, it's mid-funnel usually. So Amazon store is where you should be sending this traffic.
So if we were to invest, if I hear a client saying, should we invest in an Amazon brand store? Then what I would like to know is see the inside of the store. So see how it has been performing. That's very easy to do on your Amazon platform with a seller or vendor. See your average basket size there. See if this is the amount of sales that is happening through sponsored brand campaigns are actually giving good drawbacks.
So therefore, you're in a position to say, should I carry out improvements on the store or not? That should be your key lever. Also, if you tell me that you're going to be doing a promotion with, I don't know, a Kardashian, let's say, then I would say, well, you want to do your Amazon store because that's where you want to send them, on your store, so you don't destroy your metrics and conversions. So I think that answered your question.
Paul Sonneveld
It does. And thank you for being generous and throwing that really good tip in there as well around external traffic. You're right. It's less considered, right? And obviously, you don't want to drag down the conversion page and spook the algorithm into thinking, oh, something's wrong with your page because people are no longer converting. So great, great tip.
Well, Alex, our time has flown by. So we should probably think about concluding. A heartfelt thank you for really being on our show today and sharing your invaluable expertise. Really appreciate it. Your insights have really, truly shed light on some of the nuances around marketing and the structures and the process and the data. Of course, we've only touched the tip of the iceberg.
But I always like to ask you know for for those tuning in either live or you know the recording after those maybe want to get in touch or go deeper into kind of what you can potentially offer them or maybe just to have a further discussion with you, what is the best way for them to just get all of you?
Alexandros Karagiannis
Yeah, I mean, the best way would be LinkedIn. So on LinkedIn, if you put my name, Alex Karagiannis, it's very easy to find me. Or reaching out via email, alex@lezzat.co.uk. That's super easy. I've had other agency owners talk to me about advice that they needed. And I think it's actually something that I'm very happy to communicate and have a coffee chat with. So any questions, I'm happy to get them answered. It's always exciting to hear as well some other cases and problems and how we could potentially solve them. So, there.
Paul Sonneveld
Great. Well, thank you so much, Alex. Appreciate it.
Alexandros Karagiannis
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Thank you very much for having me on the show.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you. All right, with that, we bring this episode of Marketplace Masters to a close. A huge thank you to everyone who joined us live today for today's session on advertising metrics for FMCG marketers. Now, for those of you who are yearning for more wisdom, check out our video on-demand library on our website. It is brimming with valuable knowledge, and we've had many, many episodes specifically focused on all things Amazon Vendor there right now.
Of course, I wouldn't be remiss of me to say if you are looking to refine your analytics for better insight, some of the ones that Alex talked about today, of course, MerchantSpring is a great option amongst many other options. So feel free to get in touch if you want to have a chat. And lastly, I'm always looking for interesting topics, particularly when it comes to Amazon vendor. So you know, what are the things that you're struggling with? Or what are the things you'd like to talk about? Get in touch with me, DM me on LinkedIn, and we'll set up a chat. All right. Until we meet again, please continue to excel and innovate. And thank you so much for tuning in. Take care.
