These days, content creators are a crucial part of any brand’s retail marketing strategy, and your Amazon marketing strategy should be no different. Utilizing creators to promote your products on Amazon may not be an instinctual thought, but creators have a ton to offer: for one, they can help boost your Amazon traffic and sales, spread the word about current promos, as well as help you bolster social proof and boost brand awareness.
If all of those benefits aren't reason enough, here are seven good reasons to involve them!
Put simply: creators drive traffic! You can partner with creators, send them your products and ask them to tell their followers to find you on Amazon in order to drive traffic. To really encourage more visits to your product pages, you can even consider giving creators Amazon discount codes to share with their followers. This way, consumers will feel like they got a special deal, and have an increased incentive to buy.
Keep in mind, there are a few different ways to create promotional codes on Amazon, and some of them only work for 30 days or less, so be sure to plan ahead when creating your code! (Get the deets on how to create longer-term promo codes here.)
Social media is increasingly becoming a place for product discovery, as evidenced by popular hashtags like #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and #FoundItOnAmazon. It's common for products with these tags to gain traction and even sales when they're included in creator content. From household items to makeup products and more, nothing is off limits when it comes to these product discovery hashtags, with many consumers heading straight to Amazon to purchase the items for themselves after learning about them.
These hashtags contribute to a marketing culture that’s less about brands promoting products to consumers, and more about everyday consumers recommending products to each other. This emerging concept is known as consumer-to-consumer marketing, it’s set to be an important marketing channel for brands in 2022 and beyond. You can learn more about it here.
It can be tempting to focus only on sales or website clicks when running creator campaigns, but the first step in every buyer’s journey is brand awareness.
Most consumers don’t make a purchase the very first time they see a product. It usually takes, on average, seven encounters before a conversion occurs. While direct attribution may be more difficult to track in creator campaigns, it’s important to trust that every partnered post that goes live exposes your brand to new audiences who could purchase later on, after having more run-ins with your brand in-person and around the web.
Amazon is a huge marketplace with tons of different options for every possible product search. Any leg up that can help you stand out from the crowd is a win, and when a consumer is staring overwhelmed at the thousands of results in front of them, recognizing a brand name from a social media post they saw a week ago might very well be the deciding factor in choosing which one to purchase.
Trust is at critical lows, and these days it's common for consumers to be skeptical of brands. In fact, 92% of people trust recommendations from other consumers — even those they don’t personally know — over branded messaging.
When modern-day consumers shop, they want to know that other people are already using your product in order to help inform their own purchase decisions. This is especially important when marketing for ecommerce because consumers lack the opportunity to physically touch or see your product before purchasing.
Removing the hesitancy a consumer might have about your brand’s legitimacy or your product’s benefits can help you make a sale – and one of the best ways to do this is by acquiring other people’s testimonials: this is social proof in action.
Collecting product reviews in the form of written, photo and video formats can help with this, but if you have few to none in the first place, gathering them can be difficult. This is especially true since Amazon does not allow brands to offer incentives in exchange for reviews.
In order to get more reviews, you’ll have to let them filter in organically, and in the meantime, lean into creator partnerships to generate some outside social proof on social media and on your website.
By partnering with creators and everyday consumers to try and share their experiences with your products, you’re creating proof that someone they already know and trust has used your product firsthand and enjoyed it. Even encountering this type of content from someone they don't know, but relate to, offers valuable information about how they themselves might experience your product.
These kinds of recommendations carry much more weight than a suggestion from a brand they know has something to gain by promoting their products.
User-generated content is quite the multifaceted marketing tool. For starters, it can save your marketing team time, money and energy that would’ve otherwise been spent creating content internally.
By sprinkling UGC into your social media posts, website pages and more, you’re also making your marketing funnel more effective. A mere 15% of people prefer branded visuals over user-generated content. It’s a staggering number, especially when compared to how much UGC you’re using (or not using) in your marketing funnel!
The quickest way to bridge the gap is to partner with creators and obtain permission to reuse their content. Once you have permission, you can repurpose this content throughout your funnel, such as on your website, social media posts or in marketing emails pointing viewers to your Amazon page, in order to create the most social proof when and where you need it.
Consumers don’t like to miss out on things. There’s a certain level of herd mentality that comes into play when it comes to marketing; everyone wants to create the image that their product is in high demand, but there’s only so far branded messages can take you in that regard.
The solution? Creators! Why tell people how awesome and in-demand your product is, when you can get consumers to see it with their own eyes?
Partnering with creators to try out your products allows excitement to build, especially when consumers are seeing more than one creator at a time authentically promoting your products.
Well-timed creative partnerships can hugely impact a product rollout. If you have big dreams of an orange “Bestseller” banner, reach out to creators well before your launch to ensure adequate time to hammer out agreements, ship products and get content back within your desired timeframe.
Remember you’ll want to hype up the product before or on the day of the actual launch date, so take that into account when assigning creator deadlines.
While you can certainly take the DIY approach to sourcing creators, this strategy can take up valuable resources. If you want to add creators into your Amazon marketing strategy ASAP but are short on time and resources, we’re here to do all the legwork for you. We handle all of the logistics, from finding the right creators for your audience to shipping out your products to reporting your results. All you have to do is kick back and watch as the creator content rolls in and mentions of your products on Amazon bump up.
Ready to get started? Get in touch with our consumer-to-consumer marketing experts today to chat about how to level up your Amazon marketing strategy with help from creators.