Table of Contents
Consider this blog as a Full-On Guide for Amazon Seller to market outside Amazon Channels. It is a long post so consider taking some insights and then come back to get more juice out of it.
Introduction
There are different methods and channels you can use to promote your Amazon listings outside the Amazon platform to get extra sales. Not only you can use this to make extra money directly from your advertising efforts, but all those extra sales will add to your sales velocity which in turn will help you climb even higher in the organic rankings. So, it does make sense to do this even if it’s just for the sake of increasing your organic rankings.
I must warn you though, you should only be doing this once you’re 100% happy with your sponsored and headline search ads. There’s no point in going outside Amazon if you can’t master the built-in systems properly.
People who are searching for your product directly on Amazon are your priority customers. They are already on the platform, actively searching for your product. You only have to get your listing in front of them and make them buy from you. No other platform or website will give you the same level of high conversion rates that we get from sponsored product ads on Amazon, not even close. You will never get a 20 or 30% conversion rate by advertising your product outside Amazon’s website.
So, it makes sense to concentrate on Amazon ads first. Only when you have done everything you can found and optimized all the potential keywords in both sponsored ads and headline ads, I recommend looking into other advertising channels.
Advertising Channels
What exactly do I mean by advertising channels? This would basically be any website that offers some sort of opportunity where you can advertise or showcase your product or build relationships with your customers.
I’m talking about websites like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, specific niche-based blogs and forums, and so on. In this blog, I will cover the most popular platforms that will be suitable for 99% of the products out there. You just go where your potential customers hang out and promote your product there. Direct paid advertising like buying ad space on websites is the least efficient way of doing this ad. They’re not gaining much traction anymore. I’ve seen this same trend on Amazon too. Headline search ads were nowhere near as effective as sponsored product ads.
You will gain much better results, if you come up with a unique angle for how to promote your product in a different way, like working with influences, creating a weekly or monthly contest, creating a Facebook giveaway, sponsoring a podcast, starting a Facebook group and so on. You would not simply advertise your product via ads. You would find a way to create that relationship with your target audience first; then and only then would you sell the product. I will try to give you the detail you can use to delve deeper into how it works and how you can use one or another website to promote your Amazon business.
Nowadays, there are hundreds of ways you can advertise your business and I really hope you choose at least a few of them. You need to concentrate on your strengths. Pick one channel and really make the most out of it. If you ask me which strategy you should start with my answer would be influencer marketing. It really is the best and cheapest way to get mass exposure when you launch a new product and brand. Not only can you make these influencer campaigns ROI positive, but you will also gain tons of new social followers as a result of the influence of video.
There are some advertising channels you should be staying away from. The two most obvious ones are Google AdWords & YouTube ads. These are very hard to master especially AdWords. Prices are very high on Google and Amazon will also often compete for the same keywords.
So, from my experience, it’s almost impossible to make upwards work for Amazon products. Unless you sell something that costs more than £100.00 and your margin is at least £30 plus, I would not even waste time looking into this. For YouTube ads, they are very hard to target. Your conversion rates will be super low and even though you could probably make it work for expensive items. I still think that you’ll get a much better return on investment for the same money on other platforms.
Why don’t you look at the best tactics for engaging users and attracting consumers with Messenger marketing?
Landing Pages
Let’s take a closer look at some of the most popular advertising strategies for our Amazon businesses but before that, we need to talk about landing pages.
Landing pages: Talking about specific strategies for advertising your Amazon business, I want to emphasize how important it is to create a landing page for your offer you don’t want to send any outside traffic directly to your Amazon product page.
You can do this but I must warn you that your conversion rates will be significantly lower than if you use a landing page. It helps you warm up your lead before he or she is ready to make a purchase or at least ready to see Amazon product pages and then decide. If you simply send people directly to Amazon a very high percentage of them will bounce back almost immediately as no one likes to be sold directly like that.
There is more you can do with smart landing pages with email integrations to get even better results. The best way to set this up is by presenting the product on the landing page and having a special offer via an email opt in. This means that potential customers have to enter their email address to receive your special offer link or coupon code.
This approach helps you build up excitement but even more importantly it lets you collect a customer email address. You can use this, later on, to build up a relationship with those people send them special offers and so on. This is something, we’re not even allowed to do on Amazon directly as Amazon does not share customer emails with us.
Elements in Landing Pages
On the landing page itself, you will make sure you have elements in place like your logo, product images, pricing or special pricing available at Amazon, description, testimonials or reviews, images of people or customers and ideally a video of the product, FAQs section, any certification logos or trade approval logos, you can use a timer that counts down to when your offer expires and any additional elements that make your product, company and the whole offer more legit and trustworthy.
Be careful about how you use Amazon logos on the landing page. Though you can’t simply take Amazon’s branding and apply it as you want. Amazon does allow us to use “available at Amazon” graphic that really is enough to show people that you sell this product on Amazon which actually works as a great conversion rate booster alone. People trust Amazon. They have no issues with credibility or worries about things like payments or shipping when they know that Amazon handles the transaction.
Options to Build Landing Pages
You probably want to know what the best and ideally cheapest way to create such landing pages. While the best won’t be the cheapest. There are multiple options available.
Amazon Stores:
Using Amazon store pages, if you’re registered with a brand registry and have an Amazon store, you can use it to create basic landing pages for your products. You can even have a landing page with a video on it. This would be totally free and it’s a super simple way of creating a basic landing page. The downsides however are that you won’t be able to create truly custom-made landing pages with a special offer, timer, email collection, and the other features that paid landing page generators offer. The second downside will be the landing page itself. It will look very simple because you can’t edit it the way you could with custom tools. Amazon only allows certain blocks and layout models to be used here. While this is the easiest option and completely free to use, I would not really recommend it because it won’t give you the results, you’re after.
Free landing page software:
Another option would be to use free landing page builders. These builders allow you to install on your own hosting account like wordpress.org. You would still be paying a small monthly fee for hosting, but chances are that you already do this anyway to host your domain names. A simple website and emails. The downside of this method is that it’s very complicated. You will have to spend lots of time learning how WordPress works, finding a great landing page theme, installing various plugins and the visual end result may still not look that professional unless you outsource the design part to someone else. This method may seem cheap and simple on paper but in reality, it means you’ll be spending many frustrating hours getting it set up properly only to have an end result that most likely won’t be perfect and this leads us to the next option which in my opinion will be the most suitable for the majority of Amazon Sellers, special Amazon landing page software.
Paid landing page software:
There are special online tools that can handle Amazon landing pages. These tools are built specifically for Amazon sellers so they will have all the tools and features. When you sign up for a service like this, you can have a great looking landing page created in just a few hours. These tools work online, and they have premade templates you can use. You’re essentially working with pre-made blocks of information, so there’s no need to custom design or code anything.
Here are some of the most popular platforms right now: andingpagepromoter.com, landingcube.com, and www.zonpages.com. There are many more, but I would recommend you check out these three and pick the one that is most suitable for your product. All of these tools will come with premade templates, so you won’t have to create anything from scratch. They will also integrate with email autoresponder services so you will be actively building your own email list which you own 100%. In the long term, this email list is actually the biggest asset value of doing these promotions. In fact, it’s the next logical step towards your own independent E-Commerce store.
If you have a Shopify subscription, you could consider using zipify.com pages. This is a very advanced landing page builder that was created specifically for Shopify but can also be used to build landing pages for Amazon. It’s the most expensive option out of all those covered here but it does come with lots of advanced functions. The upside of course is that it’s fully integrated with Shopify.
Custom Made Landing Pages
You always have the option of creating a custom page from scratch too. You could get the designer to design you the page you want and then hire a developer who can turn that into HTML. This would give you your very own completely customized landing page with no monthly costs apart from the hosting fee which many of you already pay anyway.
I don’t think you need to do this, it will be expensive and you may end up with less functionality than these special landing page tools provide plus the biggest advantage with these tools is that they are super easy to use and you can make any changes you want to them on your own without paying someone else. This obviously means you will be able to create landing pages and promotions to advertise your store instead of Amazon.
Landing Page Builder built with CRMs and other software
If you have Infusionsoft by Keap or other CRMs, they come up with their own landing page, drag and drop builder, which is a great tool without spending extra, if you are already using such software. ClickFunnels is another option to build amazing landing pages. However, these are not designed for Amazon but a generic landing page builder and can be highly customized, unlike the options I have mentioned previously. If you have a good budget, then I will go with this option.
I highly recommend that you start learning about the landing pages. Go out and learn more about them. Udemy is a great place to start. You can find many great courses on landing page creation and optimization for just £10 pounds. You can also find many valuable videos on YouTube or even get a book or two on Amazon on the topic of landing pages but honestly, you don’t really have to go that deep into this topic all you have to do is learn how to create and design a landing page that converts.
This will mostly come down to the visual elements you use on the landing page, product images including lifestyle product images, video, great description, customer images, reviews and testimonials, your information, about us text and images, etc. It’s not like there are any huge secrets when a potential customer lands on your page. You just want to instantly show that you’re genuine and that they’re getting a great deal.
The landing page must be rich in content and visually appealing for this to work. Each and every percent increase in your landing page conversion rate will make a massive difference in your overall campaign success. If you’re doing this, do it right or don’t do it at all.
Funnel Ideas Examples
Note: You can check out details at fulon.co under the Integrations page. Most can be built by using different software and technologies.
This bundle comes with 4 variations of the marketing campaign which is designed around Coupon Deals and comes in a bundle which includes Ready to Use Landing Page and Email Templates for every possible trigger.
Build the Email List of highly converting customers using Product insert and Opt-In Funnels. Have your Brand’s raving fans and pretty much guarantee that each of your product has a chance to have a Best Seller Badge. Swipe and Deploy to your Infusionsoft/Keap CRM.
Build the Email List of highly converting customers using Product insert and Opt-In Funnels. Swipe and Deploy to your Infusionsoft/Keap CRM.
Get your customer’s real email using Money Back Offer Product insert and Opt-In Funnel. Match the customer’s real email with their Amazon Orders on Autopilot. This is guaranteed way to get the most powerful customer data for sales and marketing. Swipe and deploy to your Infusionsoft/Keap CRM
Build the email list of highly converting customers using Product Warranty insert and Opt-in Funnels. Match the customer real emails with their Amazon Orders on Autopilot. This is the guaranteed way to get the most powerful data for sales and marketing. Swipe and Deploy to your Infusionsoft/Keap CRM.
Get your customer’s real email using Gift Card Product insert and Opt-In Funnel. Match the customer’s real email with their Amazon Orders on Autopilot. This is guaranteed way to get the most powerful customer data for sales and marketing. Swipe and deploy to your Infusionsoft/Keap CRM
Let’s get into the actual strategies you can use to promote your products outside the Amazon platform. We’ll start with the godfather of all platforms — Facebook. All we have to do is create an ad campaign on Facebook, watch people click on our ads; go to Amazon and buy your product all day long. It’s that simple right? wrong!
If you actually think that this could work you’ve been watching too many hyped-up YouTube videos. These so-called gurus would have made you believe that all you need to do is put a few ads on Facebook set your targeting profile to your average customer and sit back while the money rolls in.
I’m sorry to burst your bubble but this just isn’t going to happen. You will never make a profit by doing this. Facebook clicks are way too expensive to promote cheap Amazon products to the masses. You will spend £50 on ads just to get back £20 in sales and that’s if you really know what you’re doing or simply get lucky.
Amazon buyers generally don’t go on Facebook with the intention of buying something on Facebook. People hang out and connect with friends, watch the latest funny videos jokes, share stories, and just have a great time. Think about how much you like going on Facebook and seeing ad after ad after ad.
Fill your news feed, it’s annoying and no one likes it because when you’re not in a buying mood you’re less likely to click on an ad. As a seller, running ads on Facebook will result in a very poor conversion rate, and knowing how expensive Facebook links are, this low conversion rate means that you simply can’t make it profitable.
I know Facebook ad experts who are lucky to break even on their first sale from a Facebook ad campaign usually they just lose money on the 1st sale and hope to make up for it on repeat sales from the customer so they basically buy the customer on the Facebook platform. They see it as investing money so they can market to this customer later on and maybe make a profit in the long term and these are the experts at the very top of the game.
People have been doing it for years and have a huge amount of marketing experience. Even they struggle to break. If you are just starting out on Amazon with their private label products business, Facebook should be used in a totally different way. You can still reach out to new customers on the Facebook platform but you don’t want to do this via the classical direct sales marketing method. Let’s take a look at some of the things you can do on Facebook.
Social Presence — The first thing you will want to do is start building your social presence on Facebook. You should have already created and customized your Facebook page at the branding stage. Now you will start to use it to build up your social following by posting regular valuable content in your timeline; by posting product images and videos in your timeline, by taking part in the community leaving comments or posts in related Facebook groups and pages, and so on. I won’t go into detail on what to do here.
The Internet is full of great up to date guides, articles, videos, books, and courses on exactly how to do Facebook marketing if you’re new to this. I recommend you pick a book or two or buy a course on Udemy on social Facebook marketing to learn how it all works.
Even if you don’t do anything extra, make sure you make a new post for your Facebook page at least once a week. Over time you will see that you are starting to build a natural following without doing anything extra. It will be very small though compared to a situation where you actively go out and try to reach more people and engage with them. Still just doing one post a week will be better than nothing.
An updated live Facebook page also helps. When your Amazon customers do a search for you on Google, your page will rank high in the search and they will easily be able to find and connect with you. Many people also prefer to contact you via Facebook Messenger instead of email so make sure you receive message notifications to your main inbox, so you don’t miss out on any customer queries.
Giveaways, Contests, and Competitions
This is where the true power of Facebook lies. If you want to use Facebook to its full potential, creating and organizing giveaways contests and competitions is in my opinion the way to go especially if you sell to a female-oriented market. For some reason, women simply like these things and they actively take part in these contests on Facebook.
They are happy to exchange an email address or leave a Facebook message for you to enter a contest. Yes, these will generally be freebie seekers but don’t make the mistake of thinking that those people are not real humans and that they don’t buy anything online. They absolutely do and if you know how to connect with them later on once the contest ends, you can build a real following and relationship with these people.
The key element here is to create a contest that is highly related to the product you sell. If it’s a giveaway, you will simply give away your product. Giveaways can work very well for Amazon sellers because you know that people who are interested in a free product actually need and want that product and the chances are, they would buy it from you anyway if they don’t win the giveaway.
Of course, just a small percentage but even if it’s 20 or 30 sales out of every 1000 people that would still be a very good result for giving away just one product. Before you run your first giveaway, you should build up your following to at least a few 100 people. Without followers no one will see your post and you will get very few entries but if you have at least a few 100 followers and the giveaway or contest is good, people will share it with their friends plus you can then pay Facebook to boost your post and show it to more of your followers and friends of your followers.
This way, for example for just £50 or so you could easily reach thousands of people on Facebook. Even if you have just 300 fans on your page, through this giveaway you will collect email addresses or get these people on your Facebook
Facebook Messenger
Using a Facebook chatbot, you can communicate with them later on, build those relationships, and of course promote your products too. There is software available that will help you with creating this setup. Chatbots helps you create automated campaigns for giveaways contests.
Manychat is a very interesting application that allows you to create various Facebook-related action widgets that will unlock some sort of prize for a user. It is very interactive and works great to build a relationship with people while building up your list.
Manychat is one of the most popular chatbots on Facebook. It allows you to build up Messenger lists, send out automated messages, and more. This is a very powerful way to connect and interact with people on Facebook. This topic is massive and if this strategy seems suitable for you and your business, go out and learn everything you can find about it.
There are lots of blog posts, YouTube videos, and Facebook groups where you can learn how this all works. If you feel that this type of strategy is suitable for your business, you will simply have to invest some time in learning how it all works.
Facebook Groups
This may not be suitable for everyone, but chances are that you can utilize Facebook groups to create a loyal follower base totally for free. It won’t cost you anything to try this out. If it fails you, simply scratch the idea and move on. The idea is simple — you create your own Facebook group that would be interesting for your target audience.
This doesn’t mean that you create a group around your product as such. In most cases that just won’t work. You want to create the group around the niche or around the problem associated with the product. For example, if you sell a garden tool, you would create a group around the topic of gardening but since gardening is such a wide topic and very competitive you would need to pick a subtopic of gardening and concentrate on that.
It could be as simple as finding and curating other people’s content in your group, like finding cool stuff on YouTube and Instagram and sharing those with group members. This would be a classic entertainment type of group, but the majority of your followers will still have some interest in your products too. If you sell a cheese grater, you could create a Facebook group around the topic of pizzas. Yes, not about cheese itself, but about pizzas.
Think about it, every pizza maker will need your awesome cheese grater, right! Be creative and trying to stand out with your group idea and how it relates to your products. The main goal with the group would be to attract people with common problems or interests related to your product and then either educate them help them or entertain them.
The main purpose of the group can’t be your product. That won’t work. No one likes to be sold to directly. Some large brands and very popular products will have their own groups created by fans, but this won’t really apply to you if you’re just starting out. Groups work well if you have information you can share with others that will help them out. For example, let’s say you’re a good painter and sell paints. You create a group to share tips and tricks on painting with your potential customers.
You use the group to answer questions and genuinely improve other people’s painting skills. Imagine what kind of authority this builds for you. People will trust you and you won’t even have to sell anything to them. This is how powerful this strategy can be if executed properly. Facebook groups can be a great way to advertise your business because you will be in full control of what gets shown in the group stream.
You will have full access to communicating with group members. This makes it even easier to run a contest giveaway or share a discount code. It takes time patience and energy to build a large Facebook group but if you have some sort of expertise or knowledge to share with others this may be your best marketing tool on the whole Facebook platform.
These were a quick overview of some of the most effective ways to use Facebook for your Amazon business marketing. This only scratches the surface and you will discover so many more ways to utilize this platform if you really decide to dive deeper and educate yourself on this.
There are really no limits to what you can achieve because Facebook is such a massive platform and actively offers marketing tools you can use to reach out to new customers. Facebook could also be used as a great way to super launch a new product but only if you’re ready to invest some money into it. If you want to go this route, what you would do is simply create a giveaway of your product and spend some good money on Facebook ads to promote it to thousands of people.
All of these people will leave their email address in exchange for taking part in your giveaway. After the giveaway ends, you reach out to those people and offer them the product at a great discount. A percentage of them will take up your offer, go to Amazon and buy your product. This will increase your sales velocity and boost your organic rankings. It is very similar to the effects of Amazon sponsored products but it’s even better because this would be outside traffic.
There are tons of opportunities on Facebook. You will have to pick and choose the approach where you are most likely to succeed for your business and start there. Focus on just one strategy, so you can really invest your time and energy into that concept and become great at it. There is no way you will be able to do all of these at the same time and to a high standard.
Let’s finish this up and move on to the old school method of using Flyers to get more repeat customers to your business.
Order Inserts
Okay, this strategy won’t be as fancy as the others but if done properly physical order inserts do work and can be a quick and easy way to increase repeat orders. This strategy will work best in two situations:
- If you have a wide range of related products that can also be marketed to the existing customer base and
- If the product is a consumable.
This means that the customer will have to buy it again after a certain period of time. It includes products like ink or toner for printers, food items, office products, glue, paint, beauty products, party products, water filters, and thousands of other items. If you sell a one-off item something that people would buy only once, I probably wouldn’t recommend wasting time and money on order inserts.
The only exception would be if you could potentially upsell a related item or related service. You simply won’t be able to achieve a high conversion rate. You’ll be wasting money on order inserts. For a business where repeat customers are the norm, what you basically want to do is insert some sort of marketing material within each order that gives the customer an incentive to come back to you and place their next order. Typically, this will be a paper flyer offering a discount on the customer’s next order. Depending on what margins you have, you can go for a 10 or 20% discount. That works on every item in your Amazon store. You can also use this strategy to promote specific products.
Essentially you will be creating a coupon code and setting the discount amount for your chosen product selection. Then, you will need to get your flyer design done. Then ask the supplier to print it out and include it in the packaging of each item. Amazon does not allow us to create separate inserts that should be included in each order. The only way to get this done is to include the marketing material directly inside the product packaging whether it is a Cardboard box or plastic bag as long as you have some sort of packaging you should be able to insert a printed paper flyer. Another important thing to understand is Amazon does allow you to advertise your website via such marketing material. It is strictly against their terms and services. I know that many sellers ignore this rule but don’t say I didn’t warn you if you do it.
Just play by the rules and advertise your Amazon store and products that you can and should do. However, have your website address printed directly on the product packaging. This is something Amazon can’t prohibit us from doing because obviously most branded goods packaging will have the brand’s website on it. I’m not saying that many people will check out your website just because you have your website address on the packaging, but some will, and since it does not cost you anything why not do it. When your packaging design includes your website’s address, make sure it does not show up on the images you use on Amazon. This is against Amazon’s rules. You can’t advertise your website address in product images, so you want to place the website address strategically on the packaging. Maybe on the sides or back so it does not show up in the product images.
When you design packaging, don’t put a large website address in front of the box. If you have already done it and your website does show up in your product images, you will need to get someone who’s good with Photoshop to mask it out. If you are sending the stock to yourself first to inspect or repack before sending it to the Amazon warehouse, you can simply insert these Flyers with each item by yourself. You can order printed Flyers very cheaply from eBay.
Another thing to consider is when you do it this way you can have different designs created for different products and even have an expiry date set for specific offers because you will be able to switch out and change flyers every time you send stock to Amazon. If your business is based around consumable products, this strategy can work very well. Apart from inserting a printed flyer, I highly recommend that you somehow incorporate your special offer or at least your website address on the product itself or its packaging. Yes, you can get your website address printed on the product itself and that’s fine even if you don’t have an online shop yet.
You can simply redirect your domain name to the Amazon store or to a specific listing. The idea is that when the product has been consumed or it needs to be changed the information about your business will be found directly on the product itself. Ideally, it’s a website address and your logo plus a short piece of text such as 10% of your next order with the coupon code on the side. Not all products will have space or look good with so much information. However, at a minimum, you should have your logo printed on there. if it’s possible, include your website address too, and if the product design allows it like you can have special offer information printed on the product too. This really is common sense. You’re just thinking from your customers’ perspective here.
Put yourself in their shoes, wouldn’t you be happy to get a 10% discount or free shipping when you need to replace the product? Of course, you would and your customers will appreciate it too! Just make sure the message is clearly visible and it offers real value to people. If we go back to paper Flyers, the vast majority of them will eventually end up in the bin. That’s just how it works. But here are a few tips to increase your chances of customers actually keeping and using your offer in the future. Create a highly targeted offer.
The biggest mistake people make is that the customers will react to offers that are simply not relevant to them. Let’s say you sell dog beds and you create a special offer for dog toys. While dog toys might sound like a perfect match for someone who buys a dog bed. In reality, it’s not. Very few people will go for the offer as it is not actually that targeted. It could be that people don’t need any new dog toys or their dog doesn’t play with them at all or something else. A much better and much more targeted offer would probably be to sell a special blanket or warmer for the dog bed that person just purchased or maybe a cleaning product for the bed or accessory. You need to think of something that is directly related to the product you have sold and would be of interest to the majority of customers and provide value. The higher the discount you can offer, the more people will act upon it.
Obviously, we still want to make money and not give away all our margins but if you can only offer a 5% discount don’t even waste your time. A discount of 10% should be the absolute minimum discount if you want to get any kind of result. Ideally, you should go even higher but only if your margins support it. If the item you sell is more expensive than say £30, it would be best to advertise money off instead of a percentage because the monetary value will look like a better deal to the customer. For example, £10 off an item that sells for £49.99 sounds like a good deal to me.
Have a great design — Please do not try to create a flyer design on your own. Get a professional on Upwork.com to design it for you. Be personal, people love dealing with real people. Show that you’re a real person behind this business include your own image in the marketing materials. Maybe an image of your office, even images from your suppliers, manufacturing facility, etc. Create a more realistic human touch to your company. Yes, you can add a family pic in the marketing materials too. It may look cheesy to some but if it’s a family business and your family is part of it then I think it works very well. It may even be more difficult for people to throw such a flyer with images of real people in the bin (at least I hope so).
Create urgency — If possible, include expiry dates on your Flyers to create urgency. I know that with Amazon FBA, it’s really not that easy to manage because you don’t want to end up sending out products with expired coupon codes. However, if you can, set an expiry date to fuel promotions. These are my top tips to improve the efficiency of physical order inserts. This strategy alone won’t make or break your business, but I think it’s worth giving it a try to see how well it works with your specific product and target audience. If you do this right a few percent of your customers should take you up on the offer. It really depends on the product and how good or how irresistible the offer is. On Amazon, we can’t really give huge discounts and still maintain good margins because our profits are limited but since the cost of these paper Flyers is very cheap, it is worth at least giving it a try to see if it works or not for your business. After 1000 orders, you can then evaluate whether it is worth it to continue with this strategy or if you will be better off spending that money on Facebook activities or Instagram ads.
The next strategy is one of the best and most profitable advertising opportunity for Amazon sellers, influencer marketing.
Influencer Marketing
If you ask me, this is the most important concept in this whole blog. Influencer marketing is the perfect way to advertise your Amazon business because it’s simple to execute. Unlike paid advertising or Facebook giveaways, where you really have to learn many new skills to be able to do it effectively; when it comes to influencer marketing you don’t have to do any of that. No special skills required. It’s cheap.
You can even start for free with this strategy. The only cost would be sending one or a few products to the influencer. You can start with as little as £50-£100 and see immediate results. You can spend that kind of money on Facebook or Instagram ads in just a few minutes and still not get any sales in return. Influencer marketing yields instant results. As soon as you get your first deal going with the influencer, you will see results. If the product you sell is good and you have picked a suitable influencer, you will make sales. It grows your social following.
This is another cool side effect of working with influencers. Rapidly increase your social followers because the percentage of the influencer’s followers will start to follow you. For this reason alone, this marketing strategy is great for new companies who need to get the word out. It helps with your Amazon rankings. All the sales that the influencer brings to your Amazon account will increase your sales velocity plus these sales will be coming from outside Amazon’s platform which gets even higher ratings from Amazon.
This in essence will greatly help you boost your organic rankings. It creates content for you. Influencers will create content for you, it could be a video or image format, but they will do that work. You can use or refer to this content on your Facebook page or even use the video for your Amazon store if it is a review type of video. There are some other long-term benefits like building your brand awareness, building links to your website landing page or Amazon store, increasing Google rankings, and so on. But for the first reason alone I think this is the best strategy.
Facebook giveaways can work if you master them, but I know first-hand that the majority of people won’t put in the necessary time and effort needed to master a new skill such as Facebook advertising. It is so much better and more realistic for you to just pick something simpler, something that works, and just do it and influencer marketing is just that. It’s a simple and effective way to advertise your business on a budget. I’m sure many of you have heard of the term influencer marketing but what exactly does it mean.
An influencer is basically a person with an active audience. The audience could be big or small. It could be on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat but the principle stays the same. The person will have an active follower base that they interact with on a regular basis. Influencer marketing simply means that we as business owners collaborate with influencers to promote our brands and products.
This can happen in various ways like sending free products for a review, paying money for a review, paying a monthly salary for regularly using the product, and promoting it via content created by the influencer, paying a commission on sales, paying for contests or giveaways and so on. There are various models used here and they are often combined too. For example, many fitness influencers will have large YouTube and Instagram followings.
Brands will pay them a monthly salary to use supplement products plus they are commission based on the sales they deliver using a special link or coupon code. In some industries, money is not involved at all and everything is based on free stuff and product reviews like it is in the vaping industry. For example, no legitimate vaping product reviewer will take money for reviewing products because that would damage their credibility and the authenticity of their reviews.
What they do instead is simply accept free products from manufacturers and do reviews of them honest reviews. Manufacturers usually send many items at the same time so that the influencer can create giveaways and contests around their products. This model is good for both parties as brands get the exposure they want while the influencer gets free products for reviews and giveaways which keeps their followers happy.
There are ways of doing influencer marketing but in most cases, for Amazon sellers, this comes down to basically getting a product review or at least a product mention from an influencer for a fixed fee or for free product method. I don’t know whether you have noticed this or not but nowadays almost everyone wants to become an influencer on social media. Most people don’t realize, less than 1% actually make it to the top to fame millions and the glamorous lifestyle.
The vast majority of influencers are wannabes. They stay at a lower level or quit altogether, and this is great for us. This means that there are many people with a small follower base who we can use to promote our products these small or start-up influencers are usually quite happy to do this just in exchange for receiving free products. This is exactly what you will do. You will find influencers with a small follower base that are related to the product you sell and contact them.
Ask for ways you can get your product reviewed or at least featured in their content. There are many influencer directories available now and even special software programs that will search for influencers. But just doing a manual search on YouTube or Instagram works best. YouTube and Instagram are the two main platforms you should focus on as they are the most suitable ways to advertise a physical product.
Podcasts for example would work best for services or digital content. You simply go to YouTube and Instagram and search for keywords related to your product category and niche. This will help you find content creators who have a follower base that could be interested in your product. Then you contact the person and ask what kind of deals they offer. Often influences will work via an agency and this is a clear indicator that they won’t do anything for free and you will have to pay.
Also, influencers will usually have a page on their website where information on possible deals is published. Now if you’re starting out and looking for free deals, look for influencers who have a small following this ranges from a few 100 people to a maximum of a few 1000 people. If the audience is bigger than that, you will most likely have to pay. As you do this research, you should write down all the influencers you have found in a spreadsheet.
This means you can contact them again in the future when you’re ready to do pay deals. You should pick quality over quantity. There are lots of influencers with fake and inflated follower numbers. They will use bots and other Black Hat techniques to artificially increase their number of followers just so they can charge more for promotions. So be careful with this. Always check out the influencer’s engagement rate before doing any deals. You can check this by looking at how regularly a person posts, how many comments, likes, and shares each post receives.
If they have 100,000 followers and get just 20 comments on a post, it’s obvious that something is not right, and those followers are fake. There are many tools and free calculators available online that will analyze engagement for you and compare it to the industry average so you can see how well that person is doing. Just search for influencer engagement on Google and you will get tonnes of information on this topic. For small influencers with less than a few 1000 followers, you can manually check the situation. Just use common sense to check whether the influencer has real and active followers or if it’s mostly bots and spam.
So you found some influencers, save their profile links in a spreadsheet to keep track of everything, and simply contact them and ask for details on how you could work together. Don’t be afraid of this process. Influencers are in this game 100% and they expect companies to contact them and offer all kinds of deals. what I recommend for micro-influencers who are ready to do this for free is — offer to send them a product in exchange for a review on YouTube or in the case of Instagram alone or promotion.
I would also offer to send additional copies of the product for giveaway purposes. Influences like to do giveaways as their follower love getting free products. Sending 5 products also should work best. You should also ask for a link in the description block, below the video, to your Amazon listing with information on a say 10% discount coupon code. This way the influencers’ followers have an additional incentive to check out your Amazon listing plus you will be able to track ROI for your campaign based on how many coupon codes are used. This review plus giveaway plus coupon code strategy really works best with the free method as well as the paid method.
The main steps with the paid method are basically the same as with the free method that we just covered. The only difference is that now you can look for even bigger influencers who will have 100,000+ more followers. I would still recommend you start small though. Your first few deals should cost around the £100 to £200 pounds mark, so you can measure the average return on investment and then gradually work your way up to more expensive influencers.
With bigger audiences in the paid method, you will also try to get them to do a product review for you. Maybe a giveaway and share the link to your Amazon listing or landing page. The bigger the influencer, the pickier they are about what kind of products they will review and what advertising they will do for you. Many influencers won’t do product reviews as such and will only do mentions which are not as effective also.
With many super popular influencers, their engagement rates are actually not that great, so don’t think that the more followers the influencer has the more effective your campaign will be in terms of ROI. It’s not always the case, but you will only find out what works and what doesn’t work for your product by going through this process yourself so just get into it and start with some smaller influencers.
You can gradually build up your budget as your confidence with this strategy increases. Here are a few final tips — the product must be flawless and ideally something unique and different to what’s already on the market. The more unique your product, the higher the chances of influencers accepting your deals as they usually don’t want to promote boring products that are not of any real use to their followers.
Not everyone will reply to you, that’s a fact. It’s a numbers game so you want to contact as many people as you can to get those replies. Maybe you will even have enough to cherry-pick which influencers you would like to work with. Pay close attention to the geographical following. If you’re based in the UK and sell on Amazon UK look for UK-based influencers in the beginning.
Put time and energy into this, you can achieve phenomenal results with influencer marketing and scale your campaigns to crazy levels. If you have a budget available you can show your product to millions of potential buyers, but it won’t happen overnight, you will need to start small, test various approaches and grow your campaigns gradually.
I do recommend you delve a bit deeper into how this all works especially the engagement rates, so you know you’re investing your money nicely. There are lots of websites that cover this topic in detail just do a search for influencer marketing on Google and spend at least a few hours to learning more about this industry.
If you have not heard of Pinterest, chances are you’re not a woman as 80% of Pinterest users are female. Still, with more than 200 million active monthly users, this is a website you can’t ignore especially as it is oriented around physical products.
How does Pinterest work? Pinterest works like a vision board or mood board for collecting and organizing aspirational content and images. Users can save images called pins that they find anywhere on the Internet or upload their own to organized albums which are called boards.
They can also follow other users and pin their pins to their own boards. Each pin links back to the original source so it’s like a bookmarking website but based on images. The great thing about Pinterest is that many people use it as a wish list. Whether they are planning a wedding or remodeling a kitchen or creating a fancy dinner for friends, Pinterest users can search for and collect inspiration ideas images, and information on their boards because each image links back to the source website.
These pins are highly marketable. People can easily click through to the website of the product they like and buy it. For example, if a person is remodeling their kitchen, they will search for kitchen design ideas and inspiration on Pinterest. They can scroll through the results and save the ideas they like on their own kitchen-themed board. When they’re ready to buy something, they can simply find the pin click through to the website, and buy the product.
So, the whole Pinterest experience is very product orientated. It’s mostly about real things, real products that people can buy and usually online, so this platform is a dream come true for eCommerce businesses and it doesn’t stop there. Pinterest is turning into a giant shopping platform similar to Amazon or eBay but much more simplified and user friendly. Users will be able to effortlessly buy the product shown in the pin, directly on the Pinterest platform. It will be a great opportunity for us to expand our sales beyond Amazon.
Pinterest also has a built-in ad system that is already available and works in a similar way to Amazon’s sponsored product system. You simply select which pin you want to promote and pay for each click delivered. There are also options to pay for impressions, to build brand awareness as well as video promotions and other features available. Once you sign up for your Pinterest account, you will be able to explore these functions for yourself and see how they work for first hand.
Compared to other advertising platforms like Google for example Pinterest is actually very user-friendly. The platform was designed with normal people in mind while with Google AdWords you really need to be a numbers geek to even understand how it all works. Even if you don’t plan on using their business features like paid ads within the Pinterest platform, I still recommend you create an account for your brand, so you have some presence on Pinterest for people who search for your products.
Create a new board for each product you sell and then upload product images there. Then link this back to your Amazon listing or landing page in the description block. As you progress with your business and create images for social media accounts keep uploading them to Pinterest to grow your board with lots of images and of course if you’re not ready to use Pinterest for advertising now, make sure to look for the buyable pins feature.
I think people will love the simplicity Pinterest offers and the platform should yield very good conversion rates. 80% of Pinterest users are female, but don’t think that means that only products for women can and should be sold here. Many women will shop for products that are targeting men like gifts and other reasons. Plus 20% of users on Pinterest are men. 20% out of 200 million is 40 million, which is still a very significant market.
The latest data actually shows that new account signups are almost evenly between men and women. So, it means that while Pinterest started out as more popular with women, it has gained popularity with men and will begin to equalize over time. Pinterest is also a very interesting place for influencer marketing. There are Pinterest influencers with massive followings in the millions and there are smaller Pinterest influences too.
These influencers will have very popular boards that get lots of traffic each month. As sellers, what we can do is, find such influencers on Pinterest and pay them to get our product pinned to their board. Pinterest is full of opportunities. The fact that it is so product-oriented makes it perfect for eCommerce businesses. People go on Facebook to socialize, connect with friends, and have a good laugh. It’s very hard to sell to someone who is not looking to buy anything.
On the other hand, users on Pinterest are actively looking for product ideas and inspiration. So, they are already in a buying mindset. When they go on the site, Pinterest is like Amazon meets social media and this is the reason why so many experts predict a huge success for the Pinterest platform and buyable pins in the future. Right now, is the perfect time to get onto it because clicks are cheap and competition in many categories is minimal. Don’t wait for it to become oversaturated. Think now, how you can use Pinterest to promote your product and business and just get into it.
I’m sure that you are all familiar with Instagram and how it works. The majority of you will even have a personal account and already using it to follow other people. If not, this is the right time to get onto it. Even if, you have no personal desire to use it as a businessperson, you simply can’t afford to ignore what’s going on in the world.
You must always follow the latest developments and you want to be active anywhere your target customers spend their time. Instagram is a massive highly visual social network where hundreds of millions of active daily users share images and videos with their followers. Unlike Pinterest, which is more of a product-oriented platform, Instagram is a more people-oriented platform. People follow people on Instagram.
They’re not searching for products as such, but they do buy products based on recommendations by those they follow aka influencers. Instagram is not the best platform to use to advertise plain products. To be successful on this platform, you always have to tie in the story behind your operation. You need that human connection. Many small businesses use Instagram very successfully to connect with their audience.
As an Amazon seller, this may not be possible for you especially if you’re just starting out and have just one or a few products. If your products are unrelated that makes them even less suitable for Instagram. While you should create an Instagram account for your brand and post an image or video of your product at least once a week, it won’t really yield any significant results because people are not actively using Instagram as a way to search for products.
You could try the well-known method of getting followers by just following lots of other people and commenting on their posts; in the hope that they will follow you back. But the reality is that this is a huge waste of time because you won’t be able to create interesting content on a daily basis to build that relationship and keep your engagement level high. There are always exceptions though.
It could be that your product or business is highly marketable on Instagram especially if you are the type of person who feels good in front of the camera and can build on your own personality to create valuable content and connect with your audience. If that’s the case, by all means, go for it. If we use the cheese grater example, you could create a recipe every day that involves the use of cheese as an ingredient, and of course, it will be grated with your super-duper cheese grater.
You can take images of videos and share recipes with your followers by creating tons of valuable content like this. You will be building your very own audience on Instagram. If you want to take this approach then the best way to kick start a new account is as follows:
- Everyday search for 10 or 20 hashtags that are related to your niche and product,
- For every search start following 10 to 20 people and
- For every new person you follow, make a comment on their latest post.
This way you will start to follow at least 100 new people every day and some percentage of them will follow you back. Once a week or so, you can do the clean-up process where you unfollow people that did not start following you in return. You will do this for at least the first few months just until you get your first 1000 plus followers.
After that, you will find that your follower base will start to grow naturally as people start to share and comment on your posts. This all happens in addition to posting new content on your account at least once a day and using 5 to 10 of the most targeted hashtags with your posts. So, there you go, a super simple and effective way to start your very own influencer career. Of course, it will only work in combination with the creation of great content.
So, if you’re not ready to produce it, don’t even start. Instagram will only work if you have the type of personality that is suitable for this kind of exposure and if you have the time and energy to put into this process. For the majority of people, I just know that it won’t be the case. So growing your own large following on Instagram won’t really be a viable option.
I really think your time is better spent on other platforms like Facebook or Pinterest, but I can’t really write Instagram off entirely because it is yet another massive platform where you can leverage other people to promote your products. Yes! I’m talking about influencers again. Instagram influences are much more business savvy than say YouTube bloggers.
On Instagram, 99% of people who have more than 1000 followers will know exactly how much they charge for paid posts and will be ready to do business with you anytime. Just like with the other platforms, you have to be careful when evaluating these influencers. There will be some people who will have fake audiences. So, you always want to evaluate engagement rates and start with smaller influences first and make sure you have a landing page in place before you run any such deals on Instagram.
You want to direct people to your brand’s website first to give special offers in exchange for an email address or at least a special offer coupon code. Only then people are diverted to Amazon and your listing. You don’t want to send them directly to Amazon without a landing page. There’s also a paid advertising system built into Instagram and it is operated under the same ads manager on Facebook because Instagram is owned by Facebook.
Just like with Facebook ads, you will really have to take the time to learn the craft and spend lots of time and money to make paid Instagram ads work for your Amazon business. it’s just that the clicks are expensive and without smart conversion funnels, email collection, follow-ups, and everything else, you just won’t be able to turn a profit especially if you’re not good with numbers and have no experience with paid advertising.
I don’t want you to start an Instagram ad campaign, spend a bit of your fortune, and never see any sales as a result. You will be much better off if you find a small influencer that is highly related to the product. You sell maybe just a few 1000 followers and pay them a few bucks to do sponsored posts for you. I can guarantee you that your ROI in this case will be much better than blindly buying clicks from the Ads Manager.
To sum it up, Instagram can be the quickest and easiest way to build your own audience if your personality is suited to it. For everyone else, the best way to utilize this platform is by renting other people’s audiences via influencer marketing.
What's your next step?
I have tried to showcase the various advertising options that are out there, so you know that there are ways to bring in extra traffic and sales from outside of Amazon’s marketplace. However, if you’re just starting out, I don’t actually recommend you do any of this until you’re 100% happy with how things are working for you on Amazon.
I say this from experience because I know how much time and energy and money this could take. For example, to properly learn and master Facebook ads, it will take a lot of time, discipline, and funds to try things out. This kind of investment is not going to be realistic or suitable for most Sellers. You will basically be wasting time and money that could be better spent optimizing your Amazon ads or researching new products.
But when you’re ready for this, I highly recommend that you start with influencer marketing and Pinterest. These two strategies are the most newbie-friendly and E-Commerce orientated. They will yield the best results for the time and effort you put in and more specifically you should target YouTube influences first as physical product reviews in a video format can be very powerful.
You will also get video content created for you as a result which you can then share and refer to this in your other marketing activities. The second strategy that works really well for Amazon businesses is using Pinterest influencers. You can pay to get your products pinned to highly popular boards related to your product or niche. This will bring you constant traffic and extra sales on Amazon, which will make you money, increase sales velocity, and improve organic rankings.
Once you have made progress with these two strategies, then you can look into Instagram, Pinterest paid ads, and everything else. Just don’t try to do it all at once. You will get overwhelmed and achieve nothing. Pick one thing, just one model with one strategy, and work on that until you get it right. As for the motivational stuff, I will end this blog by referring to a book called “Crushing It”.
While this book is more focused on personal brand builders and influencers, it actually covers a lot of great business advice, social media advice, and is generally super motivational. It will give you lots of ideas that you can implement in your business plus it shares lots of success stories that are always interesting to read.
