Editor’s Note: Rachel Johnson helps our clients give juice to their sales on Amazon with our Brand Fuel service. We have seen eye-popping results from $8K a month to $1M+ in just six months for some brands. Sales growth is the primary reason brands seek us out, but many also discover that their businesses overall improve – a virtuous cycle we love.
Brand Fuel is one of several strategic services eGrowth Partners offer sellers to help them manage their businesses from hiring Seller Central-trained (by us) full-time workers to high-volume inventory logistics, to account compliance due diligence on business buy-sell transactions. From the beginning, my goal was to help Amazon sellers succeed on the platform in a compliant way.
Reinstatement will always be important at eGrowth, but our clients needed more.
Growing with an Amazon Consulting Partner
One of the most common issues our clients have when they first come to us is that they are doing too much in their business, and do not have the time to work on their business. We hear, “I would like to be able to focus on the larger decisions while knowing that the day-to-day operations are being cared for properly.”
When we work with a client for Brand Fuel, we have two areas that we excel in. The first is high quality marketing that combines the keywords most likely to get clicks and rank for a particular product along with the image and text that are most likely to convince the right customer to buy and the wrong customer to walk away. The second is a consistent and reliable team in the Philippines that requests negative feedback removal, notifies us of stranded inventory issues, highlights potential performance problems, and more.
Let us look at 9 ways that Brand Fuel helps relieve your day-to-day work crunch and allows you to be more organized and grow your business!
1. We use Teamwork for increased productivity.
Our project management tool, Teamwork®*, is a project management tool on steroids. It manages tasks and milestones and has an in-system communication system and the ability to track files, notes and time tracking. We use it to manage our projects and to manage client and third-party support interactions.
You can see exactly what we are working on, exactly when items are due, and whatever notes and files we are working on.
2. We plan, so we know what matters.
Every quarter, we prepare a plan for your project that includes strategic tasks to meet revenue goals, specific project goals, and other metrics. These might be increasing conversion rates on specific ASINs by 2% or 5%, etc.
By focusing on high level goals, you move your business forward. It can be easy to miss growth opportunities when you are in the weeds all day every day.
3. We are experts and help you make decisions faster.
When you do not know what you do not know, it is much easier to make mistakes.
In 2002, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld famously said, “Reports that say that something has not happened are always interesting to me because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we do not know we do not know. If one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult one.”
While he was talking about national security and the potential threat of weapons of mass destruction, it is not a distant analogy to think of some unknown unknowns that can result in the takedown of your Amazon account, effectively torpedoing your years of hard work.
We know what is happening with Amazon. Whenever something new happens, because we have hundreds of clients we work with every year, we learn about the new issue very quickly and can start formulating potential solutions before you even know that a problem exists.
We try to be as self-sufficient as possible when working with our clients. We work with you to get images, invoices, certificates and more and store them securely in our drive so that our team can handle as much as possible without contacting you.
Our goal is to be an extension of your business, not add more work to your plate.
To be fair… it usually takes a bit of extra work up front to create the SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), set up the drive files, and standardize organization so that the work can be offloaded.
We have yet to onboard a client who created these SOPs in advance!
5. We use all traffic options to grow your brand faster.
While we first started as exclusive to Amazon, we now also grow your business on Walmart.com and drive traffic to your listings via Facebook and Google. By growing your traffic through multiple channels, you can effectively out-compete your competitors who are only driving traffic using their Amazon channels.
Need to figure out which customer avatar is most likely to convert on Amazon? We do that. Need to figure out which video storyboard gets the best click through rate and the best conversion rate on the page? We do that too.
We drive traffic and optimize the amount you spend at the same time in one of the least data rich e-commerce environments.
6. We value your data and privacy.
We never discuss your personal data or business information with any other clients, the press, in a blog post, etc., without your permission.
We have contracts with our clients that include mutual non-disclosure provisions because your data is important to you, so it is important to us.
7. We meet with you regularly, so you know what is going on.
During the first part of your retainer project with us, we meet by phone weekly, sometimes even more often.
It is critical that we get solid guidance from you and feedback on our project together, just as if you hired a new employee. Because there are quite a lot of us on the team, it does take a little while to get to know each other and what everyone does.
After a few months, we back off from the regular meetings and reduce to every couple of weeks or once a month, generally along with daily updates via email.
There is never a point at which you do not have access to your Teamwork project or cannot see what we are working on. Your assigned project manager is your liaison with the Brand Fuel team who will always make sure you are on track with us.
8. We provide complete transparency.
By logging our time in our Teamwork project, you can see exactly what your consultants are working on.
While we do not track our operations team this way, you can see exactly what marketing projects are being managed for you, and you can feel free to ask any questions you may have.
Why do we do this?
It is well known that certain shadier companies make the choice to get into consulting simply because they “know more” than their client and are notorious for padding hours or outright fabricating what they are working on.
We take integrity seriously and will always be transparent with you about your projects.
9. We obsess over Amazon so you don't have to.
We go to every big show – and often speak at them. We are writing books, writing blogs, listening to podcasts, guest speaking on podcasts – we live, breathe, and sleep Amazon every day all the time.
We know as soon as there are new beta releases or new pages on Seller Central. Just this week Brand Catalog popped up in Seller Central, showing the current star ratings of all the branded products in your account, finally making it easy to see that information all in one place.
We obsess over Amazon features, procedures and behaviors, so you can focus on growing your business.
Our Ideal Partner for Marketing Success on Amazon
Businesses that are a good fit for us usually have the following profile; they are ready to hire an e-commerce manager:
- Startups with sufficient investment capital to spend for up to year on advertising and marketing before getting a return on investment
- Existing wholesale businesses looking for marketing support and advertising support while building their own label or new wholesale partnerships
- Businesses that have been growing but are starting to pivot to other opportunities such as growing their website, getting into wholesale, etc., and need support with Amazon
- Owners who are particularly interested in one element of managing their business, such as product development or marketing, but need help with other aspects of their business
If you are looking for a partner to help you who cares about growing your business within Amazon Terms of Service, if you are ready to delegate tasks to a partner so you can spend time growing your business the way you want to, then Brand Fuel might be the right option for you.
Note from Cynthia: Rachel did not mention that the Brand Fuel team consists of former Amazonians who literally helped create Amazon’s PPC program. They understand it in a way few outside consultants ever will.
*We receive no commission for this recommendation. Teamwork is our project management tool of choice. Please don’t send me requests to review or mention your software. That’s not what this blog is about.
