Amazon Influencer Marketing and Amazon PPC
Amazon Influencer Marketing and PPC: Better Together
Brands leveraging Amazon’s advertising solutions across Sponsored Ads and DSP is nothing new in 2024, as these are both proven ways in which marketers can reach relevant shoppers that can drive sales volume and bottom line business growth. There’s an area within Amazon’s advertising toolkit which often goes under the radar of many brands, yet is a potential game changer in leveraging influencer marketing to reach high value shoppers in engaging ways.
What is Amazon Influencer Marketing?
Influencer Marketing on Amazon (also known as Amazon Influencer Program) leverages the power of social media influencers to promote products, this helps customers research and discover products they might be interested in. Influencers with a significant following on channels such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest can create a storefront and earn commissions on validated purchases made through their page.
Influencers can be celebrities, well known and respected authorities in an industry or popular bloggers and social media personalities. Influencer marketing can take place in almost every industry but has been extremely popular in the beauty and fashion markets
Consider this scenario: imagine a new makeup and beauty label collaborating with a renowned beauty influencer on both YouTube and TikTok. The influencer proceeds to endorse the product across their various social media platforms, introducing the recently unveiled makeup brand to potentially millions of followers. This action promptly enhances brand visibility and builds trust among the brand's audience. It's clear how deploying this strategy can rapidly elevate brand recognition, delivering instant outcomes that strongly resonate with the intended shopper demographics.
How Amazon Influencer Marketing Works
Amazon influencers create storefronts featuring their recommended products. When followers buy these products through the influencer's storefront, the influencer earns a commission. This process is straightforward and transparent, making it an appealing form of marketing for many influencers.
The Benefits of Using Amazon Influencer Marketing
Embracing Amazon Influencer Marketing comes with a number of unique benefits to brands looking to diversify their marketing strategies and extend their outreach beyond the more conventional approaches of paid marketing:
Increased Product Visibility: Influencers can bolster product visibility through their established followership
Multi-Platform Exposure: Influencers typically engage across various high-traffic social media platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and more. This means that each collaboration with influencers enables your brand and product to be showcased across multiple social media channels.
Trust and Credibility: Influencers' recommendations hold weight, fostering trust among potential buyers.
Improved Sales: Influencer marketing can lead to increased sales, given the influential power these individuals wield over their followers.
What is Amazon PPC?
Amazon PPC, on the other hand, is a model where advertisers are able to serve their product ads on Amazon's marketplace to get in front of prospective customers based on specific keywords that shoppers search for online.
This form of advertising is an excellent way to drive product visibility and generate traffic to your product detail pages - ultimately generating more sales for your business.
How Amazon PPC works
With PPC advertisers bid on keywords, if their bid is the highest their advertisement gets displayed when a user searches for that keyword on Amazon. Advertisers are only charged each time they win the audience and their ad is clicked on by a user.
This process is a clear way for advertisers to closely control and monitor exactly how much they are willing to pay per click, while also setting exactly how much they will spend per day on advertising, ensuring optimal use of their budget.
The Benefits of Using Amazon PPC
Although it is more commonly used than influencer marketing, Amazon PPC advertising is a tried and trusted form of advertising your brand and products to shoppers that deliver a number of well known benefits:
Precise Audience Targeting: Advertisers have the ability to precisely target specific demographics and keywords, enhancing the relevance of their ads.
Data-Driven Insights: Amazon PPC campaigns provide valuable data and insights on ad performance, allowing for strategic adjustments.
Enhanced Conversion Rates: Ads are displayed to users who are actively searching for relevant products, leading to higher conversion rates.
Potential for Higher Sales: Successful Amazon PPC campaigns often lead to increased sales, contributing to overall business growth.
Differences between Amazon PPC and Influencer Marketing
As you can see by now, influencer marketing and Amazon PPC advertising both have their unique advantages mechanisms to promoting brands online. Given their unique differences, it’s crucial for advertisers to understand these differences to maximize the key advantages each of these strategies can deliver for their business. Below, we cover the key differences between these two approaches:
Cost Comparison
Amazon Influencer Marketing involves collaborating with social media personalities to promote your products. While costs can vary greatly depending on the influencer's popularity, on average, a small-scale influencer might charge between $250 to $750 per post, with larger influencers commanding anywhere from $5,000 per post and above.
On the other hand, as already discussed earlier, Amazon PPC is a model where you control what you bid for each and every click, also known as the cost-per-click (CPC). CPC’s can range anywhere from $0.30 up to $4.00 depending on the volume of searches and demand for other advertisers to bid on those same keywords. What this model ensures however is that advertisers control exactly how much they are willing to pay and invest, ranging anywhere from $10 per day all the way up to $10,000 per day and beyond.
This difference in cost structure highlights the flexibility that PPC offers advertisers, while Influencer Marketing can, at times, be more cost effective and require lower investment levels compared to PPC advertising.
The Reach of Influencers vs PPC Ads
When comparing the reach of influencers to the reach of PPC ads, studies consistently demonstrate that influencers hold an advantage in terms of both expansiveness and authenticity. Influencers possess the ability to tap into their well-established follower base, creating a more genuine and relatable connection with potential consumers. This occurs as influencers have organically built trust and rapport with their audience over time.
On the other hand, PPC ads rely on strategic methods like keyword targeting and bidding, aiming to capture the attention of potential customers amidst the sea of digital content. As such, Amazon PPC advertising reach is determined by the popularity of targeted keywords and the ad spend levels invested, with higher budgets enabling greater audience reach.
The Engagement Rate for Both Strategies
Engagement rates present a distinctive dynamic for both influencer marketing and PPC ads. Influencer marketing often takes the lead in this aspect due to its personalized approach and the inherent trust influencers have cultivated with their audience. The authenticity of influencer content tends to elicit higher levels of interaction and participation from followers.
In contrast, PPC ads offer a unique advantage in that they grant advertisers direct control over ad placement and targeting parameters, for example, controlling whether to serve ads on Amazon or off Amazon's marketplace, or even specifying where exactly your ads are shown to shoppers on Amazon's own website - such as search engine results page, or on competitor product pages. This increased level of control can be leveraged to drive high-quality traffic to specific product listings, optimizing the chances of conversion when using data informed approaches through campaign reporting and analysis.
Audience Demographics and Strategy Choice
Navigating the choice between influencer marketing and PPC necessitates a close consideration of your brand's target demographics. For instance, younger audiences tend to exhibit a higher susceptibility to the influence of the influencers they follow, making influencer marketing a potent choice for products aligned with this age group.
On the other hand, older demographics might exhibit a more favorable response to traditional PPC ads, which they may find more familiar, dependable and more seamlessly blend amongst organic product listings - oftentimes Amazon PPC ads even going unnoticed by shoppers.
Choosing Between Amazon Influencer Marketing and Amazon PPC
When it comes to selecting a strategy for your Amazon business, the choice between Amazon Influencer Marketing and Amazon PPC can seem complex. The decision should be based on several key factors, such as your business goals, product type, and unique factors pertinent to your company.
Factors Influencing the Choice of Strategy
The effectiveness of both strategies depends on your objectives. If you aim for brand visibility and engagement, influencer marketing could be your best bet, as influencers can boost your product's exposure and create authentic content. On the other hand, if your goal is immediate sales and targeting specific demographics, PPC can deliver faster results as it allows for precise targeting.
Product Type and Strategy
The nature of your product can also help determine the ideal strategy. For instance, lifestyle or fashion products might benefit from influencer marketing due to its visual and personal appeal. Conversely, technical or niche products might better benefit from PPC, as it can target specific search terms and demographics.
Hypothetical Scenario
Consider a company selling high-end fashion accessories. Given the visual appeal and lifestyle association, they might lean towards influencer marketing. However, if they have a new product with less awareness, a PPC campaign targeting specific keywords could be more beneficial in the short term. Ultimately, the choice depends on aligning the strategy with the company's unique factors and goals.
Combining Amazon Influencer Marketing and Amazon PPC for Maximum Results
Both strategies have their unique advantages and as with most of Amazon's marketing offerings, work better together when combined to drive higher brand visibility and sales volume for advertisers willing to embrace both strategies:
Integrating Both Strategies
The key to integrating Amazon Influencer Marketing and Amazon PPC lies in their complementary nature. Influencer Marketing involves collaborations with individuals who have a strong online presence and can influence their followers' purchasing decisions. On the other hand, Amazon PPC is a model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked. By leveraging the reach of influencers to drive traffic to your PPC ads, you can increase visibility and conversions.
Combining these strategies can amplify your brand's visibility, credibility, and reach. Influencers can provide authentic content and endorsements, while PPC ads can target specific demographics to drive sales. This dual approach ensures your brand message reaches the right audience at the right time.
Conclusion: Amazon Influencer Marketing vs Amazon PPC - Balancing the Scale
In summary, after diving deep into the nuances of Amazon Influencer Marketing and Amazon PPC, it's evident that these two strategies possess unique attributes and operational approaches to how they work and the type of customers they best target. While they operate independently, the true advantage emerges when these strategies are combined together to elevate each other's unique advantages. The merging of Amazon Influencer Marketing and Amazon PPC holds the potential to yield superior business outcomes for advertisers willing to lean into both strategies.
