Differentiate your products by using these highly-effective marketing strategies
Influencer basics
Selling products online is a compelling idea. You can start an online store for a tiny fraction of the cost that would be required to open a physical store. An online store can serve hundreds of millions of people, billions if offering international shipping. A physical store by contrast is generally limited to a geographic range and the number of people in the surrounding communities.
However, for all the advantages of e-commerce there is one stark drawback, comparison shopping. Shoppers can easily compare products, moving between product pages in a few clicks. With most brands implementing best practices; high quality images, feature videos and compelling ad copy, the ultimate decision often comes down to price.
This leads to the common “race to the bottom scenario”. With brands unable to differentiate in any significant way, price wars usually result in brands competing over razor thin margins. This challenges the long term financial viability of businesses and often leads to insolvency.
How do you break free?
Differentiation is inherently difficult in a digital setting. Many scrupulous brands have become proficient in advertising poor quality products as far better than what they actually deliver. This is familiar to most people who shop online even occasionally. Products that appear to be high quality in images on Amazon end up being cheap junk that may only work for days or weeks, if at all.
This is particularly frustrating for brands that design and sell high quality product at a higher price point. But a recent released Amazon service has made differentiation easier for premium price products.
Amazon Live
Amazon Live is a shoppable live-streaming platform launched by Amazon in 2019. This little-known marketing tool has been gaining momentum and has been a powerful sales generator for early adopter brands.
Influencers recruited by Amazon, many of whom have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers share and demo products through livestreamed events hosted on Amazon. These livestreams can generate substantial viewership both through live views and recorded playbacks.
Getting your product featured on an Amazon Live may seem like a lucky break, but the influencer who create these videos are receptive to outreach and placements from new brands which they may have never heard of before. Platforms like Rebaid can help facilitate these placements, more on that later.
When a product is featured on Amazon Live, the influencer will do a thorough review, demonstrating features they believe are most valuable to their audience. Moreover the live streams are interactive. Shoppers viewing the live stream can ask questions and request certain features be demonstrated. Lastly the influencers endorsement of a product carries significant weight when a shopper determines the value of a product.
Using the early adopter advantage
As the first part of this article established, digital differentiation is difficult. Brands that sell low quality products are able to disguise themselves behind the digital veil. However with influencer features on Amazon Live provide a welcome opportunity for high quality, premium priced products to shine.
But similar to other Amazon programs, the lions share of gains are captured by the early adopters. When Sponsored Products, Amazon’s PPC advertising program launch in 2015, brands could generate ACoS of 3-4% with simple, non-optimized ad campaigns. In the current period brands commonly see 30-50% ACoS. A similar phenomenon is likely to occur with Amazon Live.
As a fairly new program, there is an abundance of influencers creating content and relatively few brands seeking placements in these live streams. Inevitably as more brands become aware of this effective new marketing channel, demand for placements will go up faster than influencer supply, resulting in rapidly rising cost.
So this is the time to start exploring Amazon Live. With placements start as low as $150-$250 depending on product category, there is little risk and lot’s to gain by running an Amazon Live campaign.
How to connect with an influencer
Making connection with influencers has been a challenge across all social media platforms and Amazon Live is no exception. Influencers are great at creating compelling content but they are notoriously bad at establishing consistent relationships with brands.
Rebaid has eliminated this point of friction by establishing ongoing relationships with the top Amazon Live influencers. Brands that sign up for Rebaid have instant access to the largest group of Amazon Live influencers offered by any platform.
Moreover brands can book an Amazon Live placement with an influencer on Rebaid in just a few clicks. Rebaid handles everything from beginning to end, starting with sending a product sample to the influencer, managing special request for product features to highlight and scheduling the live event.
Rebaid has influencers from small community influencers through celebrities, with varying demographics to match virtually any product. When creating a campaign brands can browse through past post and videos from influencers to make an educated choice on the best influencer for your brand.
The bottom line
Selling high quality products at premium price points is the best strategy to build a profitable long term business. But you can’t count on shoppers being able to sense the inherent benefits of purchasing your product over the discount alternatives. Through Amazon Live you can effectively convey the value of your product while generating large scale exposure amongst an audience that matches your target demographic.