Channel Mastery - Ep. 22: Elaine Kwon and Jordan Taylor Kwontified

Kwontified

**Get your business bionically consumer centric with kwontified**

“Typically, if you are doing everything that you can with well-optimized campaigns, you can expect marketing to contribute between I’d say 20% to 35% of your monthly sales revenue.”
- Jordan Taylor

EPISODE PREVIEW:

Do you ever feel like you’re playing a game without knowing the rules? Or what about learning only the hard and fast rules of the game without understanding the philosophy or over-arching strategy? Being out on the sharp-end like this when planning around and investing in growth for your Amazon business is most definitely an uncomfortable feeling.Elaine Kwon, a favorite of Channel Mastery listeners, returns to our show to set some guardrails (comfort!) and spread some sunshine (good news!) around how to approach the “new” retail of coordinating online and offline strategy. Her colleague and co-founder of Kwontified, Jordan Taylor, makes his debut today on Channel Mastery – and he brings a hugely complimentary viewpoint and insights to this episode. Jordan offers some tactics and guidelines for how to best apply your marketing dollars in online advertising on Amazon.If you’re struggling to stay on top of online marketplaces, especially Amazon, and if you’re in the throes of planning for your multichannel business for 2018, this is one show you will not want to miss!

GUEST PROFILES:

Elaine Kwon

Co-founder of Kwontified, Elaine Kwon is a multilingual ecommerce sales leader with proven success in creating powerful ecommerce solutions and online business growth strategies for her clients. She began her career in logistics and supply chain efficiency, then transitioned to Amazon Fashion within buying and ecommerce management, eventually leading one of the luxury divisions at Amazon Fashion. Today, she leverages her ecommerce, product, operations, and supply chain experience – and intimate knowledge of Amazon Marketplace – to help beauty, lifestyle and fashion brands navigate Amazon and grow their online businesses.

jordan taylor

Jordan is co-founder of Kwontified, and compliments Elaine with his consumer-focused marketing experience. Jordan has an extensive background in omnichannel marketing strategy, global brand development, demand generation, and digital advertising. He began his marketing career in web development, search engine optimization, and social media integration, before co-founding Bergwind Marketing, a digital marketing and lead generation company. Today, Jordan leverages his expertise in digital marketing and search engine optimization to provide guidance to fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands as they navigate the Amazon platform to grow their online businesses in the U.S. and internationally.

TOPICS COVERED:

“New” retail, online and offline strategy coordination, the industrialization of multichannel business, Amazon as a search engine, fluid budgeting, average cost of sale, marketing expectations, customer lifetime value, driving revenue vs. acquiring repeat customers, seller central headline search ad, online ad buy budgeting, protecting ad space for your customer journey, advertising on Amazon

SELECT QUOTES:

[Elaine] “In order to survive and thrive today, you need to balance the wholesale relationship with a true direct-to-consumer online experience.”
[Elaine] “What we’re seeing now is the need and quick development towards what we would call ‘true industrialization’ - true professional standards of the e-commerce landscape and moving away from the Wild, Wild West mentality.”
[Elaine] “One of the most important things to think about is not so much, again, ‘How do we catch up to today?’ but rather, ‘How do we get ready for tomorrow?’”
[Elaine] “This concept focuses on the idea of really four areas that need to be digitally integrated for a brand and/or a retailer to thrive: digitalization, omnichannelization, platformization, and entertainmentization, which I know are really interesting words and take a new look at certain things. But the bottom line is you have to take your online, your offline experiences, logistics, and data, and you have to integrate them across the board.”
[Elaine] “The guiding question one should ask oneself in trying to think this way is really, ‘How can I be more convenient to my consumer, and how do I tailor all of my operations and strategies to achieve that?’”
[Jordan] “When it comes to marketing, the main thing is to have all the tools at your disposal. I’d really say that it’s really as simple as that and be open. Life, and I’d say marketing by extension, don’t necessarily go in a straight line, so be open to different ad types, different ways of marketing.”
[Jordan] “Typically, if you are doing everything that you can with well-optimized campaigns, you can expect marketing to contribute between I’d say 20% to 35% of your monthly sales revenue.”
[Jordan] “The one thing that I’d really recommend to people really looking to [explore Amazon advertising] this Q4 is consider stacking automatic campaigns with manual campaigns. I mean that in the sense of we’re not perfect. … If you’re not up for manual targeting, focus on product segmentation.” Edited for context