#570 – Amazon Listing Optimization Workshop

Join us in this episode as we bring you an exciting update on Project X, where we gear up to launch a new product on Amazon. We walk you through our meticulous process for keyword research, listing optimization, and advanced photography techniques, essential for any Amazon seller looking to boost their e-commerce game. Utilizing tools like Helium 10’s Xray and Cerebro, we identify top-performing competitors and extract valuable keywords to build a successful product listing. This episode is packed with actionable insights, including expert advice from Lailama Hasan, Helium 10’s marketing content manager, and Tayyaba Hasan, project manager at AMZ Onestep.

Next, we explore the significance of competitor analysis in optimizing your Amazon listings. Using Helium 10 Listing Builder’s Competitor Performance Score (CPS), we highlight the importance of identifying high-performing keywords that competitors are ranking for, such as “coffin letterboard” and “coffin decor.” We also discuss how to enhance product descriptions by addressing common customer pain points and incorporating unique product characteristics. By reviewing competitor images and customer use cases, we gather valuable insights to improve our own product’s features and marketing strategies.

Finally, we dive into the art of creating impactful product images to boost conversions. With expert guidance from our expert guests, we explore the three main types of images required by Amazon: main images, infographic images, and lifestyle images. Practical tips on lighting, equipment, and setting up backgrounds are shared to help you capture high-resolution, detailed images. Additionally, Tayyaba Hasan explains our four-step approach to creative image development, from research to optimization, and the importance of A-B testing and updating creatives based on customer feedback. Stay tuned as we wrap up with a sneak peek into next week’s webinar about TikTok Shop.

In episode 570 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Lailama, and Tayyaba discuss:

• 00:00 – Listing Optimization Workshop for Amazon Sellers
• 02:12 – Amazon Product Keyword Analysis Strategy
• 09:06 – Optimizing Amazon Listings With Competitor Analysis
• 11:09 – Using AI to Write Product Listings
• 20:21 – Optimizing Amazon Listing Images for Conversions
• 21:16 – Product Photography
• 32:51 – Listing Image Optimization for Amazon
• 33:04 – Optimizing Listing Images for Conversions
• 36:24 – Image Concept for Pre-Cut Letter Boards
• 41:23 – Product Sizing and Reviews
• 43:38 – Stay Tuned For Our TikTok Shop Webinar

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today’s a deep dive update into Project X, where we’re going to launch a new product soon and together we’re going to go over how I found the keywords and how I make the listing for this product plus get guest expert advice on photography, A+ Content and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of 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 e-commerce world. And you guys can see that I’ve got all my Project X gear on today because this is a Project X update where you know for those of you who don’t know Project X was this case study we did where we found coffin shelves and a whole bunch of other products that we started selling on a real Amazon account and we’ve kept it going throughout the years. And so I decided to launch a new product, a coffin letter board and I’m going to open up my strategies into how I find the keywords a little bit of a generalization on it, but how I find the keywords, how I put together my listing, and then we’re going to talk about some advanced strategies for photography, like when you should use a agency, when you can do it on your own, and how you should tackle things like A+ Content, and how you can look at competitors to get ideas, et cetera. So we’re going to go deep into this. This is a recording of a live training that we actually did a few days ago, and so we’ve cut it up so that you guy s can get the best of those strategies and hopefully you can take some of this and apply it to your next product launch or maybe your first product launch out there. So hope you enjoy this listing optimization workshop.

Bradley Sutton:

And I’m going to take you from ground zero, getting the keywords first. So here is on Amazon. First of all, let’s go to the main keyword for this product coffin letter board. All right, and this is just a easy way in which we can get the main keywords. Okay, once I get to this page, I like to run Xray on the page to see who are the top sellers. All right, so who is really making the most money in this coffin letter board niche? And this is a niche that you know. I’ve been watching this for a while. You know like I wish I would have been one of the first ones to sell this, like I was for the coffin shelf, but unfortunately, I wasn’t. All right. But that’s all right. I wanted to show you guys hey, you don’t always have to be the very first to the market.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, when you’re running Cerebro on a product that you don’t even have yet. Like me, I don’t have a coffin letter board yet. I need to choose another product to be the baseline product, all right. So I’m just going to pick one here from like around the bottom of the page. It’s not selling. Well, let’s go ahead and pick this. So that’s the first one that you click on. Needs to be a product that is not going to be one of the main competitors. And now what I want to do is I want to select the like five, six, seven or eight top competitors for this product. All right, that are very similar to my product informant function. So this is the number one guy. This, this nom new coffin letter board. All right, believe it or not, this guy is selling 500 of these coffin letter boards a month. Kind of crazy. Uh, here’s another one. They’re only selling about 29, but we’ll go ahead and throw them in, uh in there as well. Here’s another one. They’re selling 119 units a month. So I definitely want to see what’s going on with them. I’m not going to choose this LED one, all right. So this is interesting. This is a. Is this a coffin letter board? Yes, but because it’s got this LED like and it’s very small, I can tell because of the price is $12. I am not going to look at the keywords for this product, all right, because I don’t think that it’s going to be super relevant, uh, to me. I want to get hyper relevant products to my product. All right, let’s go ahead and choose a couple more here. This one’s selling 65 units a month. Here’s another one that’s selling 29 units a month. All right, this is good. Let’s go ahead and enroll with this, all right, so we’re going to hit run Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

What am I doing? What did I just do? Why is this an important step? I want to analyze the competition right. That’s where I’m going to get my keywords. What are the keywords that are driving sales, and some of them are doing incredible sales, and these are the keywords that are going to form the base of my listing. And now what I’m looking for is I want to get like the top 10, 15 keywords and make sure those are in phrase form in my listing. All right, and listing builder is going to help with that. But then I don’t only want to be relative or indexed for 15 keywords, these uh products. There might be 50, there might be a hundred, there might be more than that of keywords that they might be getting sales from, uh, or that they might be ranking on page one for, and that means that I probably should be able to rank on page one for these, for these keywords. So this is going to be what I’m looking for what are all of the relevant keywords to all of the products, or at least some of the products that I want to be indexed for or searchable for? Okay, so let’s go ahead and see the results here. All right, so 8,000 keywords. I know there’s a lot better way to find this in 8,000 keywords. Now what I’m going to just do is I’m just going to show you a quick one that I can do, but again, this should take like about an hour by itself. I’m going to do this in five minutes. I’m going to say minimum search volume 200. And then I’m going to go to these advanced rank filters and the number of competitors. I’m going to say minimum one is between rank one and 30 under competitor rank. So basically, what I’m saying is show me all of the keywords Helium 10, where this product, these products, one of these letter boards is ranked between one and 30. That means they’re on page one.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, and so I have a whole bunch of keywords that have come up here. You can see some of these coffin letter board sign. Here’s a keyword that’s a brand name. I always delete those. I don’t want to have a brand names on here. I don’t want to. You know that’s against Amazon terms of service to put brand names in your listing. Okay, um, so I probably should take a lot more time to see if there’s any other brand names, but let’s just go with this as is. Again, we have videos that have very detailed a strategy on keyword research, but you guys can watch that. We’re just going to pretend that we already vetted all of these keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

So now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to export this to the clipboard, okay, and then, the next thing I’m going to do is I’m actually going to go into listing builder and I am going to put these keywords in. Now, this is the. This is where listing builder comes in. I could just have this list of keywords, right, and you know, have it in a Google doc or an Excel file or something, right? But I want to be able to make sure that I’m indexed for my important phrases. Plus, I want to make sure that I’m indexed for the phrases that maybe I don’t have room for. But I need those individual keywords, and if you’re trying to do that just with a naked eye, you know, like that, that’s almost impossible to make sure. All right, I’m going to show you how Listing Builder is going to help with that.

Bradley Sutton:

So, here in listing builder, um, I’m going to add a new, a new listing. All right, I’m going to say create from scratch and let’s just start building. Okay, the very first thing is I need to put in my keywords. So I’m going to hit manually add keywords and I’m just going to paste all of those 114 phrases. Now there’s a lot. I know I probably don’t want to see like I already see another one that has that brand name. I’ll just go ahead and delete that. But again, we’re just kind of like fast forwarding this process. But whatever tools that you use to get all of your keywords that you want to rank for, go ahead and make sure that they are all here in your keyword bank and then hit the word add to bank. Ok, now it’s going to show me all of these keywords plus their search volume, and now I’m pretty much ready to start going with my listing.

Bradley Sutton:

So I’m going to go ahead and hit next and now you can see here that I’ve got all my 112 keyword phrases and I’ve got all of the one word roots that come from it, the two word roots, et cetera. So this is the important thing because, as you see, if I were just to write my listing right now, if I were to type in Halloween decor, okay, do you see what happened here on the left-hand side, Halloween decor as a phrase got checked off because I just put it in my listing, and then those individual words of Halloween and decor both got checked off, and so this is important, because this is how you’re able to make your listing and know that you have used all of the keywords that you want. So, at the end of the day, my top keywords, I want to make sure I’ve got in the phrase form. There’s no way I can get 112 phrases right into my listing in phrase form, but at least my top 10 or 15, plus every single one of these individual ones that and these are the words that make up these phrases here.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so let’s go ahead and go to the next step. You’ll notice that this CPS is blank. Okay, so CPS is blank. This is very important. This is what tells me which of my keywords are the most important, because they’re getting sales for most of my competitors. So what do I have to do? What do you guys have to do when you’re making your listing like this? I have to go down here and I click keyword performance rank, okay, and now I have to hit add competitors. And so what competitors am I going to put in here? I’m going to put the same, the same competitors that I had in Cerebro, okay, now I want to. I want you guys to see what’s going to happen when I do that. What’s going to happen now is this competitor performance score, which actually is the same thing that was from Cerebro. If you look in Cerebro, the very last column in Cerebro, guys, is competitor performance score. This is not new to Helium 10. This has been in Helium 10 for years. This is what tells you the strength of the keywords compared to the competitors. All right, so this really helps you understand which are the keywords that most of the competitors are ranking for. Okay, and there, I did it there.

Bradley Sutton:

Now everybody’s got a score. All right, I got to take away this because it was still giving me a score, even though I only had one keyword in there. But look at these scores. All right, so this is the number one, uh, one, and sure enough, they’re the number one seller. You look at that, guys. The number one seller happens to have the number one listing SEO score. All right, so this is based on all of the keywords, how many of the keywords they’re using, how many in phrase form, and how they have it optimized throughout the listing. All right, right now, what is my score? My score is seventh out of seventh, I have a zero because I haven’t put anything in my listing, all right, so now I can sort this, my keyword phrases, by competitor performance score. All right, now I can see some of the top keywords here. Coffin letter board is a 10 out of 10. Coffin letter board sign. All right, uh. Coffin decoration, coffin decor All right. So these are some of the keywords that I know I have to have in phrase for my listing. So what’s the next step? I’m actually going to do this, where I’m going to get some help from AI to actually write some of this listing. And again, these steps, you guys should take at least 30 to 45 minutes. I’m going to try and do it in like less than five minutes here.

Bradley Sutton:

So, right, here I want to start putting in some of the characteristics of this product. So let me go ahead and do that here. Let’s go ahead and say hey, this is 17 inches by 10.5 inches. This product, our product, actually includes a special coffin-shaped um chalkboard as well, includes mini coffin shaped chalkboard. So I’m going to write that as a characteristic. That’s something that’s I chose so that I can differentiate it. So  that I can differentiate it from what’s uh, what’s going on. Let’s uh with the competition. All right, what else do we see? Well, can I put includes wooden stand. Can hang on wall. What are some other places that I can get ideas on what to put here? Let me show you really quick. Let’s say, I go into that top selling coffin letterboard right here I’m going to run Helium 10 review insights. Now, the first thing I’m just going to look, though. I want to look at the images. This is important for all of you guys. Look at the images of what people are leaving reviews for. Take a look here at some of these. This really gives you a good idea about what’s going on, about how people are using this product. So you should do this for your competitors.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so I’m going to look here at the review images that people have been doing. So now, look at this. I can see that people are using. Guys, this is a crazy product. Like I cannot believe how many people are buying this and how many people love this kind of product. It’s kind of crazy. But you can see here this is something that I identified early on in the process that I didn’t want to do. Do you guys see these letters and how you have to, like, twist them to take them off. So our product is going to have pre-cut and pre-sorted letters. So you know what? That’s a good thing to put right here. So let’s go ahead and do that. Includes 500 character or letters and spooky emojis. Letters are pre-cut and pre-sorted, all right. So that’s like a definitely a key feature, because these images people are complaining about this how you know, like, like this is like impossible to one by one take away these letters. But now I can see, um, you know some, somebody did one for like a divorce party. It says 99 problems, but a husband ain’t, one is one. So there there’s a little like humor I can find to do here. I see some people have this for coffee shops. Some people, a lot of people, have it for looks like a wedding and birthday party. So there’s all of a sudden, just in seconds here I’m getting tons of use cases and guess what, guys, we’re going to talk about this later. This is also the kind of thing you should be looking at when you’re trying to plan your images that you’re going to take. Don’t just look at the images that the other sellers made, but now go ahead and take some cues from what customers, actual customers of this product, are using this as use cases, you know, because there’s tons of stuff I never would have thought about, you know, like I wouldn’t have thought about a divorce party having it. Look at this. Somebody has says on their coffin letter board tips appreciated, normal is boring, stay weird. I mean, some of these are pretty ingenious, right. So this is some great ideas.

Bradley Sutton:

Now the other thing that I can do is I want to run review insights here. Okay, and this is going to tell me what are some of the two, three, four word phrases that people are mentioning a lot in the reviews. All right, so the way you can do that is you click here on keywords once it loads all these reviews, and now I’m going to get some instant insight into what are people concerned about with this product and hit keywords, and then here we go. So look at this, a lot of people are saying so many letters. So maybe I want to see what are people saying when they say so many letters. Oh, it comes with so many letters. Perfect size comes with so many letters. So this one had 500 letters, and so this is. This is again something I should have looked at before, which I did, which is why I wanted to make sure mine had 500 letters, because I could see that a lot of people like that it had a lot of letters, right. But now I want to see what else that people are complaining about letters off, what is that? All right. I recommend use a sharp scissor to cut the letters off. This person says it’s pretty easy to pull the letters up, but a lot of people are concerned about their having to pull the letters off or cut the letters off. That’s why I made sure to call out in my listing that, hey, our letters are pre-cut and pre sorted, all right. I’m going to go ahead and analyze these and get even more points that I can put in my listing. All right, uh, let’s say here good for parties and weddings, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

So now let’s go ahead and put our brand name, Manny’s Mysterious Oddities, and I want to put that at the beginning of the title. What is the product name? I’m going to say coffin letter board sign. Now, this is really important because I saw here that two of my most important keywords are coffin letter board and coffin letter board sign. Now, if I just put coffin letter board sign in the title, that means I get two keywords for the price of one in my title and it’s going to help me on my bang for my buck, for my SEO, my SEO title. All right, let’s go ahead and pick a tone here. Let’s pick humorous. This is a humorous product, right? Um and again, I? I should be filling this completely up with a whole bunch of information. I only filled up 200 out of 500 characters, but you guys get the uh, the picture. Now I’m just going to hit hey, write it, write it for me. But look at this in seconds. Now I have a title that says Manny’s Mysterious Oddities coffin letter board sign. There it is. That was exactly I wanted to get two keywords in one. Beetlejuice decor, Halloween party decorations with mini coffin chalkboard. You see, the AI knew what I had in here 500 pre-cut letters and spooky emojis, perfect for parties and weddings. It got so much of my stuff just in the title. All we have done here is the title, and now I can see that once I say use suggestion, look at this. I was able to knock out a lot of my individual keywords and keywords, and that’s basically how I do the rest of the listing, guys, what I’m going to do is just say, write it for me, and now AI is going to give me some suggestions. And then the point is I want to try and use up all of these individual keywords as much as possible so I can be indexed for all of these phrases. And then anything that has a high competitor performance score I definitely want to make sure that I have in phrase form in my listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, so that’s how you make a listing. Again, this this took me 20 minutes to explain. It should probably take you an hour or two hours because you should be doing a lot more work on this. I would probably go in here and I’m going to just I’m not going to just go with the AI um, suggestion for it. The AI can really give me a good start with using the keywords and having like a certain theme or vibe to it. Like I, in this case, I put a, um, you know, humorous vibe, right, and now I just finished writing my listing up and I make sure that I use these uh keywords, uh, make sure that I use these keywords up. So this is important, guys. This is just a simple way of doing your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, speaking of SEO, what if English is not your first language and you’re trying to write a listing here in Amazon USA or me? I don’t speak perfect Japanese and I want to write a listing for Amazon Japan. I’m not going to use my own knowledge of Japanese to try and write that. No, you can write these prompts here in Listing Builder in whatever is your native tongue, and then you tell Helium 10, hey, this listing is going to be for Amazon Japan. This listing is going to be for Amazon Spain, and it will write the listing in a common language of where that marketplace is, and when I say common language, I mean, like common grammar. Right, it’s not, like you know, Google Translate, which is all weird and everything right. So this is really a great way to make your listing and, like I said, I did this in 20 minutes and I almost have a better listing than most of these competitors already. Imagine how good I can make it if I just spent an hour or two hours, and this is the beauty about listing builder right. So that is how you can go from keyword research to actually making the structure of your listing and then making sure that you are optimized for it based on the score.

Bradley Sutton:

One last thing I just want to quickly show you is, as you write your listing, you want to see how your score is going on, right? So here is my listing. Let’s go ahead and rewrite these bullet points. My score is going to start changing as I start utilizing this, and the goal is hey, I want to be more optimized for the main keywords than my competitors. I want to be number one here, and so that’s what you kind of shoot for when you are doing this. Image copy is just one aspect, right, it’s just one aspect of the listing. The rest of it is what images? It’s A+ Content. So I brought in some experts to talk a little bit about the photography aspect of things and some other listing optimization aspects. So let’s go ahead and invite our first guest up here is Lailama Hasan. Welcome, how’s it going?

Lailama:

Hello, thank you for having me on. I’m just going to quickly introduce myself. I’m Lailama and I’m currently working as a Marketing Content Manager at Helium 10, where I plan and execute social media strategies. I have a background in Amazon selling and as a commercial photographer specializing mostly in Amazon brands. I’ve also consulted these brands on optimizing their listings with the goal to boost conversions optimizing their listings with the goal to boost conversions. So here I am, back on this webinar with Bradley talking some more about product photography, how to do it yourself, and then whether it makes sense for you to outsource to an agency or not. And if it does not make sense for you to outsource, then how do you go about conducting research for those images that you will create out of the pictures that you’ve taken?

Lailama:

Now, a lot of people are overwhelmed by photography, right? A lot of people say I don’t have the creativity to take my own pictures. Well, where do you begin? I just want to start by saying simplify, you know, let’s break it down into the three image types that are required by Amazon. So every listing has three types of images and each image requires a different photography approach. So we’ll go over each image separately to understand, like what is the goal of these images and how to go about photographing them? The first one is your main image. It’s going to be a white background image. You need bright lighting. The main purpose is to bring people onto your listing, so you want to give them all the information possible about your product. Maybe there’s a USP that you want to highlight, so make sure you put it in bright white lighting. People are able to see the color, the textures so they can make an informed decision and go on to your listing.

Lailama:

And then the next one we have is infographic images. So these are usually the second type of image that you see in the middle. These are going to be like your hero shots. These are really functionality or USP focused shots. You might need to throw in some reference items for sizing or explain to people how to use these products. So that’s the goal you want to keep in mind. And so take pictures from every angle. Explain how to use it. If it’s not a simple product, what benefits and features it’s going to give you. So you want to. When you’re doing the photography, you want to keep these goals in mind.

Lailama:

And then, lastly, you have the lifestyle images. So here you’re selling your brand a lifestyle. You want to have models in it. You want to have the models that are representative of your target audience and so usually like have the product you know, show the use case of your product here. And then you know, just before when you’re taking the pictures, you just want to, again, keep the goal of the image in mind. So once you have that, it’s gonna make the task of photography a lot easier for you. Now the next question that comes up is okay, there’s so many options out there. What equipment do I use? You just need a few items to get started. So I’ll break it down again by image types just to make it easier for you to. You know, pick out your equipment. The first one for main image, you simply need a camera. This can be your phone. If you have a good quality camera or you, you could also rent out a DSLR and put it on auto setting. Again, there’s no really preference here, but if you want a higher quality image, then I would recommend renting a DSLR camera. And then the second thing you want to have is two sets of lighting. These can be, you know, any lights around the house. Make sure that it has a white hue to it and then you can mix it with natural lighting. If you can photograph next to a window or outdoors, that’s going to, you know, really bring up the quality of your image.

Lailama:

I do recommend again renting out Godox lights just for that professional look, so that you can have a higher quality of image. The reason I talk about higher quality is because when you’re uploading these images to Amazon and finally when people come to your listing, they’re going to have that zoom in feature and so if your image quality is high, they’ll be able to see the details. But if the quality isn’t high enough, then your image can look a bit blurry. So just to like mitigate that risk, I would say rent out equipment, and just for the DSLR camera and for the two lights, the rentals might be $150 max if you’re not going for anything new or fancy. But again, phone and regular lighting will do as well. Next, you, for your main image, you want a solid white background, so for that I’d recommend going for like a sturdy piece of paper. This could be a construction paper that you can find at any stationery shop, and then, if you have a bigger product, I would say, go for like a white cloth. The only reason I wouldn’t take, you know, pick that as my first choice is because that’ll need to be ironed out and that’s more work. We want to make things easier, so, you know, a piece of paper might just work better.

Lailama:

Okay, and now for infographics. Of course you’re going to need the same camera, the same lights, but for backgrounds, you know, these are your hero shots, so you want to show your product and its functionality, and so these are going to be like really clear images of your product, but also looking aesthetic. So you want to pick out a background that might be like a solid color that is a part of your branding palette. Or you can pick out like a linen cloth, a wooden textured, you know, paper or something. So let’s say it’s a kitchen product like this example here. You can go for a marble background, a wooden texture, you know, switch it up whatever looks aesthetically pleasing but also like doesn’t take away from your product. And if you don’t want to go through any of this hassle, then you can also just take a picture on a white background, just like you would for your main image, and then overlay it on top of an artificial background with apps like Canva. And then, lastly, we have our lifestyle images. For this, you’re really just gonna need your product put onto like a relevant lifestyle setup. So in this case, we have a yoga mat, and they’ve literally this could have literally been shot in your living room. Um, if you have like an outdoor sport product, let’s say it’s like um, soccer ball or something, then you might want to go to a park. So there’s like lots of options for like free locations where you can do your photo shoot. And so, once you’ve done your photography, you figured it out.

Lailama:

A lot of people are also thinking, okay, well, should I do it myself? Is it worth it, or should I simply outsource it? Like, what is it gonna? How do you decide that? How do you make that decision? I think it’s all a matter of time, money and effort. So you know, these are all three of them are resources, because time and effort is also a big resource when you have to move fast, when you’re launching your product, and it really just a lot of the times boils down to what your budget is. So if you have a low budget, then you’re going to have to pay with more time and effort, and that’s when you go the DIY photography route. But you know again, the question is okay, are there any other factors that I should consider outsourcing to an agency? Well, you are going to be a one man army versus the agency is a whole team. So you’re going to need the expertise of a photographer, videographer if you’re making a video a creative director, an Amazon specialist editor. You’re going to need models. So it’s a lot of moving pieces and this can take a lot of time and effort on your part, and maybe even some freelancers to put all this together. The agency has it all figured out. They have a blueprint, a process of how they’re going to go about executing this project for you.

Lailama:

So you can save time and effort. Um, by outsourcing. And that’s why I say outsourcing isn’t just a cost-saving measure, the cost being your time and effort. It’s also a strategic move that empowers you to focus on your core competencies. And so, let’s say you’ve decided against outsourcing to an agency. Well, you’re going to have to create these photos into listing images. And how do you go about that? There’s a lot of research that goes behind it to make sure that these images actually convert, because it’s not just a matter of putting these images up. They need to resonate with the buyer, they need to give the buyer the information that they need in order to convert them from a view to a sale, right? So how do you turn these images photos, into listing images? Well, it’s usually you know it is a time consuming process, but you can use something like it’s one of my favorite tools. It’s called Listing Analyzer by Helium 10. And they have this feature called media comparison where you get a holistic view of all of the pictures that your competitors have put up, and so you can really see, okay, what are the best ways that I can showcase the features of my product? And, you know, make a decision once you’ve looked at all the visuals and you pick out the maybe seven best images out of that. So, now that you know how to showcase each features, but which features should really take priority, and that’s where your customer comes in.

Lailama:

And so you’re going to have to do review analysis, the Q&A analysis, go on to your, you know, trying to figure out like what are the burning questions, what are the common misconceptions within your product niche? So pick out your top 10 competitors five might be the best, five might be average and run Review Insights which is again a Helium 10 tool on each listing and dive into the one star, the two star, the three star rated reviews and find out what these misconceptions are and incorporate that information into your image. And then, another thing that I like to do when running research for images is outside marketplace analysis and this is your external inspiration. Um, that’ll help you elevate your brand because you’re looking at the best players in your niche, but outside of the Amazon marketplace. This could be Pinterest, you know, and you’ll see, like a mood board, like this, or it could simply be a Google search and you go on to like the best companies that are in your niche. These companies will usually have strong branding, so you can really learn how to present your brand and its messaging from these top brands.

Lailama:

And lastly, you can never predict what image will perform better, which one’s going to resonate with your audience, and that is why I recommend doing split testing, so you can showcase the same information in multiple ways, but you’ll never know which image is going to communicate your message the best, and this is especially true for main images like here you know it’s the same dog leash, but is it better to use a model? Is it better to use to showcase your variations? If yes, then do you show all of them in one picture or do you focus on the main variation? So these are the questions you’ll have answered through a split test. I really like using Helium 10’s audience, which will allow you to split test your images and make that decision pre-launch, which is the biggest advantage here. So run the split test and see which one will convert the best.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s go ahead and go into our next speaker, who’s going to talk a little bit about something. Some other aspects that you need to be thinking about when you’re doing your listing optimization. All right, well, take it away, Tayyaba.

Tayyaba:

Sure. Well, hi guys, how’s it all going? I am Tayyaba Hasan and I’m going to be talking about the creatives and the image aspect of Listing Optimization. And we’re a Canadian company, so that is optimization with an S I’m going to be giving you some insight into how we created the listing images for the coffin letter board. I’ll discuss a little bit about our approach and get into the process and maybe you can take some tips and tricks and apply it for your own business.

Tayyaba:

So a little bit more about myself. So I work as a Creative Director. I worked as a Creative Director at AMZ One Step and now I work as a Project Manager. So we work with Amazon sellers to scale their business with data-driven creatives that convert, and we do all things creative. So images storefront everything in between.

Tayyaba:

Now I do want to talk a little bit about our process and kind of how we approach creating some images and these creatives that convert. So there’s a few steps, four steps that we typically take. So the first one, of course, is that research. Lailama and Bradley went into some good detail about how to do that research, but the main part, the main takeaway, is really just to identify the unique features and benefits of your product. This can be done using all of the tools and the strategies that were discussed. And then the next plan. The next step would be just to create that plan. So gather all of your ideas together and put yourself in the shopper’s mind and really create like a storyboard outline for the images. This is really just a fine balance of knowing you know what sets my product apart, what questions would the shopper have, and then how can we just show the two visually. Now, after that’s all done and you’ve got a really good idea of what you want each of the images to kind of portray and what the text is gonna say, you’re gonna get into production. So, of course, that is just the shooting and executing the design. Whether you do that yourself or you outsource it to an agency, that’s up to you. And the fourth step would, of course, be that optimization. So Lailama did touch a little bit on A-B testing. So if your creatives are done by a professional agency, ideally there’s less chance of misrepresentation and negative reviews, but every so years, in any case, if you decide to upgrade your product, change something about the features, improve it, you’re going to need to update the creatives, and a few years. Even if you don’t update your product, a few years will give you enough data to really spot any trends in your customer reviews and adjust accordingly.

Tayyaba:

The research aspect, like I mentioned, is pretty much dependent on understanding the difference between a feature and a benefit. So a feature is very straightforward it’s that specific attribute or the functionality of the product. But the benefit is actually the value that that feature is going to offer the customer. This is the part where we’re going to address their needs or, you know, solve a problem. We’re going to tell them that this is how this product is going to optimize their life in any way, or how it can play a role. So how does this apply to that coffin letter board? Well, when Bradley came to us, he let us know that there was a very key feature and that, of course, was that 500 plus, you know, pre-cut and sorted letters. That’s an amazing feature, but the benefit to the customer is really what you want to relay. So what is the benefit? It’s going to be the fact that it’s that hassle-free. It’s that hassle-free message creating and you have uniform and polished letters every time, as opposed to where you had to cut them. It saves you time and, of course, it reduces mess.

Tayyaba:

So first we sort of came up with the image concept to tackle the image that’s going to portray this feature. So we wanted to show the polished look of the pre-cut letters with someone using our product and maybe show that versus a competitor. We want to show this in a way where it shows also a common use. So in this case, the header very straightforward. You can even ask ChatGPT give me a header for an image like this, give me 10 headers and they’ll do that. So pre-cut for hassle free decorating very straightforward, and some icons or text that really are going to drive the benefit home is the fact that there is a uniform and a polished look and it’s mess free. And then we also have to consider the common uses. So, if you recall, one common use was that these coffin letter boards are used in Halloween themed parties, kind of like a welcome board with a punny or a clever text. So this was sort of a screenshot and we just sort of analyzed all of the images of the competitors so we can see if you were to zoom in, you’d be able to see that a lot of them have that punny text and a lot of them you can see actually have they’re not pre-cut, they’re all just you’ve got to cut those letters out. So these images that you see in between, that’s all showing you the letters that don’t arrive pre-cut.

Tayyaba:

So the common uses we want to consider this and then apply that to our products. So we want to look at these trends. We see that there’s, you know, messages written on the board. They’re all sort of a play on words. It’s either Gothic or Halloween themed. We see the we want to show how the polished look of the pre-cut letters is better than, as opposed to just the mess of dealing with competitor products which are not pre-cut. And then we sort of applied that into a rough kind of a sketch. So we created a plan. Now this plan, we knew that we wanted to use the relevant setting right. So this is sort of like a Halloween gothic themed party. We know that we want to showcase the coffin letter with something punny, and so I just wanted to chatGPT and said you know, give me a quirky, punny message for a Halloween party letter board. And then I know that I wanted to showcase the competitor image as well. So if, ideally, you can order the product of the competitors, but if not, you can use some Photoshop magic to manipulate it. So this is the actual image that we came up with in the end, so to give you a little bit of an idea. So, tying all of those together, this is a Halloween theme. The chatGPT said something very cute like eat, drink and be scary. So we let our production team know to write that message on the board.

Tayyaba:

And this is actually white background photography. So, just for the sake of simplicity, I’m just showing you what it looks like when you do white background photography and you Photoshop that into a Halloween sort of a background and it’s not really, you know, necessary. You could recreate this in a real life setting. You could get the props, but this is just a more budget friendly option. So if you look at the text, it really drives that point home and we were not actually able to order the competitor product. So what we did was we just took a close up of the existing one and if you look at that. It’s a bit torn, which is pretty accurate as to how it might look when you know when you’re removing it yourself from a competitor product. So we just sort of fake the fact that the competitor’s product is not nearly as polished or uniform as ours is, and then those icons, like we mentioned, really drive that point home. So uniform and polished look and mess free. So that’s what that image looked like.

Tayyaba:

Now it’s not all about just the features and the benefits and manipulating the visuals. Sometimes it can be just a lot more simple, and so you have to put yourself in the headspace of a shopper. You know what questions would the shopper have, and so the other approach is just to sort of tackle, tackle, that kind of um question. So Bradley did mention that while most of the competitors are selling coffin letter boards with a stand um, you know, for for a niche like this there’s not that many like bundled items. So maybe the shopper is just a little bit going to be curious as to what exactly am I getting? I see there’s a letter, I see there’s a smaller chopper, what does this mean? And so we want to just answer that question for them. You know exactly how big is each item? How much space is it going to take up in my home, especially the fact that these are bundled items and one is bigger, one is smaller? So the review insights tool is a pretty good way just to get like an idea as to exactly what questions do they have.

Tayyaba:

If you don’t have the access to look at all of these you know three thousand reviews, two hundred and seventy nine reviews, nine thousand reviews and just really analyze them and look for the trends. That’s where AI comes in, so you can use the review insights tool, export all of those, copy the Excel sheet into ChatGPT and ask it to analyze the questions so you can say something as simple as, like you know, look at the negative reviews, what trends do you see? What are customers complaining about? Where does this product fall short of expectations? And that’s really where you want to address something. Or you could take a much more sort of simpler approach and even just look at the very quickly, just look at the tags. So this is actually something that I saw off of the competitors. So one thing that they were talking about was sizing. Now there are overall positive reviews, but if you look at what I’ve highlighted here, Amazon has sort of summarized that it fits. You know it’s good, but it’s larger than they thought that it would be. So that is something you know you could ignore it because it’s such a positive overall review 57 positive and five negative but it’s really important to just catch that and then use that to your advantage.

Tayyaba:

So when we look at the competitor images and I look at the way that they’ve approached the dimensions image, it’s pretty easy to see why there might be confusion. You know, yes, the numbers are right there. In fact, some of them even go into two decimal places. But the reality is shoppers are not going to pull out a measuring tape and you can’t really rely on that. So I’m going to give you a little bit of insight into how we approach creating the dimensions image and how we can went about maybe mitigating these negative reviews. So, instead of just giving them the numbers, what we did was we threw in hands in there and so immediately you can sort of picture just how big the bigger one is and how big the smaller one is. And hopefully I can already imagine that shoppers without an image like this and just going back and you know if we should show the chalkboard like this, I can imagine already negative reviews saying you know, the chalkboard is way too small, it’s a lot smaller than I expected. Which it is it’s about? You know, three inches wide and that’s about the length of my pinky. So what this does is it really gives them the idea of they can picture it basically in their home. So this is just one way that we approach creating images to avoid negative reviews. And that brings me to the end of my presentation. I hope this has provided you guys with a little bit of insight and thank you guys so much.

Bradley Sutton:

Tayyaba for you. If anybody wants to reach out to you for more information or to get more help or to utilize your services, like I contracted you guys out to do this coffin letter board, how can they find you on the interwebs out there?

Tayyaba:

Absolutely amzonestep.com, and if you’ve got any inquiries, any sort of creatives that you’d like to get done, feel free to reach out.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, and then also you can. If some of you have different plans, I suggest contacting them through hubhelium10.com and look for AMZ OneStep, because they sometimes give different coupons for different members out there as well. All right, guys. That’s all the time we have for today. Thanks for staying here to the end. Thank you to Lailama and Tayyaba. We will see you later next month with another new topic that’s going to be in Freedom Ticket. Actually, next week it’s all going to be about TikTok Shop. So look out for an invite for special training on TikTok shop and until then, we’ll see you guys later. Bye-bye now.

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