In this guest post today, Rebaid explore why Amazon Live could be more profitable than PPC (Amazon Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands) and how they can help you succeed.
Amazon Sellers often develop their own advertising and promotion strategies driven in part by their product category and customer profile. But if there is one commonality between all sellers it is their use of Amazon’s PPC advertising program. This program which was first launched 8 years ago has quickly gained popularity amongst Amazon sellers, not so much for it’s ROI but rather due to the few and dwindling alternatives.
All sellers are familiar with the new product dilemma. When you launch a new product, it is so deep in the search results where few or no shoppers will ever see it. If your listing generates no traffic it won’t generate sales. Without sales you’ll never appear at the top of the search results. So it’s a vicious cycle to break out of.
Amazon Ads offers a solution to this problem, albeit with some major drawbacks. With PPC ads your product has the opportunity to appear at the top of the search results or in other paid placements where it will generate visibility. The hope and goal of sellers who use this program is that added visibility will translate into clicks and sales. However with per click cost often exceeding $3-$5 (and sometimes much higher) the ROI often ranges from bad to horrendous.
Sellers rationalize this seemingly bad investment by projecting large increases in non-PPC generated sales resulting from improved organic rank. With some products this outcome is achieved and the short term losses caused by aggressive PPC campaigns is justified. However very often it is not. The high PPC cost and entrenched competition is often insurmountable, leading many brands to walk away from failed launches with a loss.
Why Amazon Live is (Much) Better
In a broad sense, advertising on Amazon has some big advantages. Shoppers on Amazon are often in buying mode, ready to purchase right away when they find the right product. But while the cost of PPC ads negate this benefit, a newer and lesser known on-Amazon channel captures this advantage at a fraction of the cost.
Amazon Live which was launched last year is a live streaming platform where influencers share their favourite products, in a HSN (Home Shopping Network) format. Influencers range from moderate follower count creators up to well known celebrities. Amazon Live has been a development priority for Amazon, with a rapid series of updates and recruiting of A-List influencers to the platform.
But while Amazon Live has rapidly grown in popularity amongst influencers and shoppers, it remains relatively unknown amongst sellers. This has created once in a lifetime opportunity for early mover brands to generate huge visibility for their products at a very low cost!
Placements in an Amazon Live stream start at $100 (more on how to purchase placements below) and typically generate 40,000+ views between live viewers and recorded playbacks. Even assuming a conservative view to sale conversion rate, it is easy to see how huge ROI’s can be generated from these campaigns.
Moreover, Amazon Live broadcast often include a product page video which is a valuable asset to any listing page. This video created by the influencer is automatically and permanently added to your Amazon listing. Sellers who purchase product video creation services on Fiverr or Upwork for hundreds of dollars would see an instant savings by purchasing an Amazon Live placement instead, and that is not even considering the tens of thousands of views that the video generates when created through Amazon Live!
How to Get Your Product on Amazon Live with Rebaid
While Amazon does not offer a program linking sellers with content creators, Rebaid.com a launch and promotions platform offers just this service. Brands who sign up for a seller account on Rebaid can create an Influencer Campaign and purchase a placement with an influencer on Amazon Live in just a couple minutes. Simply enter some basic information about your product category and campaign goals. You’ll then see influencers that match your criteria. Click through to view the influencers profile, rates and past content. Once you’ve selected the influencer who you think is the best fit you can simply click Submit to purchase the placement.
Once you submit your campaign you’ll be provided instructions on where to send a sample unit of your product to be featured in the livestream along with a short form to detail any special features or request for the influencer. Typically turn around time from the purchase of an influencer campaign to the live broadcast is 10-14 days and is mostly based on how quickly a sample unit can be delivered to the influencer.
Conclusion
As with past programs released by Amazon, there is a huge early mover advantage. This is very much the case with Amazon Live. When Amazon’s Sponsored Products program first launched, sellers commonly generated large sales volumes with ACoS under 5%. Or when Amazon Prime launched, sellers could instantly rank their product on page 1 simply by converting their listing to FBA. While those days are long gone, Amazon Live offers sellers who missed out on the early days of those programs with another tremendous opportunity.
In 2022 there is no other Amazon program that can generates tens of thousands, large volumes of sales with campaign cost under $300. Sellers who take advantage of this will have the opportunity to rapidly build and scale their brands, so sign up for a free seller account on Rebaid today to explore this exciting new launch strategy!
One Response
Amazon live was a total failure the first time around and it is on track towards a spectacular failure this time around as well. Amazon starts these programs and creates an unobtainable expectation for the influencers to create a rift between sellers and influencers,. Not on purpose of course, but that is the end result. These people doing lives want to make big money and sellers don’t understand image advertising so they can never make the return they need to make in order for the live to be worth it. PPC for many sellers isn’t a logical choice because of its low price point but since sellers are not taught how to market products, they feel they have no other choices.
The reality is that sellers have a ton of choices, most are cheaper than Amazon PPC and do not require the discounting most feel they need to offer on Amazon. As a new seller, you need to buy your market share while you build an organic ranking. IF you properly research your competitors before launching, you should have a very good idea of what your competitors are targeting using PPC. Spyfu is a great tool to use to find out about converting ads off of Amazon, just make sure that the buying intent is there. This will help a seller launch and limit the high cost of launching in the dark with PPC.
Sellers need to wake up and realize this is 2022. Consumer expectations changes several years ago. They expect to be able to have communication with a brand, something Amazon doesn’t allow.
Sellers can resolve this with a social media presence.
Per a Neilson study, 92% of consumers will trust the recommendation of a stranger before they trust what a brand says.
82% of consumers purchase based on the recommendations of friends and family.
Over 50% of consumers have made purchases after seeing user-generated content.
69% of consumers do not trust business ads.
So what does this tell you? It says that sellers need to use influencers, advocates, and brand ambassadors. Amazon live is one method but I feel there are much better methods with a lower cost of acquisition than Amazon Live and PPC. We have been teaching clients to launch and rank with influencers for a long time. Referazon is a website dedicated to Amazon affiliate influencers and most will work for commissions. The key is to set goals with them and reward great performance.
We also use Instagram influencers quite a bit. The influencer industry has changed. There are influencers like the Kardashians which you cannot afford and there are creators. That is who sellers should use. Creators have much smaller audiences than influencers but they are much more effective. They create content for you of different kinds. Make sure that you own the content when they are finished and cross-post it elsewhere using their affiliate link. Amazon rewards off-site traffic. FB ads suck for most sellers because they don’t understand soft selling, so we do recommend it, especially since the distribution suck. You can get a much better reach on TikTok for 30% less. Fb ads might reach 2%, and TikTok reaches 20% Tiktok has a feature called Sparkle ads where you can license a user’s content for so many days and post as often as you like. Add your amazon attribution link to it and you can save on Amazon fees. If Amazon sees traffic from 20 different users on Tiktok with an attribution link going to your product and converting, they will look very kindly at the traffic and reward it.
We also drive traffic using quizzes to a landing page, get the opt-in, presell the product and then give them a choice of Amazon or our site. Quizzes, when done right converts at 35 to 45% plus the ads we use to drive the quiz traffic run 80% less than product ads.