If you’ve ever started using a service or product after someone you trust had recommended it, then you intuitively understand how influential word of mouth can be. User-generated content (UGC) is essentially your brand’s digital word of mouth. If you’re a brand selling on Amazon, your UCG is any shared content about your product, usually social media posts or reviews on the marketplace, created or curated by individuals rather than by you as a brand. This includes content by digital creators, who continue to build their substantial following as authority figures of their domains.
Whether an influencer is an expert in makeup products or travel services, for example, their recommendations impact a brand’s target audience to take specific actions, typically opting in to the service or buying the product they are promoting. The ability of UGC, in particular influencer generated content, in amplifying your brand presence and subsequently motivating your target audience to buy your product on Amazon, is the power of influencer marketing.
Helping you stay top of mind, establish more authentic brand awareness, to eventually driving sales with full funnel marketing, are all reasons why you should be leveraging influencers as part of your Amazon ad strategy. How?
Inspire your Audience
Partnering with an influencer who has a sizable social media presence is equally as important as it is to work with one who resonates with your brand and audience. Authenticity is one of the most important factors affecting the type of content social media users choose to consume, how they do so, and decisions to interact with and purchase from brands – or not. To get the most out of your influencer partnerships as a brand, we suggest providing them your brand guideline along with specific hashtags or terms to include while allowing them to exercise their own creative freedom when they create co-branded content.
As digital trendsetters whose understanding of their following enables them to produce content–from Instagram Reels to TikTok videos–that resonate with and engage their audience, influencers will be able to bring your products to life and help you convert your target audience in a much more authentic way.
Repurpose your User-Generated Content with an Easy Call to Action to Amazon
From paid partnerships on an influencer’s page to co-branded content seen on a user’s feed, repurposing UGC as your own with a call-to-action to your brand’s purchase page via social media, is one way influencer marketing can help your brand stand out among competition and move your customers lower down the funnel. For example, “Sign up,” among many other prompts in a sponsored Instagram post, is an easy way to lead users to your Amazon product offering. The newest TikTok Spark Ads, by far, seem to promise significantly more engagement.
TikTok’s Spark Ads unlocks co-branding to a whole new level – any brand is able to boost co-branded content directly from an influencer’s page, with a specified call-to-action (CTA) to its chosen landing page. If you’re a brand selling on Amazon, the CTA is likely your Amazon product detail page (PDP).
TikTok’s Spark Ads' format and features blend your advertised product offering in so smoothly with the platform’s interface that at first glance, they do not come across as ads. TikTok’s “For You” feed which displays an aggregation of content deemed relevant to users’ interests, whether they are followers of those pages or not, is where your branded product content will appear. Your branded product video’s visibility in the For You stream is an indication that your content is suitable to targeted viewers’ interests, being similar to those of accounts they already follow, and so they are likely more receptive to your product offering and thus more likely to click into it, bringing you one step closer to converting sales.
In contrast to a regular TikTok brand ad, of which both the photo profile and CTA prompt lead to a brand’s landing page, the profile photo of a TikTok Spark Ad goes to the influencer’s account while its CTA button separately takes the user to the brand’s selected landing page. Like in an organic post, users can also take the shared audio in a TikTok Spark Ad to include in their own content. As long as brands have the Duet or Stitch feature enabled, the TikTok community can build on creativity, and the greater the amount of UGC, the further the brand reach, the closer their target audience is to buying their product offerings.
The implication of your target audience seeing your Sponsored branded content in their feed as though it were not an ad but as if it were an organic post, is that your TikTok Spark Ad appears less intrusively as it does more authentically, bringing users much closer to purchasing from your brand. Brands selling on Amazon should leverage TikTok Spark Ads which essentially boost already strong performing content, riding on the creative nature of UGC, to maximize brand reach, resonance, and ultimately sales.
Measure your Success
Among many, two key performance indicators brands selling on Amazon can evaluate the success of their sponsored co-branded content and influencer partnerships with, are organic rank and conversion rate. The more viral your co-branded content is, the greater the share of voice your product listing’s branded search terms occupy on Amazon’s first page search results. At Perpetua, the selection of influencers to partner with, the set up of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat ads, and TikTok Spark Ads, are fast, efficient and every single ad’s sales attribution is easy to see.
Determined by sales performance, best seller rank, number of and quality of customer reviews, and star rating, among others, the higher your organic position, the more relevant your brand is to customers searching for the same product that your competitor might offer. All of these elements belong to the Amazon flywheel, the advertising cycle that empowers your product’s success, which is ultimately defined by its sales velocity. For instance, the more your sales, the better your organic rank, and vice versa, the higher your organic rank, the greater your sales.
Every click on your product listing that comes from social media is attributed to your sponsored co-branded ad, whether it is a Sponsored Instagram post or TikTok Spark Ad. Over the course of each co-branded campaign, you can also monitor your ad’s click-through rates, impressions, units sold, attributed sales, and more to gauge its effectiveness and your influencer partnerships.
To learn how Perpetua can help you take your influencer marketing to the next level, please email us at [email protected] or feel free to schedule a demo here.
