Transcript
Peter Crosby:
Welcome to Unpacking The Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
Peter Crosby:
Hey, everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Bringing the most out of your paid search, organic search and content excellence programs must be a group activity across all the teams and agencies responsible, or brands risk wasting the investment in any one of them by underperformance in the others. Amanda Wolff, Head of Marketing at Flywheel Digital, joined Lauren Livak and me to detail the innovation she has been seeing among leader brands to ensure that these functions are operating more as one and less as three. So welcome to the podcast, Amanda Wolff. We are so excited about chatting with you today.
Amanda Wolff:
Thanks for having me.
Peter Crosby:
So, success on the digital shelf today really requires success in organic and paid search, plus optimized content on product pages. That's the core way to sort of combine everything for results. The difficulty is that not every organization brings all of those elements together successfully. In order to achieve retail readiness, as you call it, and maximum performance from your seat at Flywheel, you have access to data and insights how customers are moving towards retail readiness. Can you share with us some of your observations?
Amanda Wolff:
So I think retail readiness is really a phrase that starts to scratch the surface of how retail media and the digital shelf are intrinsically linked in most of the retailer algorithms. Another word that's commonly used to describe this is relevance, but ultimately it's how does the algorithm think about your product and how does it decide if that product is the best suggestion to serve up for the customer? So we really talk about these concepts in a siloed way. We think about retail media like it's a standalone thing or content on a PDP, like the product data alone is really driving that organic ranking independently. But in reality, all of it matters and all of it works together to fuel the flywheel. My company, pun intended.
Peter Crosby:
I see what you're doing there.
Amanda Wolff:
I know. I'm so good at that way. No, I give all credit where it's due to Patrick and Chip for that name. But ultimately, content is driving two things. It's driving the conversion that's from the consumer-driven behavior. It's merchandising that product in a way that the consumer wants to buy it. So it's that consumer-oriented piece, but it's also checking the box for the machine. And by that I mean that algorithm from the retailer that's crawling that content to see if your product is a match for what the consumers want to buy. So it's really that it's both fueled organic rank from the relevance and also where media is driving awareness for top of the funnel and traffic further down the funnel.
So when you're really thinking about that flywheel, it's not just what's on the page, it's also the traffic that comes to that page. It's the conversion that happens off that page. All of that stuff works together to drive that flywheel effect. And so traffic from media is feeding the algorithm and helping you rank higher organically, just like organic ranking is helping your relevance that impacts your media spend and your media placements.
Peter Crosby:
So are there shifts that you're seeing happen to be able to try and get these things aligned or what's happening out there?
Amanda Wolff:
Yeah, so it's no surprise really because retail media is where the focus is for most of the retailers, and I'm sure that your audience or your listeners have heard this ad nauseum. They've seen all that publicly shared data around Amazon ads and retailers really want a piece of that pie. So anybody working in manufacturers today is probably dealing with retailers who want more of your ad dollars. You may already be paying them, so they may not be net new, but even if you are, they're probably adding more paid slots to their unit user interfaces in terms of paid placements rather than just the earned placements that used to be there. So there's this perception that it's all pay to play, but all that media proliferation really doesn't minimize the need for that organic work. It just changes it. So where you used to create really rich keyword-focused and conversion-focused content, those spots may not be getting nearly as much visibility as in the past. However, those placements still matter because that's really how you win those top paid positions in the options at the lowest cost.
So because the more relevant you are on those retailers, the less you pay per click, really these two concepts are kind of intrinsically linked and there's still a lot of siloing that's happening around that. But what we're seeing is more and more retailers are also holding brands accountable for readiness as they've also invested in more of their media placements. And so they do that in the form of content scorecards, which I know the team at Salsify is intimately familiar with, this idea of scorecarding and making sure that you've got all your content assets in place. But what that doesn't really do is shine the light on the negative impacts of not being reviewed, not being really viewed as being relevant in terms of media performance.
So I think it's an interesting way to start looking at your team structures and ways to start thinking about how to break down those silos so that your media performance and your content and digital shelf health performance are all put together in the same bucket, because you have to pay to play with retail media proliferation, but you also can't easily buy your way out of bad relevance or not being retail ready.
Lauren Livak:
And would you say, Amanda, that you've seen a shift recently with the maturity of e-commerce in general to say people have gone from a compliance approach to checking the box, presence of this, presence of that, to how do we measure readiness and effectiveness to actually holistically look at what we're doing on the digital shelf? Would you say that's really the shift you've seen?
Amanda Wolff:
Yeah, I think that's absolutely the goal, but I think we're still in the beginning of that journey to get there. And a big part of that is there's a lot of noise about how to isolate what is working. You may have things happening with your competitor or average selling price goes up or down. How does that impact it? And so there's a lot of signals that are there. We are doing our best to isolate that and we've got some pilots running now that allow us to really start measuring effectiveness, which is really exciting. But a lot of brands are still looking at it from a compliance standpoint.
Lauren Livak:
And you mentioned silos, so one of the biggest challenges for retail readiness is ownership. And it might sit with multiple different teams and they might have different approaches and it might not be holistic. So how are you seeing the organizations really break down those silos and bring those teams together to be able to paint a picture of retail readiness?
Amanda Wolff:
Million-dollar question.
Lauren Livak:
Right?
Amanda Wolff:
Really. A lot of them still have a long way to go, to be candid, and I think that there's a lot of ways they can start though. And so what I've given different clients that I've worked with advice around is start simple. Start with something like keyword sharing. There's a reason that a lot of these organizations are specializing and that you're working with a media agency or a content agency or a video. There's a reason that they're specializing, and I think that it makes a lot of sense for them to do. So you need people who can go really, really deep, but the more connectivity that you can have between your agencies or your internal teams, the better. And so I would start really light, start with something like keywords. What terms are you bidding on? What about organic search data in your long tail terms?
It's really a simple place to start, but even that's really complicated when you think about large portfolios and diverse categories. So at Flywheel Content Studio, we've got keyword data and even marrying that data from let's say organic panel data and then mapping that with advertising data or what you might get out of ARIP in terms of keywords. Shoot, even now you can put in to ChatGPT, "I want keywords for this product," and it'll spit ideas out to you. So all of those are options, but then the complication really comes with mapping those keywords to your attributes. And I think that's where companies like us can help do that at scale, but you can still do it yourself with a spreadsheet if you just have all of your SKUs and all of the attributes that are really most important for those SKUs.
And then think through that mapping exercise for those different keyword sets that you have so that then you can have really a golden list SKU by SKU, brand by brand even, that you can use and share with your agencies and your content teams. Because what we often see is a lot of brands haven't really thought through how to strategize their portfolio related to the keywords that they choose. Maybe every single SKU is going after the same keywords organically. When in reality, if you look at the landscape first, map it to your product second, then you can really start looking for opportunities both in media and in content, and in the two together, for the keywords you really want to win on for that particular subset of SKUs.
Peter Crosby:
Amanda, I appreciate you offering a spreadsheet as an option. I think it's a good way to sort of play around. But I think we all know that the scale and the ability to keep up with the algorithm is a tough thing to do in a spreadsheet if you're going to get any other work done. So I'm just being a pal because spreadsheet is a dirty word on this podcast, but we want people to take advantage of what's available to them for people to make progress. But ultimately, in the kind of environment that we're talking about, we all hear of it, automation is going to be a key attribute to be able to stay up with the crowd, if not win leadership in your category.
Amanda Wolff:
Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right.
Lauren Livak:
And Amanda, do you have an example of maybe how a company has successfully broken down a silo or pushed some teams together in a positive way to work together?
Amanda Wolff:
Yeah, so I think that where that really comes into play are a lot of those inter-agency teams, IATs, and a lot of organizations have started doing that, which is really, really great and it's a good first step. But what I'm also finding with a lot of those meetings is that they often come with, "These are the things I've done for you. This is my scorecard, and then now I'm going to turn it over to my social agency and they're going to say what we provided this month, and then I'm going to go to this one." And really, it's a great first step, but how do you take it to the next level? And I think that the way that you do that is thinking through a concept that I like to call triggers.
And so if you start mapping out the triggers in your organization where you need change, where you need some sort of response to happen, whether it's from your media agency responding to something that's changed in the competitive landscape or in your content, or maybe it's your social team running a campaign and they've got a lot of influencer content, those are really good opportunities to surface and have shared plans, action plans around those triggers. So your IATs can then take it back and say, "When we hear in the IAT that this is happening, this is what we should do as a response." And that might be category by category, SKU by SKU, but there are a lot of opportunities out there.
For example, you may have a social influencer team who's creating really good content, but because in the social influencer language of their contract that that imagery is not owned by the company and can't be used in other places, or it can only be used for X rights. And something as simple as just changing the language in that content upfront allows you then to have your content team be able to access all of that really great imagery from your social team and use that in their PDPs, especially if it's starting to drive conversion. So those are just some examples I think of ways that the more that you can drop those walls and get teams to come together, you don't necessarily want to have less specialization. You need those experts, whether they're in one agency or six, but the key is just to get everybody not just sharing updates, but also working together collaboratively around a structure.
Peter Crosby:
Have you seen the process for building out a core list of triggers? Is that something the client usually comes, "Here, I baked this up, do so?" Or is it really a conversation around the table about, "What's going to drive us, what do we want to stay aware of or in touch with so that we're taking advantage of opportunities or where we're being dinged?" Is it that kind of conversation?
Amanda Wolff:
Yeah, I think it is the latter. It's really working collaboratively because I think a lot of brands may not necessarily know what the triggers should be. I think they're looking to their agency partners, their consultancies to say, "What are the things that we can change about our business that are going to move things forward quickly?" So yeah, I typically would go in and say, "Here's some examples, but let's start and let's figure out who owns what parts of this and operationalize this." And it takes getting your hands dirty, but it really is building that framework for scale. To your point earlier about everybody's looking for automation, this is a great example of that. You have to build the machine to have muscle memory, and in this case, the machine is all of those experts that you're pulling together at a manufacturer from all these disparate places and saying, "We're going to build the machine now about how we interact with each other in a different way."
Peter Crosby:
I love that. One component of that is usually blowing up your KPI structure and resetting it for shared incentives that, above maybe individual incentives of each area, there's what are we all trying to drive towards that each of us has a piece of, and then how do we reward people for reaching those incentives? Are you seeing that kind of behavior in this context?
Amanda Wolff:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there's still a lot of people holding onto, I'm going to say legacy KPIs. Brand teams are always going to be looking for impressions and how they can drive awareness and engagement across their portfolio of products. But in the end, when you see an investor relations reports, they're not necessarily talking about how many clicks they got on social. They're not necessarily talking about ROAS. They're talking about sales and they're talking about share. And so the more you can incentivize teams in an organization around shared KPIs that are really about effectiveness of your efforts and not around completeness and checking the box around completeness like I talked about before, I think the more you can motivate those teams together collectively to get the change that you need done.
So for example, if media is only incentivized on ROAS, maybe they're not necessarily looking at conversion alone. ROAS is still important. It's a guardrail, it's an important guardrail, but it can also mislead people into taking credit for the sun rising. I know, right? But think about it. If you're bidding on your branded term, if I'm Tylenol and I'm bidding on Tylenol, I'm probably going to have really great ROAS for Tylenol. But if you're winning organically for Tylenol, then think about a way that you can let your listing, your organic placement, do its job and shift away some of that budget. And so looking at your sales and share is really the best way to know if what you're doing is working.
But more tactically, we also like to look at things like incrementality for that reason, not incrementality in terms of new shoppers, but in terms of increasing visibility for products that maybe would not have been seen otherwise. And so looking at those two things together, then that's when you can start getting that one-two punch related to media and content effectiveness and digital shelf to get more out of your dollars and make your budget work better for you. So if your content is performing better and you're better ranked organically, your CPCs are going to go down, and so you can use that money and channel that to lift other skews that may be hidden on page three or four.
Peter Crosby:
It's so complicated though, and you tell me if this is not true. I don't know if anyone ever got fired for buying their own branded term, or maybe they have, but I think largely it really takes some diligence and I would imagine some senior leadership to reset those in a way that gives somebody cover. Because let's say you don't buy your branded term for a while and something maybe goes amiss for a bit, you want good behavior to be encouraged, even if there's intervening small moments of fear or something.
Amanda Wolff:
Yeah, for sure. And I still think there's absolutely scenarios where you still want to bid on your branded terms, and there are some retailers that allow for conquesting and others that don't. And so some of it is a defensive play as well as other brand opportunities. Maybe it might be around DSP and some spend on display or something like that as well. So I think it can't necessarily be one size fits all, and I know Lauren and I talk about that endlessly, but you have to really view your competitive landscape and your category pretty carefully before you can make those strategic determinations. But then you're right, Peter. Once you've landed on strategy, then I think you have to have the chutzpah to stick it out and to see how things are performing, and also be willing to have somebody that you trust on with hands on keyboard to make those pivots when things don't work. We're in an age of test and learn and we always will be, but I think you've also got to have that conviction to stand with the strategies that you're trying to implement.
Lauren Livak:
I also think that's a good point though, Amanda, that you have to have someone who's owning it. This can't be part of someone's job, and when you think about organic and paid, that has to be under the same roof to be able to have the conversation to connect all of those dots. So really investing in a resource, because it takes so much time to monitor this. It changes more frequently in some categories than others, but if you don't invest in the person as well as the technology and build the process to be able to set it up, it's just not going to be-
Amanda Wolff:
That's right. If you've got specialists that are doing the good work, you need them to still do the good work. But I would also advocate that there needs to be somebody bringing that good work together or people are going to continue to fall down the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole at their job and not really think about the larger picture, which is are we driving sales? Are we driving share? What do we need to do differently to win against our competitors? How can we improve our effectiveness of our media spend? How can we make our conversions greater and win more in our competitive landscape?
Lauren Livak:
And when you're thinking about effectiveness, so measuring effectiveness is not the way that we've done historically measuring the digital shelf. So it's a different way of measurement, it's a different way of thinking. So can you talk about how you define effectiveness and why it's so important and what metrics you think are most valuable to look at effectiveness?
Amanda Wolff:
Yeah, I love that question. It's so hard and it's so simple at the same time, but really, looking at your content or your reviews or anything to bring in performance and not just checking the box. So a really great example that surfaced recently is around video. I know from the retailers, like Target in particular requires video in their content scorecards. A lot of pundits have been talking about the importance of video in driving higher conversion and higher ranking, but what does that really mean in terms of that video's effectiveness for that particular PDP? And I think that's where measurement tools sometimes don't really give us what we need and we're having to use data scientists to help us get there.
You can work with agencies to do that or your own, but if you have a commercial for your chocolate, let's just use that as an example. And in that commercial, there's a lot of chocolate chips that are in that video, and you decide to use that for your entire portfolio so that you can say, "Hey, Target, I'm putting a video up here now. I've heard from all of these providers that having a video is going to increase my conversion." That's awesome. But you included that same video on chocolate bar SKUs. What is that going to do from a shopability standpoint? Is it going to confuse the consumer? Because confusion kills conversion, right? So is that something that's really going to help you or not? I've seen some data that reinforces, that says that video doesn't get looked at that much, but when it does, it really drives conversion. The conversion goes way up, but that it doesn't get looked at as often.
So when you think about that use case and you think about the type of video that you need to be using in that scenario for that use case, it should be something for somebody who didn't get what they needed from your content upfront and had to go a little deeper. And when they went deeper, was it a brand advertisement or was it something that was really meaty that answered a question? Those are really difficult just to measure. That effectiveness is challenging. Like I said, your data scientist can help you with that. We've got that in place now. But ultimately, the reality is unless you dig deeper into those metrics, looking SKU by SKU, brand by brand at conversion, once you've made a change to an asset, it does become very hard. Now, AB tests exists, so that's another opportunity too. But I just think it's really important that we are really clear about the difference between correlation and causation.
Did having the video improve the conversion and ranking of those top SKUs that all just were investing a ton of money and pulling out in the stops for their content anyway, that would've ranked no matter what? Or was it something that having that asset really did improve that conversion rate? And so you have to isolate all those variables to be able to do that. You and I talk about canned peas a lot. It's not necessary for every canned pea company out there to have 14 images and to have six videos. But if you are in a competitive landscape, especially consumer electronics, that could be really, really important for you to make sure that you're answering all those unanswered questions. So shameless plug, you and I have that ebook that talks about that concept in more detail
Lauren Livak:
And it's on the digitalshelfinstitute.org under the partner section.
Amanda Wolff:
Yay.
Peter Crosby:
And I just want to be clear, Amanda, you and I have never discussed canned peas, so it must be with Lauren that you-
Lauren Livak:
Yes, we have actually talked about canned peas a lot, so that was definitely me.
Amanda Wolff:
Yes, Lauren and I have talked a lot about canned peas.
Peter Crosby:
I don't want to take credit for canned peas. Amanda, the thank you so much for bringing this data and perspective to our audience. There's so many places to unlock a greater value and performance in the work we do on the digital shelf, but combining, or I don't know whether combining is the right term, but putting these areas together really tightly and making each team members aware of how each impacts the others and driving your partners in that effort to be accountable for the stuff that really matters. I think this is one of the great areas of improved efficiency and greater performance that everyone needs today to drive increased profitability on the digital shelf, so thank you so much for joining us.
Amanda Wolff:
Thank you so much for having me. I love geeking out about this stuff.
Peter Crosby:
Well, thank you. We love your geekness and you can get more of it either at flywheeldigital.com or just hit Amanda up on LinkedIn. Amanda, as you would expect, and then Wolff, W-O-L-F-F. I just want to be sure we get that.
Amanda Wolff:
Got it.
Peter Crosby:
So thanks again, Amanda. It was great having you.
Amanda Wolff:
Thank you. Thanks so much.
Peter Crosby:
Thanks again to Amanda for joining us. As always, more info is available at digitalshelfinstitute.org when you become a member. It's free, for God's sake. Thanks for being part of our community.
