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How to Drive External Traffic to Your Amazon Store and Product Listings With Influencer Marketing

How to Drive External Traffic to Your Amazon Store and Product Listings With Influencer Marketing

Do you want to drive more traffic to your Amazon Listings?

Well, of course you do… who would ever say they get enough traffic?

Today we'll like to guide you through something fun and valuable in terms of boosting your Amazon traffic. We'd bet you haven't tried this before.

Why external traffic is important?

Just like with Google, traffic to your Amazon brand store or product pages will help boost your sales. Amazon’s algorithm notices when external traffic comes in directly, especially to a specific product.

Amazon rewards this!

By working to send external traffic to your Amazon storefront and listings, you may improve rankings within Amazon, work toward a Best Seller Ranking, gain trust among consumers or simplify your new product launch.

In this blog article we'll talk about influencer marketing for Amazon merchants.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing uses top content creators specialized in their respective niches (we’ll talk about niches later in the article) to help you improve brand awareness and/or increase traffic.

When you enlist an influencer to assist you then you gain access to their audience and salesmanship.

Influencers are able to leverage their expertise and charisma to be salespeople for products not necessarily their own. Additionally, they leverage different channels including social media, blogs, videos, webinars, email lists and columns to market to your potential audience.

They don’t have to have large followings, but great influencers have very dedicated followings that are proven to convert when the influencer pitches or promotes a product.

Let’s dive into how you can use influencer marketing for your Amazon sales/marketing strategy.

Why does influencer traffic work for Amazon sellers?

Influencers have proven that they can do their job of influencing others to make decisions on key aspects of their niche. Influencers specialize to gain credibility in their field because they use tactics like word-of-mouth marketing and social proof.

For example, would you trust a chef to review beauty products?

(We wouldn’t either.)

When influencers bring traffic to you, they bring qualified leads who are interested in your product and primed to purchase - or at least learn more - based on what the influencer has said about you.

What’s in it for influencers?

Some people enjoy telling others what to buy and use and why - but the smart ones monetize it!

There are influencers who will do reviews in exchange for free products. Given that this may violate Amazon’s TOS, it can be a tricky line to walk.

What’s much safer is to approach influencers who are willing to exchange content (e.g. a guest blog) for payment or who are already part of the Amazon Influencer or Amazon Associations program. Both of these programs allow influencers/associates to make a small commission off sales that come from their links to Amazon.

If you offer products that are a great fit for their customer base, you help build the influencer’s authority as someone who really knows their niche and understands what their followers want. They’re always looking for what’s new and next!

Influencers also benefit from increased exposure. If they review your product, it only makes sense to promote them in return.

Influencer marketing can be a win-win for everyone!

What Amazon products work best for influencer marketing?

LARQ self-cleaning water bottle in Granite White // www.livelarq.com

An influencer can review anything, but there are some categories that stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of influencers.

Beauty/skin care

This is an easy one. Anything cosmetic is a great product for an influencer to review along with showing off how it’s used and the results of using the product. Though this is an extremely crowded category, every positive review matters and will help. Beauty and skin care products tend to lend themselves extremely well to videos and images.

Kitchen/cooking products

Another crowded category, but one in which influencers can have a big impact. Cooking gadgets and anything that makes life easier in the kitchen is a perennially popular option for not just regular purchases but for gifts as well! These products lend themselves not only to videos and images but also blog posts.

Jewelry

A picture is worth a thousand words, and so is an influencer review! Influencers are pros at making your products look great and can also expand on other aspects of the jewelry that are more difficult to capture in a product listing (think feel and quality).

Fashion

What better way to showcase your unique designs than for customers to see how they look on someone they already love? This category lends itself to videos and images particularly well.

Baby products

With such a huge shift in priorities of parents, baby products are an ideal match for an influencer campaign. Parents scour the internet for anything to make their lives easier, and trusting a product reviewed by a person they trust will make all the difference. This is the perfect category for the mommy bloggers of the world.

Other CPG

The above are just some examples of categories that are conducive to Influencers and capitalize on popular influencer markets.

The fact is there is an influencer for everything, so do your research to find the right one for you!

How to find influencers and 7 tools you can use today

Not everyone has a list of influencers in their contacts list - but never fear, there are plenty of ways to find them.

Pro tip 💡: Offering a free product in exchange for a review violates Amazon’s Terms of Service. Be mindful of this when requesting product reviews for the purposes of driving traffic to Amazon.

Google

Using Google is a great way to find influencers, especially blog-based influencers. Simply putting in keywords related to your product is a fantastic way to start.

Tip: One great way to find influencers who may be willing to do a review of your product is to search for “Top 10 [+ your product type]”.

Social media

Hashtags can really be your best friend here! Search relevant hashtags to uncover thought leaders and influencers in your specific product niche.

For example, if you sell eco-friendly cleaning products, try searching for hashtags like #greenclean to uncover not just competition but also influencers you may want to get in touch with.

If you are aware of influencer, you can also search for their accounts directly on social media.

Pro tip: most influencers have multiple platforms that they tailor their content to. You usually only need to contact them once, but if you have a specific platform you would like to be featured on you should tell them so.

Amazon Associates

Remember that pesky TOS requirement from Amazon that you not give away free product? A great way to circumvent that without violating those terms of service is to search for Amazon Associates!

Amazon Associates is an affiliate marketing program that anyone can sign up to join. The approval is fast and Associates start earning quickly.

While Associates are not able to select any product (Amazon offers around 1 million to choose from), they often feature best of lists that you may be able to be included on in order to better round out their product selection.

To find these Associates when you search on Google, add keywords like ‘Amazon affiliate’ to your query.

Pro tip: it never hurts to ask to be included on a top 10 or best of list!

Amazon

Amazon has introduced its own program to capitalize on the influencer marketing trend - appropriately, it’s called Amazon Influencer Program.

Influencers must apply to this program themselves and once accepted create a vanity URL that they can then use to direct their base to their own page on Amazon. This basic page features products that the influencer would like to promote.

While there is no list of Amazon Influencers, you can find them in your course of searching for other influencers using Google. Check the links that they use to direct their base to products - if Amazon shows up, they’re likely an Amazon Influencer!

Marketing Platforms and Marketplaces

Sometimes it’s more effective to identify a single place where you can find lots of influencers in one fell swoop. Furthermore, these platforms will often provide a way to verify that an influencer has done what was promised - and as anyone who has worked with influencers before knows, this is a huge pain point resolved.

Whether you’re looking to create connections with fashion bloggers or advertise with a mommy blog, Tinuiti has a fantastic collection assembled of influencer marketing platforms and marketplaces.

Be aware, however - these platforms add additional cost to you even as they alleviate certain concerns.

Here's a list of 7 platforms where you can find influencers worldwide right away:

How to work with influencers or how Amazon merchants can use influencer marketing?

Influencers can be established on a variety of channels. So firstly pick your potential influencers you’re going to work with.

If one is a relatively modest-following influencer with hundreds or thousands of people in their niche, then you can have them write a post about your product, share an online review, or post a picture/video on Instagram with one of your products. Average costs of working with them is $80-$500 per piece of content.

If one is a blog influencer, you may collaborate with them by writing a guest post for their blog, ask to be mentioned in one of their earlier posts and back-linked to your Amazon listing or sponsor a post about one of your products. Associated costs are somewhere between $400-$5,500 per blog post depending on the size of their followings and how “famous” are they.

If one is a social media influencer, recognized on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Twitter, then opportunities open up for a large number of merchants in the Amazon. Because social media influencers share content about a wide range of topics such as health, cars, diet, outdoor activities, fashion, art, beauty, and interior design. Influencers can write a brief statement about your product on Twitter, upload an unpackaging video of your product or simple image post on Instagram with a backlink to your Amazon listing. Your potential costs of working with this type of influencers start at $100 and go up without the upper limit.

In addition, you can approach to influencers with open thinking, since usually they have their own way of collaborating with 3rd parties. In this way, they will be able to offer you several options for how both of you can work.

Also, you may negotiate a reward for influencers’ work in other forms, too. Obviously, money could be one option. But it also could be free products from your inventory, discount codes or any other swag.

Over to you

Even if your first collaboration attempts with influencers doesn't work out as you expected -- don't give up! Perhaps, you chose the wrong partner or not an appropriate channel to reach potential buyers.

If you haven’t worked with influencers, start thinking of including influencer marketing in your sales tactics today so that they can help you build new and lasting relationships among your target audience.