A Guide to Amazon Influencer Marketing: How to Find Amazon Influencers and Drive Traffic with User-Generated Content
Kaitlin McMahon, November 25, 2022
Table of Contents
Social media platforms are quickly becoming some of the most sought-out real estate for brands looking to build awareness and drive incremental sales. Influencer marketing is an attractive way to diversify your brand’s presence on social media, offering creativity, relatability, and an emotional connection to potential customers.
In this article, we’ll explain what influencer marketing is, how it can be applied to Amazon, and describe in detail all of the information you need to launch an Amazon influencer marketing campaign.
What is an influencer?
An influencer, also referred to as a creator, is someone that creates digital media. Most often videos and/or photos, but sometimes also audio media like podcasts. Typically an influencer creates content about a specific topic, like sustainable living, cooking, or fashion for their audience.
The people who subscribe to an influencer’s social media accounts are called “followers.” This is because the button they have to click to subscribe to an account's posts typically prompts the user to “follow” the account’s posts and updates. People usually follow influencers because they produce informative or entertaining content related to a specific interest.
Influencers are usually classified according to the number of followers they have. Below is a table that summarizes the different types of influencers, the number of followers they have, and some of their key characteristics.
Types of Influencers
Name | Number of Followers | Description |
|---|---|---|
Nano-Influencers | < 1,000 | Smallest following, but often have a very dedicated and engaged audience, typically associated with a specific community or niche. Can be selective about the products or brands they endorse. |
Micro-Influencers | 1,000 - 100,000 | Respected experts in a specific area, they've gained a substantial following because of their insight and expertise. |
Macro-Influencers | 100,000 - 1,000,000 | Well-known online presence that speaks to a broad audience, often has a certain degree of celebrity, consistently delivers high-quality content to maintain and grow their audience. |
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is an advertising strategy that uses digital content creators—known as influencers or creators—to promote a specific product on popular social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and more.
Typically, influencers create short video content for brands. Then the influencer and the brand share it via social media channels to their followers. If this concept isn’t familiar, think of celebrity endorsements. Most of us have seen a famous movie star or athlete in a commercial for a perfume, a car, or a watch. Influencer marketing is similar: it harnesses the power of social proof, getting someone that people look up to and trust to promote a product with the end goal of building your brand and bringing in sales.
What is Amazon influencer marketing?
Amazon influencer marketing uses the power of influencers to direct consumers to Amazon product detail pages, driving incremental sales and organic rank on Amazon for the advertised brand’s products.
Before diving into how you can incorporate Amazon influencer marketing into your overall Amazon advertising strategy, let’s explore in more detail how influencer marketing can help you achieve your business’s goals.
Why should I use Amazon influencer marketing?
Below we unpack the four key benefits of Amazon influencer marketing: brand awareness and credibility, improved organic rankings, increased sales, and scope of network.
Brand awareness and credibility
One of the biggest selling points for influencer marketing is that it increases brand awareness by helping your brand reach new audiences. And the size of the audience available through social media is tremendous.
According to a recent study published by Statista, as of 2022 the United States has over 302 million social media users, and that number is projected to grow to over 327 million users by 2027. Similarly, worldwide over 4.26 billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to almost 6 billion in 2027.
Another benefit of using influencer marketing to reach people through social media is that younger audiences—which can be more difficult to reach with traditional advertising—are among the most avid users of social media. Approximately 90% of US adults in the 18-29 age category are on social media.
And an influencer’s audience isn’t limited to their followers. Many social media platforms recommend content that users may be interested in. For example, TikTok has a "For You Page" (FYP). The FYP is a feed of content that is personalized to each user based on the type of content that they engage with most. Instagram has a similar feature called the"Explore Page.” These content discovery tools give brands the opportunity to reach an additional pool of potential consumers that are likely to be interested in their products.
On top of the additional exposure, influencer marketing also builds brand credibility. Members of an influencer’s audience choose to follow them because the audience trusts their overall judgment. This signals a certain amount of trust between the follower and the influencer.
A good influencer is able to situate your brand in such a way that it “fits the feed” in terms of personality, approach, and content. Ultimately, an influencer’s audience is there because they feel a connection to them, not because they want to see another ad. This is a crucial distinction between influencer marketing and other more traditional advertising channels.
Organic rank boost
Organic search results appear on the Amazon search results page after Sponsored Products ads (see image below). A product’s organic rank in the Amazon search results is influenced by the number of branded searches it receives and its click-through and conversion rates, among other factors.
Traffic driven to your product on Amazon via influencer marketing can help to improve your product’s branded search, click-through, and conversion rates, thereby improving its organic ranking.
But why is organic ranking so important? Because if your product isn’t getting on the first page of Amazon search results, it’s unlikely that shoppers will click on it. 70% of Amazon customers never click past the first page of search results, according to a study by Search Engine Journal.
Sales
The ultimate goal of any influencer marketing campaign is to increase purchases of the advertised product. In their content, influencers will mention the product and brand name, giving interested individuals all that is needed to search for the product themselves and make a purchase.
Also creators will often put a link to the product in the video or photo caption, or in their bios so that viewers can easily get more information about the product and start shopping.
Scope of network: talent liquidity and signal liquidity
Within influencer marketing, there is very high talent liquidity and signal liquidity. This means that the network of influencers and the size of their audiences across social media platforms is immense, creating vast opportunities for both unique content and large reach.
Talent liquidity refers to the large number of influencers within the social media space. According to an analysis published by Forbes, more than 50 million people around the world work in some capacity as influencers. This large talent pool of influencers means there is a wide variety and breadth of talent available in the creator space that can be taken advantage of with creator marketing campaigns. As a result, it is very easy to connect with talented influencers worldwide and promote brands anywhere.
Signal liquidity refers to the high volume of users across social media platforms that view the content influencers produce. In 2021, an estimated 22.6 trillion minutes of videos were viewed on Tiktok alone—more than double the number of minutes watched on Netflix, even though TikTok’s individual videos are significantly shorter in length. This shows that the number of content pieces the average user is exposed to is extremely high, giving your brand more opportunities to get in front of the right consumer.
How to launch a successful Amazon influencer marketing campaign
In order to launch a successful Amazon influencer advertising campaign, it is important to find the right influencers, and ensure they create the right kind of content. But how do you know which influencer and platform is “right” for your brand? Let’s find out.
How to find Amazon influencers
One of the best ways to find Amazon influencers for your brand is to identify someone creating content that’s similar to what you’re looking for and get in touch. First, create an account on the social platform you're interested in and start to look for a creator that:
is in your niche
has a brand that would be able to incorporate yours authentically
has a sizable following.
One caveat with regards to the number of followers: When trying to find an Amazon influencer, we recommend that you focus on the quality of the content rather than the number of followers the creator has. Think of a potential customer scrolling social media discovery pages as being similar to someone flipping through TV channels—the viewer’s main goal is entertainment, they’ll stop on whatever content catches their eye for a few seconds. Anyone can create content that goes viral, regardless of the number of followers.
Additionally, on platforms like TikTok followers only make up a small fraction of an account's total video views. This is primarily because the main area where individuals go to watch Tiktoks and scroll is the TikTok “For You” page, which is a personalized, scrollable feed of content that serves as the platform's main discovery tool, recommending content based on what the user likes, shares, and views.
Other platforms like Instagram and Facebook are starting to follow suit by incorporating three categories for viewing their feed: “Home,” “Favorites,” and “Following,” in addition to the “Explore” page. This adds another opportunity within the “Home” page for users to see content that has been recommended for them, taking up the space that those they follow once owned.
That’s why finding an Amazon influencer who creates on-point content is key to getting your product in front of as many qualified viewers as possible, both via follower views and views that result from a social media platform’s recommendation algorithm.
Finding Amazon influencers sounds like too much effort?
Perpetua's Amazon influencer software will reach out to its 100,000+ influencer network to find interested influencers and their proposed costs.
You choose and brief influencers on the content you want: hashtags and mentions, as well as any trends or concepts that you'd like to include. And you own the content and can repurpose however you like, on social media or your own website.
Cost
When implementing an influencer marketing strategy, it can be difficult to know what kind of budget to allocate and how much to compensate a creator for their content. The old adage about getting what you pay for holds true with Amazon influencer marketing; the more budget you put towards a campaign, the higher the content quality will be.
Although it is important to choose a creator based on their content and not the size of their audience, the number of followers a creator has largely determines what a creator will expect for compensation.
To help you get a sense for what it costs to have influencers make content for you, the creator cost recommendation sheet below outlines reasonable fees to propose. These should serve as a rough guide—the exact amount an influencer charges will vary depending on the market.
Cost guide for Instagram influencers
Followers | Content Creation | Content Creation and Posting | Content Creation, Posting, and Boosting |
|---|---|---|---|
<10,000 | $40 - $80 | $60 - $140 | $100 - $150 |
10,000 - 50,000 | $80 - $150 | $140 - $220 | $150 - $270 |
50,000 - 80,000 | $150 - $200 | $220 - $300 | $270 - $350 |
>80,000 | >$220 | >$330 | >$350 |
Cost guide for Tiktok influencers
Followers | Content Creation | Content Creation and Posting | Content Creation, Posting, and Boosting |
|---|---|---|---|
<10,000 | $40 - $80 | $50 - $100 | $80 - $120 |
10,000 - 50,000 | $80 - $120 | $100 - $150 | $120 - $200 |
50,000 - 80,000 | $120 - $180 | $150 - $250 | $200 - $300 |
>80,000 | >$180 | >$250 | >$300 |
Once you’ve selected a creator you’d like to work with, you can choose from three service tiers:
content creation: influencer develops the content and delivers it to you
content creation and posting: influencer develops the content, delivers it to you, and posts it to their social media account
content creation, posting, and boosting: influencer develops the content, delivers it to you, posts it, and promotes it
The more involved the creator is in promoting the content, the higher the price will be.
You can also request permission from the creator to use TikTok “Spark Ads” and “Boosting” on Instagram to promote the content after it has been posted. Typically, usage rights will be granted for 60-90 days for the additional fee outlined above, and allowing your brand to maximize the reach your content can get.
Best Practices once creators have been selected
Aftering finding your creator, we recommend keeping up with trends on social media so that you can recognize what is doing well throughout the duration of your campaign. You can do this by scrolling through the “For You Pages” on the social media platforms where your content will be appearing and looking at creator accounts that produce compelling content relevant to the space in which your brand operates.
A key best practice is to provide a creative brief to your creators outlining the type of content that you’d like them to produce. It should include aspects of the advertised product you’d like to highlight and examples of content that you like, is well-aligned with your brand, and has performed well. This will accomplish two things that can help your Amazon influencer marketing campaign get off to the right start; the influencer will:
understand what you’re looking for
be able to deliver the type of content you want, without having to go through feedback rounds.
If you haven’t run an influencer marketing campaign before, you can get example content for the creative brief from successful campaigns run by other brands in your industry. If they don’t exist, you can look at adjacent or comparable industries.
One caveat: a good creator will know their own brand and what kind of content performs well for them, so make sure to give them the freedom to incorporate their knowledge and expertise into the content they’ll create for you.
Recognizing the “right” Amazon influencer marketing content
Influencer marketing is not like traditional video advertising. The popularity of apps like TikTok and Instagram is a result of the engaging content found within. Social media content is often unique to the platform and varies immensely from traditional video advertising.
The most important characteristics of successful influencer marketing content include creativity, fluid structure, and authenticity. Below we'll look at each in more detail so that you can know what to look for when you’re evaluating content for your Amazon influencer marketing campaigns.
Creativity
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram flip the script entirely when it comes to digital advertising. TikTok's main message in its business is “Don’t make ads. Make TikToks.” underscoring the importance of using creative expression in marketing strategies to transform the way that users consume content. As social media platforms continue to encourage creativity and new ideas to spark trends, brands have more freedom to take risks and try new approaches.
Fluid structure
Influencer marketing is all about dynamism, impact, and memorability. Unlike with traditional video advertising, experts discourage brands from reciting all of their products’ assets within the video. It is also not necessary to have a strong call-to-action at the end as these features are sometimes not native to the platform.
Authenticity
Influencer marketing content should be tailored to the age groups that make up the majority of each social media platform’s audience. One commonality across all age groups is a desire for authenticity, for content that doesn’t feel like an ad disrupting the feed.
This is a key difference from traditional television ads, which interrupt a program to sell a product. Users on today's social media platforms engage with organic content. Content that incorporates products naturally without sounding like an ad piques the interest of the audience and can lead to higher engagement with the advertiser’s brand.
Importance of trends
A trend is a common theme portrayed in online content that is attractive to engage with, which people will often put their own spin on. Trends make up the most-viewed videos on TikTok and Instagram, as they captivate their audiences the most effectively. Therefore, it is extremely important to leverage trends and understand what is going to perform well and when.
On social media platforms there are different ways to be “trendy,” and it is hard to predict what will drive engagement. Sometimes there will be a song or audio clip that gains a lot of traction, other times it will be a type of video that users enjoy watching and sharing.
Most trends can be adapted to any niche. It is important that any trend you try to capitalize on aligns with the overall message of your brand, and builds trust and authority.
Good content on TikTok vs Instagram
Even though many of the principles of engaging content apply to both platforms, TikTok and Instagram do have subtleties to be aware of when evaluating and creating content.
TikTok influencer content: the dos and don’ts
Do | Don’t |
|---|---|
- Use trends to gain momentum | - Mention purchase details in the caption or text of video |
- Have a strong, “scroll-stopping” hook | - Use phrases like “link in bio” |
- Keep it short and sweet: ideally between 5-7 seconds |
Instagram influencer content: the dos and don’ts
Do | Don't |
|---|---|
- Use trends to gain momentum | - Recycle content from other social media platforms |
- Include on-screen text and captions: the algorithm uses these to share content | - Use phrases like “link in bio” |
- Include a CTA, mention there’s a link in the bio, and send viewers to a product |
Repurposing user-generated content
Once influencers have generated content for you, it is yours to repurpose in your own marketing and social media channels. Be sure to read the details of any agreement you sign, however, as this can be dependent on the contract with the influencer.
Influencer marketing content can also be turned into a video ad to be used on Amazon, for example, as a Sponsored Brands video ad. And Sponsored Brands video ads can have a large short-term and long-term impact. Brands that adopted Sponsored Brands video for the first time saw sales increase 21% more than those that did not, according to a recent study by Amazon.
The same study found that In the long term, brands that added Sponsored Brands video to Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns increased sales by 10% and click-through rate by 25% more than those that ran Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands products ads alone.
A note on crediting the influencer: etiquette is to give credit to the influencers when repurposing their content, unless you’ve expressly stated that you'd like to do otherwise in your initial agreement.
Using TikTokSpark Ads to repurpose Amazon influencer content
TikTok Spark Ads allow brands to create advertisements out of organic content on the platform to maximize the reach of their organic videos through paid promotion.
With authentic content that looks native to the platform and not like an ad, Spark Ads have become well known for their scroll-stopping features. According to a study published by TikTok, Spark ads deliver a 134% higher completion rate and 157% higher 6-second view-through rate than standard In-Feed Ads.
Below we’ll go through some of the core benefits of Spark Ads, and suggest content that is ideal for repurposing with Spark Ads.
Authenticity
One of the most unique features of Spark Ads is that your brand can promote a creator’s organic content on Tiktok from their own handle, making it look more authentic and organic within a user's feed. When launching Spark Ads, you can create your own caption and include any trending and related hashtags. You can also choose a CTA button which will be included within the post. This allows for easy access to the product’s detail page on Amazon, leading to increased measurability and conversion. The new Spark Ads landing page user interface has a 69% higher conversion rate for brands compared to the prior landing page.
Highly Targeted
Spark Ads are a highly targeted way to boost your content’s reach. Your brand has the ability to select a target audience based on many characteristics including, but not limited to, location, age range, and user categories. Through this granular targeting, Spark Ads ensures spend is used efficiently to reach users most likely to convert, boasting a Cost Per Action (CPA) 36% lower than In-Feed Ads.
Which content should I Spark?
There are three characteristics that make content suitable for promoting with Spark Ads. You want to promote content that:
already had strong organic performance
follows current spark trends
represents your brand in a strong way
Making use of Spark Ads to boost good content can lead to a positive engagement cycle in which the boost in engagement provided by Spark Ads makes TikTok’s algorithm pick up the content and distribute it more widely. This wider distribution in turn increases organic engagement, which signals to TikTok’s algorithm that the content should continue to be distributed, further propelling the engagement cycle.
How to measure success
With social media, success is measured by the amount of engagement a post gets. This can be likes, comments, shares, and mentions. Although this data is a key indicator of whether or not content does well on a platform, it does not give the brand solid proof of financial success.
Amazon attribution allows you to track the success of a campaign through a generated link that creators can put in their bios once content is posted. The expectation is that interested consumers will click on the amazon attribution link and will purchase the product after seeing the content.
Although Amazon attribution is a great way to see directly attributed sales, it does not capture all of the data. This is because there is a large portion of people who either miss the link entirely or will not convert immediately after watching the video. Instead, these customers will remember the brand or product name and make a purchase some time after the content has been consumed.
Indirect purchase journeys are why tracking other metrics (apart from directly attributed sales) throughout the duration of your Amazon influencer marketing campaign is crucial to grasp the scope of the campaign’s impact.
Below, we’ve summarized the most important metrics for evaluating your Amazon influencer marketing activities. All of these metrics can be tracked within your Amazon Account.
Key Influencer Marketing Metrics
Metric | Definition | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
Attributed sales | Using an Amazon Attribution link, you can see how many people clicked on the link and made a purchase | The higher the attributed sales, the more profitable your influencer marketing campaigns. |
Cost per click (CPC) | Cost per click: Spend per campaign / # of link clicks per campaign | See how effective your influencer ads were relative to other advertising campaigns that you are running. You can even get more granular and calculate CPC per influencer to compare creators with each other and track their personal success, learning which ones work best for your brand. |
Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) | CPM: (spend / # of impressions) x 1,000 | See how much you are paying for 1,000 views of your content relative to other advertising campaigns. The number of impressions reflects how many times the content is shown on a user’s timeline. |
Cost per detail page view (CPDPV) | CPDPV: spend / detail page views | This metric reflects the price of driving a customer to your advertised product's detail page. |
Branded searches | Branded searches: people who searched for your brand name on Amazon | An increase in branded searches following the beginning of a creator marketing campaign can indicate that a large number of people saw the content, were interested, and wanted to learn more about your product. Instead of clicking a link to your product, they searched for your brand on their own and may have made a purchase. |
Search frequency rank (SFR) | SFR: the numeric rank of a specific search term when compared to all other search terms during a given time period | Allows you to track the searches of your brand or product name compared to your competitors. Can indicate whether branded searches are consistent within the industry or are attributable to your marketing efforts. |
Organic keyword rank | Organic keyword rank: where your product appears on Amazon’s Search engine results page for a specific keyword | A product increases in organic rank for a specific keyword the more it is clicked on and purchased by consumers using that search. A keyword rank boost for your product within 1-3 days of your creator marketing campaign going live is a signal of initial success. Although it is not directly attributable, it is an indication that more people are searching for and purchasing your product. |
Organic sales | Organic sales: income generated within a specific company that was not attributed to an advertising campaign | An increase in organic sales for a specific product during an influencer marketing campaign can indicate increased product awareness and sales. A lot of conversions happen minutes, hours, or even days after the content has been consumed. These purchases are often captured by organic sales numbers. |
For more on influencer marketing metrics and creator-influenced paths to purchase, check out this article.
Using Perpetua’s Amazon influencer software to implement your Amazon influencer marketing strategy
Perpetua’s Amazon influencer software connects brands with content creators across TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook.
From one simple platform, brands can select a product from their portfolio that they’d like to promote and the size, niche, and demographic characteristics of the audience they’d like to target. After that, Perpetua will reach out to its 100,000+ influencer network to find interested influencers and their proposed costs.
Brands have full control with Perpetua’s Amazon influencer software, with the ability to:
brief influencers on the content they want: including hashtags and mentions, as well as any trends or concepts that should be included or excluded in the content;
approve each interested influencer before they’re added to your campaign, and control how much you’d like to invest in the campaign;
opt to approve content prior to being posted.
And brands immediately own the content produced by Perpetua’s Amazon influencers. You can Boost videos directly under the influencer's handle for 60 days, or leverage the content on your own social media platforms for life.
Perpetua’s Amazon influencer marketing software also comes with robust reporting capabilities.
Measure the full picture: Through an automatic connection with Amazon attribution, influencers each have a unique link to send traffic to your product, allowing you to track sales easily.
Full-funnel impact: Measure the growth of organic rank on your most important search terms alongside your organic sales to understand the full impact of your campaigns.
Brand Referral Bonus: Selling on Amazon US? Automatically earn back a percentage of your sales generated through attribution links.
Get started with Amazon Influencer marketing and begin your influencer journey today.
Summary
As more and more people spend time on social media platforms, it’s become imperative for brands to incorporate influencer marketing into their overall marketing strategy. In contrast to paid social ads, influencers provide a way for brands to build out an authentic and organic presence on social media.
Influencers allow you to leverage their unique style and expertise to create content that entertains and resonates with their audience, and that can spread via social media platforms’ recommendation algorithms. In this way, influencer marketing leverages the authenticity, creativity, and existing audiences of influencers to build awareness, boost organic rankings, and drive incremental sales for your brand.
A Guide to Amazon Influencer Marketing FAQ
What is the meaning of influencer marketing?
What is an example of influencer marketing?
How do you find an influencer?
What is an Amazon influencer?
What are the types of influencers?
To get started or learn more about how Perpetua can help you scale your Amazon Advertising business, contact us at hello@perpetua.io