The Complete Guide to Influencer & KOL Marketing for Amazon Sellers
In this post, I will share my best tips and most useful hacks on how to get the most appropriate influencers and bloggers to talk about your products, keeping in mind that you are probably selling on Amazon.com or on other similar e-commerce platforms.
Getting the most out of your KOL (Key Opinion Leaders) network is not the easiest job: because differently from PPC, keyword optimization, or other sales-related elements, the influencers’ performance will mainly depend on your good relationship with them and on the value of your product.
This is why I prefer to call this whole subject: Media Relation Management.
Introduction
So, you have started your first bunch of sales on Amazon, you got your first nice orders and verified reviews, and got your listing optimized. Great job! Now what? You are thinking it would be cool to have some good influencers/bloggers to talk about your product(s) on their channel.
How to start? Where to find the reviewers? Should you target bloggers or aim to video reviewers? How much is it going to cost and how will you be able to evaluate the results?
What do you need to know
Today’s influencers’ system can pretty much be summarized in this way: you are going to have a good success with the reviewers – your Media Partners – if:
1. You have a very good and innovative product, OR
2. You have a very good relationship with them, OR
3. You pay them enough money to be featured on their channels/websites.
… Best performance is obtained if you combine all of the 3 above.
Approach The Reviewers
If you are a new seller on Amazon, the first 2 scenarios are very unlikely to happen, as you probably entered the market of Amazon with a product that has already been there for some time, the competition is very high, and you are just starting to build up your Media Partners list.
READ MORE: The Secrets Behind the Success of Chinese Amazon Sellers, as Revealed by Insiders
If you don’t want to approach the scenario #3 (you pay them good money to feature your product on their channels) then you will have to start building your contacts list of potential partners and start contacting them and to make a clear list of why your product is different (better) than the competitors. The problem here is that this job will take you a lot of time.
This is why a lot of new sellers who don’t have time/money to invest in Media Relations, will outsource this job to freelancers or marketing agencies (this is one of our services at Growth Hack Consulting, so get in touch with us on this page to know more).
Quick tip: if you are going to hire a freelancer to do this job, never accept a pay per hour. For a few very simple reasons:
3. If the potential reviewer is not good/suitable, there will be some extra time to pay for changing the reviewer and find more suitable ones.
Since this kind of freelance services might be expensive and the results might take a while to show up, you can start investing your own time in finding the right media partners and start building your own media list. You should be aware that you are literally going to invest your time here, as the results will come only after some months. Let’s start the smart search!
364,000€ in 30 days with <13% ACos%? Ask Us How!
Start The Search
How to find the right reviewer? The short answer is to this 1 million dollar question is: search on Google or on YouTube “your product + review”. Easy, right? Who has written a review about a product similar to yours, might be interested in reviewing also your product.
But think again about it, if you simply look for reviewers of products like yours on Google, the first 5-10 pages of results (that means a lot of results) are going to be top ranked websites. This means that the owner of the website will most of the times want to be paid unless your product is really really innovative. But once again, this is not very common for Amazon sellers.
So, What To Do Now?
1. Search & find some blogs categories/collectors or online groups where there are listed other blogs and websites that provide reviews, often divided by category or industry. This, for example, is a good example of Travel Blogs Website Category:
3. Always start from the bottom: begin contacting the mid-low level reviewers/influencers/social media profiles and little by little escalate to the higher levels, as your product gets more popular and there has been already somebody writing about it.
How To Evaluate if a Media Partner is Good or Not for You?
1. General Overview
Here you will have a general overview of the website, you can see whether a potential partner is a good fit or not, and you can also pretty much imagine how expensive they will be.
2. Traffic Overview
The traffic data is just an estimation. My suggestion is to combine different sources of data regarding this matter to have a better idea of the real stats.
3. Referrals
Referrals are very important for your final purpose: if a website is sending a lot of links to Amazon, it is a great fit. This means that they are redirecting their users to products on Amazon and they are probably making use of Amazon Affiliation Marketing services.
Take a look also at the incoming traffic (referring sites): webmailtin and libero are some of the main mail providers in Italy: this means that the website is driving traffic to their pages via email marketing. A great opportunity for you to explore more newsletter/email marketing campaigns with them.
4. Audience Interests
This is quite straightforward: the main interests should be matching with your products, or your products will probably be not accepted for a review, or they might have low performance.
There’s much more information to be discovered on Similarweb.com about your potential influencers, go and have a look!
Put It All Together
You will want to add several elements to it, to be able to track the actual performance of your partners including:
- Action Type
- Channel
- Brand
- Product Model sent for review
- Media Name
- Contact email
- Date
- Budget Spent
- Review URL
- ROI performance calculation.
Understand that a good influencer/blog/website is a channel where users go to find the information they are looking for. You want your brand and products to be there, when relevant to their searches and interests.
Ultimately, the entire objective of your work will be to create and maintain a long term, profitable relationship for both parties. You want to do this because each influencer will work with you as a preferred sales channel and informational channel for your customers’ niches.
The more great relationships you will have with different influencers, the more target audiences you will be shown to. Easy as it sounds. But very hard to achieve.
READ MORE: 7 Key Points to a Successful Amazon & E-commerce Business
How to Achieve the Best Results
What you want to create is a virtuous circle of cooperation and interests between these 3 players:
- The Media – Influencer
- The Brand (You)
- The Customers – Audience.
Sarah
Interesting insight! Thank you for sharing these tips, really useful.
Davide Nicolucci
Thanks Sarah!
Maggie Zhou
Thanks a lot for brining out a very thought provoking article! It is well worth the read !
Davide Nicolucci
Glad you liked it!
Andy Shea
Good article. Hope to see you in Hong Kong someday!
Davide Nicolucci
Thanks Andy, just drop me an email [email protected]
Sure :) See you
Sure 🙂 See you
User
You really make it seem really easy with your presentation but I to find this topic to be actually one thing which I think I might by no means understand. It seems too complicated and extremely wide for me. I’m looking ahead for your next put up, I will try to get the hang of it!
User
Wow! This can be one particular of the most beneficial blogs We have ever arrive across on this subject. Actually Great. I’m also an expert in this topic so I can understand your hard work.
Bluitt84674
Good article and right to the point. I don’t know if this is really the best place to ask but do you folks have any thoughts on where to employ some professional writers? Thanks in advance 🙂
Volpe
Keep functioning ,remarkable job!
Terzo
I will immediately snatch your rss as I can not find your e-mail subscription hyperlink or newsletter service. Do you’ve any? Please permit me recognise in order that I may just subscribe. Thanks.
Tschetter
Thanks a bunch for sharing this with all folks you really understand what you’re speaking about! Bookmarked. Please also talk over with my web site =). We may have a link change arrangement between us!
Marchione52014
I think this is one of the most important info for me. And i’m glad reading your article. But should remark on few general things, The website style is great, the articles is really excellent : D. Good job, cheers
Hasper
Hello.This post was extremely interesting, particularly because I was looking for thoughts on this topic last Thursday.
Roenigk8115
Keep functioning ,remarkable job!
zuca bag accessories
Thanks a bunch for sharing this with all folks you really understand what you’re speaking about! Bookmarked. Please also talk over with my web site =). We may have a link change arrangement between us!
Bloxsom46978
It’s really a great and helpful piece of information. I’m satisfied that you shared this helpful information with us. Please keep us informed like this. Thank you for sharing.
Thune
I have been reading out many of your stories and i can state clever stuff. I will definitely bookmark your site.
Vitantonio
I added a new list today. I’m going to try to find new sites in a slightly different way. Read all about it by clicking the link above.
Massengale6981
Fantastic goods from you, man. I’ve understand your stuff previous to and you are just extremely fantastic. I really like what you have acquired here, really like what you are stating and the way in which you say it. You make it entertaining and you still take care of to keep it sensible. I can’t wait to read far more from you. This is really a tremendous site.
Estrado
Very good written information. It will be valuable to anybody who employess it, as well as yours truly :). Keep up the good work – for sure i will check out more posts.
Kopinski
Howdy very cool site!! Man .. Excellent .. Wonderful .. I’ll bookmark your web site and take the feeds also¡KI am glad to search out numerous useful info here within the post, we want work out extra strategies on this regard, thanks for sharing. . . . . .
Wiscount80456
Nice post. I was checking constantly this blog and I am impressed! Very useful info specifically the last part 🙂 I care for such info a lot. I was looking for this particular info for a long time. Thank you and good luck.
Somerset
I have read some just right stuff here. Certainly value bookmarking for revisiting. I surprise how much attempt you place to make this type of excellent informative website.
Headings
You completed a few nice points there. I did a search on the theme and found nearly all persons will consent with your blog.
[email protected]
I do accept as true with all of the ideas you have offered for your post. They are very convincing and can certainly work. Still, the posts are too brief for novices. Could you please prolong them a little from next time? Thank you for the post.
bigpond password recovery
I have read some good stuff here. Definitely worth bookmarking for revisitingThis is the type of information that are supposed to be shared around the net. ..Thank you for any other fantastic article.