[00:00:00] Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Listeners of this podcast are experts at thinking about the consumer who is shopping in a digital context
[00:00:25] and how to do their best marketing to win over those consumers in moments of discovery and conversion. Tim Wilson, Chief Revenue Officer at ProductWind, thinks that you ought to be marketing at another customer that you may be neglecting. The algorithm itself. Winning at that marketing motion may be more extensive and more winnable than you think. Tim joined Lauren Levak-Gilbert and me to explain. Tim, welcome to the podcast. We are so delighted to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:55] Thanks so much for having me, man. I'm excited to be here. You spend most of your day talking to computers. And what I mean by that is that you and your company, you're looking at the algorithm behind retailer sites to really understand what's going on there, what's important, what they prioritize. And then you propose that people really should be fully on marketing to the algorithm.
[00:01:21] And I just, you know, obviously we spend a lot of time talking about how to be successful on the digital shelf. And I hadn't really heard that term before. So aren't people already doing that? Or is there something more going on that, which wouldn't be surprising, I don't understand. Yeah. Well, it's a good question. I'm still laughing at it. I spend all my day talking to computers. I do have, contrary to belief, I do have some friends. Okay.
[00:01:49] I am proof of that because we got connected through a friend. So there you go. You have one friend is what we know so far. Well, now you have three. You can count us in your friend circle. All right. Look at that. The power of networking. No, I do though. We do spend all day checking out, you know, computers and the algorithms and what's working, what's not working. Marketing to the algorithm, what that means to us is, and you'll hear me say it a lot today,
[00:02:19] is historically people, consumer brands, consumer manufacturers would meet with a buyer and have these large strategy meetings, you know, 10 years ago in preparation for how to influence that person to gain favor, knowing that it was going to drive results for their product. They would get better visibility, better placement, et cetera. Today, the algorithm is that buyer, is filling that role of the buyer.
[00:02:50] The algorithm is what's determining the placement and the success of any individual product, right? These retailers, Amazon, Walmart, et cetera, they're relying more on automation and their technology than they are looking to hire more people. So if the algorithm is the thing that's determining your product's relevance and therefore success, it seems like we should be marketing to it, right? If anything that is going to be influential to your product's success is something that
[00:03:18] should be marketed to or should be taken into as part of your strategy. And what I mean by marketing to the algorithm is that it needs some very clear things. There's five things that the algorithm is looking for. And we believe everyone should be incorporating these five things into their strategy, right?
[00:03:40] So those are traffic, external traffic, conversion, sales, and sales velocity, right? Those are the five core elements that the algorithm, generally speaking, is looking for, certainly across the major big box retailers that are out there, Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, et cetera. And Tim, you've used the... Yeah, because I kind of found out that the... Sorry, this is very important, Lauren. I found out that the algorithm does not enjoy a nice meal.
[00:04:09] It doesn't care about being taken to dinner. So digging deep on this, I think, is really important. So now that I got that important thing out, Lauren, you must ask your question. We're just going to ask, Tim. You've used an example before to kind of explain this. And I really liked it. And it was something about lemons or maybe lemonade or something. Can you talk us through it? I think that'd be super helpful for the audience. Absolutely.
[00:04:37] If you talk about marketing to the algorithm, I hear frequently people talk about how they use their link strategy or updating their title, their product description, things of that nature. And of course, that matters. And the analogy I gave is, I have three daughters. One of them in particular just loves... She loves doing a lemonade stand. It's how she makes her money. And she has a blast doing it. So she's become really good.
[00:05:06] And you got to have the cups, the ice. You got to have a sign. You got to have all these different elements. And you've got to obviously set up your stand. And so one day in particular, she came back totally dejected. And she had just a horrible day at her lemonade stand, man. Like you can imagine just like a seven-year-old who's just so full of like optimism with everything. And she came back, especially after having the success that she's had, frankly. But she came back completely dejected and bummed out.
[00:05:36] I was like, what happened? Why didn't you... She sold like two cups in two hours. And the reason it didn't sell is she had the sign. She had the cups. She had the ice. She had all those things like the title and the description. Because of course you have to have that. You can't have a lemonade stand without cups of lemonade. But what's more important than anything else is the location and the weather. There was no game. There was no baseball game going on.
[00:06:05] And it was an overcast day. So even if your lemonade isn't very good, if you set up shop at a soccer game or a Little League game and it's 90 degrees and hot and humid, you're going to sell really well. And I feel like when you think about marketing to the algorithm, I hear brands either not really know what I'm talking about or focusing on the cups in the ice rather than the location and the weather. And the location and the weather here in this case is traffic, external traffic, conversion,
[00:06:34] sales and sales velocity. And so when you get that right, which I'm sure your daughter did the next time and is now living outside the home in her own mansion. At age seven. Yes. But when you get that right for the algorithm, what are the benefits of getting all five of those running at optimum speed?
[00:06:59] Well, what happens is if you believe the world is algorithmic, which I do, that's like the founding belief of what we're doing here. Then by definition, everything is connected. So when you hit on all five of those things, what you're really doing is you're telling the algorithm that your product is extremely, it's hot. It's getting hotter. It's relevant. It's the thing that people want to buy.
[00:07:27] I frequently hear the word relevance or relevancy. I've heard it on your podcast several times, people talking about driving relevancy. And I don't know that we ever really defined that. But we define relevancy as that's the question that the algorithm is looking to answer on any individual search. So consumers go to Amazon and they're searching for a coffee cup.
[00:07:53] What Amazon delivers is not just a coffee cup, knowing that you want an actual thing to drink coffee out of instead of like a T-shirt with it on there. It's looking for the thing that people are most likely to buy, which is an important framework, right? Amazon, Walmart, they're not here to help you sell. And anyone who's selling on these platforms wouldn't say that's true, right? They're not here trying to help you sell. They're here trying to help people buy.
[00:08:19] And so relevance means what's the thing people are most likely to buy. When you send in those five elements with increasing intensity week over week, you are quite literally training the algorithm into loving your product.
[00:08:34] The benefit of that or what happens to your question, Peter, when you do that is one, the first thing you'll notice is a tremendous upward pressure on your organic ranking, meaning your organic rank becomes much better, right? So you go from not being on page one to being on page one, as an example. That organic rank is feeding relevancy into the algorithm, drives up visibility. It's also going to now make your sponsored product rank higher.
[00:09:04] So your retail media becomes more efficient and effective, right? So your share of voice goes up, which I know this podcast is a huge fan of share of voice, yourself, and because it's a leading indicator of what? Of sales, right? So as your share of voice spikes, so too will your sales. And this is how you can begin to get that proverbial flywheel spinning in your favor.
[00:09:32] And again, the key is to be able to hit on those elements with increasing intensity for an extended period of time. You don't want to just do it. You don't want to just have some effort where you get a bunch of traffic and sales in one week and then everything falls flat because that's not going to deliver a strong enough or a long enough signal into the algo. And consistency is key, right? It's your point. And it shouldn't just be for like a day or two days.
[00:09:59] You have to do it like over time and it needs to be strategic based on kind of what your overall goals are. Would you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are so many use cases when you should be marketing to the algorithm, right? And everyone has limited resources to some degree. So you've got to be very thoughtful about which products you do it to and when and how long you do it for.
[00:10:27] And we can talk about a couple of different examples there, hopefully today, about when you should be using it. Perfect. So there's five things that we need to talk about, but we're not going to hit all of them on the podcast. But let's talk about sales, right? Number one, most important for brands, but they can only control a piece of that, right? Because they're trying to get more sales. They're trying to increase conversion. What would you suggest from an algorithm perspective they focus on when it comes to sales? Yeah, so great question.
[00:10:57] As it relates to sales, well, first of all, sales is the cure-all for everything. I think we all know that, right? That's not even an algorithm thing. Everyone on the phone today or listening today will tell you, yeah, when my sales are up, everything is good. So it's sales. It's also really sales velocity because you may be a newer product in the category or you may be an entirely new product launch, I should say.
[00:11:25] So what the algorithm is really looking for is, is your product something that more people tend to want every day? Are your sales increasing? Sales increasing is another way of saying sales velocity, right? What a great example of this would be, we work with a very large CPG. They make paper products, including napkins.
[00:11:53] They have a generic white napkin that we've all had and used millions of times in our life. Easter just was a couple days ago. I don't know when this is going live, but Easter was just three days ago. And we helped them back in March. Easter has a, most events have about a two-month buildup, whether it's Easter, Memorial Day, back to school.
[00:12:19] Meaning about two months prior, you can see using Helium 10 data a really strong increase in search volume for those types of terms. And when you drive your efforts around marketing to the algorithm, focusing on things like sales and sales velocity, when you searched on Amazon for an Easter napkin, everything you saw was eggs and bunnies and different pastel colors.
[00:12:47] But sure enough, all the way up to the number one organic slot was just a plain white napkin. That works, right? I mean, it works for anything. But even though, and the reason for that is because the sales velocity is signaling relevance to the algorithm. And again, the question is, what's the thing people are most likely to buy?
[00:13:10] And when the algorithm sees that increasing sales velocity week over week, it says someone's looking for a napkin. Well, this is the thing people are most likely to buy, right? I can see that it's growing, it's hot, and it's getting hotter. The sales velocity is increasing. So that's how you're able to get your high organic placement in that visibility, which obviously now leads to traffic and et cetera. And did they need to have Easter in their content?
[00:13:36] Or you're saying they wouldn't necessarily even have to target Easter as a holiday? They didn't even necessarily target Easter as a holiday. They didn't. And it's different for like Prime Day, right? For Prime Day are these, you know, what do you call them? Man-made events? What do we call Prime Day? Mega sales, I think is what. Yeah. Is there a term? Well, the last podcast we did on it was mega sales or something like that. I think. Mega sales? Yeah. Tentpole events. That's what we call them. Tentpole events.
[00:14:07] Tentpole events. Yeah. I don't know if that's a technical term or not. Whatever these, yeah. When you have more of these tentpole mega sales events, there is no, it's like the exact opposite. There's no two month build. What's interesting is that, and I'd be curious to that you're listening on this right now. What we typically see is that week before the event, sales actually dip. Consumers know a sale is coming and they're waiting to get the better deal.
[00:14:38] So, rather than necessarily having to launch your Prime Day kind of deals on the day of the deal and pay these different kind of extremely high CPCs, when there's a drop in sales like that, guess what the algorithm does when it sees some other product with growing and intense sales day over day, week over week, leading into Prime Day?
[00:15:04] It shoots you up to the organic spot and it's the fastest, cheapest way to do it because no one else is really buying. So, if you can deliver sales and signals for that week, two weeks before Prime Day, you're going to get a huge jump of share of voice. And if you can have a large share of voice on Prime Day, that's really the best way for you to get a profitable kind of four-day event or whatever it is these days, two days. So, Tim, going back to the napkin example. Yeah.
[00:15:31] At least, what did you do for them? Because it sounded like they already were sort of set up to succeed because people want a white napkin. So, what did they do with you folks to accelerate that or to make sure that that happened and that it happened to them? Yeah. Yeah. So, it's a good question, Peter. What we did for this particular company is you take a look when you're working on an existing product.
[00:15:59] There's different strategies that you need to use based on what type of product it is, whether it's a new product, whether it's an existing product, how long it's been around for, potentially what category it's in is likely going to have an influence, along with what is the goal or the objective for your particular effort. Because there are dozens of different applications here.
[00:16:21] In this specific application, the goal was we knew from looking at the monthly search volume, we knew and we saw that interest in Easter napkins, if you just go look at whatever data you use to understand search volume on Amazon,
[00:16:40] you can see roughly two months before Easter, a tremendous uptick in Easter napkins as a search effort on this particular case on Amazon. And so, we knew about two months before the event is when consumer interest starts to tick up, obviously peaking the closer to the event.
[00:17:02] And so, what we did was we worked with this brand to essentially run a new age sampling program to where we were able to have the software orchestrate tons of people, meaning a thousand plus people over time,
[00:17:28] going out and purchasing this product and performing some tasks for the brand. And so, the idea is that if you start early, competition is low, search volume is low. It's a lot easier to get to the top of the hill in those days, in that time period, than it is the week or two just before when competition is rabid.
[00:17:54] So, it's similar to surfing, right? And with respect to, you have to see when the wave is coming, when the wave of demand is coming, and you can't wait until the wave is on top of you to start paddling, or you're going to miss it. You have to start paddling before the wave comes so that when the wave arrives, you're already on top of it, and then you can just ride the wave of demand. And that's what we're trying to do. That's what we do with the Easter napkins.
[00:18:21] So, you're trying to win in the earliest days of rising demand for your brand, because that's a moment where a little bit of activity drives a lot of attention from the algorithm. Exactly. Okay. Depending on what's happening, there may need to be some sustained efforts as well to sustain it. But this is what I mean by being thoughtful where and when you market to the algorithm. Fascinating.
[00:18:51] Okay. So, another element, you're getting yourself in front of the algorithm and you're waving your hand saying, look, stuff's happening over here. And you've got both sales starting to boost, sales velocity going. And then you said another element of the five that you need to be great at is external traffic. So, define that for our listeners and then what the goal is in this magic moment to lead you to success.
[00:19:49] Yeah. We've seen retailers double down on retail media and looking to sell ad for dollars and even expanding their reach off of their own property. Right? We've seen Amazon very aggressively, great partnerships with other publishers.
[00:20:12] So, if you're able to show Amazon not just sales and sales velocity increasing sales, but you can show them that your product is a magnet for bringing people from off-site to on-site. That's extremely valuable to Amazon.
[00:20:37] And as a result, we've found external traffic to become one of the core elements for success in terms of marketing to the algorithm, sending in the data you know the algorithm loves. And is that things like brand sites? Like where to buy? Like where do you see most brands get a lot of their external traffic from? Is it social? Where does it come from? Probably a cross-section.
[00:21:06] It really is a cross-section of all different places. For us, what we do is we've found working with people who are really excited about your brand and your product or whatever the case may be from that point of view. But people that are really excitable for your product and simply asking them. It's amazing how far it goes. This will go.
[00:21:30] Simply asking them to share that product detail page link out with their friends and family and network. And certainly in some cases, traditionally, that can be social with a creator making a post. But it can also just be most people listening today have some type of their own creator community where they have identified brand advocates that they can send product to or they can ask them to make posts on their behalf.
[00:21:55] Just simply asking them to either make the post or text or email it out to a bunch of people, right? Just think about the simple scale. If you have a creator community of your own of, let's say, 1,000 creators, which I think many people, many companies will have, and you're able to get those 1,000 people to just share that link with 10 friends and family. This doesn't even have to go out into the emotional look.
[00:22:22] You now have 10,000 external visits to Walmart.com or to Amazon, whatever you want. That is going to be a great signal, and that's a great starting point for how you can start to implement this yourself. I know a lot of brands that when they launch a new product, they send an email out to their whole function. And I'm like, everybody click this link to try and get the traffic, especially for new products. Because you have to facilitate it in a way, right?
[00:22:52] Because doing it organically through a sampling program makes a ton of sense, but it's not always an option for everybody. So figuring out a way that you can do this a little bit more scrappy makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, every salesperson out there right now listening is like, yeah, you don't get anything you don't ask for. So just asking those people that love you the most to help out. It's amazing. I also think people, maybe this is me still being, I don't know.
[00:23:19] I think people that generally like to help people too, right? And you want to help people you really like. So I know companies are not people, but people have a personal relationship with a lot of people, with a lot of the brands that are listening right now. And if those brands were to reach out to their audience and say, can you help me? There's a really high percentage of those folks who are going to want to do it. If for nothing else, it's also cool coffee table talk. Something they talk about what their friends and family about.
[00:23:44] So yeah, you got to do whatever you can to send in that external traffic for sure. And essentially what you folks are doing is for your clients, you're automating a lot of that process. You're describing the kind of the motions that need to be taken. And it sounds like what you folks are doing is either doing that on behalf of your clients or automating it to a good degree so that it can scale. Is that right? Yeah. Speed and scale are critical.
[00:24:13] We have software that allows you to do this literally at a click of a button and the software will orchestrate everything. Finding the people, managing the payment, organizing who does what, when, that whole process. So Tim, let's talk about the famous two-letter word, AI. We can't get through podcasts without talking about it. The fate of the algorithm with agentic AI. What does that look like? How are you thinking about that?
[00:24:40] Especially when it comes to things like external traffic, like AI agents are driving some of that. How are you approaching all of this in tandem with the algorithm? No, you can't get away from it. You know? It's like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey, man. It's everywhere.
[00:25:04] What I would say is that the more that there is AI being adopted and used by the companies or brands and retailers, the better it is to market to the algorithm. Because what it's really telling you is we're relying more on our technology. That's another way to say it. And I think you need tech to market to tech. Rufus, for example.
[00:25:32] That's another way to think about Rufus, in my opinion, is it's really emphasizing or shining a light on the long tail keywords. It's no longer about Easter napkins. It's going to be, I'm having family over for the holiday dinner type. What do I need to have a successful holiday meal? Those are the types of things that Rufus is helping you answer. And that's another version of long tail.
[00:25:59] And so where does that long tail come from? Again, it's just going to bounce back to the relevancy. I think retailers have been using AI for a while now. I don't think it's a new thing for most retailers because they've all been building out these intelligent systems internally to help with their merchandising and to help with what products they want.
[00:26:20] It's just now that there's this layer on top that makes it easier for consumers to interact with the AI, it's exploded with excitement and possibility. And we've seen, without a doubt, our own customers benefit with Amazon Rufus. I've seen our customers' products become something that are being recommended as people are shopping on ChatGPT and things of that nature.
[00:26:46] So I see AI as a starting point for people if they're looking for, if there's any doubt about, should I have marketing to the algorithm as part of my strategy? I think if you have any doubt about that, like the fact that we're moving into such an AI-centric world, hopefully it relieves any doubts that you have.
[00:27:09] And I love this, you know, that in some ways the AI is an expanding circle around a technology that already exists. The algorithm is at sort of the core of everything, if I understand what you're saying. And I'm wondering, as you're seeing your clients who are kind of dipping their toe into that, or maybe in some ways not by mistake, but as an added bonus, they are doing well in Rufus results.
[00:27:38] I was just wondering if you're taking any early learnings from what it takes to be successful at that as well as? Are you finding that it's exactly the same principles that are needed? Because there's some discussion about whether, you know, there's such an industry that built up around SEO and getting that right and gaming the system and all that.
[00:27:57] And one of our co-hosts and co-founders of Salsify, Rob Gonzalez, was at our recent Digital Shelf Summit saying, you know what, forget about LLMO, GEO, you know, whatever the latest acronym is. The founders of like OpenAI and Anthropoc and Plays like that, they are deliberately trying to create something that can't be gamed. You just have to do great content and have people love your product and you'll be fine.
[00:28:25] I'm just wondering what you're learning in your early days about what's different about winning in that arena. So I think that, yeah, I think it's important for everyone to realize something, which is if you want to be successful today on marketplaces like Walmart, Amazon, Target, Best Buy, you have two customers. You have the end user that everyone obsesses over today. Who's using my product?
[00:28:53] You have, I don't even know how much effort gets put into understanding these, building out these personas and telling me that, you know, Lauren probably lives in the city. Has an amazing dog, right? Loves to shop at, you know, Viori, wherever it is. You build those personas and those are important and that is extremely important, but you also have the algorithm. And the better that you market to both customers is how you win an outside share. So is it the same as what you were doing before?
[00:29:22] In many respects it is because when you talk about doubling down on building great content, what you're talking about is optimizing your PDP for conversion, making sure that the customers are getting the, you know, have confidence in purchasing your product. And that's, that's the tipping point of where we started the call where sales velocity is one of the, is like the most critical component because sales cures all.
[00:29:51] So I agree with that statement, but I also feel like it's a little bit of a worrying about your ice and your cups instead of worrying about your location and the weather. The fact of the matter is relevancy means what's the thing people want to buy. And that's not changing with AI. It's not changing with your Rufus example or anything like that. And so the way you can tell it, this is a thing people want to buy is by sending in those signals.
[00:30:20] We know the algorithm loves traffic, external traffic, conversion, sales, sales velocity. That's, that's really what cures all. Because increasingly discovery will be the result of someone asking a question to accomplish a mission.
[00:30:34] And then the only chance to win that is in that moment, in that conversation, it's going to become such a much more momentous thing in that it's happening in a, essentially a private conversation happening over on the side. It's just, there's a million of them happening at once. And, but the principles for showing up are relatively the same. It's just the scale, to your point, the scale, speed and timing changes. Yeah.
[00:31:05] And Shopify just announced the integration or it's, it's, there's code available to integrate Shopify buy now into chat GPT. So, I mean, that's a buy now feature while searching on chat GPT, which means you're not going to the PDP. You're not going to any external sources. You are trusting what chat GPT is telling you and you're purchasing. It's bananas, isn't it? It's, I know. Yeah.
[00:31:30] And we are seeing, just bring it back, even, but like, you know, we definitely see, we are seeing our customers' products show up in Rufus as, you know, the first or second result. And that's all they're really showing. I forget what it is. I think it's three or four that Rufus likes to show you. Four or five, depending on the category. Four or five. Yeah. Three or four. So practice the fundamentals. I just think that people have got to make sure they understand what the fundamentals are because of course you have to have that good title and product description.
[00:31:56] I consider that table stakes, but what, what really matters again, are those, those five elements we've been talking about today. Well, Tim, I love the reminder. And then also the expansion of brains to think about the timing of these things and, and how to prepare for it.
[00:32:16] And so thank you so much for bringing that to our attention and, and walking us through some of these sort of answers that need to be done to not only win your consumer, but also win that algorithm. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. One more thing actually that I wanted to touch on. Yeah. I wanted to bring out, you were talking earlier about what are the benefits or what happens when you market to the algorithm. And I mentioned increase in share of voice and traffic and all those things.
[00:32:46] The other big benefit is that if you just think about the word relevancy and what's the thing people are most likely to buy, the algorithm is looking to understand, okay, if this is something that people are most likely to buy, whatever that thing is, if you have related products in your catalog, those also, it's like a rising tide floats all boats. So if you are an electronics company, you're selling your outdoor camera, security camera is doing exceptionally well.
[00:33:15] Other outdoor cameras in your portfolio will also benefit and get a lift. They'll be buoyed. So it's really, uh, uh, you know, a catalog wide strategy that you can have in terms of which products you promote and when. And so that's to me, one of the most exciting components to this is how you can focus on one product, but really benefit the entire category of products for your, for your business. Like your robot attack dog. Yeah. Did you see my.
[00:33:47] Wandering around the house. You gotta, everyone who will, you gotta wear shin guards at my house. Exactly. I don't have a robot attack dog and I need to wear shin guards in my house. Oh, that's true. You kind of do. The, the most loving Rhodesian Ridgeback in North America. But just a big old pile of limbs coming at you. It's so funny.
[00:34:12] I was like, I don't know if anybody in the e-commerce space is as associated with another thing as much as you are with your dog. I know. It's because he's the best. He is. Tim, thank you so much for closing it out with a, well, I did that, the attack dog. Tim, really great to have you on. Thank you so much for sharing all these great insider secrets with our audience. We really appreciate it. Well, I'm excited. Thank you so much for having me on. It's something I believe everyone should be asking about.
[00:34:42] Asking, pushing their agencies and internally, how are we marketing? Like, how is the algorithm playing into our strategy here? And everyone can do it. You all have the ability to tap into your own internal. You don't even think you have to hire outside resources. You can, you have it internally today. You can orchestrate plans to drive those five elements of sale, you know, traffic, conversion, and sales. So please do it. Give it a try. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Thanks so much, Tim.
[00:35:12] Thanks again to Tim for all the science and the optimism. Get more of all of that by becoming a member of the DSI at digitalshelfinstitute.org. Thanks for being part of our community.