2X eCommerce Podcast

Building a Highly Engaged Community → Phil Hadfield
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[00:00:00] we created our Facebook community that we have slowly, but surely built we've got around 3000 members now, comparing that to, you hear other people talk about, maybe they've got 20, 000, 30, 000. This is like highly engaged community where we involve them at every step. Of the journey from getting ideas from them, essentially, if they want product enough, we probably will create it if there's enough demand to, them helping us name the product them helping us choose the best color, them helping us choose the best size.

We, so we started doing that in 2022 and we knew we were onto something when one of our A larger knife organizers we did just over 80, 000 just over our launch weekend in Off Amazon sales. And we really leaned into that and was like, okay, this, we need to be a lot more active on this and take this to another level.

And in 2023, what we started doing was surveys. So customer surveys where they would tell us about, [00:01:00] we would show them designs. at like initial concept stage, but then we would also ask them questions about all kinds of different things about our business. We're thinking of doing a podcast.

Would that be interesting to you? Would you listen to this and just all kinds of different things. And it's been. So for me, I personally, I'm not the type of person who would bother with that as a customer. So I always just thought, do people actually want to speak to us? Do people actually care?

But these people really do. They love being part of it so much so that tomorrow I've actually got like a, I've got a zoom call with about 20 of our customers doing like a focus group with them. And I'm just going to get Real time feedback on a number of key issues, customer service, all kinds of different things.

And what this has done is just means that I think people feel like they truly know us. They fit, they feel like they know the face behind the brand. And so when things maybe are less than ideal, they're a little bit more okay to To [00:02:00] accept it in some cases, but also what it means is that whenever we launch a product, you can never be a hundred percent confident, but we are as close to a hundred percent confident that it's going to be a winner as possible because this way they've been with us at every single stage of the journey.

Mhm.

2020, so that was 2021. It was only in 2022 that we started to diversify a bit. Interesting. And the other thing I picked up earlier and was your mention of the fact that you'd seen what was in the market is quite a significant point and you're like, okay, it's not really serving the modern consumer, we could do it better.

So you hired a product designer from Upwork. Put together your how you envisioned a modern accessory storage box, or, yeah, modern accessory storage box should look like, I think you started out with watches and [00:03:00] you designed your stuff yourself, and you put in those emo, emo cues on Amazon.

What were you doing to get attention was, were you advertising within the platform or were you still using micro influencers and just directing everybody to the Amazon store? Yeah, now more than ever, but yeah, back then as well, like you have to use PPC pay per click advertising.

Super important back then we were so unique compared to what was on the page. We stood out like a sore thumb in a very good way. So we immediately pretty much became, we were the top seller pretty much immediately. So that in 2021, we. Our Q4 sales were like insane. We, by that point we, yes, yeah, we were using external traffic to drive a lot of our launches.

It was really 2022 when we started to see, cause we'd started to build our own Facebook [00:04:00] community. Those launches ended up being like pretty huge on Amazon and those would really drive ranking and mean that, we'd get a lot more reviews quicker than our competitors. And. So yeah, that was the, that was how we were driving sales in addition to advertising.

What were the best education educators or courses and. people, experts that essentially changed the way you sold on Amazon in terms of the success you sought to was it? Yeah. I don't, I say, I don't want to be I'm trying to, I don't want to be like negative about any of the courses that we took, cause they all hadn't played like a real part.

I feel like we had to, so we took a course called reliable education. They're not about anymore. And they're very different to the course that a lot of people take in the U S the course that everyone takes in the U S they tell you to find the cheapest possible product. So it [00:05:00] involves like a lot lower.

A barrier to entry and means that you can, sell on Amazon really quickly, but what that means is that you come across against a lot of Chinese sellers foreign sellers who can, blow you out the water when it comes to selling at low margins. What this course taught us to do from the beginning was focus on brand, but also focus on products that were a little bit more premium.

Mhm.

Interesting. And then how, what is your selection criteria for influencers? Do the influencers you reach out to, or who want the product speak about the accessories that go into your products? Um, because we don't, so there's a few different kinds of influencers that we work with.

There's the influencers that, we're just super, all of them were super lucky to work with them, but the ones that have huge followings, like we can't really demand much of them, but it's up to them what they do with it and ultimately, even if they were post a story with our product, [00:06:00] I think that's a, it's pretty good.

So we don't really have much say on those guys, but we work with a lot of micro influencers that, the or nano, I don't, I think it's micro or nano, which, whichever one they are between 1, 000 to 15, 000 followers who are just super talented in photography or videography, which again, we're quite lucky in this niche that a lot of these guys are super creative.

So because they want to have one of our products to create. interesting and unique content, we're able to give them a bit more of a brief. So we'll have a brief for them to follow. Can you talk about this particular aspect, yeah. Can you talk about how it is, how it fits with your specific accessories?

Yeah. Is that what you meant? Sorry. I meant so for one of our businesses, we're very much influencer, it's very much influencer driven and. our approach there is we only look for teachers, like influencers who are teachers. So if you're not [00:07:00] a teacher, what do I mean by a teacher?

An educator you just, we wouldn't consider you. So the other categories of people who glamorize their lifestyle Hey, look at my watch. Hey, look at my nice dress. Hey, look at me in this, Hey, look at my nice car. They're different from people