Why Amazon Influencer Marketing is the Next Big Thing

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

The Rise of Influencer Marketing

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.

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.

Amazon Influencer Campaigns

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.

Amazon Micro-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.

By William Gasner

CMO at Stack Influence