Today, we’re diving into the fascinating world of Amazon and its impact on pet product sales. Join us as we chat with Erin, an expert in Amazon marketing, who breaks down the essentials of how the platform works and why public relations plays a crucial role in boosting visibility for new and unique pet brands.

And if you can’t listen, here is the recap!

Alex: Can you tell us a bit more about your company, Accelerazon, how did it start? Like where did the idea come from? What are you guys exactly doing?

Erin: Yeah, absolutely. So my husband, Stephen, and I co-founded Accelerazon, which actually started last year in 2023. But prior to that, we had both worked at a full-scale digital marketing agency. My husband, Stephen, had been there for almost a decade and I had been there for five years. We did everything for clients in terms of e-commerce. So we would help them build their websites, we would help them do their Google shopping, advertising, their social media, their email marketing, and we’d also help them run their Amazon business. My husband and I decided that trying to be all things for all people left a little bit to be desired. We were heading to the Amazon department, but we kept getting pulled onto other sides of the business. We felt like we really needed to niche down in order to do a really good job for our clients on Amazon, which is its own ecosystem and a giant beast by itself. So we spun off into just an Amazon-only, pet-focused business, and that’s been going really great. We launched October 1st last year, and coming up on a year now, it’s been a wild ride.

Mary: Yeah, I just want to bring this up in terms of niching. So your business, like Whisker Media, is very niched. We all only do the pet industry, and that’s all we do. And you know, I heard a lot of negative feedback when we started Whisker Media. Like, oh, you can’t just survive on the pet industry. And that is so wrong. Wouldn’t you agree, Erin? Like, the pet industry is an amazing growing, a lot of times they say recession-proof industry.

Erin: Yeah, I mean, especially in America, pets are part of your family, right? So there’s so many things that we do for them as pet parents. And I think there’s a lot of industry that’s been built up around it. And like you said, you know, there is this line that it’s recession-proof because they’re members of the family. You might not be going on vacation or traveling to Italy or Portugal, but you’re going to be home and your dog or cat or whatever pet you have is there with you. And you might be spending more time at home because you have less money to go out to dinner, but you’re still going to spend money on them because they’re there, they’re constant, they’re your companion. Yeah, so we actually do work with a couple brands outside of Pet, but we are very preferential to Pet because on Amazon specifically, there are certain categories on the platform, and the data that’s required and the rules and regulations that Amazon has for products and sellers varies greatly from category to category. So we just know that Pet category so well that we really, really, I mean, 90% of our clients are in that category because trying to learn another category is a huge learning curve. So that’s where we like to stay, for sure.

Alex: So there are so many products on Amazon, even for pets, you know, there are so many, like Cat Trees, for example. How do you choose the Cat Tree? Because there are so many Cat Trees. So how, when you have your clients, how do you make them stand out on Amazon? What is like your marketing strategy or your strategy to make them stand out compared to their competitors?

Erin: Yeah, that’s a really great question, Alex. So, and we can kind of, I wanted to kind of dive into the nuts and bolts of how Amazon works and how PR could really play a great part in that. But it is, like you said, really hard to stand out from the noise because everyone and their mom is a seller on Amazon, right? There are so many products. So the key is really knowing how the platform works and being able to take advantage of the search algorithm and exactly what it is doing when a customer types in, you know, dog chew toy. How do you get your client’s products to show up in those search results? It’s a bit of a game, right? Like we have to make sure that their titles and their bullet points, all of that content is really optimized for keywords. When we onboard a client, we spend probably a month doing this deep dive analysis, and we try and focus on three keys. We try to find the keywords related to their product that we can rank for on Amazon so that when customers are searching for them, we show up. Then we do a deep analysis of the market. So, you know, if you said cat treats, we go and we look at a bunch of Amazon competitors that sell cat treats and what they are doing. What are they doing well? Let’s make sure that we’re hitting everything that our competitors are doing. And then we really do a lot of meetings with our clients and kind of learn about their specific product and what their key product differentiators are. How can we communicate that to potential shoppers on Amazon? Why our cat treat? What sets us apart? What are we doing as a brand or what have we designed in the product that makes us the one you want to buy over everyone else? So that is kind of our secret sauce—our three keys.

Mary: So let me ask you, is it possible? So when I search Amazon, a lot of times the big companies come up. As a small to mid-sized pet company, how do you beat that? Is it completely SEO, which is search engine optimization, and keywords? Is that really the golden ticket?

Erin: Yeah, that’s definitely an important part of it. So this is actually a really good segue. If you guys wouldn’t mind letting me maybe dive into how the search engine on Amazon works.

Alex: Absolutely.

Erin: Okay. Also, I know it’s a podcast about PR, but I feel like in order to explain how important publicity and buzz really is when it comes to making Amazon sales, I’d like to explain a little bit about how it works.

Mary: Yeah, absolutely.

Erin: You know, we just kind of need like a high-level understanding to give listeners some context into why PR can be a really powerful tool. So let’s see. First off, Amazon is a product search engine. And, you know, I’m sure most of us have used Amazon as shoppers. So let’s kind of start with what we know. Imagine you go to Amazon and in the search bar, you enter dog chew toy. You know, a page of search results then gets populated. And this page usually has like a big headline image followed by rows and rows of products. And at some point while you’re scrolling down the page, you know, you might encounter a video. And then there are more rows and rows of products. If you’re detail-oriented, or you know, maybe you have eyes like a hawk, you might notice that a fair number of these results have this teeny tiny gray text below the image that says sponsored. So this means more or less, again, not getting too technical here, that these results were populated based on sellers who were advertising on the search term dog chew toy that you entered as the shopper. So Amazon kind of picks which ads end up on a search result page based on a couple of factors, but again, not to get too technical. It’s mostly based on how much a seller is bidding in their advertisement to get placed on that search result page. So in my example, I said the headline is there, there’s a first row of products, and then there’s a video further down the page. Most of those are usually ads. They have that little sponsored text on them, and you’ll usually see maybe another row or two of products that are also sponsored throughout that page. The rest of the products that end up on the search results page are what is called organic placements. So these products, the sellers that sell them may not have been running advertising, but their products still show up on the Amazon search results page because Amazon thought it was a good fit for what the customer was searching. And Amazon picks to show these organic results based on a number of things, but it boils down to two things really, how relevant the product is to the customer’s search query and how likely it is that the product will sell, right? Because Amazon, they just want to sell you stuff. So to do this, the algorithm in Amazon looks at the content on a product’s detail page to see how relevant it is to the search that the customer entered. And there’s also some back-end metadata that as a seller, you can put in there to further inform the algorithm of like what exactly your product is to get it in front of the right people. But that’s only kind of half, maybe not even half of the equation for Amazon’s algorithm. The other half is historic sales volume and the conversion rate of a product and other things like ratings and reviews and so on. Because Amazon really wants to know, like, hey, if I put this in front of a customer, how likely is it that they’re going to buy it? Mary, this is probably why you see a lot of big brands pop up, because they have that historic sales volume that Amazon is like, I know that this is likely to sell, so I’m going to put it in the search results page.

Mary: They’re buying an ad on Amazon, they have to pay extra, right? Is that what you’re saying, to be seen in the sponsored section?

Erin: Yes, to be seen in the sponsored section, well, I should say this. To show up in the sponsored section, it’s called a bid auction. So any of those placements that have sponsored on them in the search results page, that means that when a search was entered into Amazon, like dog chew toy, everyone, big brands, little brands, resellers, they like raise their little paddle in the auction. And they’re like, this is how much I’m willing to bid, to show, I say this loosely, because Amazon will be like, okay, you bid $2 to show up here, and then let’s just say a big brand bid $2.10. So the big brand’s gonna win. They will get charged $2.10. Amazon will put it at like $2.01, because that’s all it took to beat out the next highest bidder. And then the big brand will only be charged that amount if someone clicks on that. So you’re not even bidding really to show up. I mean, you have to bid to show up, but you only pay if a customer clicks on the ad. But yeah, these bigger brands who have a lot more advertising dollars and bigger marketing budgets, they can definitely kind of rule those sponsored sections, which is why it’s really important to make sure that your product listing is super optimized so that you can kind of snag some of those organic spots. Or, you know, as an agency, we like to tell smaller brands or newer brands, like it’s gonna take some investment in advertising to kind of help get the ball rolling. Because you don’t need to continually invest in advertising because half of the organic reason that Amazon will show you is if you have historic sales. So, you know, if you invest in a bunch of advertising and you get a ton of sales, kind of back off because then you will have moved up the organic ranking enough that Amazon might show you without you having to pay. And then you just keep making sales and it’s kind of like this snowball effect.

Mary: Got it.

Erin: Yeah. But so all of this is like kicked off when a shopper enters a search into that Amazon search bar, right? So to kind of circle back and bring it back to PR, because that’s what people listening to the podcast really want to know about. If you’re a shopper on Amazon, you know, you at least have to have a general idea of what you want to buy when you enter something onto Amazon, right? So Amazon sellers are bidding on keywords that they think shoppers will search for that are specific to their products. And Amazon is also showing organic results of products that are relevant to customer searches. So it’s such a search-focused platform that customer education for market building or garnering awareness for a new brand is hard to do on Amazon. To have a lot of people searching for your brand on Amazon or searching for your super new unique product, they need to already know about your brand or your product. And this is where PR is super helpful for a brand’s likelihood of being successful on Amazon because the magic of what you guys do, Mary and Alex, is you can help a brand, like a new brand or even a brand that’s starting to see a plateau, kind of get its name back out there or help educate people on why they need this brand new unique product that solves a need that no other product on the market is currently addressing. Because Amazon is not a research tool, right? People are searching to buy things. So you guys, we love partnering with you guys to help our new brands or to help our unique products, kind of get their name out there so that they have a better shot.