The latest info on influencer marketing trends, micro influencer news, and the world of social media
This past week Business Insider released some leaked documents showing that Amazon is expanding their influencer marketing program which has been on the back burner for the past two years since launching in 2017.
Amazon has been on the forefront of many technological trends over the past few decades and they haven't fallen short on influencer marketing. After the success of their affiliate marketing program, giving individuals commissions for bringing the online marketplace sales, they decided to create a similar program catered to influencers in order to take advantage of the many marketing benefits social media users have to offer.
Amazon's Influencer Program has stepped up it's game
Screenshot of Amazon's Influencer Program Page
The Amazon Influencer Program gives influencers on social media platforms (like Instagram or Youtube) their own custom page on the Amazon marketplace. On this page, influencers can add any number of products that they would like to promote to their audience, creating a custom "online store" with their own special 'vanity URL' (i.e. amazon.com/shop/influencer-name). When someone purchases a product from their custom store page, the influencer will receive a commission of the profits.
"Amazon has been on the forefront of many technological trends over the past few decades and they haven't fallen short on Influencer marketing."
This feature is similar to Amazon’s Associate Program where individuals can get a commission from promoting products with a special 'affiliate link' but this new program provides Influencers more power or “influence” by giving them a branded presence on Amazon with a custom page to promote as many products as they wish.
Giving influencers their own page on Amazon allows them to easily direct their followers to a single location to make money with the online giant as opposed to directing followers to individual product links with 'affiliate tags' as was the strategy in the past.
Photograph sources via Pexels
The major change Amazon has made to their influencer program is to allow Micro-Influencers to join. If you don’t already know what Micro-Influencers are or what different types of influencers exist, you can learn more about them in our blog article Why Micro-Influencers are the Best Influencers. Since the program's inception, only influencers who had large following bases either on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Youtube were allowed to join the Amazon influencer program. According to Business Insider’s research, this has finally changed.
The Amazon Influencer Marketing Program now accepts all forms of Influencers
Photograph of Influencers via Pexels
Amazon started soliciting and accepting numerous Micro-Influencers who have been coming out on Twitter and other social media platforms announcing their recent invitations and involvement in the program. Apparently “thousands have been signing up”. This has shifted the tides of their old strategy which involved only accepting big time social media personalities such as Mark Cuban and Gillian Michaels.
"The major change Amazon has made to their Influencer Program is to allow Micro-Influencers to join."
Another major update Amazon has implemented this past year is a revamp of their product commission structure from a stepped commission (increased profits for higher sales) to a flat rate commission (no increase in percentage based on sales). Amazon has decided to give different percentages of profits to influencers who promote various product niches on the marketplace. Influencers and Amazon Associates alike will be have the same structure until further notice.
The highest paid commissions are being paid to fashion influencers who have the opportunity to make 10% of every sale they are apart of. I assume Amazon is catering their highest commissions to the fashion industry to bolster their own fashion line which was released in 2017. The second highest commission is going to influencers who promote furniture products which is followed close behind by the non-apparel category that includes Amazon’s own products Echo and Fire. It makes sense Amazon wants to reward influencers for soliciting sales on their higher priced goods and products that they produce in-house.
Another way Amazon allows Influencers to make money is by giving them flat fee monetary rewards called “bounties”. Bounties are earned by Influencers bringing in sales through embedded buttons on their Influencer pages or banner ads specifically targeted at their own online services like Prime, Audible and Amazon Fresh. According to the insights that Business Insider recently disclosed, Influencers will be able to make up to $15 US and as low as $3 US for every service sign-up they bring in.
Photograph sources via Pexels
The Amazon influencer program has found a unique way to bypass the issue of accepting influencers who have fake followers. This issue has become a major problem in the influencer marketing industry over the past few years with the advent of mass fake social profiles and automation-bots who can create a false perception that a social media profile has extreme popularity when in reality they are small fish. Many influencers will purchase fake followers in order to increase their fee for sponsored posts and will even buy fake likes on their posts to create a facade of high engagement. The rise of fake follower accounts has resulted in brands getting conned out of millions of dollars.
The New York Times did an extended story on the fake follower industry called The Follower Factory, as well as Time magazine who wrote about Twitters purge of fake accounts which resulted in high profile individuals like Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and even Obama losing millions of followers. Amazon has been able to avoid this major issue in the social media influencer industry by only rewarding influencers for purchases they bring in, not for their following reach or post engagement.
Influencer marketing has been growing at an exponential rate for the past five years
Photograph of Influencers via Pexels
It’s not surprising that Amazon has finally step their game up with their Influencer Program since Influencer promotion is becoming one of the best online marketing tactics for eCommerce sellers and is growing at an annual rate of 38% with an estimated ad spend poised to reach between $5 billion and $10 billion in 2022. It’s also not too shocking that they now have included social media users with tight-knit followings into their program since Micro-Influencers have become the leading influencer type for marketing campaigns in 2018, and Amazon’s previous attempt at soliciting big name Influencers wasn’t very successful (as Forbes pointed out in their article “One Year Later, Amazon's Influencer Program Has Not Changed The World”).
Amazon’s online marketplace competitor Walmart has also recently entered the Influencer space by integrating brands’ Influencer posts into their product listings in an attempt to “out-innovate” the leading online marketplace giant. Starting last June, Influencer pictures of food recipes, product recommendations, and blog articles began appearing below some products’ specifications. With Amazon’s strong hold and huge market share of 48% in the online retail market, Walmart is going to really have to really step up their game in order to increase their meager 3.7% online retail market share and try to take on the digital retail goliath.
It’s a bright future for Influencer marketing as a whole, as well as for Amazon sellers as we enter into 2019. It will be interesting to see what other changes both Amazon and Walmart make this year to take advantage of the power social media influencers have on consumer sales.
The world of influencer marketing has grown. Now you don’t have to be a celebrity, model or create the best memes on the internet to be an influencer marketer.
Actually average social media users with only a few thousand followers have become some of the most powerful influencer marketers in the industry generating the highest conversion rates for brands. You also don’t need to break the bank to partner with influencers anymore. Many smaller influencer marketers are willing to work with brands in exchange for just a free product or for some sort of cross-promotion deal. A new world of social media influence is upon us.
Average people are now making a living off of influencer marketing as Micro-Influencers
Photograph of Micro-Influencers via Pexels
There are now new labels for the growing variety of influencers. Each type of influencer comes with different advantages and disadvantages which we’ll go over in the following paragraphs. Here is what the industry is calling the different types of influencer marketers:
What are Nano-Influencers: Nano-Influencers are social media users with 500 - 1000 followers. They usually have high engagement levels and low follower reach.
What are Micro-Influencers: Micro-Influencers are social media users with 1,000 to 10,000 followers. They usually have high engagement levels and average follower reach.
What are Macro-Influencers: Macro-Influencers are social media users with 10,000 to 1,000,000 followers. They usually have average engagement levels and high follower reach.
What are Mega-Influencers: Mega-Influencers are social media users with 1,000,000+ followers. They usually have low engagement levels and high follower reach.
"Average social media users with only a few thousand followers have become some of the most powerful influencer marketers."
Influencer marketers now come in all sizes. As the world of technology has become more advanced and social media platforms have expanded, influencer marketers as followed suit. Companies big and small are now devoting large percentages of their marketing budgets to influencer marketing campaigns. According to a recent marketing study published by Linqia, 39% of marketers surveyed planned to increase their influencer marketing budget in 2018, with 19% deciding to spend over $100,000 per campaign, up from 13% last year.
There are various benefits and downsides to working with the variety of influencer marketers. Let’s start with Nano-Influencers. Nano-Influencers are the cheapest to work with and usually will be willing to create and post content in exchange for a free product or a few dollars. Even though these social media users don’t have a very big following, their engagement and trust levels are usually very high since most of their follower base are people they know (friends and family).
However their reach is very limited, so the time it takes to communicate and deal with Nano-Influencers often doesn’t pay off and isn’t worth the effort. They also usually don’t care about the quality of their posts and aren’t very creative, so don’t expect content created by Nano-Influencers to be very good.
Next we have Micro-Influencers. These social media users have become the new ideal candidates for influencer marketing campaigns since their followers are usually very engaged. Micro-Influencer followers often consist of a mixture of close associates and loyal fans who love the niche the Micro-Influencer is posting about. These Influencers also know their subjects really well and their followers trust their opinions, since they interact a lot with their audience and are relatable (being normal people and not celebrities).
Micro-Influencers have the highest product conversion rates in the Industry.
Photograph of Influencer via Pexels
Micro-Influencers are also very targeted in their posts. They have garnered a following by becoming masters of their topics and creating engaging, quality content within a specific niche. Another great benefit of working with Micro-Influencers is that they are often willing to post on social platforms or perform online tasks in exchange for just a free product or a cross-promotion instead of getting paid. If they do want payment for posts or task it will be a low cost fee.
Then we have Macro-Influencers. Macro-Influencer reach is much greater than Micro and Nano Influencers but their followers are not as engaged since they have much more people to satisfy and the majority aren’t personally known. These Influencers also have begun to taste “celebrity status” and usually have slightly inflated egos which makes them less likely to work with you without getting paid.
For companies with large budgets to spend on influencer marketing, Macro-Influencers aren’t a bad choice but will cost much more than smaller influencers and their additional reach may not be worth the extra expense. Also Macro-Influencer subject niches aren’t as specific as micro-influencer accounts which can limit your ability to run a highly targeted influencer campaign.
"Amazon sellers have started to use influencer marketing to boost their product listing rankings and to accumulate user-generated content"
Last but not least let’s go over Mega-Influencers. These social media users are usually celebrities, models or very creative individuals (meme profiles, artists, etc.). They have the highest reach out of all the types of influencers but their engagement percentage is the lowest. Working with Mega-Influencers can be very beneficial for your brand since people worship certain celebrity profiles and with only a single post you can notify a massive group of social media users about your company.
However if you’re looking for product sales, your conversion rate percentage will most likely be much lower than if you worked with less popular influencers since engagement and trust isnt as high. You will also end up shelling out a pretty penny to get a Mega-Influencer to post about your brand and usually the influencer will delete the post after a day or two so the longevity of your influence is often limited.
The title of are article already gave this away, but in my opinion and the consensus of the online world, the best influencers to work with are micro-influencers. Mega-influencers had their time on top but their crown has been taken and their kingdom has finally been overthrown. Why you might ask? The reasons come down to cost, engagement, reach, relate-ability and targeting.
As I mentioned before, Micro-Influencers will often create and post content without needing to get paid. They have a large enough following that will make it worth the effort to work with them. Their following base is often highly engaged and trust their suggestions, which increases product conversions for your brand. They are relatable to their audience because they live normal lives like the people who follow them. Because of their new found popularity they develop and share quality content that is enjoyable to view/read. Last but not least their posts are usually directed at specific niches so you can create highly targeted influencer campaigns and reach your ideal customer base.
Influencers have grown to include more than just celebrities
Photograph of Influencer via Pexels
Recently the Wharton school of business and the New York Times best selling author Jonah Berger (also business professor at Wharton) partnered with the Keller Fay Group (a leading market research company) to perform a research study on the most effective influencers in the industry. After interviewing 6000 individuals, their research concluded that micro-influencers took the cake.
They found that “82% of consumers are highly likely to follow the product recommendations of micro-influencers”. The study also showed that “Micro–influencers have up to 22.2 times more ‘buying conversations’ that include product recommendations each week than an average consumer. In conclusion their research deduced that Micro-Influencers are the best of the bunch and even more trusted than average consumers when suggesting products or services to purchase.
Due to the many benefits listed above, our agency Stack Influence decided to focus on developing a community of micro-influencers in order to help online sellers with their marketing efforts. We’ve now accumulated a massive network of micro-influencers who love trying products in exchange for posting on social media.
Unlike Macro or Mega influencers, Micro-influencers are ideal for growing Amazon brands because they will promote on social media without breaking the banks with additional payment for creating or sharing content. Next Micro-Influencers provide quality curated content for sellers to use for marketing efforts and for their own social media promotion. They share their posts with a highly engaged audience with just enough reach to dramatically increase brand awareness. Finally they have the highest product conversion rates out of all the influencers, since their followers trust their suggestions, so they can bring in additional affiliate sales to increase your profits and scale your social legitamacy even more.
"Micro-influencers love trying products in exchange for posting on social media and performing related tasks."
Micro-Influencer marketing is now a billion dollar industry and ‘the game for 2018’ if you’re in the eCommerce business. For 2019, I believe influencer marketing and specifically working with micro-influencers is only going to become more prevalent and valuable. Amazon sellers have started to realize running influencer campaigns is one of the best strategies to help their business succeed on the leading online marketplace. Amazon has now taken control of almost half of all online sales for 2018 and will probably increase their market share in 2019, so being on Amazon and working with influencers is the formula for online success. Don’t get left behind on the hottest marketing strategy to help you dominate the eCommerce world in the new year.
Creating a community around your brand is one of the best strategies to increase the value and longevity of your business. However developing a consumer following for your brand is a tedious process that can occupy a large amount of time for any company.
Writing blogs, creating YouTube videos, starting a podcast and building a social media profile can all be effective ways to create an initial brand following, but can also consume a lot of valuable time or cost you an arm and a leg to outsource. An easier and more effective tactic to efficiently generate an engaged community is to utilize the power of Influencers.
Social media Influencers are one of the best new marketing tactics
Photograph of Influencer via Pexels
If you're on social media, you’ve probably heard about the rise of Influencer marketing. From Mega-Influencers like Kim Kardashian and Selena Gomez to everyday social media users like you or me (Micro-Influencers), the use of influencers for online marketing initiatives has become one of the best strategies to develop a community around your brand and generate new online sales. Influencer marketing has even become so big that the government had to step in. The FTC recently passed a new law requiring all influencer posts to include statements notifying followers of sponsor content. The law was passed in an effort to eliminate subliminal messages and grant consumers the courtesy of being able to distinguish between organic and sponsored content.
"Influencers have become one of the best strategies to develop a community around your brand and generate new online sales"
If this is your first introduction to Influencer marketing, let me take a moment to explain. Influencers are social media users who are willing to promote brands, products or services on their social platforms in exchange for a monetary payment, free product, or cross promotion benefit. Depending on the amount of followers a social media user has, their consumer reach, engagement and conversion rate can vary – more on that later.
Influencer marketing has predominantly been used by online eCommerce sellers to promote products or services. However recently Amazon sellers have started to use Influencer marketing to boost their brand awareness and to accumulate user-generated content for marketing initiatives. If you are an Amazon seller looking to increase your brand presence online, get a stream of initial sales or get user-generated content to utilize in advertising, social media or other marketing initiatives, then you should definitely consider running an Amazon Influencer marketing campaign.
Influencers don’t have to be users who have massive followings either. There have now become different terms for the various types of Influencers (i.e. Micro-Influencers, Mega-Influencers, etc.). As an Amazon seller, I would personally recommend working with “micro-influencers” – social media users with 1,000 – 10,000 followers who are willing to promote your brand in exchange for a free product instead of getting paid (or for a low monetary payment).
You could hire a Macro-Influencer (10k - 100K followers) or a Mega-Influencer (100K+ followers), but you will end up shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a single post that will most likely be taken down after a day. There are numerous benefits to working with Micro-Influencers as an Amazon seller, which include higher engagement rates, lower expenses and more reusable branded content to name a few.
Influencers have grown to include more than just celebrities
Photograph of Influencers via Pexels
As an example, let’s say a social media user name Lucy has 150K followers on Instagram. When Lucy posts content about products she gets a conversion rate of 0.7%. Molly on the other hand only has 15K followers but when she posts on social media promoting a product she gets 14% of her audience to purchase. Between Lucy and Molly who has a larger influence on sales? Oddly enough, Molly is actually a more valuable Influencer. Even though Molly only has 10% of Lucy’s following, her conversion rate is twice as effective. Recent marketing studies have proven that Micro-Influencers have higher conversion rates when compared to Mega-Influencers.
"Marketing studies have proven that micro-influencers have higher conversion rates when compared mega-influencers"
Besides having a higher conversion rate, most Micro-Influencers are willing to post on social media in exchange for a free product without any monetary payment, as I previously mentioned. This not only will help out your bank account but can also help increase your Amazon popularity and sales.
At Stack Influence we specialize in getting Influencers to promote our clients Amazon products and not just their online stores. We also only partner with high quality products so Influencers are compensated for their promotions without feeling the need to get paid. Very few if any Influencer platform or agencies focus on getting Influencers to promote Amazon products even though Amazon now dominates the online eCommerce world.
Our entire collaboration exchange leaves everyone happy — our Influencers get a free high-quality product and our clients get UGC, social promotion and brand awareness. If you run your own Influencer campaigns and are also an Amazon seller we would highly recommend trying to get Influencers to promote your Amazon listings, since its now so beneficial to have a strong Amazon presence as an online seller.
Last but not least another amazing benefit to partnering with micro-Influencers, instead of spending the big bucks to hire a mega-Influencer, is that you get lots of user-generated brand content. For the price of one Mega-Influencer post you could get dozens if not hundreds of product lifestyle pictures (depending on the cost of your product). Such user-generated content is extremely valuable for brands and can be utilized on your own social media profiles, for marketing material, or for branded advertisements to name a few uses.
If you’re lucky you may even be able to convince Influencers to post a link to your product listing in their Instagram story or within their post (if they are posting on Facebook). This can generate additional online sales as well as help your eCommerce site or Amazon listing SEO (search engine optimization) by creating what are called “backlinks” in the marketing world. Now is the time to start planning an Influencer marketing campaign if you're an Amazon seller - I promise that you won't regret it. Amazon Influencer marketing is the next big thing.