The following is a transcript of Episode 25 of Return on Podcast, the show where we help e-commerce sellers improve their ROI in business and in life. For more episodes, subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen on Podbean, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.
All right. Welcome to Return on Podcast, where we talk about the experiences, the obsessions, and the habits of the most successful e-commerce entrepreneurs. I’m your host, Tyler Jefcoat, and I wanna welcome to this episode of ROP. You know, Amazon bought Whole Foods, right? The big grocery chain, Whole Foods, in 2017 to push its retail and marketplace businesses deeper into the food and beverage industry. Consumables have really been front of mind for Amazon for a while, but that was a tangible, like $13 billion, tangible investment. And Amazon cracking into the space of consumables, of repeat customers, of repurchase intent, and of owning actually the gigantic grocery category. I’m not sure that they’ve gotten to where they’re owning it yet, but they’re making some progress.
This trend was really, in a kind of a fascinating way, accelerated by the pandemic, right? All of a sudden grandma was a little bit more comfortable maybe buying something consumable on Amazon or through a website, and yet, consumables is this kind of every other category that we represent here at Seller Accountant. 2022 has been mostly headwinds, right? Whereas things were really frothy and amazing and profitable over the years of the pandemic, eh, it’s been a little bit more challenging in the last nine months. And so how we drive our marketing strategy, our digital marketing, our paid strategy, whether it’s consumable or not, is a really interesting question that I wanna wrestle with today.
And to wrestle with that question, I wanna bring my friend in, Luke. Luke, you owned a eco D2C, an agency that specializes in driving revenue growth, and you’ve got a really clear focus. You serve all sorts of Amazon and direct consumer brands, but I think the consumable space is an area that you excel in, man. Thanks for joining me today. How are you doing?
Luke Tierney:
Doing great. Thanks for having me.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Yeah, dude. You bet, man. So Luke, I always I love getting to meet with people for this show, and I always say, hey, here’s my friend Luke, but actually Luke, you and I probably meet almost every month to just talk shop and grind away what it looks like to build our businesses. And just to kind of get a little bit of your journey here, at what moment in your life, kid going to a liberal arts college in Indiana, at what point in your life did you decide getting a real job is not an option for me? I gotta go start a business.
Luke Tierney:
So it’s funny you ask that. So I never intended on starting a business, which I feel like a lot of people like you and I say, but I was, two years out of college, I had moved out to Seattle, and I was trying to get, I was, I basically, I was in a situation in which I was trying to get a job working for an environmental consultancy that I had my eyes on there. And I had moved out to that city with the idea of getting involved in something in the consulting, marketing, and that was, Seattle was known, still is known for being like a very like green friendly city and having businesses doing interesting things along those lines.
And what I realized is that I was fighting to get onto a ladder. And it was not gonna be a ladder that I could jump off. It was not gonna be a ladder that I could, you know, I wouldn’t be able to do two years there and then go do travel and do these things that I always wanted to do.
And so I made the decision to basically take up what little money I had at the time. I made a list of things that I wanted to do or learn how to do before I got quote unquote serious. And then I left to go do them. And so one of, one of the things on that list was there was a couple things that were related to, to travel, but I wanted to learn Spanish, wanted to become fluent.
And so I ended up in Colombia and ended up starting my first business there, almost like an opportunity arose and I jumped at it. And then once I discovered that, like that was all she wrote, the rest is history. I didn’t wanna do anything else but build, build things.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Love it. I feel like the, that journey is, you’re right, it is pretty common to be like, yeah, I’m probably gonna get a job. My parents got jobs and people get jobs, and then you realize that, but in order to do what I wanna do, I don’t want be on the, I love that illustration. I don’t wanna be on a ladder that I can’t get off of. I want to build something that I can have some say in. And then the problem becomes once you’ve tasted working for yourself, it’s actually not easy to be a good team player and just be someone’s employee again. You kinda, you catch the bug and it’s kinda hard to turn back, isn’t it?
Luke Tierney:
Yeah, no it blows off the doors of what’s possible, especially if you get like a, an early, like an early success with it, I find. So it’s got like all the bumps in the road, right? Nobody calls it easy, but it’s yeah, once I got a taste of it, there was, it was all, it was all I wanted to do.
Tyler Jefcoat:
So let’s talk about bumps in the road for a minute. So this has been a year, Luke, you and I both have, grateful to say this, we both have successful agency consulting businesses. You serve a lot of e-commerce brands. I serve a lot of e-commerce brands, but damnit, 2022 has been tough. Like, and it’s not tough because we’re like worse at what we’re doing. It’s tough for the same reasons that the listeners of this show have had a tough year. It’s just, there’ve just been headwinds. I got an email from a friend this morning that said he’s suffering wind burn because of so much headwind this year. Right? Now what are you seeing in the market that’s been, I don’t know, a little, I don’t know. How are your customers doing? How is your agency doing? What are you seeing in the market right now?
Luke Tierney:
So I think there’s a lot of things that are happening at once. Like a lot of us know it’s pretty, you can just turn on the news and you can see a lot of the big sort of macro reasons like the economy and supply chain issues. Everybody’s dealing with a lot of the same problems around the world right now. But there’s also a piece of this that is incredibly important, that is not going away, even if the economy turns around, supply chains cleared up tomorrow, and that’s just the way people buy online is changing.
The space has matured, and digging in more is necessary. So I can, I know a lot of social media marketers, for instance, that are yearning for the 2017 days. Or like an, you and I can remember when it was possible to make five figures a month selling HDMI cables on Amazon, right?The space has been, has matured. Like covid might have accelerated some things, but we were already moving in this direction. And so really –
Tyler Jefcoat:
What are you seeing that is changing, like what are some of those pivot points that you’re seeing that, that were like, dang, you can’t just sell HDMI cables and make $20k a month anymore?
Luke Tierney:
Those kinds of brands are erased at the bottom on Amazon now. You need to have a, you need to have a brand. Like brands have a, brands have had to grow up, so to speak, and have to deal with like much larger business problems. Like you don’t see, you don’t see as much content these days about, hey open up like some FBA brand from a supplier found on Alibaba and retire to Costa Rica. You don’t see, like those people are, a lot of that content’s getting laughed at right now, frankly. It’s not to say that you can’t still do it. I don’t want you to go all your friends and be like this guy Luke is just just talking smack. But it’s gotten a lot harder.
The cat was outta the bag on that a couple years ago in terms of people knowing how much opportunity was on Amazon. And so the marketplace has gotten more competitive. The marketplace has gotten more expensive to pay to play, and brands are having to look now at, they’re having to look at incorporating other channels. They’re having to look at omnichannel strategy. Amazon as a platform itself is showing signs of prioritizing organic rank for listings that get converting traffic from external sources. Like we’re looking for hard proof on that. But there’s all of this, there’s a lot of evidence that we’re seeing that we are moving in that direction.
And so then comes the question, how, what other channels are we incorporating? People look to social to, be, for the brand awareness, quote unquote, piece of it. How, what does that actually mean for you? Like how are you measuring that? Like what other channels – regardless of whether Amazon was a small piece that fit into your wider digital marketing strategy before, or whether your business was entirely dependent on it, the way we use these channels is changing, and in order to really find success, you want to dig, you really wanna dig into like true, omnichannel’s a buzzword. But there is a big difference between an omnichannel strategy and a multichannel strategy. Having a cohesive plan, and, really, growing as a business as opposed to having something that’s strictly lifestyle.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Just to make sure, if I heard you right there, were you saying that there’s a difference between multichannel and omnichannel? Is that what you’re saying? There’s a distinction –
Luke Tierney:
Absolutely.
Tyler Jefcoat:
So help me, help our listeners understand that distinction, if you don’t mind.
Luke Tierney:
Yes, absolutely. So a multichannel strategy just means that you’re present in different places and the strategy for each of your channels is very channel specific. It’s a lot of satellites moving and moving in different directions. And an omnichannel strategy is a strategy that actually has a one cohesive overarching strategy that the different channels fit into and a cohesive voice across those channels.
So, for example, if all of your channels are driving traffic to different places, if you’re not really sure like which is fitting into the bottom of your funnel versus upper funnel, if you have maybe you have different marketing partners that are involved and none of them are even like, talking with each other, they’re just like running their own shows, these are examples of multichannel. You’re in multiple places, but customers, depending on where they visit you and how, where they discover you, they might have a pretty broken experience of seeing you on one channel versus the other.
Omnichannel is more, omnichannel is gonna be a lot more centered around having something specific, something cohesive that all of your different advertising channels are getting behind. An easy thing to think of is a new product launch. How are you incorporating Amazon, social, Google, email? There’s a lot of learnings you can spread across different marketplaces in terms of using learnings on one channel to optimize your other channels. Is your website up to snuff in terms of, if you’re priced on Amazon the same as you are on your website, people would rather buy on Amazon, which maybe that’s great.
Maybe that’s exactly where you, what you want to be. But if you’re trying to prioritize your website experience, it needs to be compelling. People need a reason to buy there. Social’s a great place to test creative that you can spread across your other channels. There’s a lot of different examples of what you can use to have one cohesive, overarching strategy instead of, effectively, a bunch of misfits running around, hoping to have success.
Tyler Jefcoat:
So let’s say that a brand woke up today, they’re listening to this podcast, and they’ve decided that they’re a band of misfits. It’s almost, I almost picture this like you’re trying to fight a battle along some kind of a country line, and you either have a coordinated strategy to move your forces forward, or you have a very discombobulated lack of a cohesive strategy, and yet you’re still fighting on multiple fronts, right? I feel like that’s the picture that I got in my mind when you mentioned multichannel versus omnichannel. But Timmy wakes up this morning and says, oh boy, I’m discombobulated. What are some of the tactical steps that, that he could take to make meaningful progress towards being a real omnichannel success story? And yeah, give us some of your thoughts on that front.
Luke Tierney:
Yeah. So first of all, I would highly suggest, there are some aggregated numbers that I would highly suggest looking at. Do you know what your aggregated spend is across channels, and do you know what your aggregated sales is across those channels? And are these things are regularly being looked at? And I, let me dive into why this matters in particular when it comes to talking about social media and driving brand awareness to ideally get sales on Amazon.
Since iOS 14, tracking capabilities have been reduced. Everybody knows that. But what this has meant for a lot of brands is they’re told just to go like, invest in brand awareness. They don’t necessarily have like much of a funnel.
They’re just kind of throwing money at it. And something that we’ve seen a lot on the Amazon side, for instance, is we’ll be humming along doing what we do best, and all of a sudden we’ll see this drop in total sales and in brand interest in branded terms. And then we’ll say well, hold on what happened here? And then, we’ll look for clues in the marketplace, and we get on a call with our partner and then sure enough, they’ll be like, oh yeah social just seemed really nebulous so we just decided to cut it. We decided to cut a budget there. And there’s been no effort to look at what the percentage drop was in Amazon when they did that on their website or anywhere else that they might happen to be.
So it’s never gonna be perfect. Like even if you, like attribution between channels can be tough, and there’s some ways to approach that I’m happy to dive into. What Google, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera, say your numbers are are always gonna be like slightly different if you’re trying to reconcile between platforms, but if you’re not even making an effort, if you don’t even have a plan, then you could be throwing real wrenches into your strategy. Or you could have a strategy that was, on its way to success and you’ve cut it because you weren’t able to tactically, you weren’t able to properly measure it. So that’s one example of one of the elements.
Tyler Jefcoat:
I actually wanna dig in there a little bit, but a comment I wanna make here is as a CFO practitioner, and we’re both serving kind of these same million plus dollar brands that are selling on Amazon, other e-commerce channels, this is why it’s so important for us to measure TACOS, like true TACOS. You mentioned the two variables, actual total variable advertising spend divided by actual total sales across all channels. And I think we can get – this is another siloing faux pas that we can make as brand managers is we can be so focused on ACOS on Amazon, or looking at actual – it’s funny, as soon as you start talking about Facebook, you’re all of a sudden looking at ROAS just for that Facebook spend or something like that. And I think that your comment there is so resonant is that we need to make sure that we understand actual, all in TACOS and that TACOS number is regularly compared to our expected lifetime value of a customer so that we have a strategy that is not just cohesive.
And by the way, this is the, like, other part of this kind of military illustration here, but it can’t just be cohesive across front one and front two, but your like, whatever, your supplying depot that’s bringing in the funding, right? Your finance team, your logistics team, your sourcing team need to all be aligned. At the end of the day, the price of admission is profit. You do have to actually make a living in order for this to be successful. Any other comments about that? And then I wanna ask you about attribution.
Luke Tierney:
Yeah, so I would, so you, you already touched on it. Actually knowing what your LTV and what your repeat customer ratio is on Amazon is some, an awful lot of sellers that we talk with have no idea what this number is because Amazon doesn’t give it to you directly. It takes some kind of tool or partnership like digging on the back end to actually get that, but you can actually get that. So if you dive into the reports, for instance, like you’re not gonna be able to see, just so everybody knows how this is done, at least roughly on the back end. If you dive into the reports, you’re not gonna see your customer’s emails, but there is gonna be like a placeholder email that is unique, and you can see how many times that customer comes back, and you can measure that over time.
As you’re thinking about allocating your budget and what your ACOS, your TACOS, I’ve also heard, I’ve heard people refer to this as LACOS, like lifetime ACOS, so to speak. If your repeat customer rate is really high, which, if your brand happens to be a repeat consumable, you mentioned we work with a lot of food and beverage brands, a lot of them ride or die based on those numbers, right? If you do have a high repeat customer rate, and you’re looking for growth, you might actually have more room to grow there than you thought.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Well, and I think, by the way, for anyone listening to this who’s selling kind of a, more of a traditional, not a supplement or not a repeat customer centric brand, don’t let that point fall on deaf ears here. Like it’s, you may be wanting to spend a hundred percent of the sale price of the product to acquire the customer. You may be happy to spend a ton of money in ads up front if you have conviction that the customer’s gonna purchase it 10 times over the course of three years, or something like that. And so this idea, like that math, that assumption that, Luke, that you’re talking about there of, what is the actual LTV of my customer, given the limited data set that I have within Amazon or any other channel, that – I’ve never heard of a LACOS, but I think that’s crucial and that’s what we try to, I didn’t know to call with that.
That’s what we try to measure at Seller Account and to be like, okay. If we decided that your acceptable TACOS is 10% of the sale price because you sell a hundred dollar product and here’s your profit level, but now we understand that you’re gonna have 2.5 purchases lifetime from a customer. Okay, now we can go calculate a total expected profit for all whatever, two point whatever purchases, and therefore we can afford to spend more than 10% on the ads. We can spend 20% because now we’re gonna buy the customer and get a repeat purchase. And this goes back to your comment on the omnichannel strategy where this is why, if you spend that extra money, if you decide to spend double the TACOS, double the advertising to acquire that customer, and you don’t have a coordinated repeat purchase retargeting campaign on the back end, you’re throwing that money away, right? I’m sure that’s really crucial for your customers.
Luke Tierney:
Yeah, absolutely.
Tyler Jefcoat:
So pivoting directly into the consumable, what are you learning about being successful selling a repeat – we’ve obviously talked about LTV, that’s crucial, aligning your ad budget with your LTV. But what else are you learning about making a consumable or food or beverage business successful, either direct to consumer or on Amazon?
Luke Tierney:
Well, a lot of it falls into the same things that will make any other seller successful in Amazon. I mean, there are some notable differences in the food and beverage space, namely that, even post pandemic, some two thirds of all grocery – well upwards of that, so over 70% of grocery purchases still happen in store.
So your advertising mix is different. The way it fits into your overall strategy might be different. You have a lot more digital first brands that might not even be focused on brick and mortar. It’s its own kind of animal. But at the end of the day, we’re still launching, testing, iterating, getting feedback, especially in the early days, just making sure that you can be nimble, taking advantage of all the opportunities that Amazon has to offer in terms of measuring up your space.
We talk with a lot of – and this will circle back around to omnichannel strategy. It’s pretty common for us to have brands approach us these days. And they’re always, it’s always some version of like, we’re trying to crack the code on Amazon. We feel like we haven’t cracked the code. I feel like spending a thousand dollars a day is not too much to ask. Like, why can’t my provider just get us there like tomorrow? And what it comes back down to a lot is, for a lot – we’re bottom up, top down advocates in terms of, build the bottom of your funnel first and then allocate, if you can get that portion of the funnel. And this is regardless, by the way, whether it’s Amazon, whether it’s Google, whether it’s Facebook, whether it’s another platform. If you can get the bottom of your funnel built out, if you can get your PPC campaigns like, working really well at a high ROAS, then, or even like a basic level of decent performance, then you can start investing in some of the upper level stuff.
And the way that we like to connect this across channels is, people ask, typically this is framed in, what platform should we be on, like Amazon versus Facebook versus Google versus all these others? Where I would say the better question is, first of all, how are you building your funnel? Whether it’s in the way that we are advocating or not. Then start to drop in the different channels. Like it’s still likely gonna be Amazon in terms of where the most opportunities at the bottom of your funnel, but are you just trying to like scale on Amazon as fast as you can so you can justify like DSP, or are you also thinking about other channels that you can bring into the mix to really flesh out the bottom of your funnel before you start investing in like programmatic before you’re ready and waste a ton of money.
Tyler Jefcoat:
For consumable D2C brands, I’m just, I was curious you just brought up Amazon’s probably still, and by the way, this is probably true for every category. You’re still gonna get a better ROAS on Amazon normally than you will in almost any other channel, especially as an unknown kind of new brand because Amazon still has the eyeballs that are having purchase intent behind those eyeballs. And so we may get mad at Bezos because he gets a bunch of our money, but he still delivers, I believe it’s still five times the ROAS of a cold start Facebook campaign or cold start Google campaign. My question is who’s number two right now? For like a consumables brand – all right. I’ve built my bottle of funnel. I’ve got Amazon as dialed in as I can right now, I’m ready to start pivoting omni. Where do you go next first? Is it Facebook? Is it Google? Is it something else? Does it depend on the brand? Like how do you guys approach that?
Luke Tierney:
It’s gonna depend on the brand and where the customers are. So the way that we like to think through that is, if this was a couple of years ago, then I would’ve said number two is probably like Facebook, Instagram, right? The social media channel that’s right for you is gonna depend on what kind of brand you have, which demographic is properly makes up your customer base, but since tracking got a little bit more complex, I would say that in our space it’ll often be, I’m gonna exclude Instacart from this conversation because we wanna keep it to wider e-commerce and that’s more relevant to brick and mortar, but we, it’s usually Amazon and then either social or Google, I would say.
And I’m speaking in really broad generalities here, the difference being, if you’re in an established category, and there’s a lot of search for it already, then Google’s a really great place to start. A lot of the same rules are gonna apply there as Amazon. Social media is gonna be a lot more, it’s more interruptive kind of marketing, right? And you’re going to get a lot of people who are more like browsing, right? They’re, they were checking something else out, and you’ve piqued their interest. So if you’re in a category that’s like new, if you have a innovative product, if you’re trying to, test messaging and like gauge interest and things like this, like social media’s still awesome for these things.
But if you’re walking into a category that is more established and has the search, then I would say, I would certainly say Google is ideally – you’re testing all of these and seeing, you’re testing all these, you have attribution properly, you know, as set up as well as you can, and you’re allocating budget accordingly as you go. But those would be, those are the first places we typically look.
Tyler Jefcoat:
By the way, hearing you articulate that, I’ve never really thought about it quite like this. Tell me if I’m, tell me if I’m wrong here, cause I might be misstating this. But like, if I’m imagining kind of a bigger picture of a funnel, obviously Amazon’s as close to the bottom of the funnel as possible, and your purchase intent for someone who looks up on the app as a Prime member is very high. And I just always clumped Google and social as the rest of the funnel. But it actually might be more that Google is more middle funnel, right? Like they’ve at least heard of the category, they know enough to, to Google it and are doing research. Their purchase intent may, is almost always gonna be lower than if they’re on Amazon.
But that makes sense that if you’re doing bottom up, you would probably go Google second. Unless you’re hoping to be more disruptive, it’s a less well known. There’s not as much current search volume, and then that, here’s a new cool thing that you’ve never heard of before is gonna be a TikTok video, is gonna be a YouTube short that’s, hey, I never knew you could do this for your cat. Now you can.
I had a client last month, Luke, that had a totally random TikTok person put a video out that generated like a 10x to their product on Amazon overnight. And we were like, holy cow, how did that happen? And it was because there was a problem that existed, but there, no one knew what to call it. They didn’t understand that there was like a thing, and the social media created that top of funnel awareness that there’s a new category in my universe that is, I can solve this problem. Is that, would you describe Google as being more mid funnel then in that regard?
Luke Tierney:
So when we approach it from – the way that we approach it from the omnichannel perspective is that each one of these platforms has ways of using it that’s more bottom, middle or top. So on Amazon, like your very bottom of the funnel is gonna be your sponsored product campaigns, like your certain like sponsored brand campaigns, and then if you’re going like upper, if we’re just start getting a little further out, then we’re getting display. And if we’re going, really upper funnel, then we’re getting into DSP and programmatic.
You have similar dynamics happening on Google, Facebook, and other platforms, right? Like you’re still gonna have to choose which platforms you’re going to play on first or how you’re gonna prioritize them. But if we’re just running, like video on social media tends to be a little bit more to your point, like upper funnel and drive awareness. Your retargeting campaigns are probably gonna be your highest, like directly converting campaigns on social media. Like, probably. I am, again, speaking in broad strokes, but. You can operate this way where each channel operates in just one piece of your funnel.
But what I’m suggesting is that, the pyramid actually has there’s a lot of overlap there. There’s the bottom of the funnel ways that you use all these channels. There’s a middle funnel way to use all of them. There’s an upper funnel way to use all of ’em.
Tyler Jefcoat:
It completely makes sense. That’s actually much clearer. Thank you. All right, so I wanna end our, the part of our discussion that’s on business tactics here with a, with maybe one more kind of shot at kind of a tactical, practical here. Luke, if you were gonna be speaking to a brand owner that’s listening to this show and we’re gonna say, okay, some of this stuff has resonated. Give me like, bro, gimme like one or two nuggets that I can go take action on next week that might move the needle in the quest to either coordinate my strategy or be more successful off Amazon. Does anything pop in your head that might be that summative or summation of the things that somebody ought to take away and try to do in the next few weeks?
Luke Tierney:
Yep. So one thing that we are enjoying from a tactical perspective is we’re making efforts to build little Amazon armies for brands that are off platform whenever we can. So what we mean by that is so we have Amazon attribution now. Posting attribution links directly into social media campaigns and things like this, we still find to be like painfully inaccurate a lot of the time, or at least difficult. So there’s a couple of workarounds that we’ve been focusing on, and again, this is all gonna depend on what you’re trying to do, but we like to create, we’ll put a landing page between the external campaign and your Amazon listing. So the attribution link will be on the landing page, and there’ll be some kind of offer on the landing page to try to capture an email, which of course is not something we know on Amazon.
So if we can get between the customer and Amazon even a little bit, and we can get an email list that we can retarget, we can get, frankly, more accurate attribution data by setting it up this way. Then will some people fall off because they have an extra thing in their way? Yes. But we’re also gonna be sending more qualified traffic to the Amazon’s listings. I can’t imagine that Amazon is prioritizing listings for organic rank. They’re already getting, that gets traffic that doesn’t convert. It just doesn’t make, that’s just not how the platform works. So if you can dial that in and if you can get external traffic helping your listings in a variety of ways, and you can create this off-platform audience that you can use for new product launches, that you can send out emails to whenever there’s a Prime Day happening or the holidays or whatever peak season event you have, then you have an asset that you can use to great effect on the marketplace, which is something that’s really valuable.
People have been frustrated, sellers have been frustrated forever because of their lack of control and ability to do this with their audience on Amazon. So we’ve been investing a fair amount in strategies along those lines and have been seeing some good results.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Pretty interesting ’cause I meant to come back to attribution earlier and that was, we all know this is true, and it’s not easy, but it’s worth it, the effort to try our best engineer, customer ownership into our funnel. And by the way, initially this will be at the cost of some efficiency, like where if you introduce a landing page into the middle of your ad stream, you are going to lose conversion. Therefore, your price per conversion is gonna go up.
But at some point early in our iteration, getting to that 10, 15, 20,000 emails that we can then interact with a relationship with our customers, I think that’s pretty, pretty – and it’s almost never been more valuable. It’s funny, there was a few years ago, Luke, where people were saying, “this doesn’t really matter anymore. Don’t worry about emails.” But I disagree. I think one of the most powerful assets we can have as a brand, especially as we look to actually build a brand, is a relationship with customers that allows us to launch new products, solicit feedback should we need it, that kind of thing. And yeah. Anything else? Any other anecdotes related to attribution that you think would be pertinent?
Luke Tierney:
I think that’s the big one when it comes to Amazon is just making sure that you are tracking, you are able to track as much as you can the trafficking conversions that are coming to your platform from these external sources and being able to do it accurately.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Do you have a favorite tool, by the way? Do you have a favorite, like, if we’re trying to do omnichannel attribution, here’s a gadget that’s out there that you guys ought to take a look at. Is there anything that pops in your mind when I ask that question?
Luke Tierney:
There are multichannel, like attribution, like tools out there, but they’re expensive and frankly, we haven’t used them. Like I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending one. I do, like I –
Tyler Jefcoat:
But that’s helpful by the way. You can save us a lot of money if the pro that uses this for a lot of brands is like, yeah, I’d be careful not to spend 500 bucks a month on a tool like that. That’s helpful.
Luke Tierney:
Yeah, I mean it’s the thing is multichannel attribution is inherently gonna be messy. The numbers from platforms don’t line up. Like Amazon’s own internal reporting doesn’t line up to itself like constantly. Getting into it knowing that it’s important, but knowing it’s gonna be messy is a pretty important – you wanna manage your expectations there, but it doesn’t, it’s gonna be impossible to measure how your other activities are really shaping up for the big picture unless you’re taking a look at the mix all combined.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Love it. A takeaway here and then we’re gonna pivot to a couple of fun topics here is interesting. But this is a year where there are some headwinds. The market’s a little weird. The capital markets related to acquiring Amazon businesses are not as rosy as they were a year ago, and as a result, this discussion, Luke, that you and I are having is another step in the kind of drum I’ve been beating this summer to say, this is the time to invest in your brand and in driving future value for your brand. And one of the things that we as a population neglected when things were so easy on Amazon during the heat of the pandemic was we neglected some of these infrastructure builds that you’re alluding to. Let’s make sure we understand all three phases of our funnel for different channels, that we have a coordinated strategy, that we are fighting for customer information and fighting for attribution, knowing that it’s imperfect and now’s the time to invest while the market’s weird.
You’re not gonna sell your business for maximum multiple right now. You’re gonna need to spend, if you have cash flow, you may wanna invest a little bit more in building the future so that when the sun comes back out again, which it will, you’re gonna be in a position to get maximum value on the market for your brand. Any other comments about brand building before we pivot here?
Luke Tierney:
No. Just good luck to everybody out there fighting the good fight. Like now’s one of the times to hang in there. The landscape is always changing, and there’s always – are there other channels that are like, everybody wants to know more about TikTok these days, right? And if TikTok’s right for your brand, then fantastic. That’s a whole conversation. There are ways to dig into a lot of these major platforms and get more out of them. But it’s, it will take, it, it takes bringing the whole team into the room. It takes, aligning around a particular strategy. But there, there is still room to grow even in, even in the midst of headwinds. It just requires the crew working a little closer together to extend the metaphor.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Love it. Love it. All right, so wild left field pivot here. This is really useful. Hope you guys took some nuggets out of that. Luke, tell us about the time, I wanna hear this story. I may have to keep this kinda quick, but I wanna hear the story about how you went looking for wild African hippos in the Colombian jungle and found them. Tell us what was going on there, man.
Luke Tierney:
So this was satisfying because a lot of people didn’t think that we’d actually be able to do it, but it’s – my story with this begins like some time ago but the full back story is that unfortunately, this is like another Pablo Escobar-caused problem. He had a zoo, and when he was killed, they took away most of the animals, but hippos are the most violent – not the most violent. I think they kill the most, more people than like any animal. I think more than any mammal, at least, in like the world. Like they they’re enormous, they swim quickly, when they run on land, like, they’re like as fast as a person. And they’re really territorial, so if one of them is chasing you, like it’s a race. They look big and clumsy and they’re not. Or they look clumsy and they’re not. They definitely are huge.
And so Escobar gets killed. He has four hips that he left behind, one male, three females. Now there’s over 60 of these things, just like they got out, and they’re just roaming around the jungle in the mountains of Columbia. Just an objectively ridiculous situation. It’s a classic invasive species situation. So when I was in college, I had a scholarship working with an environmental center back at that time. And so I had to kill a lot of really boring plants. Just invasive species like wisteria and English ivy and things that, you know, I’d just walk around with some other college students in the same, who had the same gig, and we would clear the area of these things. Really, really repetitive, really boring work. So when I found that there was an invasive species that were hippos, I had to go check it out.
Tyler Jefcoat:
You gotta jump all over that. Yeah.
Luke Tierney:
Yeah. So me and a good friend essentially just caught a bus to this town that was like nearby. We found a couple of like, we went to the one hotel that had like little pedal bikes that you could rent and then just like biked all over the jungle until we found them. So there’s 14 of them. They’re in a lake. Like they, they were yawning, which I found out later is like a sign of aggression, but you could fit like a body in there like easily. But yeah, they’re living their best hippo lives, like free of any of the dangers that they would face back in Africa.
So it’s a ticking time bomb in terms of when this will cause a problem, but it was, yeah, it was satisfying to find ’em ’cause a lot of people doubted we would. But it’s just this, it’s a funny metaphor for Escobar’s like legacy in a certain way because nobody knows what to do with ’em. Like the Army came in and shot one and then people got upset and protested outside the National Congress wearing animal masks and playing the Lion King soundtrack, and that worked somehow. Like the animals are just multiplying and not getting touched. So it’s just this, it’s this problem that nobody knows how to deal with, but at some point, they’re gonna have to – I don’t think it’s killed anybody in the local town yet, but it’s, there’s videos of these things just walking through the main street.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Wow, that’s amazing. What an absurd, amazing story there, Luke. That’s, I really think you – thank you for sharing that with us, man. Alright. Final segment. Every episode we end with the, we call it the return on podcast. We’re gonna try to grab the essence of James Clear’s Atomic Habits. You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you’re gonna fall to the level of your habits. So here’s my question. Is there a habit, hack, tactic, practice that’s given you an absurd, an equally, a hippo-sized return on investment?
Luke Tierney:
I meditate almost daily in the mornings, and I get the most out of it when I’m doing it daily. I like to use Sam Harris’ Waking Up app, and just making a habit out of not only meditating, but also digging into some of the more like, mindful content is something that I just personally found to be like really useful. Just one example recently of something that’s been impactful was a mini series called Time Management for Mortals. And as somebody who’s been obsessed with productivity hacks at different points in time, just to listen to content that makes, like that make a lot of really good points.
But there’s this idea that if only we can optimize enough that we’ll get there, wherever that is, like we’ll be able to do it all. And just to return to the lesson of like, that’s false, right? Like the way that you get places is by really focusing on the couple things that matter. There’s always gonna be too much that is worth doing to do both in business and life. Having a practice that, just the base of meditation, but also like making time in my like day to day and week to week for, things that help clear my head more than just the sitting down for 20 to 30 minutes a day has really done a lot for my sanity.
Tyler Jefcoat:
That’s so well said. I have nothing to add to that because every word of that was very well stated. It isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing the right things and focusing. I hope you guys rewind that and listen to Luke’s comments. Luke, thank you my friend. I will make sure that your website is posted in the show notes, but just really quick, I just wanna make sure people grab this. Like who out there listening to this needs to reach out to you and learn more about what you guys do for sellers and brand owners?
Luke Tierney:
So we get particularly excited about working with mission driven brands, hence our branding. But really anybody listening to this who cares to reach out and talk about some of the things that we’ve hashed over today, whether it’s larger omnichannel strategy or just how to squeeze a bit more out of the marketplace and really size up whether or not you’re taking advantage of as much opportunity as your brand has on Amazon right now. More than happy to talk with you. You can reach me at luke@ecod2c.com.
Tyler Jefcoat:
Awesome, dude. Yeah, and again, we’ll make sure those links and the website and whatnot are in the notes. Luke, you’re the man. Thanks for joining me today on the show.
Luke Tierney:
Thanks, Tyler.
Tyler Jefcoat:
All right. Hey, and guys, we say this every week and I really mean it. Anyone who makes it 40 plus minutes into this pod, I just wanna say thank you. Luke and I are grateful. Your time is valuable. Hope you’ve grabbed a couple nuggets that serve you, and with that, we’ll go ahead and pivot for the day. Until next time, I hope you kill it. Take care.