June 7, 2024
LAS VEGAS – Earlier this year at Prosper Show in Las Vegas, Dakota Morse (pictured) shared his strategies for working with influencers and social media to build brands and cultivate loyal customers.
With Amazon Prime Day roughly a month away, the Prosper Show Newsletter revisited the topic with Morse, founder of ALT Group, an Amazon advertising agency based in Santa Monica, Calif. The 28-year-old Morse worked at Amazon for five years before starting Alt group and has launched several seven-figure brands and one eight-figure brand.
Prosper Show: What mode of social media is losing steam?
Morse: You could look at Instagram as losing some level of steam. Instagram is a really good channel overall for getting views, but the number of views that convert to sales is lower. We use instagram to grow awareness, but if you put an affiliate code in an instagram reel, and look at how many sales that drives, it’s very difficult. I’ve found the level of virality, or the ability to go viral on Instagram, to be fairly limited.
We’ve done it for many of our brands, and we continue to do it—but it feels harder and harder sometimes to have content that cuts through and really captures peoples’ attention. We still see it as a very important initiative and there many eyeballs on Instagram. It’s definitely part of the strategy.
Prosper Show: What’s gaining steam?
Morse: You can create brand new TikTok accounts, post content, and it can get a million views. I don’t know if it’s an algorithmic difference, but I did see more and more brands go from zero to millions of dollars in sales a lot faster through TikTok initiatives than is even possible to do via Instagram.
Prosper Show: Can you use it to bypass Amazon?
Morse: I don’t legitimately think you can say, ‘I’m not going to sell on Amazon at all, I’m just going to focus on my D to C website’ and launch one brand on Instagram and another brand just with TikTok content. I would bet a million dollars that that brand would be able to scale to at least six figures if posting consistent content on TikTok versus posting consistent content on Instagram.
Prosper Show: What are your Prime Day strategies?
Morse: One strategy is to liquidate inventory that we don’t necessarily want to hold on to and are willing to blast through. We have that traffic, and it’s helpful to have those email lists, SMS [short message service] lists, and social media followers so you can blast out and drive that extra traffic to Amazon. You can run aggressive discounts on newer products.
I’ve moved personally away from the strategy of just selling things to sell things, which I think a lot of sellers still do. But why just lose money on Prime Day? I don’t need the rank holding for that much longer than post Prime Day. I have not seen documentation of a net benefit of moving insane volume on Prime Day unless it’s remnant inventory.
Prosper Show: What should sellers be doing to prepare for Prime Day and/or the holiday season?
Morse: Building a following on social media and having a well-built-out email list are important. Those are two things where it’s almost too late for Prime Day. Start building those things so you’re not scrambling in the future for Prime day or other events. We already have emails built out for Prime Day for all of our brands. They’ll go out and say, ‘Check us out on Prime Day. We have these sales going on.’
Prosper Show: What are the big benefits of building that following?
Morse: You have customer data that you essentially own. You have an engaged group of people who want to hear when you’re doing sales and discounts, and when you’re doing events on Prime Day. Even if you don’t have a huge following, you should be posting across social accounts such as TikTok and other things, to educate people to the fact that you will be taking part in Prime Day. We’re only typically going to do that—at max—maybe a week before; in many cases, even 48 hours before. But then once it’s on, you’re obviously going to crank and try to move as much as possible.
Prosper Show: Why is social media so important?
Morse: With Amazon, you can come up with an idea, source the product, launch the product, and run PPC [pay-per-click]. If you have good pages, you’ll get some level of sales. It seems very black and white and there are companies that have built literally billion dollar businesses just doing that and having good pricing. However, pricing alone is usually not enough to be a differentiator on Amazon.
Prosper Show: What type of feedback did you hear after your presentation earlier this year at Prosper?
Morse: People are excited about social media, scaling on social media, and building a brand that is differentiated. Other people were obviously looking for outsourced solutions. We provide that as a service within our agency, so that was a lot of people coming up to me asking, ‘How do we work with you to do this for us?’ I was also surprised that a couple people came up to me with international demand for these types of services.
Prosper Show: What’s your level of concern about the TikTok ban signed by Biden?
Morse: I honestly don’t think that’s ultimately going to happen. There hasn’t been a proven case that TikTok has been used by foreign entities to cause issues with the American population, or that it’s being used in some type of nefarious way. If that was proven, there would be a much different case to be made, and we will see what plays out.
As a side note, I don’t think social media is a net positive, to be honest. It helps brands grow, and it helps them get reach, but there are instances where we should look further as a society. I don’t think kids and teenagers should be utilizing social media, or at least being exposed to social media when they are in a developmental phase.
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