Feeling Inspired? How to use Amazon's social tools to boost your marketing
Pic by Amazon
Amazon knows the value of social media.
It knows consumers use these sites first to talk to their friends, but second to engage with brands.
And it has incorporated its own versions of several popular social media sites over the last few years, to help brands strengthen their marketing inside Amazon: including Instagram (Amazon Posts), and YouTube and Twitch (Amazon Live).
The latest is Amazon Inspire, which echoes TikTok.
Let’s explore how Amazon Inspire works, and how brands can get involved.
Amazon Inspire: What is it?
Amazon Inspire is an in-app shopping experience, available only in the US for now, where users can browse a feed of videos from brands and influencers for inspiration.
The videos include shoppable links, so browsers can click for more information on a product they like.
The feed is personalised, according to what the shopper has already viewed and bought on Amazon. As with TikTok, the best format is for short, portrait-oriented videos.
Like Amazon Live, brands need to be in the Amazon Influencer Program for their videos to appear in Amazon Inspire. You upload images and videos to your Storefront, and the videos will show up in the Inspire tab algorithmically, provided they feature at least one Amazon product.
What benefits do brands get from joining?
In recent years Amazon has made great efforts to ensure sellers get brand recognition from their customers, rather than shoppers thinking of their purchases as merely ‘from Amazon’.
Which means sellers, particularly in the US, now have a large range of in-Amazon marketing tools to use for free.
And they’re proven to work, enhancing the way shoppers interact with your brand through their shopping journey.
Amazon Posts, for example, can boost your purchase rate by 2.5%, says Amazon.
These tools create new opportunities to engage your customers while they’re in the marketing funnel. Amazon Live allows customers to talk to you or the influencers you use directly through its Live Chat function, for example.
And customers can ‘follow’ your brand across Posts, Live and Inspire to see more of your brand and products, becoming loyal repeat customers to your brand, rather than just Amazon.
Amazon is also using these tools to create new advertising experiences: you can now boost your Amazon Posts into Sponsored Brands ads, enhancing your ad strategy with fantastic lifestyle-context imagery. We expect Amazon Inspire will also develop an advertising function in the near future.
The tools are so simple to use, too. If you’re already advertising on TikTok, don’t hesitate to put the same content on Amazon Inspire, and the same for your Instagram content on Posts.
How do I get involved?
Amazon Inspire is only available in the US for now, so if you sell on amazon.com, we recommend getting involved - same as Amazon Posts.
There’s a wider picture here: if you’re not currently selling on Amazon.com, these social tools make it really worth your while to expand into the US.
To feature on Amazon Inspire and Amazon Live, brands need to join the Amazon Influencer Program. But bear in mind shoppers are expecting to see influencers! Make sure your content stands out, and the personality you’re using is charismatic and influential. We have some fantastic clients with charismatic, knowledgeable founders who are perfect influencers of their own, and use Amazon Live to great effect.
You can also try engaging influencers to feature your product in their videos. Find an influencer you like, whose brand matches yours; follow them on social media; and DM them with an offer for collaboration. Influencers earn commission from Amazon when products in their videos are clicked, so it can be a really cost-effective way for brands to engage new customers.
Does Amazon have any rules about what videos to upload?
As mentioned, mobile-friendly vertical, short videos work best: Amazon recommends no more than 30 seconds to engage shoppers.
You can tag multiple Amazon products in one video, but you must include at least one.
As with Amazon Posts, Amazon actively encourages brands and influencers to repurpose their existing social media videos, as long as there are no watermarks from external sites, and copyrighted music is removed. Read Amazon’s video best practice guide here.
Michael Yanez, our Head of US Business Development, says: “These social marketing tools from Amazon make a huge difference for our clients selling in the US. We’ve seen the way Amazon Posts appear all over Amazon - on your Brand Store, in search results and on your competitors’ pages. For such a simple tool, the increase in touchpoints between the customer and your brand means a potentially huge uplift in sales. Amazon Inspire is likely to have a similar effect.”
Selling in the US? Want to know how to make the most of Amazon’s fantastic social tools? Give us a call today!