Even if your primary goal for your brand is Amazon success, building your brand outside of Amazon is a smart move. Social media is the most accessible, efficient means of achieving key marketing goals, including:
- Increasing traffic
- Increasing conversions
- Building a brand identity and brand story
- Improving brand recognition
- Opening communication channels with your customers
Social media is free and available to everyone— what’s stopping you from using it? We’ll help you get started with all the possibilities that this form of marketing can unlock for your brand.
Where Amazon falls short
Amazon is a site designed to serve consumers during the buying and selling process. It has less of a focus on the marketing element of e-commerce, leaving little opportunity for up-and-coming businesses.
There is also limited space to give your customers a brand experience on Amazon. Social media offers more opportunities for personalized customer interaction and creativity in marketing.
Connect with your customers
Amazon doesn’t encourage much interaction between buyer and seller. Most customers will only reach out to a brand if they have a question or issue about their product.
In contrast, social media is designed for forming connections. Major platforms have some form of messaging feature, opening a direct line of communication with networks. You can ask your customers what their needs and wants are, and answer to them directly.
You’ll get a feel for the type of people who make up your customer base: who they are, what they care about, what they’re interested in. This information will not appear in Amazon Analytics; they are some of the unique insights that social media provides.
Interacting with your customers through their preferred social media platforms also builds loyalty. Putting in extra effort to show a genuine interest in your customers makes your brand memorable to them. The experiences you create with one-on-one interactions translate into brand loyalty. This leads to repeat sales and invaluable word-of-mouth advertising.
Humanize your brand
Social media allows your brand the capacity to act like a human being. You’ll be perceived as more relatable and empathetic when you use these tools the way other people do. Start by seeking out content within your niche.
Find content across any platforms that have something to do with your brand and like it, comment on it, share it, and credit the original poster. Do this over and over to give your brand exposure and take part in online communities that already exist in your niche.
People will appreciate that you aren’t only posting advertisements. Rather, you’re showing acknowledgment of and interest in other creators.
Social media also unlocks opportunities to showcase the brand and its employees naturally. Let your customers see your office, and introduce them to your team. Show that there are people behind the brand and that these people love to interact with you.
Social media-exclusive opportunities
With the expansive network of social media platforms and features available on each, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. With more brands taking advantage of social media marketing, it’s becoming difficult to stand out.
The key is to get creative about how you plan for social media. This keeps customer interaction at the forefront of your mind.
Facebook Live
Facebook is a great place to point customers to your Amazon store by sharing photos and videos with links to buy. To move beyond this basic level of engagement, you should be harnessing the power of Facebook Live.
Facebook gives more organic traffic to Facebook Live content than other types of content. They also make Live videos more likely to appear higher in the News Feed while they are live, compared to when they are no longer live. Plus, Live videos receive three times the engagement of other videos on the platform.
Instagram showrooms
Instagram is another excellent choice for sharing photo and video content. To maximize Instagram’s capabilities, create pages for each product so you can tag specific products.
The product-specific Instagram pages can act as showrooms for your product, and the bios can contain direct links to that specific product.
This maximizes the Instagram space that your brand occupies. It also gives your customer a more immersive “shopping” experience similar to your website or Amazon store.
Influencers
Instagram and YouTube are also hosts to large communities of influencers. It connects people whose content is in your niche and presents it to large followings of people who are interested in that content.
Seek influencers who could work for your brand, and whose content aligns with your brand message. Then, offer to send them a free product to be featured along with a tag on your brand’s social media.
This form of marketing is especially powerful, as customers trust the influencers that they follow. The social proof followers receive by seeing influencers interact with your product may be the push they need to make a purchase.
It will also introduce your product to those not yet familiar, increasing brand recognition.
Giveaways
A final method to leverage social media marketing is to host a giveaway. This works across a variety of platforms and can be done as often as you see fit.
To host a giveaway, announce on your social media platform of choice that you will be giving away a free product, and outline the terms for entering to win.
You may have customers post a photo of their product or tell you their favorite thing about the product, then caption their entry with a hashtag of your choice. This strategy gets your customers to create content for you, as well as increases brand visibility.
Make sure to celebrate the winner: congratulate them and feature them on your social media to create that valuable, memorable experience.
Source: Här, Christian. “Building Your Private Label Empire Through Social Media.” Prosper Show, 12 April 2017, Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Conference Presentation.
