Defend Your Turf

Howdy manufacturers. Jon Hoch, Founder of Power Equipment Direct, and I am back continuing our video series on our brand new Preferred Placement program.

In our last video, I promised you that I was going to show you three strategies on how to use Preferred Placement to better maximize your marketing dollars.

So there's the lazy approach, and then there's the Jon's recommendations way of doing it. So let me show you the lazy approach, right?

Say for example you have 200 skus on our website. Well, the easy thing for you to do is just say, "I'm just gonna bid 25 cents a click on every single one of them." And you can do that. And I actually recommend that you don't do that, because I don't think it's the best way of using your marketing dollars.

Instead, I think there's three reasons why you want to use Preferred Placement.

The first is that you work really hard to earn the number 1-5 spot on our website, right? So what you want to do is you want to defend your turf. So you want to defend those positions that you already have, and you want to take full advantage of that.

In addition to that, there are new products that you might put on the website. And you want to make sure that they get the most visibility. You want to spend a little bit of money to promote those products, and make sure that they stay on the first page and that they do eventually earn the best seller spot as well.

And then lastly, there are your mediocre products. And you can say, "well... you know, why would I want to invest in some of the mediocre stuff?" That's the whole point of Preferred Placement. If you're on page 2, or you're on page 3, what you want to do is invest those dollars. You want to leap frog the competition to get on page one, right underneath that #5 spot.

As far as your products that aren't selling, you probably shouldn't even put a bid on there, because what's the point? They're not selling anyway. Maybe our customers don't even want them.

And then if there's discontinued products, there's no reason to put a bid on something that's not even live on our site anymore.

So, let's talk about the first one, okay? Let's talk about defending your turf, alright?

Here is a search result for an electric cold water pressure washer. And you'll notice that there's a #1 seller, #2, #3, and what I want to do is I want to point out #4 here, okay? Because, the #4 position, at one point, wasn't a best seller. And I'm going to show you what we did as an experiment and kind of prove to you the value of Preferred Placement.

You'll notice that, here's May, all of a sudden "BOOM", they start getting a bunch of Preferred Placement clicks because that's when we turned it on. Because it wasn't a top seller. So as a result, it started getting a bunch of clicks, and started earning a bunch of traffic and visits - and started selling some products.

You'll notice that here in the middle of June, you go "BOOM" and shut off. You could say, "well, yeah - you turned it off Preferred Placement, so it shut off." Actually, we didn't. It's still on. It's still on to this day as a matter of fact. The reason why it stopped getting clicks is because it now is in the top spot, and it earned that 1-5 spot, and it costs you nothing.

So if you have Preferred Placement on, and you're the number three seller, and someone clicks on your listing, it doesn't cost you a nickel. You earned that spot, it's free to you, and it's great. And you need to defend that spot.

Here's what I recommend doing, okay? You have money in your account. Let's go ahead and give this a try, right? So you can filter your products the old fashioned way, but we've also created Jon's favorite filters. The first one is the Defend Your Turf.

The moment you select the Defend Your Turf, what it will do is it will actually sort the products that we recommend that you should apply this strategy to. The products will be there, you just put in some bids, everything's great, what's easier than that, right?

Lastly, I wanted to show one thing for you. Most accounts already have marketing dollars associated with them. This account, for example, has a $50 credit. The money is there for you to use. If you log into your billing center, and you realize that you don't have any credits, just send me an email at jon@pedstores.com and I'll be happy to get you a credit - I'll be happy to get you a trial to get started on this.

In our next video, we're gonna talk about new products and how to use Preferred Placement to get visibility and exposure for those new products that you really care about.

Thanks for watching. Have a great day.

NEXT: Promote New Products - How to Give New Products Extra Exposure