The Magic of Influencer Traffic – How Driving Warm Referral Traffic to your Amazon Product Listing will 10x your Keyword Rankings, Conversions and Sales
How important are influencers, and their recommendations, to physical products
— whether they be sold on Amazon or any other platform? How important are influencers to anything in business, really? The short answer: very important.
Right now, our organization is hiring for almost a dozen roles from editors to copywriters to ads managers… and here’s a prediction: 90% of those jobs will be filled by someone who is recommended to us by someone we already know, like and trust. The same could be said for the hundreds of job vacancies I filled during my time in corporate America. It’s just the easiest, safest bet, to go with someone who comes highly recommended.
There’s a tidal wave happening in e-commerce right now, and specifically with regards to the sale of physical products online. More competition, higher fees and costs from transportation to storage, manufacturers going direct to consumer, and the list goes on. How do we compete? The days of finding a product on Alibaba, sending it in to FBA, and becoming a millionaire are over.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. There are things we can do to be proactive, and if we do them the glory days are just as bright.
Enter: Influencer Traffic.
What is it? Quite simply, influencer traffic is traffic from a trusted source, an authority, that is driven towards any subject or product for the purpose of making a sale, opting into a list, etc.
How does it help me? Imagine having someone in your space…if you sell baby products that’s a mommy blogger with an engaged following…if it’s sporting goods that’s a star athlete or well respected coach… post, tweet, record a video…anything to get the word out, about YOUR product. It happens every day, and the traffic, good will and SALES generated as a result are immense! Just take a look at these recent articles from Forbes, Huffpost and AdWeek.
Influencer marketing is not new. Big brands and influential people have been using it for a long time. What is new, however, is that because of the explosion of social media over the past decade, and the plethora of “micro-influencers” (people that have small but highly engaged followings), the opportunity to use influencer traffic to drive sales for small to mid-size physical products brands is ripe for the taking — and almost no one is taking advantage of it. In much the same way that the internet and advances in manufacturing small quantities have made it possible for you and I to start a small brand of physical products, increases in social media engagement, and the way people consume their information along with who they consume information from, has created a ripe opportunity for influencer marketing.
How Influencer Traffic Benefits Brands:
1) Keyword Rankings
Remember the good ol’ days? When you could tell someone to go search for a keyword, find your product, buy it, and then your ranking would skyrocket for a keyword? Well, that still works. Now imagine an influential figure for your target audience telling thousands or tens of thousands of their fans to go
do that. Pretty powerful.
2) Conversions
We all know that conversion rate is king when it comes to Amazon products. What if you could turn on and off the traffic (and conversions) to your listing by having influencers lined up, itching to share your amazing product with their following.
Imagine the power of using influencers to launch a product, placing you right amongst the top of search results for the most relevant keywords in a matter of days or weeks rather than months. It’s more than possible…it’s plausible with influencer traffic.
3) Sales
That’s what it is all about, after all. Sales are what pay the bills, allow you to keep the lights on, and to reinvest in growing your business. In January of 2017 one of our products experienced a 400% increase in sales overnight, and increased sales for weeks. We finally traced this back to an influencer that had reviewed the product on YouTube and shared that with their (several hundred thousand) subscribers. We now use bitly links for influencers, so we can tell right away who is promoting, and where increases in traffic are coming from.
The possibilities really are endless, and are ripe for the taking.
What does this cost? Nothing, really. Maybe just an hour or two of your time to connect with people in your space. Maybe a free product or two given to an influencer in the hope they’ll love it and share it with their fans. The real secret to influencer marketing is finding the influencers. While this is not rocket science, it can be time consuming.
My favorite way to short-circuit the research and outreach to influencers is to use Overgrowth.com (a sponsor of the Movement). Overgrowth allows us to quickly and efficiently search through hundreds of thousands of potential influencers based on channel, keyword, language and size of their following. They even have recommended templates that we can use to contact them quickly.
Overgrowth makes what was once a powerful strategy available only to the largest of brands — attainable for small ones like yours and ours. And, they want to give you a chance to try it out for yourself. For a FREE trial of Overgrowth, just click here.
