The following is a guest post by e-Comas.
How do you make money? You have to spend money. It’s a tale as old as time. But on Amazon, retailers can do this more cost-effectively than ever before: there are clever options for every budget.
What’s more, you can complement your Amazon ads by advertising your Amazon listings elsewhere, including Google, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media sites.
We’re eyeing up the mounting popularity of TikTok, among other social commerce trends, and thinking now is a good time for creative brands to give the young platform a try.
But first: the (relatively) old ways are often the best.
Get Your Ads on Google and Facebook
One of the best ways to diversify your Amazon advertising is to take it to Google, and link to your Amazon product detail pages; it drives traffic.
You can do the same with Facebook and Instagram. There are clever ways Amazon gives you to link social media with your Amazon pages, and one of our favorites links Brand Store with Instagram – more about that in the next section.
Don’t believe the rumors that Facebook is ‘dead’. It might not be the trendy thing anymore, but it’s still massively popular with every generation, and still a very effective advertising platform, with excellent audience targeting.
You can use Amazon Attribution to measure the impact of your advertising off Amazon.
Instagram has also grown as an Amazon ads platform in recent years, and is still growing, thanks to following in TikTok’s footsteps. Read on for more on that.
Open a Brand Store
Amazon Brand Stores give you a complete shop window within Amazon: you can create attractive pages with shoppable images displaying your products in context, so consumers interested in your brand can view your complete range.
It’s great for building customer loyalty, and you also get a handy personalized Amazon URL.
There’s also a hidden gem for Instagram marketers. You can use Instagram as a source of traffic and lead it to your Amazon Brand Store pages by creating a ‘source tag’: a URL that you generate from your Amazon store and share on your Instagram post.
This gives you insights reporting on the number of views, visitors, units sold, and sales that came from that Instagram post.
New Trends in Social Commerce
Augmented reality (AR) still sounds so futuristic, but it’s becoming more and more commonplace. On Snapchat, for example, it gets used all the time in filters: Snapchat allows advertisers to create their own filters to engage consumers.
AR is a great way to engage shoppers, especially if your product is cosmetics, or something wearable, such as sunglasses. L’Oreal, MAC, and Chanel all offer the ability to ‘try on’ lipsticks, eyeshadow, and other cosmetics using AR on their websites.
But there are plenty of non-wearable brands being creative with it, too: McDonald’s current Snapchat campaign gets consumers to raise their eyebrows to be told which summer menu item they should try.
Meanwhile, Livestream shopping is set to boom. China’s leading the way, with people watching on average one Livestream per week, according to GWI.
Brands on Amazon can get on this trend by joining Amazon Live: the platform allows influencers, and brands themselves, to make creative and engaging live videos directly selling up their products. And it’s free.
We think it’s great for brand loyalty: people are able to ‘follow’ their favorite brands on Amazon, even little-known brands.
But the biggest and most promising trend at the moment is short-form video, and the biggest platform for this is TikTok.
Short-form Video is the Way
TikTok is currently one of the fastest growers in social media: monthly users have grown 32% since 2020, while the app pulled in $4.6 billion in revenue in 2021, a 142% year-on-year increase.
There’s a perception that TikTok is for the young, and we would certainly recommend it for brands targeting Gen Zs and millennials.
But while the audience is undeniably younger than other social media, its biggest-growing user groups are Gen X and baby boomers. We think there’s an opportunity for savvy brands to get ahead of the curve in targeting these older users on TikTok: one report says that only 14% of marketers plan to up their TikTok spend in 2021.
People use humor on TikTok like nowhere else: it’s a place to be visually clever and show more of a friendly side than you would on the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook.
We think it’s a less daunting, more brand-friendly platform than YouTube. TikToks are typically done on a mobile phone, and the platform provides plenty of editing tools: professional-looking YouTube videos require more effort and resources.
TikTok also offers five types of advertising, so plenty to choose from: from In-Feed ads, to exclusive, one-per-day Brand Takeover ads. Its ads are really quite innovative, such as Branded Hashtag Challenges, and Branded Effects, which use AR as described earlier.
How to Do TikTok
One of our clients, a small family business, creates their own funny TikTok videos from home, getting the whole family involved and using editing tricks for a bit of magic. The seconds-long videos are funny, engaging, and make a highly effective showcase of their products in use.
If you’re not comfortable with taking matters into your own hands, there are influencers whose gimmick is finding good buys on Amazon. You can reach out to them with paid opportunities.
And if you don’t fancy taking on TikTok, Instagram is an interesting platform to experiment with short videos instead. It has a massive, multi-generational audience, and it blends its traditional, static social media posts with Reels – TikTok-esque short-form videos.
Like TikTok, Instagram Reels has grown massively since 2020 – by 20%, according to GWI.
There’s no doubt this latest trend in social media is ready to be used effectively by brands. We’re excited to see the creative ways our clients use it to boost their Amazon sales.
Contact the e-Comas team any time for information and assistance with your eCommerce journey!
