#638 - Strategies For Launching A Brand In 2025
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Today, we've got back on the show one of the first ever guests on the SSP way back in 2018. And he's going to be talking about a wide range of topics such as AMC, TikTok shop, influencer marketing, and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. ♪

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we've got back for like the fourth or fifth time here somebody who was

I just noticed was on the third ever podcast we did. He was like, might have been the first or second outside guest we ever had on the serious podcast. Cause it was episode three. So if you guys want, can find episode three, get his whole backstory. But like, I believe episode one was just like me and Manny coats and episode two.

Might have just been me or maybe Kevin King or something, but Leron was the first outside guest on the podcast, I think. So welcome back to the show. You've been on here for years now. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, I know. It's amazing to see how the space has evolved, how Helium 10 has evolved over time. And you've been a main anchor. The one steady component of all of it has been you. So thank you for having me on. It's great to be back on the podcast.

Awesome. Awesome. And who am I wearing today? Well, we've got Beanie by Incrementum Digital. We're both matching there. I also consider this like we also have something called Insights Dashboard in Helium 10. So something similar. But yeah, this saved me. I was in, I think I was in Japan or somewhere where it was super cold. I didn't have any beanies. I was like, oh,

Uh, incremental digital had sent me a beanie. So, uh, that, that saved my ears from frostbite, uh, when I was freezing temperatures recently. Yeah. Anyways, we're not here to talk fashion. Uh, let's just catch up on different things. And the first thing I would say, let's see if you agree with me or not, but like 2000 or 2024 was like the year of change on Amazon, whether it's fees, whether it's new things of advertising. Um, like I do not remember a year, uh,

where there was more significant changes on those fronts, you know, advertising fees, things like that, than 2024. Would you agree with that? And then if so, what are some of the biggest noteworthy things for you? Yeah, there were a lot of changes. And also Amazon, I would say,

sharing a lot of, um, a lot of changes, not just for sellers, but in, in, in general, like Amazon introduces Rufus and, you know, these, a lot of changes in general, um, you know, shipments and placements and, and fees there. Um,

uh, you know, Amazon introducing more services and like a lot more people doing things like AWD. And, um, you know, I see Amazon even taking market share away from three PLs that are, that didn't have as good a year because of, you know, Amazon taking, taking share of their partnership with TikTok. Um, you know, a lot of, yes, a lot of things evolving. Uh, one thing I would say I saw early in 2024 is we saw brands really starting to

to shift their focus to really focus on their profitability a lot and put a focus there because of increasing fees and pressures there. I think...

some of that pressure for brands is a little bit has improved somewhat. You know, we now see brands that, you know, overall we see our clients doing better this December year over year, this January year over year. So hopefully some of that's in the, in the past and maybe some concerns with the, with the economy and inflation. And again, those, some of those things past due, but yeah, 2024 was a year of a lot of, a lot of changes and maybe starting on the,

pathway of how ultimately, you know, Amazon platform will change and how like search results are going to change too. Because one thing I see as the, as we get, you know, more to AI and, and search results is that in reality, you know, when I search something and you search something, the search results should be different because Amazon should have a good understanding of our shopping habits. You know, for example,

I was at lunch, like one of our neighbors here and one of our neighbors talk about buying on Amazon and how the first thing she does is she's she she does a search and then she sorts by price from low to high. Right. I never shop like that. Right. I look at reviews like it's not how it's not how I shop by like lowest to highest price point. But that's how she shops.

And I'm thinking, well, if she does that and Amazon knows that all the time, then why not just serve her up the results that way to begin with? Right. Because they know they know how she's shopping or, you know, serve her up into what she's most likely to buy. And.

I think now with AI, with things like Rufus, that while I don't necessarily see people have made this huge transformation to shopping with Rufus yet, it's going to get better. And some interesting things where advertisers are now better able to target audiences with advertising is another, I think, big shift that's coming this year. And you may...

not have heard about this yet, but you're going to start to hear more about how you can now use your own audiences to, or not, but your own audiences to target. So for example,

Something that we're doing now is creating lookalike audiences, which, you know, historically you would think like, why wouldn't Amazon have that to begin with? Because like platforms like Facebook have had that for, for years where you can kind of, you know, upload your email list or, you know, and create a lookalike audience. Well now with Amazon and Amazon marketing cloud, you can create a lookalike of your highest spend customers and increase your bids by

for those, uh, for that lookalike audience. And then where would those ads show up? Like, what would it be for just when they're searching, like we're not targeting keywords per se, or is it targeting keywords specifically for those audiences and just wherever those guys are shopping on Amazon, they're going to see those ads. Yeah. So like the big shift is that, you know, up until like very recently, you can say almost like now, um, you can only use AMC with DSP.

And so it would be display ads that were showing on and off Amazon. And you can create this lookalike audience and it would be towards that display audience. Well, now you can implement it for sponsored products. So if you activating AMC for sponsored products, then you'll see you'll have like an audience tab and you can actually add that audience there that you created and you can increase your bid to that lookalike audience. So even on keywords, when that particular audience

um, lookalike person, um, you know, which, which is highly similar to somebody shopping from you is doing a search. Your bid would go from a dollar to whatever, to a dollar 50 based on the percentage that, you know, you want to, you want to increase your bid. And so now, you know, I'm kind of thinking, um, I had this conversation with somebody and we're like thinking like, you know, Amazon executives are sitting in a room and, um,

They're like, you know, cost per click is kind of flatlined, you know, like because at a certain point, you know, you can't increase cost per click anymore because, you know, it gets unprofitable for brands. So like, hey, cost per click is flatline. What can we do to get brands to increase their cost per click and make more money on our advertising business?

Well, if you can get the brand more closer to who they want to reach, they would be willing to pay more because the theory is your conversion rate would be higher, which then it would be okay. And so it seems like, you know, this was like a brilliant idea to get brands to find a way to increase their cost per click. And Amazon's doing this in a lot of ways, right? We've seen in the last quarter,

last few months, Amazon rollout B2B audiences where you have business customers and you can increase your bid to those business customers. Makes sense when you have these bulk products or like, hey, I'm selling these packages of 1,000 masks that mainly go to schools or something. Well, I don't want to have to get clicks in the regular Joe Schmo is not going to have a very good

conversion rate or you know like it's not going to click on my product and buy it so like to be able to just show it only to the business customers and schools and stuff makes a lot of sense I mean yesterday I was talking to somebody who came to us potential customer and I saw that they're selling paintbrushes and things like that and so I was the first question I asked him is have you tested increasing your bids because like painters right like people like that that would normally maybe go to Home Depot or whatever like might buy from you and if they have an Amazon business account you can increase your bids so as people said yeah it's on our list you know to test and

And those are the kind of things like people should be looking at right now. And Amazon does give you the results on those business customers. So you can easily see if that's like a placement, you want to get a better placement to get in front of those customers. And more and more, I see that's how, at least with advertising, you'll be able to get closer to who your target audience is and test.

And, you know, okay, I want to pay more, but I don't want to pay more for my existing customers who buy from me. I want new to brand customers only. I want lookalike customers only. And Amazon is very interesting. It allows you even to set like,

you know, a lookalike audience based on customers that have spent X dollars with you in the last year. So if you have a supplement and it's 30 bucks, you can put in customers that have spent a hundred with me that have bought a few times. And I want to look like audience to them, the propensity to buy for me. Um, or it gives you also like the types of audiences. I think one of the options we're starting to test is like balance because it's like kind of like, um,

It gives you different types of audiences that you can create for propensity to buy from you. And so I think this is pretty cool. On the one hand, yes, it helps Amazon's advertising business because it gets you to increase your bid. But if I'm increasing my bids and I'm also getting a better conversion rate,

then I think that could be a win-win. But if you're listening to this, this should be your sort of call out to figure out how can I get access to Amazon Marketing Cloud. Today, you could do it through tools or agencies or tools.

or unless you can get your own access to like, you know, the Amazon marketing cloud, maybe if you're, if you're a bigger brand through a rep that you have, et cetera. But generally today it's going to be through tools. You should consider tools slash agency or somehow to get access to it, because I think that's going to be one of the shifts that we're going to go into this year with Amazon. And then if you think further out with Rufus, that ultimately the results are going to be more customized to, to the, the,

to the end customer. Which again, I think is a good win for, for Amazon if they're able to put more relevant products and like solutions and, you know, in front of people. So this is like, you know, I think what kind of this year is like is interesting shift in the first time, I think really a meaningful way that the search results are changing other than just the way they've already been different is, you know, based on inventory being close to me, et cetera, I might see something different than you see. I'm in New York, you're in, you're in, you're in Cali. But,

But now I think it's meaningfully going to change based on how advertisers are going to start to position their bids to specific audiences, which is pretty cool. What about on the analytics side of AMC? Because that's something that's like now democratized where in the past, yeah, well, I mean, the regular AMC actual targeting, you know, that's still you got to use agency, you got to have a software platform.

to use it have kind of bigger spend but now AMC for the first time as far as on the analytics reporting side is available to just Joe Schmo and even like inside of Helium 10 we've got it because they made it available so what should sellers out there who have never used that

visibility before, what should be their priority as far as what they should be looking at? Is it more like trying to figure out that purchase flow of how their display ads and their video ads and product ads work together in that customer journey or what's the highlight? Yeah. So a couple of cool things that Amazon has added. So yes, one, understanding that purchase flow and seeing how your purchase rate is

it should be higher when customers are exposed to more ad types. And you can start doing some of your own calculations with attributing a cost. For example, if somebody sees...

sponsored ad, SB ad, SD ad, and the attribution goes to the last click, which maybe was SD, then maybe instead you can give a third of the attribution of that sale to each one of those ads and figure out because the person didn't start out with that SD ad, they ended up buying through that SD ad. So I think, yeah, trying to see which ad types are working well together and how your, how your, how,

Having, let's say, different ad types together, like sponsor brand, sponsor product, is creating either yes or no, like higher purchase rates and if it's worthwhile to run those ads together. So kind of understanding the customer journey and how multiple ad types work together is one area. Another sort of related but interesting thing Amazon has added recently is long-term partnerships.

sales data. So now you can see in your reporting beyond just the, you know, 14 day or seven day attribution window, how sort of a row as based on beyond just that attribution window. And you can, you'll see a, a

higher ROAS and you can see the impact of somebody first interacting with an ad, even though they didn't purchase within the attribution window, how ads are affecting your sales ultimately. So that's another cool thing Amazon has added. And recently in CES, they announced also that AMC data would now go back five years. It was going back, I think like 18 months until now. So you'll be able to analyze your audiences for a five-year period.

just more data. And I think this is a shift that's happened over the last few years, I think since Andy Jassy has come in, that Amazon has sort of opened up the floodgates to giving you like as much data as possible, where in the past, they, you know, I mean, like,

you know, there were days where like, oh, Amazon will never give you the true search volume, you know, or anything like you had to, you had to use tools for estimation. And now, you know, you have brand analytics and search frequency and, and the query performance report and all these things where Amazon is just giving you at the carts and all this stuff. And we thought we'd never see that. And that's, I think Amazon overall philosophy becoming more open

open in a lot of ways and you can see that now with amazon opening up things like buy with prime to other to to other websites they're you know multi-channel fulfillment they're opening up their uh their warehouses can now do you know fulfillment from your from your website sales um they are they just announced at ces that they're opening up their advertising

to other retailers so now if you're selling on like we have clients like on irb.com that like in supplements and we can actually run ads from the amazon console on irb.com which is like you know amazon is sort of um opening up their technology as a service to other retailers so i think amazon realizes like at one point they made the decision they realized okay we're not going to be

the only destination people are shopping at, but we want a piece of the entire pie with the different services that we offer. And how can we get that even if somebody is selling on Shopify or now on another website, how can we monetize that through our fulfillment network, through our advertising technology? And I think that's Andy Jassy's

like philosophy, like AWS, which is running the cloud network for all, you know, a lot of websites online. It's similar philosophy of let Amazon sort of be the underlying backend channel for advertising fulfillment. Um, it'll be really interesting to see how many retailers, um,

take up Amazon on that advertising as a service. It's a nice advantage, I think, to those brands that already know Amazon advertising and will be able to run those ads on other platforms. It's a nice competitive advantage. Are you afraid of running out of inventory before your next shipment comes in? Or maybe you're on the other side and you worry about having too much inventory, which could cap you out at the Amazon warehouses or even cost you storage fees.

Stay on top of your inventory by using our robust inventory management tool. You can take advantage of our advanced forecasting algorithms, manage your 3PL inventory, create POs for your suppliers, create replenishment shipments, and more, all from inside Inventory Management by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash inventory management. And don't forget, you can sign up for a free Helium 10 account from there, or you can get 10% off for life by using our special podcast code SSP10.

So another question I had, you know, we wouldn't talk along the lines of all these new things that are available to to advertisers and brands is I'm just curious, what are you doing differently in 2025 for some of the fundamentals? You know, because I feel like there's just.

There's a lot of talk, like you said, like, hey, Rufus is going to change things later. To me, it's not yet because it just kind of sucks from a consumer side. It kind of sucks. And so, yeah, until it gets better, people aren't going to adopt it. But there's people now saying, oh, you got to change all these things. For me, I'm not changing anything as a seller.

just because a lot of the things that Rufus does, it's still based on the same principles. You know, like, like I've never been one of those people who says, yeah, just stuff your keywords or stuff your listings with keywords. And that's the best thing. No, you've always should. Hey, look at the reviews and bring in these things that aren't keywords and talk about pain points, which is exactly what Rufus is doing. So for me, like right now, Rufus is kind of like almost filling in the gaps of the people who aren't maybe doing all the best practices. And now it's kind of less than that gap. But that means that if we were doing the best practice, there's not that much that we have to change. Right.

launch changes, you know, like little things here with launching, like I've always been using PPC for launch for the last few years. I'm just wondering, the fundamentals of listing optimization, keyword research, basic advertising, you know, not AMC,

What are you doing differently in 2025 than say 2023 or things that you've incorporated in the last year for some of your bread and butter things, if anything? Yeah. I mean, the one thing I would say with Rufus is that we are using it to look at listings and look at the questions that Rufus is properly with and making sure that you have those answers in your listing. Right. So like you said, it's a way to

find the gap between like a competitor and, you know, what you have in your listing and making sure that you are answering those questions that Rufus is like prompting people to maybe ask about a product and then making sure you have the answer so that when the person does, you know, click on that or something that Rufus has the right answer based from the listing. So I would say...

If somebody is asking that question in your competitor listing, they probably would ask it on yours. And so being ready for that is a good, a good move. Yeah, exactly. So I would say that's kind of how we're using it now, just like for best practices, making sure, but essentially yes, listening fundamentals to me are, um, are the same. Um, you know, I think the things we, we are, I think ultimately a lot of the fundamentals are the same, but you know, the things we're, uh, focused on is, um, um,

more testing, making sure, you know, advertising isn't cannibalizing your, your organic sales,

sales. Um, you know, we found like, you know, we had, we had a customer, we just did their like annual review and we found that like pulling back on bids last year resulted in like much better performance. Like they had more, more sales, their organic sales grew by 20% because as a strategy we kind of pulled back on bids and, you know, maybe let their organic positions take the sales a lot of the time instead of the, instead of the advertising positions. And they ended up just having, um,

a lower, you know, they had like a 23% tacos in 2023 and they had like a, you know, 18% tacos in, in, in 2024. And we're talking like a pretty decent, you know, 38 million in, in, in sales on this brand this past year and 30 million the year before. So they had stronger sales here, lower tacos, lower cost per click, just further optimizing, further testing and using the data and the tools out there that, you know, that we have to do that is like one of the,

one of the things we're focused on besides these new initiatives as far as like, you know, testing. But, you know, I think the main fundamentals, you know, haven't really changed. I do think, you know, brands really have to focus on a lot on their creative, their video, their creative. I think also brands should be,

you know, what they do outside of Amazon is important, very important now, just because, you know, you have more, especially if you're in a niche where, you know, you're competing with more like Chinese sellers, let's say, which is a lot of niches, but like maybe less so in like supplements or beauty or certain niches. But, you know, what's going to really help and save your brand in a lot of ways is

branded searches or influencer marketing or doing those things outside. We're definitely doing things like creator connections. We're driving more sales. It's not the brand game changer, but it's definitely driving sales for brands. And I hope Amazon allows you to do more with it, like reach out to influencers and making it a better tool. But I think brands really need to

do things outside, work with influencers, be on the platforms, Instagram, TikTok, wherever, you know, YouTube shorts, wherever social commerce is happening, whether TikTok here, you know, TikTok is here or not here in order to drive those branded searches on Amazon and grow those branded searches, because that puts you in a position of not just competing on price and not just competing on, you know, on, on reviews, you know, like I won't, chances are, if you look through my history of buying, you won't find me buying

buying a product that has, you know, 10 reviews on Amazon. Yesterday, you know, my wife sent me something she saw from an influencer and it was a toy product, like maybe for my son. And I had like a hundred something reviews again, like that might be something I bypassed normally, like hundreds on the reviews in toy category. But I looked at it like, Oh, cool. It looks kind of interesting, whatever. And that's because an influencer was talking about it and was already showing the product. And you have that transfer of social proof from the

the other channel coming into Amazon where the things like, you know, whether it's now the cheapest or somebody else has a thousand reviews, influencer already recommended it already trust. I'm going to buy, I'm going to buy what they recommended because they've tested it already played with it, whatever. And they recommend it. Right. So I think those things just become overall more important for brands if they want to get out of competing on Amazon, just based on the traditional things of the marketplaces, which is a lot about reviews and price.

And that's, you know, I think a big shift. And I think we're seeing...

we're seeing growth of more and more Chinese sellers on the platform, you know, according to like marketplace pulse and, you know, other, other data sources. So, and, you know, by the way, as we have AI, we just had this announcement on like deep seek and right, like AI, it's going to get easier for those non-English speaking brands to have better content and, you know, better understanding of the consumer and how to position your brand and who's your target audience and doing all these things.

Um, so, you know, I think right now your edge is on, you know, I think, I think sellers in the U S have always done better on the branding side and the marketing side. Um, and those levers, I think you have with working with influencers, reaching out, you know, um, I have somebody on my team, Kate, you know, Kate, Kate launched, launched her own product. Um, and, um,

She was trying to figure out funding and everything else. And she put it on Shopify. It's just like pre-orders. And she made like a unique product.

She reached out to influencers and she sold six figures on pre-orders in the last few months just with influencers promoting it because they love the product. And that's unbelievable. That's amazing, right? And my initial advice to her was, and she's applying for a patent, utility patent on this product, is don't put it on Amazon until you get the utility patent because as soon as it's on Amazon, this product is made in China. The Chinese sales are going to copy it. You won't be able to...

enforce it while the patent is pending. The strategy we have right now, I mean, if it's converting pretty decently with pre-orders with influencers, that's a great strategy once you have inventory and ads are working well too, even during pre-order. And so...

Like those strategies. And then when she does launch it on Amazon, let's say a year from now, she launches that product on Amazon. She's going to have the branded searches already there. Like it's going to be that much easier, right? People are already going to probably see it somewhere else. And it's going to be instead of pushing uphill on a launch, it's like pushing downhill, right?

And so I think you need to think about your strategies for launching and how you do things. I'm not saying don't launch on Amazon first, but I think you want to have that outside strategy too. It becomes more important today if you don't want to compete on price and reviews or it lessens the amount of time you have to be out of profit just to push a lower price point, et cetera, until you build up enough reviews to kind of be relevant.

And, you know, that's and, you know, I think maybe even where we are now over two years ago, platforms like like TikTok, for example, are really influencing what people are buying on Amazon. Right. And and on Shopify. And so I think you want to have that as part of your strategy. And even now, as you are selecting your product, right, that you want to think about how, you know.

how is this going to play out? What's the strategy for like social or influences with this product? Cause if you have a product like this person that's selling paintbrushes, I mean hard to, um, now that's a brand that's been on Amazon, I think for years they have like a bestseller, you know, paintbrushes, et cetera, 20, you know, 20,000 reviews and you know, okay. But if I'm launching paintbrushes today on Amazon and I have a really hard time and then like going and making that, uh, you know,

a viral sensation is going to be very difficult too. And so thinking about the products that you want to launch, um, before, you know, I mean, going back to when I think we got started with Amazon, you would launch whatever, as long as it was like opportunity, right? Like you, you know, you use, use something like x-ray, um, you would, you know, a black box, you'd find, you'd find the opportunity, um, and you would launch it and you can know you could do on Amazon. Cause there's a, a, there's a, um,

a line between the amount of supply and demand but i think today you can't do that you have to think about what's going to be you know what's going to be beyond that also and that's i think a shift for you know 2025 and again i hope amazon takes more steps in the direction of things like creator connections and other opportunities that are allowing live shopping trying to figure out why why us hasn't picked up on that like china and yeah and other places but but along those lines like

We're talking about marketplace. We're talking about influencer marketing. Two years ago, if somebody were to ask us maybe, hey, I'm selling on Amazon. What's the no-brainer marketplace? I should just go ahead and list my products. I think maybe people might have said Walmart as like, all right, yeah, you're not going to try and match your sales, but you've got the product in the United States. That's the easiest and most obvious next step. Right.

I would almost say this year for now, I mean, who knows what's going to happen with different things, but I would almost say that before Walmart, you've got to be considering TikTok shop. Would you agree with that? A thousand percent. I've thought the same thing over, over the last year, because with Walmart, we kind of know,

We kind of know what you're going to get on Walmart. You're going to get anywhere between 5%, maybe up to 20% of what you do on Amazon, depending on the brand, of what's the potential there. With TikTok, you have the potential to go viral. You have the potential to blow out. I think we both know the seller that was doing these groove handwriting that his wife was a home mom homeschooling her children. Yeah.

Oh yeah. You met you before they joined their, their, or they, they started their TikTok journey. They learned about TikTok at the same event that you spoke at there in New York. I totally forgot about that. And you know what? Um, and I did some of his Amazon advertising and then they stopped doing Amazon. They said, look, we have so much inventory demand for TikTok. TikTok is 80, 90% of our business. And Amazon is like 15, 20%. Like we're pausing, like working with Amazon. Amazon was just like so small on their business. TikTok was

massive for them. They did so well on TikTok and that's because they had the right product that very visual, very targeted, right price point. And they crushed it on, they crushed it on, on TikTok. And you couldn't do that on Walmart, right? Walmart, you know, Amazon and Walmart are for people to kind of search and find what they're looking for. And TikTok is,

to help you discover the things you don't know you need, you know, that, that, that you need or that you want. Um, and you have that, you have that massive ability. Now I think they work, I think TikTok and Amazon work very well together because, you know, if I see something on TikTok that's interesting, I'll probably just go to Amazon search for it. Um, you know, I bought something on TikTok shop just to see what the experience was like, and it was fulfilled by TikTok. It was interesting. It took about four or five days. I got in, it was, it was a fine experience, but, um,

just gonna go buy i have prime i'm just gonna go buy it on on amazon and get it really quickly right so i think they work very well together and you know and it makes your tick tock will make your amazon business stronger it will not make your walmart like walmart will not make your amazon business stronger or you know so uh i think unless you're going into like we have a plan to go into walmart retail they want you to really do well and online there etc like yes i would

um you know tick tock would be my go-to for sure as any secondary channel um again along with maybe like shopify if that's like a focus but i think tick tock just like where you know ultimately it's where people are um again especially if you have the right product towards like the the demographic that's on there i think you can create certain products like if i'm thinking today about you know

a product like beauty, beauty crushes on TikTok. Why? It's very visual. It's demonstrable. I can see instant maybe before and after, you know, one of our clients is a brand called Setshu. If I'm

if I'm saying it right, S-A-C-H-E-U. They have this lip liner. Now, I'm only an expert on lip liner because of the client now. But they have this lip liner that you put it on and you leave it on for like five, 10 minutes, and then you kind of peel it off and it creates this color and more plump lips or whatever.

And they have also the best seller on Amazon and it's, you know, yes, we're running ads and we're doing things on Amazon, but it's because this product has gone viral on TikTok, like celebrities and all this stuff on TikTok. And there's no, you can never achieve that on, you can never achieve that on Walmart. And so I think even now, as you're thinking about what product am I going to launch? You want to look into those categories and where you think you could be and like how,

demonstrable as this product and if I'm going to launch let's say I'm going to launch a baby product well can I get a baby on my videos or do I need a baby on my videos to do that is that going to be harder you know unless again you have established brand and you're thinking about how to do it but like

I'd really think about how is this going to play off what my strategy could be for social commerce, social media, and how is that going to feed into, you know, Amazon's always talked about the flywheel, but now the flywheel is sort of like social media, you know, and Amazon working really well together. How can I feed it into that, you know, total flywheel, total flywheel together. So I think, you know, if I'm looking to launch a brand and launch products, that's,

you know, on, on, on Amazon, I'm looking at, I'm looking at trends and I'm looking at, I'm looking at how things are doing on TikTok. Now TikTok can show me the sales. I mean, essentially the sales, because it shows me how many units people have sold on their products. So I get a lot of data there. And then you have all the data that Amazon has with reviews and listings and, you know, and, and the search volume and everything else that like your product research should,

shift into like what can work really well together because I absolutely agree that Walmart would not be the second channel I launch after, after Amazon, not, not anymore because I think I could do so much more again, at least with the right product, so much more on, you know, on a, on a tick tock as opposed to on, on a,

on on walmart now it'll be interesting to see who who ends up buying it now they say microsoft isn't talks but like it could have been a great purchase for like a walmart uh you know to uh to come in walmart's had some like partnerships with tiktok too um we had uh one of our clients had done uh

special advertising with Walmart and they had a partnership with TikTok where the ads on TikTok only showed to Walmart customers. So they had a partnership with TikTok too. So it could be a great purchase for them, but it'll be interesting to see who buys it and if it can maintain. But I think the point is that no matter what the

it's proven now, right? Like, and somebody will, you know, some platform will come up or Instagram will pivot or, you know, to kind of do more of what TikTok is doing if, if it's not around, but I believe it'll stay, it'll stay around, uh,

and there'll be some kind of deal, you know, formed. Yeah. Yeah. It's got, it's got, you know, it's not just going to go away. All right. Before we get into your last strategies of the day, how can people find you on the interwebs out there? Sure. So I'm on LinkedIn. They run hershcorn. I'm on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,

Um, I'm on TikTok too, but you know, you may, you may see some dancing videos too, uh, you know, if you go on there. Um, but you know, you can find me there or, uh, Liran, L-I-R-A-N at incrementaldigital.com or through our website. Um, uh, you can, you can, um, you know, reach out to me. Uh, we do a lot of audits for, for brands. So, you know, happy to talk to you, uh, about your brands or if you have any questions in, um, you know, in, in general.

One thing we want to consider offering this year is like this AMC

as a service, helping you set up audiences and things, even if we're not running your ads. So we're considering doing that. Maybe that's, you know, something you want to talk about, you're interested in, maybe is something we can kind of start to beta because we do think it's going to be more important and we can help like set up your audiences. So you have access to it, even if you want to run ads, you know, on your own. And yeah, so, you know, you can feel free to reach out.

Favorite Helium 10 tool? First of all, what I use every day is I use X-Ray every day. Do you like the new features we have? How we have the child item sales now? We used to have that seven years ago, but we haven't had that for years. I love that. I also love all the keywords suggestions and search volume you see on top.

uh just when you're when i'm searching something on amazon sometimes do a screen share with customer whatever and like shows them all the keywords and search line so um i love that it's a tool that you know it's a must-have um you know uh tool obviously a lot more you know reverse asin and keyword tracking and now there's the market share data um

And just a lot there. But yeah, it's a tool. I think in my company, we have like four or five, you know, Helium 10 accounts that we use just because of the amount of quantity that, you know, that we're using it. So yeah, love Helium 10. And yeah, like I said, you've been the steady hand, you know, in the company, you know, since like, I know Helium like 20,

2016, 2017 when Manny first started it. Yeah, thanks. A lot of people jump around, I think, and you and I are definitely not in that crowd. We've kind of stuck with our original companies. Last 30 or 60 second strategy for sellers that's something actionable they can work on? I think if you haven't implemented Creator Connections, play with it, for sure. It's no risk. You give a

give 20% commission. You can drive significant sales depending on your product and demand for it. But I think that's really worthwhile to play with this year if you haven't implemented that. And then test out things. Look at your B2B

Look at your B2B placement and sales on your ads and see if you want to increase bids for that low-hanging fruit of things. And of course, I will just add brand tailored promotions, another great way to drive sales if you haven't implemented that.

Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, Iran, thank you so much for joining us. You've been on this show since like 2018 and next year, 2026, we'd love to reach out to you and bring you back to see, I'm sure there's going to be plenty of new stuff to, uh, to talk about. So in the meantime, feel free to keep sending me the incrementum digital swag and I'll be repping it when I can. Amazing. Thank you so much for having me on. Uh, look forward to the next one.