#124 – How to Brand Your Amazon Business to Get Noticed Both On and Off-Amazon

In eCommerce, a strong product launch can mean the difference between a brand that you can easily scale-up and one that you might have to later put aside.

Today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton speaks with Meny Hoffman, the founder of an eCommerce branding and marketing firm. Meny offers expert advice on how to brand your business in ways that have allowed some of his clients to very successfully launch products with just a handful of reviews. He also has some great ideas about how to create a brand that can help start the calls coming from big-box retailers looking for next great product.

Who doesn’t like the idea of expanding your base by connecting with buyers on Amazon as well as retailers? Listen in to find out more.

In episode 124 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Meny discuss:

• 01:07 – Meny’s Origin Story
• 02:30 – An Early Love of Entrepreneurship and Creating Things
• 04:00 – Meny’s Beginnings with eCommerce
• 07:00 – Witnessing Client’s Concerns at Ground Zero
• 08:27 – What Does “Building a Brand” Mean?
• 10:05 – Defining a Brand
• 12:05 – Determining Your Brand Identity
• 14:20 – Digital Activation
• 15:20 – Telling a Story
• 17:10 – Optimizing for Progress
• 19:00 – Finding a Common Denominator
• 21:00 – “Am I in This for the Long Run?”
• 24:00 – High Quality Brands Can Sometimes Sell Without Reviews
• 29:00 – Bradley’s Search Game 
• 31:42 – Meny’s 30 Second Tip
• 32:42 – How to Reach Out to Meny

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today, we’re going to hear expert advice about how using effective branding can allow companies to launch products with just a handful of reviews and help get your product noticed by big-box retailers. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m 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 eCommerce world. We’ve got a serious seller on the line with us today. Meny, how’s it going?

Meny Hoffman: Good. Thank you for having me.

Bradley Sutton: All right, well, let’s hop right into it. We’ve actually met in person before, but this’ll be the first time that most of our audience are meeting you. And I don’t know too much about your backstory. I purposely try not to do research beforehand because I like to be surprised with everybody else about how cool your origin story is. Let’s just start. Where did you grow up?

Meny Hoffman: Brooklyn, New York.

Bradley Sutton: Brooklyn, New York, and what part?

Meny Hoffman: It’s Williamsburg.

Bradley Sutton: I used to live very close, Brooklyn Heights. I lived there for a couple of years.

Meny Hoffman: Yeah, sure. Okay. We’d say that Williamsburg is basically the cooler place outside of Manhattan now.

Bradley Sutton: There you go. There you go. Now, is it true that that’s the zip code where something crazy like 10% of Amazon sales all come from one zip code in Brooklyn? Or is that true or is that an urban legend?

Meny Hoffman: Yeah, I think the number that’s circling is 7%, but it’s still a huge number.

Bradley Sutton: That’s crazy. That’s great. You grew up in Brooklyn. Now, are you a pizza fan? 

Meny Hoffman: A pizza fan? Yeah, with a lot of cheese.

Bradley Sutton: Juliana’s or a Grimaldi’s pizza. 

Meny Hoffman: None of those just because we eat kosher.

Bradley Sutton: No kosher over there then.

Meny Hoffman: Yeah.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. All right. Will you take me to some kosher pizza when I go to Brooklyn next?

Meny Hoffman: Absolutely. We’ll take you to some cool places.

Bradley Sutton: Excellent. Now, when you were growing up there in Brooklyn, how did you envision your professional career? I mean, were you one of the kids who wanted to be a firefighter, or did you already know you wanted to be an entrepreneur at an early age? How did that work out for you?

Meny Hoffman: Absolutely. My first business card I had when I was 13 years old. I still have it in my office, and I show it to people. I loved creating stuff; from the early years when kids in my grade were playing games and card games on the computer, I was creating stuff. I’m the kid with the lemonade stand; let’s put it that way.

Bradley Sutton: Love it. Love it. Now, upon graduation in high school, did you attend any college or university?

Meny Hoffman: No. I believe that once you follow your passion, you’re going to learn. I’m a strong believer in education as a whole, but I feel that as you grow and you find your passion, you find out what you want to do, and then you learn the skills that you need as you continue to grow.

Bradley Sutton: What was your first real job would you say?

Meny Hoffman: Sure. Obviously, after I got married, I wanted to start doing something. I started off actually, well at that point, it’s actually now getting to be 20 years. I had a friend of mine, a partner, still my partner, that was in the printing business. And I said, “I see things are happening online and the future of everything shopping will be online.” And we actually opened up a printing website. That was the first gig that we did together.

Meny Hoffman: And I remember going to my father and speaking to him about this idea, and he said, “Who wants to print off a website? I have my local print shop; I’ll go into that print shop; I’ll show them what I want.” And I said, “Thank you.” And then a few days later, or a few months later actually, I came back and said, “Okay, here’s the website domain name if you want to check out my website.” I did build a website, and that was the beginning of what’s now Ptex Group.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. You got into e-commerce right away then?

Meny Hoffman: Yeah. it’s obviously not the typical e-commerce that you are seeing today, because it’s quoting; it’s a service business. People will actually just submit their artwork or request for a quote, but it’s still something that it’s very prominent to our business now.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. At any point, as you were doing this business with your partner, did you start selling physical products as opposed to just kind of like a service?

Meny Hoffman: Throughout the years we’ve been very much involved in different ventures as a company grew. And I’m the type of person that if people come to me for education and people want our expertise in any industry, I would love to learn it. My first interaction, I know a lot of the listeners are Amazon sellers. My first interaction with Amazon was I started hearing the buzz again and again and again: Amazon, Amazon, people are selling on Amazon. At that point, it wasn’t private label; it was all trying to arbitrage or just finding good closeouts and putting it up there. And I literally wanted to test the market.

Meny Hoffman: I actually went on the first website which came to mind. I love Staples as a brand. Went on Staples. I saw something on special. I bought 10 printers, and I wanted to put it on Amazon. And I remember the first day they arrived at my office and one of my employees were asking me like, “Are you a replacing all the printers in the office?” I said, “No, I actually want to test Amazon, because I want to be knowledgeable in that field.” And that’s how I put it up. I sold it, shipped them out, and then obviously, the last couple of years, we’ve been very aggressively involved with some of our clients on the product branding side, understanding how they’re doing it and the consultancy side and on the execution, which is actual work we do for them. I’m very much involved in seeing what’s selling, how people approach their business, and what they’re actually doing.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. You deal with a lot of Amazon sellers, but other than those 10 printers, I mean, did you ever start like your own brand on Amazon? Private Label?

Meny Hoffman: We’ve been involved. Meaning to say we had certain partnerships, which we didn’t do the execution, we didn’t do the development, but I was involved in every single step of it, and I still am. I know all the bells and whistles, all the ropes, and what people need to look out for and how to actually build a successful Amazon business.

Bradley Sutton: You’re kind of like me back in the day, before I worked at Helium 10. I probably had the skill set. I could do my own private label and build a big brand and everything, but I was content with just helping others to do it. And also, maybe the ceiling is not as high, but because it’s not my own brand, but at the same time, the floor is not as low, you know?

Meny Hoffman: Yeah. And what I did last year, I actually flew to China. I wanted to see it, the manufacturing process. When I speak to my clients, and I see what they’re going through and the challenges they’re having, I wanted to see it close up. When we do consulting, I think this is very important. Any type of service provider, they need to be able to understand this from the client’s perspective and what they’re actually doing on a daily basis. The consultancy and the advice, it has way more meaning.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, absolutely. I remember you’ve talked to me about this even last year, that for you, one of your passions is brand building, and the importance of it. And there’s no one exact way to do things. For example, if somebody is just doing the wholesale model of Amazon, obviously they don’t have to worry too much about the brand. You know, that’s more of the brand owner’s responsibility, and other times people just might want to just do the niche, really niche products, that one-offs like fidget spinners and just capitalize on it or masks like right now or eclipse sunglasses. Well, yeah, it probably is not necessary to make a brand. However, in your experience, I know you’ve worked with a lot of Amazon sellers who have built brands. And so that was kind of like what I wanted to talk to you a little bit about. First of all, can you explain just what that means? You know, we use that term all the time “building a brand,” but what is Meny’s definition of what building a brand, first of all, even means?

Meny Hoffman: Perfect. I do want to make this introduction because I think in this conversation we’ve had so much content out there and on different occasions, different years, different timing stuff of the Amazon journey, so to speak. I always tell my clients the following, when I meet with the people. The first statement I always say: if you’re looking to capitalize on Amazon as your platform, which means I want to make some quick money. I want to get in there, make some money, and maybe take that money and invest in something else. If it doesn’t work out long term, then probably you should just learn the algorithm. You use the Helium 10 tools, figure it out, find a product, and just do it. Rinse and repeat again and again and again. If you’re looking to build a brand, which means you’re seeing for the foreseeable future, this is the market I want to be in, then this conversation needs to be that I’m building a brand, my distribution channel is Amazon, because if not, nothing of what I’m going to be sharing with you will make as much sense if you don’t have that immediate distinction between what are you actually doing? Am I an Amazon seller or I am a brand owner with my distribution channel as Amazon? And what I’m going to be sharing with you now, I’m not sure exactly how much time we’ll have, but I’ll try to pack in as much value as I can with which is called our playbook. We’ve built now over 200 brands throughout the years, and a lot of them never sold on Amazon, and they’re all in big-box retailers or direct-to-consumer on B to C, and a lot of them are very successful on Amazon. And what we found, what we do, actually, I want to share it with you.

Meny Hoffman: Whoever’s listening to it should just pay attention to how I define a brand. A brand is everything. The brand is not nice packaging; brand is everything that you get in touch with your end consumer, which is the expectations, the memories, the positioning of what you actually want the person should feel when they come in touch with your brand. And when you build a brand, when you do that, automatically, everything you do has to sink in. And what I’d like to say is when you build a foundation of a brand, and let’s take this typical example that everybody is familiar with, Starbucks. Okay, they sell coffee, which the cup of coffee still needs to be the product. Well, the positioning of the brand is all about the experience you have by shopping and buying Starbucks coffee.

Meny Hoffman: Then, you have Dunkin Donuts. They also sell coffee to a certain extent, sometimes even more than Starbucks. But their positioning is all about the convenience. As soon as you have that positioning, it turns everything. What products, what price point you need to be, what type of marketing initiatives you need to do. Yes, of course, you’re going to take money from any customer who walks into your store. Who do I need to make sure is pleased? Who do I need to make sure that I need to keep the momentum going in brand loyalty with? Those are the people that actually fit with my positioning. But that’s the foundation of every brand.

Bradley Sutton: This kind of has to be kind of decided upon maybe even before you source your product, because your brand is going to guide that process then, right?

Meny Hoffman: We can speak about the six, and then we could then we could come back to this discuss like as a listener to the show. If somebody is already selling on Amazon, how they could actually apply it even if they are already at the later stage in the process. But let’s first speak about branding, in general, which is the first thing is finding your purpose, which is the foundation of your brand.

Meny Hoffman: The second step is the identity. Now, identity means that every touch point with your brand, which is your logo, your packaging, your identity, your patterns, everything you do, your photography; everything you do on a visual perspective, it needs to match up. And the problem I see a lot with brands is they have that purpose and they have that passion, they have that foundation, but then they go to a graphic designer to do just a nice packaging for them. And then there’s a huge disconnect. If the positioning is you want to be in the pro-line and you want to be something, you want to be really a hip brand, or you want to be a mommy brand, whatever you want to be, what the purpose is, and what you’re solving, it needs to match up with your identity. And when you build out the identity, I don’t think singular, don’t think about one piece. I’m just doing my packaging. Think about every touch point you’re going to have with your client. That’s from your packaging, insert cards. It could be your website. It could be your social media. Eventually, it’s even an email confirmation on an order or even the Amazon follow-up emails. Whatever it is, you have to sync it up, so your identity has to be synced up. That’s number two.

Meny Hoffman: Number three, on every brand which is called activation, launching your product. And this is where I see a lot of, and I, actually, it goes back a little bit to the Amazon sellers, which I see so many times. There’s this disconnect. People don’t realize you got to have a very strong launch strategy, and launch strategy is not so much about the algorithm of Amazon and what you’re going to be doing on the giveaway. It’s also, “what do I want to see?” Like almost like a strategy for the next six months. Do I want to be wide or deep? Do I want to have multiple products? Do I want to have less products? Do I want to be on one marketplace? Do I want to be multiple marketplaces? The reason why it’s important to have that understanding prior to even whatever brand you’re launching, because your decisions will depend on it. Your success will depend on it, and if you’re just winging it, doing one piece, let me try a product, and then come back to another product. Then again, you’re not building a brand. You are actually doing just testing the market. But if you’re coming in with a strong brand, which you have a solid foundation, you have the identity build out, you want to have a launch, an activation strategy, and then come digital activation, specifically, if you have an eCommerce website or an Amazon listing. Now Amazon, you have so many great podcasts on your show that you had, the episodes that you had, where people were speaking about your actual listing. Amazon is not giving you so much good real estate if you’re a brand owner. Use your images wisely. It’s not only about product features and benefits. Speak about your brand stories. Speak about the passion. Why? Because yes, you’re making a singular purchase, but you want to be able to convince the buyer to buy from you versus somebody else. You want to show that I am passionate about the exercise industry; I’m passionate about my kitchen gadgets, whatever it is, and you want to be able to, so I am the choice. You can do that with your images. You can do that with your copy. Yeah, of course, you need to speak about the keywords, and you have to speak about the features and the benefits but speak about the brand as a whole as well. And then the same as with EBC and storefront. Now, you have the capabilities of having this all built out and use it to your advantage. Share a story; tell a story. And the reason for that is we have seen customers of ours, clients of ours that build brands, they might have maybe three reviews and they’re still starting to get 10, 15, 20 orders per day for new products. And the reason is because the customer gets through to the listing, all of a sudden sees that this sounds like a very trusted brand because I’m seeing they’re paying attention to all the details of a brand, and I’m used to seeing a former successful brand.

Meny Hoffman: Now, most people are satisfied to sell on Amazon. Now that’s fine; that’s what your goal is, the immediate goal is. But in order to really build a brand, you want to build brand engagement. That’s where you follow them up. You follow up with email marketing, which you could do within terms of service, even the basic templates that you’re sending out for reviews. Don’t speak just about the review and just take that template, match it up to your identity, match it up to your purpose and your foundation, and share that story. All of a sudden, the person connects with you again. And then there’s different ways that you could do where you could upload the information on Facebook or try to match it up. Now, follow them on Facebook; create that community around your product. And you could do this through email marketing. You could do this through insert cards. There are so many different ideas you could use on insert cards. We don’t deliver any single brand without a strategy for the insert cards. Why? Because that’s your opportunity with the unboxing experience when you do that packaging, you are opening up the package. Brand engagement is social media, email marketing, and anything else. And then sometimes it’s influencer marketing. You want to build out that strategy. Last but not least, which we see so many people just ignoring, it’s called evolution, optimized for progress. This is a stage where every few months, at least twice a year, you got to reassess your brand. You got to see competitive landscape updates. Maybe there’s competition that came in that you didn’t know about. Industry reassessment, maybe the purchasing habit change in your industry, and all of a sudden, you’re seeing sales going down, but you’re not realizing it. Product expansions. If I already have loyal following and loyal buyers on this particular product, what is my potential expansion of products? And last but not least, new sales channels, how could I expand what’s already working? Double down on that. And then slowly but surely expanding, which goes back to the launching new product activation strategy to bring them all together.

Bradley Sutton: Well, we had talked about in the first step it; it almost sounds like something that needs to happen before you even start sourcing your products. But you also mentioned that there’s cases where somebody could have already just launched, maybe not thinking of building a brand, they just white labeling a product or they just stuck their sticker on something. But at that point, it’s not too late to start the brand. How does that work if they’ve already had a product, and they never really gave thought to doing a brand.

Meny Hoffman: We call them growing brands. We work with emerging, growing, and establishing brands, and we have a lot of our clients which is in the growing stage, which means they’ve been successful on Amazon for a couple of years, but maybe the landscape has changed where there is more competition coming in. Well, maybe the strategy is taking it off Amazon and going to big-box retail where you have to have a stronger brand. Identity is a stronger brand purpose.  What we’d take at that point is we have to be able to basically extract that purpose and that foundation and give you the personality with what you got. Sometimes, it will mean certain products won’t fit into your brand lineup from here on, but sometimes we need to find that common denominator. What is the common denominator between all your products? And let’s figure out what sets you apart. There’s probably something already there because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to compete with what the other sellers are already on Amazon. If you’re serious about building out your brand, it takes commitment because you might then at that point start really is zooming into some products and then letting go of others. But at one point, we have to find that common denominator: what sets you apart and what’s your unique brand messaging that we could really double down and expand across all your products, across all your touch points, every piece of communication and so on and so forth.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Now, is there something like somebody can just ask them to like do a self-questionnaire like “Hey, is a brand a way to go for me?” Because like I said in the beginning, I know there are cases where it’s probably not best to invest in a brand. Like, for example, the solar eclipse glasses are only going to be a one-month thing and then probably won’t come around for another couple of years or something. But just, generally speaking, what can somebody, how can somebody do a self-analysis to know if building a brand is really the direction they should take?

Meny Hoffman: Perfect. It goes back to the following. What are you planning to do long term? I mean to say, what is your strategy? And I think so many people just jump into stuff and actually Amazon made it years ago when people started to jump on the Amazon bandwagon, and they made it pretty easy. You went to Alibaba; you copied the product; you got a sticker; you put it on; and you sold. It’s becoming harder and harder. Let’s not kid ourselves. We all know that. And the reason for that is because we’re getting slice and dice from all sides, from the fees, from the competition, which are way more focused, way more developed brands, and so on and so forth. To answer your question directly: ask yourself the following question. Am I in this for the long run or am I just testing something?

Meny Hoffman: And if the answer is, “I want to do this long term,” then you want to have a solid foundation because long-term could mean a couple of things. Long-term could be Amazon. Long-term could be eventually B to C, my own website, could be brick and mortar. You know it could be big-box retailers. When you get to a big-box retailer, and we have a lot of clients that are in big-box retailers today and you want to be able to speak the language. If it’s sitting with a Target buyer, if the only reason they should take you is because they want to diversify. I don’t want to only sell on Amazon. They’re not taking your product, but if you could say, “Look, this is who we are as a brand. This is the client persona. We fit exactly your target market. We also have cool products, which could be easier on the people because they will have more choices, less choices, whatever your positioning is at that point. And then all of a sudden, you’re speaking a language that the buyer wants to hear because now you’re speaking, you’re also marketing to the same target market that we’re marketing. Why shouldn’t we do business together?”

Bradley Sutton: Excellent, excellent. Now what are some examples that anybody who always talks about different strategies and especially those who like agencies who deal with many sellers; they all usually have some good examples, but you don’t have to mention names or companies or products or anything, but maybe some of your previous or current clients. Like what’s a cool example you could give of somebody came to you, maybe they didn’t really pay much attention to their brand and they were doing okay and they were selling $1 million a year, but then you worked over six months to build up their brand image and now they’re making $5 million. You know what I’m talking about, just some story like that to really illustrate what kind of impact, focusing on your brand, can have on your business.

Meny Hoffman: Sure. I’ll give you a couple of examples without mentioning names where the brand that somebody is selling in the cookware line. Well, actually, the client came to us that they want to build a brand in this space, and they already were successful on Amazon and excelling, but they felt that if they want to do something long term, they got to get the branding in place. And then, as we were working again, we were debating about the name, they actually said that if we’re going to invest, let me do a side by side comparison. Let me actually build a totally new brand, the same product line, no name, everything else, and let me leave what’s already working, what’s there, so I don’t have to dismantle everything that is there.

Meny Hoffman: Now, our comparison is showing that the new brand is selling about 25% higher price margins. And not losing a single sale. Actually, certain months are even doing more sales on the first brand. And what that comes to show is that people are willing to pay for a quality product. Sometimes, the quality could only be shown with a strong visual brand around it. When you open up an Amazon listing page, or if you look at an Amazon search result page, you might see both of their products, which is competing a neck on neck, on some of the keywords. And even if it’s not the first on the page is only the fifth on the page and his other product is even higher up, he will sell more from the branded image, which is the branded listing. And not only more pieces, but even more on higher margins. That’s not always the case, but that’s it. As a case study, I want to demonstrate that. The other thing is what we see which this is almost all the time, which is as I mentioned before, most people speak about in the reviews; you can’t launch a product without a review, you can’t launch a product without review. We have a client that’s launched close to 10 new products. I don’t remember the exact number in the Q4, and  almost like the end of Q4, all of his products had less than five reviews, and he was selling between 20 and 30 a day per and what it comes to show is when you have a strong brand, you’re able to overcome a lot of that hesitation, which most people overcome with reviews because it sounds like a solid brand. They just launched a new product, but if I look at the storefront, I see this is a brand that I could trust. If I want to look him up on Google, I find a website that has that brand messaging. I find them on social media. When you look at going back to what I started, I’m building a brand, my distribution channel is Amazon. Now, there’s extra money and effort on those managing my social media, maintaining my email list, maintaining my website, even if it’s not for the sales. Well, it’s just to showcase even the Amazon seller that I’m successful. This is a solid brand, somebody that captured this market, and this is what we do all day long from a brand perspective.

Meny Hoffman: That will be a second case study where when it’s something that challenge what people have. And then last but not least is we have brands that were three or four months on Amazon, and they were approached by big-box retail buyers. I see you have a solid line of items on Amazon. Looks like a brand that we would love to work with. And let’s start the conversation. I once was at an event where the CEO of Costco spoke, and he spoke about branding and marketing, and in the Q and A questions at the end, somebody asked him the question about “what do you know about branding? Do you just take a warehouse with products with cheap pricing, and everybody comes and buys?” and he answered, “you know how much time, money and effort we put in it so it would look like a warehouse?” And it was so brilliantly sad because people think the comment, every Costco looks the same: That’s their positioning, therefore the visual identity is matching up to that positioning every single time before they opened a store.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. Even though that’s completely different ballgame. The same principle applies to selling physical products, whether it’s on Amazon or just anywhere else online. You want a consistent feel where somebody doesn’t even have to think about it. It’s just like, it’s almost subconscious where you expect a certain feel from a brand. And I think that can definitely help a lot of sellers who are building the brand. Now I want to get into a specific tip in a second from you, like what we call the thirty-second tip of something that you can give in 30 seconds or less. But before we get there, lately, I’ve been playing this game with our guests, and we call it the search volume game. Now, almost every time, they don’t get 100%. And I actually liked that. There’s no pressure here. I actually want you to miss them. And because the point that I make with this is how just like in branding, studying your customer avatar is very important and not just relying on what you like. I’m sure you don’t say to your clients like, “Oh yeah, this is exactly what I think, and this is exactly how it has to be.” You know, you guys do market research, et cetera. Similarly when people are selling on Amazon, we can’t just think that “Hey, the way that I search or the way that that makes sense to me is necessarily going to reflect the way that the customers search or the way that the customer is looking for.” How I illustrate this is I give the guests three keyword searches. These are keyword searches on Amazon and then using Helium 10 Magnet, I have gotten the estimated search volume in the last 30 days. And so, what you have to do is try and match which keyword goes to which search volume. And a lot of the times, it’s a trick, like the ones I find seems to defy logic, but you know the numbers don’t lie. The three keywords I’m going to give to you, search terms are, let me pull it up here. Okay, here we go. They are going to be kosher, kosher salt, kosher cookbooks. All right, these are three searches on Amazon. Now the actual search volume from most to least, and I’m not going to tell you which is which, obviously. One of these three keywords is searched for 11,000 times a month on Amazon. Another is searched for only a thousand times, and another one is searched for less than a thousand about 700 times a month. Which one do you think is which? The three again are kosher, kosher salt, and kosher cookbooks,

Meny Hoffman: I think the 11 thousand is the kosher cookbook.

Bradley Sutton: Hey, keep going. There are two others.

Meny Hoffman: And then we have kosher salt getting the second one, and kosher getting the least.

Bradley Sutton: Kosher getting the least. All right, so here it is. You actually got them mixed up. All right, so here it is. This is what I love. I just love this because I mean I think out of all the times I’ve done this, only one person got them right, but this really, I mean obviously you are an expert in things that are kosher, and maybe the way that you search is not the way that another person might be searching for this. The number one word here for Amazon is kosher salt. 11,000 times a month. People are searching for kosher salt and kosher is actually number two with only 1000 and that kind of makes sense because usually if you’re searching on Amazon, you don’t type in such a vague keyword. You know, I was thinking maybe you were going to pick just kosher. It has the number one because a lot of times these vague keywords are the ones that are kind of most commonly searched. And then kosher cookbooks was the least amount at only 682 estimated searches.

Meny Hoffman: For those listening, maybe you want to get into the kosher salt business.

Bradley Sutton: Yes. Hey, that’s what I’m seeing right there. Only around a thousand competing products. Kosher salt, find a factory guys. Alright, now let’s get back to more serious things. This is the serious sellers podcast, but not all fun and games here. Now you’ve given us a lot of tips and strategies about branding. I love that. That’s six bullet point list there that you gave the very important information, no matter if somebody is doing e-commerce or building a business off of Amazon, but what is something that that you could tell us that it’s, it has to be 30 seconds or less that you think is really valuable. A great tip, it could be about branding, it could be about kosher pizza in Brooklyn. I mean, whatever you are an expert in, what is something that you can give our listeners in 30 seconds or less? This is our TST section of the show.

Meny Hoffman: I would say don’t underestimate the value of what great customer service does for your brand. And we see this with Amazon sellers all day long where they might nitpick on a return. They might need nitpick on trying to get away without sending your replacement product. But what that good review, what that good positive social media post could do from that client if you’re going above and beyond, will do wonders for your brand.

Bradley Sutton: Excellent. That’s great. That’s great. That’s great advice. Are you planning to go to any conferences this year I can maybe see you at?

Meny Hoffman: Sure. I’m going to be at Prosper Show.  I’m going to move here, and I’m going to be speaking on this topic at the event. I’m also going to JCon; I am going I think it’s called White Label. That one and not 100% confirmed, but my team wants to be there, so I’ll see if it’s going to work with my schedule but Prosper for sure.

Bradley Sutton: All right, awesome. I’ll see. I’ll see you there. Now if people want to find more information about branding or to reach out to your firm, how can they find you on the internet?

Meny Hoffman: Perfect. First of all, personally, I love sharing a lot of content, and the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. Meny with an “E”. It’s M, E N Y, H O, F, F, M, A, N. Search me and follow and connect. And I love to connect and share some content. If you want to learn more about what we just discussed on this podcast, head over to Ptexgroup.com/pb for product branding. On this page, I have two offers for your listeners. One is you could scroll down to the bottom of the page and you could download our seven simple ways to build your product brand on Amazon and beyond, free of charge, which is an eBook where you could actually follow on a lot of the practical tips, how to implement what we just discussed. If you’re serious about taking your brand to the next level, there’s also opportunity to schedule a free brand audit. On the same page, ptexgroup.com/ PB, you have a link, schedule your free brand audit. It will ask you a couple of questions and gives you a direct access to my calendar to schedule an in-person or a remote meeting with me to actually discuss your brand.

Bradley Sutton: Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us and we see you hopefully soon at one of these conferences.

Meny Hoffman: Thank you for the opportunity.

Bradley Sutton: Quick note, guys, don’t forget that regardless where you are listening to this podcast, whether it’s on your iPhone, or on Stitcher, on Spotify, that you hit the Subscribe button so you can be notified every time we drop a new episode.