Influencer marketing is hands down one of the most subtle yet powerful forms of advertising. Influencer campaigns strike the perfect balance between value and promotion, helping brands capitalize on the most crucial asset of all – customer trust.
This is perhaps why the influencer marketing industry has more than doubled since 2019 and was worth more than 16 billion USD in 2022. And it is showing no signs of slowing down.
The Amazon Influencer Program helps Amazon sellers connect with platform influencers and leverage the impact of influencer marketing to drive their Amazon brand KPIs.
What is Amazon Influencer Program?
The Amazon Influencer Program is an extension of the Amazon Affiliate Program.
This creator-economy edition of the affiliate program helps brands connect with relevant Amazon influencers. Working with these people, brands can get customized content pieces, recommendations, and reviews published on social sites as well as on Amazon.
The influencers get a dedicated link – like an affiliate link – to share with the products they promote and earn a commission whenever someone buys through these links. The collaborating brands don’t have to pay the commission, but they have to cover the influencer fee.
Difference Between Amazon Affiliate and Influencer Programs
The influencer program is almost like a variation of the affiliate program, built to align with the creator economy. It differs from the affiliate program in that Amazon Influencers get a lot more tools to help them promote products in the best, most engaging ways possible.
They also get vanity URLs and customized storefronts where they can publish all the content they have created, along with wish lists and recommendations.
Why Consider Influencer Marketing?
Customers have grown immune to conventional ads and have built an invisible filter to keep them out. Influencer content gets through this filter and takes your brand with it, helping you interact with an audience that may otherwise be impossible to reach.
And that's just one of its benefits. Here are some more:
Builds Brand Awareness
72% of Gen Z and Millennials, the most significant consumer cohort, follow influencers on social media.
A brand gets to reach its target audience directly through influencer content. Not just that, it goes through a medium that the customers are most engaged with, social media, and in a style they love – entertainment or education.
Influencer marketing helps your brand grow beyond the commercial bounds and maximizes your products' reach by helping it reach an interested and engaged social audience.
Most importantly, the influencer's content does not only get to the people who follow them. Good quality content gathers traction and finds a place in content discovery tabs. Once there, your branded content can reach and drive awareness to more people and cast a wider net.
Win Customers Trust
What drives sales? Trust.
This is why brands looking to increase sales volume or push their bottom line need to foster trust with their customer as a first step toward their goal.
63% of people trust an influencer's opinion of a product much more than what brands say about themselves. 50% of millennials – one of the biggest customer cohorts – trust recommendations from influencers.
Customers look up to influencers as unbiased, sincere advisors when shopping or looking to shop. So naturally, when an influencer recommends a brand, the customers automatically trust it to be worth their time and money.
Influencers work hard to foster this trust with their audience. And when a brand collaborates with them, it gets to enjoy a share of this trust with half the effort.
Bag More Sales
Once you have won the customers' trust, sales flow naturally.
92% of customers trust an influencer's recommendation more than ads. 33% of Gen-Zers claim to have bought something after an influencer recommended it.
Many shoppers head to their favorite influencers to look for recommendations and buy products accordingly. This is why your brand is more likely to experience a positive uptick in sales once an influencer has reviewed and recommended its products.
Help Drive Organic Traffic + Rank
One of the ways Amazon influencers promote your product is by sharing an affiliate-like link to your listing on their social handles. This helps funnel traffic from social platforms like TikTok and Instagram onto Amazon.
There is anecdotal evidence that Amazon's a10 algorithm rewards brands for driving external traffic to Amazon. When your products get traffic in-flow from external sites, it is more likely to rise in organic ranks.
Influencer campaigns can also increase branded searches for your products. They promise a rise in organic sales as well.
All of these factors are by-products of an effective influencer campaign and help your product, and consequently, your brand go higher in organic results and capture more of the market share.
Finding the Right Influencers
The benefits of working with influencers come second. The decision of choosing the right influencer comes first.
Ideally, you need to work with an Amazon influencer whose audience aligns with your target audience and who can create content that reflects your brand's personality.
Most importantly, you need to find someone who fits the budget.
Here are three factors you need to consider to find such influencers:
The Influencer Niche and Industry
Most influencers have a highly niched following. So, you must be careful about who you work with to ensure your brand gets to people interested in your products, lest your efforts fall flat on an unrelated audience.
It is important that you find influencers that play in your industry and have a follower base that aligns with your brand's target audience.
You can search for Amazon influencers by searching for hashtags like #FounditonAmazon on Instagram and scrolling through the results to pick influencers in your niche.
If you sell stationary, for example, this might help:
Amazon's Shop by Interest and Livestream tabs can also help you discover influencers working in your industry.
Amazon’s Shop by Interest tab.
Going through these tabs, you can also check out the kind of content an influencer creates and get a better idea of whether they can deliver what you want.
The Influencer Fee
Influencer fee varies depending mostly on their follower count. Generally, the higher the follower count, the more expensive an influencer is to work with.
Interestingly, though, influencers with fewer followers – micro or macro influencers – tend to have a better sales-related impact. That's because they have a more deeply nested audience and a warmer connection with these people.
This is why even CPG giants like Proctor & Gamble often work with micro or macro-influencers instead of celebrities.
The Content Quality
You also want to check whether the influencer can create content that can stop your prospect mid-scroll and get them to engage with it.
Apart from that, trends form a big part of social media. Influencers that are quick to notice rising trends and capitalize on them with tasteful, creative content tend to generate a stronger impact.
Do a bit of re-con and see which of your short-listed influencers create high quality content and have been good with trends recently.
Of course, the fee may go up with the quality of content an influencer creates. But when investing resources with an individual, you want to ensure they generate good value for your brand.
Maximize the Use of Content You Create
Depending on your contract with an influencer, you may reserve the right to use the influencer's content for your brand across different platforms. And if you do, make sure to leverage their video and static content to run ads on and off Amazon.
You can use video and static content to run Sponsored Brand video campaigns and leverage this content for your Sponsored Display ads.
These ad types are insanely powerful in driving brand awareness and store traffic. Brands that used Sponsored Brand videos for the first time saw 21% more sales than those that did not.
A Chinese consumer electronic company tested Sponsored Brand Video ads, pairing them up with effective budgeting and advertising tactics, and experienced a 3.3x higher ROAS for these campaigns.
Influencer content can easily be repurposed for Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Display video ads and can help you run overarching advertising campaigns that reach your target audience across platforms, from social media to Amazon and other sites in the virtual world.
Final Words
Amazon Influencer Program helps Amazon sellers leverage this high-impact marketing vertical without having to fret over tracking and attribution.
Amazon Attribution and other metrics from Amazon's suite of ad tracking parameters can help you track and optimize your influencer campaigns.
But before you can drive real metrics, you must find and work with the right influencers – ones that can create relevant, engaging content for your brand.
At Accrue, we help our clients find and capitalize on the right tools to maximize their growth on Amazon and other e-retail platforms. Our ecommerce strategists can help you choose what's best for your brand and build campaigns to foster long-term growth.
Need expert opinion? Talk to our team today.