How Influencers Can Transform Your Amazon Business
Keren Dinkin, Copywriter
7 min read -
Updated:The rise and rise of social media has turned influencers into aces. You must have influencer marketing tactics up your sleeve to sell online.
Why?
Influencer recommendations drive three in four purchase decisions. From gaining visibility with the correct target audience to building trust, influencers can impact major aspects of e-commerce marketing and sales. You must crack the influencer marketing code to boost your business on Amazon.
Types of Influencers That Work for Amazon Sellers
While the sway of influencers over customers’ purchase decisions is undeniable, do remember that not all of them can yield a good ROI for your Amazon business. You’re most likely a small business with a limited budget. Only selective influencer marketing strategies can give you value for money.
Indiscriminate partnerships are a red flag you should avoid. Instead, focus on:
Micro Influencers
Micro influencers with 5,000-100,000 followers are great for marketing niche products that do not have reviews. They have some of the best engagement rates. That’s because such influencers often have a close-knit community that trusts their recommendations.
Besides, micro influencers with 10k or above followers can engage intimately with their community via their broadcast channels, promote niche products, and ensure your business gets the right kind of attention.
They are also much more affordable compared to macro and celebrity influencers. You can collaborate with a micro influencer for anywhere between $300-$500 per post. If that is expensive, your next best bet is nano influencers.
Nano influencers are great for your brand if you are new to Amazon.
YouTube Reviewers and TikTok Creators
Influencers who post product reviews on YouTube and TikTok Creators should also make it to your list. It’s because detailed reviews double up as product demos. Your prospects can not only learn about your product but also discover its utility, durability, and more.
YouTube creators are great for making long-format videos for discerning customers who research and pre-plan their purchases. Meanwhile, TikTok creator collaborations are perfect for spontaneous shoppers who value genuine reviews. The right kind of TikTok video has the potential to go viral, catapulting your product to popularity and sales.
Amazon Influencers
Creators who sign up for the Amazon Influencer Program work as affiliate marketers who help sell your products by providing social proof to your customers. They must adhere to Amazon’s rules and create a personalized page on Amazon listing all the products they promote. Every time their follower purchases a product, they get an affiliate commission, and you make money.
The Amazon Influencer Program helps influencers monetize their content. That’s why it has many takers. You will never run out of partnerships and can collaborate with multiple at the same time to boost sales.
How Influencers Affect the Amazon Flywheel
Here are the biggest advantages of influencer marketing:
1. Customer Trust and Social Proof
As mentioned earlier, influencers help with building trust and generating the much-needed social proof you need to sell.
Besides influencers, there are UGC creators who especially focus on reviews, applications, usage, and other important aspects of a product demonstration to showcase your offering. Because their followers trust their recommendations, your prospects automatically favor your products even if they have never purchased them in the past.
Another advantage of collaborating with influencers is that you can launch new or little-known products without an elaborate Amazon campaign.
2. External Traffic and Sales
Collaborating with influencers drives external traffic to your Amazon product page or brand store.
You can sell products that are relatively new, slow movers, or niche by driving external traffic from influencer posts to your Amazon product page. External traffic is also great for selling products that are not included in your pay-per-click campaign. In the ideal scenario, you should run PPC campaigns for your best sellers and sell other products through affiliate influencer collaborations.
External traffic can help you improve rank. Amazon’s A9 algorithm takes a multitude of factors into consideration when optimizing search page ranking. Traffic from external sources is proof that your product is popular. That’s a green trigger for the algorithm.
More traffic = more visibility + improved rankings + boost in sales.
Finding and Vetting the Right Influencer
Before you begin your quest for influencers, understand that they’re not the same as content creators, although some overlap exists between the two. Creators focus on original content that might sometimes be promotional in nature.
However, influencers promote your products to their followers. That’s the first criterion of segregation.
The next step is to define your ideal influencer persona. Consider the following when creating an influencer persona:
- Target audience
- Product niche
- Campaign goals
Your shortlisted influencer should match the persona you have created for the collaboration to work for your benefit.
So, the next question is, where can you find influencers who fit the bill?
- Influencer Marketing Platforms: Use tools and solutions specifically designed to find influencers for brands, like Sprout Social, GRIN, Upfluence, etc.
- Competitor Research: Find out the influencers that your competitors are collaborating with to shortlist some for your brand.
- Social Media Native Search: You can also look up influencers by niche on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
- Your Network: This may be the cheapest and easiest way to find influencers — just ask around!
Influencer Partnership Red Flags to Avoid
The goal of an influencer partnership is to drive brand awareness and sales. So, you must play by the rulebook. Keep an eye out for:
- Brand alignment. Don’t just go for influencers with good engagement rates and followers. Ensure they are a good match for your niche.
- Sudden spike in follower count. Organic growth does not happen overnight, and if your chosen influencer’s follower count has increased dramatically in a short period of time, they’re most likely bots. Avoid partnering with such influencers.
- Content quality. The content that the influencers make for your products should be good, and their output must be consistent. Only then can the collaboration meet your campaign goals.
- Ethics and rules. Avoid influencers who post controversial content and have unethical practices. Any sponsored posts should be rightly tagged as such, according to the specific social media platform rules. Otherwise, the post may be removed.
- Expectation setting. This is important to avoid negative results and disappointment. Both parties should have clarity over what they are supposed to do for each other.
How to Structure Win-Win Collaborations
As you can tell, influencer marketing is a complex process. It’s not as easy as finding an influencer and asking them to promote your product. So, what can you do to ensure the collaboration is fruitful and meets your campaign goals?
For Amazon businesses, the following strategies yield the best results:
1. Affiliate Links: Partner with Amazon influencers to promote your products on social channels. Create an affiliate link via which the influencer can drive external sales of your products. You get sales all year round, every time one of their followers purchases via the affiliate link.
2. Paid Partnerships: Similar to affiliate links, this involves paid or sponsored posts that the influencers make on their channels to promote your product.
- Performance-based Deals: This strategy requires no upfront payment. You can define the expectations and pay the influencer once all the criteria are met. Such partnerships can drive both sales and brand awareness.
- Gifting: You can also send products to Amazon influencers so they can create UGC content that can be used as reviews. This is good for promotional purposes and brand awareness.
Tracking ROI and Success Metrics
Once you have initiated an influencer collaboration, you must supervise it regularly to ensure it’s meeting its goals. Here are the KPIs you should monitor to ensure your influencer marketing campaign is on track for achieving its goal:
- Reach and Engagement: Track the impressions of the influencer’s post to understand how many times it was displayed to your target audience. In addition, watch out for likes, comments, shares, and clickthrough rates (CTR) to ensure your product is grabbing eyeballs.
- Conversion Rate: The end goal for any e-commerce business is to make sales and that’s why conversion rate matters. Reach and engagement amount to nothing if the collaboration is not leading to sales.
- Return on Investment (ROI): Ensure that your influencer marketing campaign generates a 100% or higher ROI because that’s the norm for Amazon sellers.
Thankfully, Amazon offers a tool that lets you measure sales from specific influencer campaigns. You can use the insights to fine-tune your influencer marketing strategy and take real-time data-driven decisions.
Amazon Attribution assigns unique tags to your off-platform marketing activities to track campaign performance, user behavior, and more. It’s a nifty tool that you can use to optimize your off-Amazon influencer marketing campaigns.
You can also opt for third-party solutions, like Sellerise SQP Insights, to track changes in traffic and sales. Visit our website to learn more about how Sellerise can simplify selling for Amazon businesses.
Final Thoughts
Influencer marketing can revolutionize your Amazon business if done right. Be selective, data-driven, and strategic in your partnerships. Use affiliate links, track every campaign, and analyze performance continuously. Tools like Sellerise and Amazon Attribution make it all easier.
