In this eye-opening episode, legendary Amazon expert Kevin King reveals game-changing insights about how Amazon's search and ranking systems really work. From the little-known concept of GeoRank to Amazon's powerful AI engine Cosmo, Kevin shares insider knowledge that every Amazon seller needs to understand to stay competitive in 2024 and beyond.

Key topics covered:

• The truth about Amazon's GeoRank system and why your products might rank differently across regions – plus actionable strategies to influence your rankings in specific geographic areas.
• How Amazon's Cosmo AI analyzes your listings, images, and customer feedback to determine visibility – and why you need to start "selling to the AI," not just optimizing for keywords.
• Why the future of Amazon search is shifting from keywords to intent-based shopping, and how tools like Rufus are changing the way customers discover products.
• Fascinating insights into Amazon's incredible data collection and how it's shaping the future of personalized shopping experiences.
• Advanced marketing strategies combining AI with custom audiences and personalization that are generating "ridiculous conversion rates.’

Whether you're doing $100K or $100M on Amazon, this conversation with one of the most knowledgeable figures in the Amazon space will transform how you think about optimization and marketing on the platform.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:08) Understanding GeoRank

(18:09) Exploring Cosmo

(21:24) From Keyword to Intent-Based Search

(27:47) Brand Building Beyond Products and Problem-Solution Marketing

(32:12) Embracing AI and Customer-Centric Sales

(39:15) Conclusion

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Show Notes:

• Kevin King - LinkedIn
• Billion Dollar Sellers Newsletter
• Marketing Misfits Podcast
• Norm Farrar - LinkedIn 
• AMPM Podcast
• Helium 10 
• Tom Shipley - LinkedIn
• T&C Summit
• Podcast Movement Show
• North Face
• Patagonia 
• My First Million Podcast
• George Mack - X
• DataZapp
• Reddit

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Kevin:

Us as sellers, we use the tools and we try to influence what Amazon, what we think our product is. But Amazon's like, yeah, Kevin, you can say that your product's the best or it does this or this or this, but reality is what the customers say.

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I have an esteemed guest. This guest is a legend in the Amazon space, billion dollars sellers. My guess is Kevin King. He's the host of two Count 'em two podcast Marketing Misfits with our mutual friend Norm, also the AMPM podcast with Helium 10. Been hosting that for two and a half years. He's had over 220,000 students host the billion dollar Seller summit, the billion dollar seller newsletter, and then he is also an Amazon seller. So he's doing this stuff in real life on a daily basis and is just doing very, very well. So probably didn't need to do that introduction because if you're in the Amazon space, I say the name Kevin King, you know the guy. So with that, Kevin, welcome to the show and how's it going

Kevin:

Man? It's going great, man. You talk about all my gray hairs, how I got all my gray hairs here, doing all this crazy stuff.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm joining you, man. I'm joining. I got the grain, the goatee here, and so it happens. It happens for sure. But yeah, you and I connected at our mutual friend Tom Shipley's event in Nashville

Kevin:

Deal. I think we met before. I think we met at a trafficking conversion years

Brett:

Ago. We have for sure, for sure.

Kevin:

I think we met somewhere, or maybe even more than that maybe.

Brett:

I think you're right. There's been TNC, we both, I think both spoke there and then a couple other events. But most recently was that Tom Ship was event. As we were chatting, we're like, we got to do a podcast together. What are we doing here? Haven't ever made it happen. So yeah, we're 300 episodes into the eCommerce Evolution podcast and just getting Kevin on the

Kevin:

Show. Congratulations.

Brett:

Yeah, I was looking that up. You doing a little research on chat GPT, less than 1% of podcasts get to 300 episodes, so I

Kevin:

Just went to pretty podcast movement show in August in DC and they actually said there that the average podcast makes it to seven episodes.

Brett:

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I heard. There's this phenomenon called Pod fade where

Podcast hosts is like, eh, I thought this would be more fun, or I thought this would be easier. I thought I'd publish one episode and become famous. Does not happen. Right? It's a grind. It's a grind, but you got to love it. So a variety of topics I want to talk about. Kevin, I want to get into AI a little bit as we go. I know you're doing some really unique things with ai. I know you're talking to just some of the top sellers on Amazon, some of the top brands that are doing cool stuff on Amazon, but you introduced this concept that I was not very familiar with at all. And in one of your newsletters recently about rank, so ranking on Amazon from a geographic basis or at a geographic level, can you explain what geo rank is and maybe some misconceptions around ranking that negatively influenced the way people approach selling on Amazon?

Kevin:

Yeah, sure. So Amazon, for the longest time it was no matter where they had the product, they would ship it to you. So that's why it was two day delivery. So if I'm living in Austin, Texas and I order some construction paper that's sitting in the closest warehouse is Los Angeles, Amazon would get that over to a warehouse near to me and within two days and get that to me, maybe they should sent that by Prime Air. Maybe they sent it by before Prime Air, they were using regular airlines and the cargo holes and Cargo Airlines and they would get that over close to me. And you know what, this is getting a little bit expensive to actually do this. We need to change this system to where we only show results for what's nearby so we can get to 'em the same day or we can get to them within a day and cut down on our distribution costs. We're going to charge it at the same time we're going to raise the fees to the sellers so we can make a little bit more margin. That

Brett:

Has been the theme of this year. How do we charge sellers more?

Kevin:

Exactly. But if you take a look at their p and l, look at how much more profit they had off of that. So they're raising the price and cutting the expenses, which is smart business. So what they've done is, so they basically went to, it was a direct route. So it's like in the old days of airlines before deregulation where if you wanted to fly from Los Angeles to Waco, Texas, there had to be a direct plane or you had to go through some other little city. And the airlines came up with this hub and spoke system where they said, okay, we're going to have hubs and like American Airlines for example, has a hub in la Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, Chicago, Miami, JFK, and Charlotte and almost all their flights at some point go through one of those hubs. They do have some directs in between, but a lot of almost all the flights go to those songs and then they disperse the people out. It's a much more efficient system. So about two years ago, Amazon started like, we got to get control of this distribution system. We have, I don't know what the number of warehouses they have now is 300, 3 50, something like that.

Brett:

It's a lot.

Kevin:

So what you used to do is you would send into what's called a cross stock. And so if when you go into fulfill to Amazon, FB, a, Amazon would say ship it to these one, two, or sometimes you get lucky and they say ship everything from Austin to Dallas. Other times they'd split it up into three locations all based on their algorithms and where they need the stuff and their systems. But a lot of times from one of my businesses, I sell wall calendars. I would just ship to Dallas, it's convenient for me, Austin and Dallas, it's cheap. Gets there today, it gets checked in quick and it would go to what's called a crosstalk. And these crosstalks have airline code. All the Amazon warehouses start with the same as the local DFW one, DFW two, whatever. And those docs didn't store it where our shipping doesn't store the product, it actually disperses it out.

So if I send a thousand calendars in, their algorithm will say, oh, take these thousand, break it down, send 27 to Waco, 16 to Sherman, 25 to Houston, and 82 to Austin, whatever. And they were paying on their dime. They're charging us indirectly, but to get 'em out to those warehouses to get 'em closer to the customer. And then they cited this last year like this is stupid. We need to regionalize this and do the hub and spoke system. So they broke it down into eight regions. So Amazon now has eight core regions in the United States where everything in that region is serviced by that region. And so they really don't want to show you something for sale if it's not in stock in that region because it's going to cost them more to get it to you and it's going to take longer. And so if you're not in stock, I

Brett:

Think another important point just to note there, Kevin. One, the operational efficiency and really nobody understands logistics like Amazon, but they also know that if they can show a customer, Hey, you get this tomorrow or you get this within however many hours that increases conversion rate purchases go up, the shorter the time lag is between clicking and buying and getting the product the more people buy. So showing people what's local increases conversions.

Kevin:

Case in points, last night it was 10 30 at night and I was doing some sort of a little project. I needed some black cardboard stock to put behind this little picture. I go on Amazon and it shows me a bunch of stuff, and this was on a Tuesday and it says a lot of it'll be delivered on Thursday or Friday. I'm like, no, no, I want the stuff that's going to be here in the morning. It's 10 30 at night. And so I click on the filter, it says, next day delivery, show me only the results for next day delivery and it filters it down to 200 instead of 600 or whatever. And it showed up hour at 10 30 at night. It showed up at 8 45 this morning. That's crazy. It's local and Amazon knows that. And so they went to this system where now when you ship to Amazon FBA, they're asking you to do ideal situations five or more locations because they want you to share some of that cost and spread it out, otherwise they charge you a fee. In a lot of cases, they're moving more and more towards this where they don't show results if it's not local. Your results when you type in black cardboard paper in

Brett:

Missouri,

Kevin:

Missouri may be different than mine. And so knowing that it's going to influence your rank, and if you use some of the tools that your ranks heating 10 other software tools, monitor your rank, you might see different results than what I see because based on your IP address. So there's ways to influence that though. Just like in retail, if I'm going into a Walmart and trying to get into a Walmart store, let's say in retail, Walmart takes my product and says, we're going to test you, Kevin, in a hundred stores before we roll you out to all 4,000 of our stores, we're going to test you in a hundred in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida and see how it goes. Well, I want to list those stores because I'm going to go onto Facebook or somewhere and I'm going to target those cities and run ads from my product and say, Hey, my construction paper is now available in Target in Huntsville, Alabama.

Go pick some up, send me a picture of it and we'll send you a free gift or whatever so that people are going in buying it. Then the executives in Little Rock, not Little Rock in Arkansas, in Bentonville, Bentonville, Bentonville are looking at it and going, holy cow, this stuff is actually moving. Kevin is doing good. We're going to roll you out to a hundred more stores. You gave 'em the system that way. The same thing you can do on Amazon, so you can influence, you can't really dictate where you ship your products, Amazon let you say. Well, you can use tools like Helium 10, and there's other ones, smart Scout and some others. They'll show you heat maps and they'll say, if they take a look at, they tie it to the A PA of Amazon, they take a look at the backend and they say, this is where your distribution is. So Amazon may say you have a thousand units in stock. Well, these heat maps will show you exactly which warehouses Amazon has 'em in based on the API. Interesting.

And then you could target, you can say, oh, shoot, looks like Minneapolis. I'm a little bit low on, I'm not ranking very well on, and I know I'm selling well everywhere else, but for whatever reason, Amazon hasn't sent enough or they can't keep enough in stock in Minneapolis, let me influence that. But I can't go in and say, I want to ship to Minneapolis. Amazon dictates that. So I go in and influence Amazon's algorithm the other way I go and use Pinterest ads where you can actually geotarget or use DSP on Amazon where you can you geotarget and coming soon to sponsor ads. I think it's in a beta invitation only now you'll be able to geotarget your Amazon ads. And so to actually influence that. So that's coming and it's pretty sophisticated and it's what a lot of sellers are not aware of it and how it's affecting them. They've been testing it, playing with it for a while. So this is nothing like groundbreaking, just didn't announce last week, but it's becoming more and more and more of a factor as Amazon gets their systems dialed in.

Brett:

Yeah, this is really exciting to me because I think a lot of people are just thinking about Amazon as where do I rank on Amazon or how do I show up organically or in paid on Amazon? But there is no such thing as just how do you appear on Amazon? How do I appear to unique users in geographic areas and where are there opportunities? And while you can't dictate exactly where Amazon stores some of your stuff, you can't influence sales in Minneapolis and you increase the velocity of sales, they're going to get more product there that's going to make things work better. Now, what I was also looking at, Kevin, as I was reading your newsletter is so Amazon wants to show stuff that's close. So I'm in Missouri, so whatever region we are in that I can get stuff in the next day or two, that's what I'm going to see first. But they're also looking at what is selling in my region. They're also looking at what's popular, what's moving in my region because, and I remember reading this as well where Amazon knows that, hey, north Face sells really well on the East coast. Patagonia sells better on the west coast. I'm kind of making some of that up, but that's true. There are different brand preferences or product preferences in different geographic regions, so they're going to show they're going to rank things differently based on what's selling in a region.

Kevin:

Yeah, exactly. And some of that's where you may get shoved out by Amazon, so that's where you use the outside traffic tools like Pinterest and some DSP and other stuff to actually influence Amazon. So now they think you're selling well in that region, and so that actually bumps you up on the list. It bumps you up in the rankings.

Yeah,

But Amazon, I dunno if you've ever done this, but it's amazing the amount of data Amazon has on us as buyers. Have you ever asked for your report from Amazon?

Brett:

I never have. We use Quicken, and so I can just look at my purchases on Amazon. I'm always like, I cannot believe how much money we give to Jeff Bezos every year. It's an astonishing amount, but no, how do you get the data on your,

Kevin:

There's a link. A link. You could probably Google this. I can't remember off the top of my head. It's an Amazon official link. It's for buyers. I'm not talking about for sellers. There may be a version for sellers, but for buyers.

Brett:

So you can see your buying history on Amazon.

Kevin:

Oh, it's way beyond that. No, it will blow your mind. So I did it for me. If you want to do this, just Google, it's free Google, Amazon buyer history, download PDF or something, you'll probably find the link. You'll have to log into your buyer account and then it'll take you to a page and you click a button and it will spit out a PDF. It takes it, it is got to pull it from this Oracle databases and whatever. So it takes it a few hours. You'll get an email link to this PDF. Mine went back to 2000, I'm sorry, 1999. First time I used Amazon and it was 742 pages. But it's not just what I bought. You would think, okay, yeah, of course they know Kevin. Of course they know everything I bought. I could look at my Quicken and I can tell you the same thing. No, it's everything I've ever watched on Amazon Prime, how much of it I watched, where I stopped, where I paused, how long I paused the fonts. Every computer I've ever used the IP address, I've, every computer I've ever used, it's the screen resolution of every computer I've ever used. It's everything I've ever hads a wishlist and taken out. It's every link I've ever shared. It's every address I've ever used. It's every game I've ever played on. Its every video I've ever watched on.

Brett:

I'm sure this is released now due to privacy issues. Amazon's maybe

Kevin:

Forced release years, but they don't publicize it. They don't want you to know it. It's scary. They know everything. And we talk about AI and LLMs and stuff. They got their own LLM right there. They know everything about.

Brett:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Kevin:

And

Brett:

I think you could maybe argue that Google has just as much or more data on what we look for and what we like online, but I don't know that anybody has more data on what we buy. And plus the combination of all those other things like Amazon, the amount of Amazon data that they have is unreal. And I think it's a large part of the reason why they've become the number three online ad platform, right? Leaning into some of that data creates great advertising opportunities as

Kevin:

Well. Well, you look at too, I mean one of the things I say right now is take it beyond just though those TikTok, I always say if you want to know somebody, ask 'em Can I borrow my can borrow your phone for a few minutes, roll our TikTok

Brett:

Feed TikTok know

Kevin:

You for sure, and you'll know everything about that person, what they're into, what they're currently watching just based on that feed. It's so good. It's scary what the data that's out there and there is no such thing as privacy in the United States.

Brett:

That is a really good point. Really good point. Yeah. Privacy is kind of an illusion I believe. Speaking of illusions, as we look at what are some of the myths around geo rank, which I think maybe we talked about, but how do we influence that? How do we influence that in a greater way so we can see maybe where we're not selling as well regions, we run ads around dsp, we around YouTube or on Facebook, whatever to try to get the sell through in those areas. Exactly. What else can we do to influence

Kevin:

That? That's the major thing right there is running that outside traffic in those weakened areas to actually influence that. That's basically where you can try to help influence it. Right now that's pretty much all you can truly do right now.

Brett:

Totally makes sense. But it also makes sense that, hey, if we're looking at Helium 10 and we see what our ranking is, that's kind of just a nationwide number or that's wherever. Actually maybe it'd be better to clarify that wherever

Kevin:

Pull it from,

Brett:

It's wherever it's pulling, it's wherever it's being pulled from.

Kevin:

Wherever their server, wherever their D-P-N-D-P-N pull it from.

Brett:

Got it. Okay. So then how do we get that region level data? That's where we look at Helium 10 and kind of look at those heat

Kevin:

Map there tools out there that will actually let you choose by region, ranking by region, and they're using vpn, so they're using a VPNs or not VPNs. They could be using actual physical servers and different locations and I think that's coming to Helium 10 where you can actually see the eight different regions and it'll break it down. Nice. Okay, cool. Regions.

Brett:

So love that. I think that's going to be news to a lot of people. Geo rank, you don't rank the same way in all regions across the us. It varies based on a number of factors. Talk to me about Cosmo. Cosmo's also a unique thing, new-ish thing on Amazon that influences search results and impacts both sellers and buyers. But what is Cosmo?

Kevin:

Cosmo is Amazon's AI engine that interprets your listing basically. So Cosmo is built, it's hosted on AWS, there's several components to it. Amazon comprehend is one of them. Amazon Comprehend will take a look at your listing and we'll comprehend what is this listing really about? Because us as sellers, we use the tools and we try to influence what Amazon, what we think our product is, but Amazon's like, yeah, Kevin, you can say it's your product's the best or it does this or this or this, but reality is what the customers say or what do we think or how are you wording this in such a way? So Cosmo takes a look at that and it analyzes the sentient, it analyzes the customer reviews to see what they're actually saying and analyzes your pictures. So it actually goes in and analyzes pictures. One of the examples I give is if your Amazon listing, let's say you're selling beach umbrellas and that's your listing and you got a bunch of pictures in your stack of different umbrellas, but one of the pictures doesn't show it actually on the beach, physically on the beach. Maybe it's people holding it, maybe it's the walking with it. And maybe you also are trying to get other spies on this beach umbrella. So you want people to buy a rain umbrella and other stuff. So you are not concentrating just on the word beach, but there's no pictures of the word beach. So Amazon sees that in the image stack. There's no beach pictures here. We're not going to serve this up, but we're going to deprioritize this and show it. You

Brett:

Say it's a beach product, we don't see it as a beach product based on your product images. So no go.

Kevin:

So we're going to put it down even though you're running ads on it and maybe getting some conversions. Alright, we'll give you a little bit of love for that and raise you up a little bit in the A nine, but we're not going to ranking you fully on it. So they're analyzing that. And I did a test, there's a tool luva org I think it was that you could upload a picture and I have the AI analyze this picture and tell me what it is. I took my cell phone and on the back of my cell phone I had a little case. Okay, so it's an old guy. I had reading glasses, so it's like little fold out reading glasses and I pull 'em out. And so I took a picture of my phone on the ground with the little reading glasses just kind of sticking out to the side and I put it in. I said, what is this? And it misinterpreted it and misinterpreted the image as a mobile device, a mobile phone with a key chain. It's not a key chain, it's a little eyeglasses that sit on your nose. Interesting.

Brett:

Sure,

Kevin:

I got to sit on your nose. And so then I took the picture and I rearranged the eyeglasses, took it out from underneath half of it underneath and positioned it differently. It got it right.

Brett:

Yeah, because they thought the glasses were connected to the iPhone.

Kevin:

So those kinds of things are now that's part of Cosmo. It's called Amazon recognition.

Brett:

Yeah, interesting.

Kevin:

And Amazon, you can go to AWS and type in Amazon recognition, upload photos and Amazon will spit back what they think it is.

But

They're using that to now analyze and try to determine patterns and what you're really selling and what the customer's really looking for. What's the actually intent or the buyer. And I think it's going to get to the point where in the not too distant future where it's not going to be keyword searches anymore as much Amazon will never get away from that. There's going to be some people that do it,

But they're just going to get more intent based. It's going to be where I type in, I'm taking a trip to, it's going to be more prompting. I'm taking a trip to Clearwater, Florida with my family. What do I need? What do I need? Amazon, we just talked about this 742 page PDF. They know everything I've bought. They know that maybe I don't have children, but let's just say I had children. Maybe they know that I have an overweights 12-year-old because I've been buying larger size kids' clothes or something for a 12-year-old. They know that my wife has a sense of sensitivity. She's always buying these creams of some sort for skin skin. So it's going to then suggest, in my suggestions, it's going to then suggest, oh, you're going to Clearwater, Florida. When are you going? And maybe ask a question or two qualifying question, oh, I'm going July 3rd.

Okay, July 3rd to the 10th, the weather's going to be this and this and this. Alright, here's what you need. You already have a beach chair. We're not going to show you any beach chairs. Or maybe we're going to show you one you bought one four years ago and you need to upgrade. Here's the new version. And it's going to show you, oh, you need this S SPF 50 for the wife, you need this for the kid extra wide chair for the kid beach chair. You need this, this and this and you need a beach umbrella. Let's just throw it in. Whatever. And that's the type of stuff. I think you're going to start seeing more intent-based results rather than keyword based results.

Brett:

Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And I think in the near term or even now with Cosmo, we have to understand what does the AI think about my listing? What does the AI think about my pictures? And it's no longer just keyword stuffing and gaming the algorithm.

Kevin:

You got to sell to the ai.

Brett:

Yeah, you got to sell to the ai. And I think there's still good overlap between the two, the things that

Kevin:

Are working. So defense right now, right now it's still you got to do the old way. If you quit doing the old way, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. But the new way is coming and it's coming. I don't know how long it's going to be. Rufuss is the test of this, so Rufus, the next, it's taking the Cosmo data and let's put it in a set of a technical way, let's it in a way that the average user can interact with. And Rufuss is only on mobile right now and it's a little rough around the edges, but just so was the first iPod, so was the first iPod. So they'll get this dialed in. But that rufuss taking the Cosmo data and taking your history and taking what it knows about you and trying to suggest, and I'm not the expert on Rufuss, but my friend Vanessa Hung, has figured out ways to actually influence that on the backend.

And a lot of that is by making sure that you're not just keyword stuffing, like you said, that you're actually talking situational things and putting situational stuff and filling in all those backend little fields that a lot of us skip some of the simple things of fabric and color and whatever. But being very complete and thorough and actually giving thought to exactly what's in your images, not just the pretty images, but actually images that'll convert, but also giving thought to what's the AI going to think of this? And then you take that a step further. I have not played with this yet. It just came out. I have a story coming in my newsletter about it, so I'll be playing with it tonight actually. But Perplexity just introduced shopping and a lot of people that have been playing with it have been saying it's better than rufuss.

Interesting.

It ties into Amazon. So actually it's a better tool to get results on Amazon than Rufuss itself and it's shopping and they did it just in time for right before Black Friday and Cyber Monday that we just had. So they did just in time for that. And they're saying this is the next evolution of shopping and it's not just going to Amazon, it's going all over the web and picking stuff. Google's doing some stuff with the Google lens.

Totally.

They're doing, there's a ton of that kind of stuff coming and you're going to see this evolving and becoming more and more and more. It's a shift in the way you search. So I don't know how the adoption rate will be 3D movies. Were supposed to be the next hot thing 10 years ago and everybody was buying 3D projectors and getting little glasses and that didn't take off. So maybe it doesn't take off, but I think this is going to take off and this is where the future's going to

Brett:

Be. Absolutely. I think exactly what the flavor is or is it rufuss or something else, but this is going to be the future for sure. I think the thing we had to think about now is we always used to talk about SEO. We still do, it's still relevant, but SEO for Google, SEO for Amazon. But now we're also optimizing for the ai, right? Because I do think the way most users are going to interact with platforms, the web in general, but also Amazon and other places to shop, is going to be kind of with an AI assistant. I would love to get your take on Rufuss and how popular you think it's going to be. But I watched my 7-year-old son, he used my iPhone. He was shopping for, he wanted to get this toy from the movie cars and this tractor trailer thing, and I didn't tell him to do this. He saw the rufuss thing, he clicked on it and he started asking it questions, how big is this? Will this fit? Can I drive the car into the trailer? Stuff like that. And I was like, that's really interesting, but that's probably the way we're going to interact with the shopping platforms

Kevin:

And that's how you guys start doing your backend is figuring out what are those questions When you launch a new product,

It's focus groups, it's knowing your customer and it's going to get to the point where right in the past we've been able to control our destination in a way by controlling the keywords, look for the opportunities, look for someone where someone else is not optimizing on these keywords or only three people are, and there's a lot of depth. I can just go fill in the gap or I can beat this guy, I got a better price or more reviews or whatever that control that we've had is going to start going away. And the control now is on the ai and you got to start selling to an avatar. You got to truly know your customer and truly become a true brand, a brand's, not a logo and a name, but a true brand and actually know your avatar and know what are the questions that a 7-year-old is going to ask. That's our audience.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so powerful, and this is something we've been speaking about for a long time, I know you have too, is that long-term success on Amazon, it's building a brand, not just selling products, right, selling products. Anybody can do that. That's going to come and go, but building a brand that's about really understanding who are you serving? So what's your positioning for your brand and what problems are you solving and having that clear avatar picture and then understanding what are the use cases, where are the questions, where are the problems, what are the things someone needs to know and how will they interact with the ai? So I can bring that to the surface or allow the AI to bring that to the surface. Really powerful and it's a different way of looking at it.

Kevin:

One of the things I teach in one of our most recent presentations I just did in Singapore, and I'm doing it on a webinar soon is it's on the psychology of marketing. I'm known for lots of hacks and stuff, and teaching hacks and hacks can be great and can get you out the bind, but like you said, it's not long term,

But the psychology of marketing, your 7-year-old, the way he's approaching things is the same as you and I did 30 years ago when you were seven and I was 57. No, I'm just kidding. It's the same. It's just different technology and different ways of doing it. So if you understand the underlying psychology, and so I did a presentation called the psychology of marketing and how to do it on product sales. And one of the things that's, I heard this actually on my first million podcast, a guy named George Mack, really brilliant advertising guy out of the uk. He said that you should actually do the advert before you choose the product. So not the other way around. Right now we choose the product based on all these tools and then we create advertising around and say, no, it needs to be first. What is the problem? Then go figure out how you're going to sell the problem. And in two seconds or less, you need to actually, they need to say, that's me. Not two seconds to stop the scroll with some sort of crazy waving or crazy flashing or whatever, but two seconds, they look at it in two seconds when his words or when they're scrolling, they don't give an F about you and they're like, oh, what's that? Oh,

Add that ad is me. That's my situation, that's my problem, that's my solution. Two seconds and then what's the product that fixes that solves that. A perfect example of that is of doing this is the baby changers. So you go into the airports when people travel this last Thanksgiving, everybody's out traveling, you're traveling with a baby, sometimes you need to change the diaper, so in the old days you'd find a place to do it and then now a lot of us have seen those little things. There's a little diaper changing station, the little thing that folds out of the wall. Yeah, totally makes like a little table. Well, the people that were manufacturing that 15, 20 years ago, were trying to sell that to airport facilities managers or whoever manages the stuff in the airport and they were putting this out and putting out pretty pictures with the thing, how it folds out and folds back up of happy families, mom, dad, kid all sitting there smiling, holding a happy baby that's not crying, and that was their ads that they're using in their brochures, in their marketing, and they sold something like a little less than a million bucks, maybe $800,000 worth of these things.

They then changed the marketing to a single picture and the single picture was a bathroom stall, dirtiest all get out with toilet torn toilet paper on the floor, a little bit of pee on the toilet, and a woman leaned over with a baby on the ground trying to change the diaper, the only big space that she had, and they put a tagline tag, it's

Brett:

Horrifying, right? It's horrifying. We got to change this.

Kevin:

Sales went to 800 million.

Brett:

Wow.

Kevin:

That's what I'm talking about is when you guys start thinking about it in those terms, it's problem solution, and that's how you move along.

Brett:

I think that's why Amazon, before they launch a new feature, before they launch a new initiative, what they do internally is they start with a press release. They start with what's the press release? Same thing. What's the ad going to be for this feature? How is the customer going to benefit from this? Should we even do this?

Kevin:

Yep, that's a good point. That's exactly the way Amazon does it, is start from the end and work backwards and I think somebody goes start the other way around in the Amazon world. Another thing you're talking about, an AI that I'm testing right now, that's just scary. We're talking about privacy and how much Amazon knows about you and there's no privacy in the US is I'm doing two things right now. There's a fellow that I'm testing this with for my newsletter. I've been running newsletter ads on Facebook and doing lookalike audiences to my list. It's doing all right, but there's a guy that came to me and said, look, I have an AI tool that combined with a couple other things that we're doing. I can find out anybody that's searching on Google, so if anything that's typed into the Google search bar, I can create custom audiences of that without them even knowing. I'm like, how are you doing that? I said, don't worry about it. We got it figured out. I'm like, okay. So I said, I'm game. I'll try it. So you can say that if I want, I'll test it for my newsletter. So I want people that are Amazon sellers, 7, 8, 9 figure sellers. So what would they be typing into the Google search bar? They'd be typing in Amazon seller support, Amazon seller central

Tips for DSP or something. They're not going to be typing in, how do I sell on Amazon? That's a new person. I want the experienced people. So I gave him a list of keywords and he went back out and pulled a two week run of trailing report of 484,000 people that supposedly fit that audience profile. He then imported that automatically into meta into a custom audience in the meta, and I'm testing it right now. We started five days ago and it looks like it's freaking working. We're doing lookalike on it and we're doing direct to them raw. It looks like it's actually working pretty damn well. And then he's able to take that information as four 84,000, overlay it with Apollo and some other stuff, and give me this spreadsheet that's got their physical address, their LinkedIn profile, their all this other data, their age, all kinds of other crazy stuff. And so I'm like, holy cow, you could do this across all kinds of platforms for all kinds of products and dial in better than what Facebook is dialing in. Is it still early? Give me another couple weeks and

Brett:

Totally. Yeah. Yeah,

Kevin:

This may, but if this works, my company, dragon Fish that I mentioned earlier, we're going to be offering this up. I'm not going to get that source out right now, but there's another fellow I just met in Montreal this last weekend. I was up there on some other business and we met with him and he's doing personalized stuff with AI right now. So where I can give, set up a landing page, enter my email address, you could take it a few steps further and ask a few questions if you want to. Levesque is ask method, all knowledge, ask two or three questions, makes it better, but just with an email address instantly, he can actually go out and figure out who I am. He reads all my social media, he reads any blog post I've ever posted, anything that's out there on the internet reads everything about me, and they can customize the next page to make.

The next page says, let's say, Hey Kevin, since you're a Texas a and l, Maggie's football fan and the big game is coming up Saturday, he know I posted about something. You might be interested in X, Y, or Z, or I'm an Aggie too or whatever. He can customize it and do you this with emails, set up an email sequence that customizes each email take. I did a test with him and took my, I just gave him the URL, my website, billion dollar sellers, and he sending me a five part email series as a test, and it's freaking dialed in. It looks like this guy researched me crazy. It's powerful. And he says it's in beta and the people that are using are seeing ridiculous conversion rates. And he just did it with, he's going to do a press release. He did a press release. I was trying to get press, sorry for somebody, and rather than just buying a press release, he went out and had the AI pull all the reporters that have ever written about, I'm just going to make this up a slow feed dog bowl,

And

Here's all these reporters that put in gadget and gizmo and whatever ever spoken about a SFI dog bowl and find their email address usually on their byline or find their contact or using Apollo. And then he told it, go read all the articles every one of these reporters have ever written, and he read all the articles and then it created a custom message to every single reporter that said, Hey, Brett, great job running for the Washington Post. That article you wrote on X, Y, and Z on the dogs was amazing. It really did this and this and the other article you wrote about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in this one, did you know that we have this new dog bowl that does x, y, z? Because you said that was a problem you'd like to see in this other article you wrote, we'd love to send you one if you want to take a review of it.

The person gets that like, holy cow, this person researched me. He does all this in a matter of 15 seconds, 30 seconds that that's where we're going to in marketing. It's this power. I'm about to test it with postcards or it's custom postcards to every single person. So if I'm selling hiking boots and I know that I get you to come to my website and I can even use retention.com or DA app, or not even have you enter email address and probably match up 50% of you, I could then, Brett, you come across my website, I'm going to know exactly what you're into because I'm going to immediately use Daaz app. Oh, there's his email address, Brett omg.com, dot com or whatever it is. And then, oh, here's all the posts he's made. Oh, he mentioned, he may have mentioned that he's going to take a trip soon with his family and go climb out to Kilimanjaro in Africa. Let me send him a postcard, drop a postcard in the mail, not a Facebook ad because postcard marketing still works very, very well. I'm going to send a postcard in the mail automatically that's cut the coast hardest custom printed by companies that do this. It's tailored to him. It has a picture of Mount Kilimanjaro, has a picture of my boots, and it has something to the effect of, I'm not going to say I know that you're going there, that would freak you out, but I'm going to say that

Brett:

Little too creepy. Yeah,

Kevin:

Not too creepy. But I'm going to say something to the effect that, hey, as an avid hiker that's concerned about the quality of the seat and wants to be able to hike an extra three hours a day without sore feet, our boots are the best boots. People have them from Mount Kilimanjaro to Everest and beyond, and they're great, and you're like, holy shit, I'm going to freaking Kilimanjaro. That's

Brett:

Crazy.

Kevin:

The boots I need, that's where it's going to get to. And that's

Brett:

Where, yeah, and I think really what AI is allowing is all the little things that would take hours of research or an unthinkable amount of time to actually execute on. It's allowing it at scale, right? It's allowing these customizable messages and direct outreach and building audiences and all these things that we'd love to do, but you either need a massive team of people to do or just can't do in general. AI is making that possible, for sure. Good. Any other perspectives on Rufuss or Cosmo or what we need to do as sellers to really take advantage of those?

Kevin:

The biggest read my newsletter, of course, billion Dollar Seller, there's always tips and strategies and tools in there, but beyond that is really thinking about selling to a customer, not to a keyword, selling to the AI and doing enough testing to know what are people asking? Looking right now, you may not know you're launching a new product. I don't know if my 7-year-old is going to ask, does the firetruck fit through whatever you said your son was asking? I don't know that, but maybe they've been asking that question and some of the other similar products or other similar toys. So analyze those reviews and see what people are asking. Look at the q and a section

And analyze that. Go to Reddit. Reddit's a massive tool right now, and Reddit has exploded in popularity. It's been around 20 some odd years, just went public, but Google put a bunch of money into it, and when Google put the a hundred million or whatever it was investment into it, they actually boosted it and its ramping. So Google, Reddit is exploding, but there's a lot of tools that will monitor Reddit threads, and there's a lot of good discussion that goes on in these threads of pain points and of issues that people are looking for beyond just what you see on e-commerce platforms. And sometimes you can get some really good insight off of that. So taking that kind of data and then structuring it in a way like, okay, what am I really going to focus on here? Maybe it's too massive to try to include everything, but what am I going to really focus on here? Maybe you create three different versions of your product, and each version is slightly different packaging, slightly different color or whatever,

Brett:

Just bit, right? Built specifically for an avatar,

Kevin:

Built specifically for an avatar, and that's where you got to go.

Brett:

Yeah, this is the headache pill. This is the low back pain pill. This is the soreness pill. Maybe all the same active ingredient, just slightly different, but different products. Position.

Kevin:

Ty Tylenol does that. Totally ol migraine Tylenol, this Tylenol ex. You look at the

Brett:

Ingredient, the main active ingredients, the same. There's some other things added, but yeah,

Kevin:

Yeah, exactly. Same

Brett:

Thing. Yeah. And so I think, man, I love the points you made there where hey, build the product for a customer, not for a keyword. Think about that avatar, build a real brand. The AI is going to be able to uncover that, optimize so that the AI can uncover what's going to be most important to your shoppers. Think about how to really influence rank, not just on a national level because that doesn't really exist, but think about those geo rank opportunities. Love that. And of course, subscribe to Kevin's newsletter, the Billion Dollar Seller newsletter. I'll link to all of that in the show notes. But Kevin, how else can people connect with you? So if people are like, man, I need more Kevin King in my life, I need to attend some of these events, or

Kevin:

I don't want that. It might be dangerous for your health, dangerous for your wallet, but dangerous for your wallet. But no, I mean, I'm on LinkedIn. Just a year ago, August of last year, I got on LinkedIn for the first time I was ignoring LinkedIn and it's growing pretty good. So I post on LinkedIn, so that's a good way to reach out. Just Kevin King or billion dollar sellers.com is my newsletter. It's free every Monday and Thursday of action. It's not a marketing email. It's a lot of actionable tips and strategies and news about what's going on in the world and tactics and the latest in the software side and everything. So those are the two best ways probably.

Brett:

Awesome. Check it out. Kevin King, ladies and gentlemen, Kevin, this has been awesome. Can't wait to schedule round two. I will not wait another 300 episodes. It will be much, much sooner.

Kevin:

Awesome. I appreciate it. It's been fun. Thanks for having me on, Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. Give us the feedback on the podcast. Leave us a review on iTunes if you've not done so already. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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