Social media can make a huge difference to your sales on Amazon – whatever you’re selling. It can also beef up customer loyalty to your brand and products. What’s so good about it is that you’re widening your reach and potentially bringing interested people directly onto your Amazon listing product pages from outside the Amazon sphere of influence and sidestepping your competitors on that initial scrum of an Amazon search results page.
The potential extra money from your sales via social media is a welcome new revenue stream that you can use, if you get the balance right, to pay for your ongoing activities on social media as well as offset some of your Amazon-related costs like shipping, Amazon storage (or 3PL) fees, Amazon commission, Amazon keywords and Amazon promotions.
So, whether you’re new to the world of social media or you already have an active social media marketing strategy in place, here’s a 12-step guide to help you get on – or make sure you’re still on – the right track.
A reminder of the top social media players
The Key Benefits to Social Media Marketing for Amazon Sellers
With the right social media marketing strategy in place – and good, compelling content or ads – you can hope to reap the following rewards as an Amazon seller:
- Increase reach into new audiences and markets
- Generate revenue
- Increase awareness of your brand and products
- Generate leads and new opportunities
- Strengthen customer loyalty
- Engage with customers on a regular basis
- Collect feedback to further improve your product offering
Free or paid for social media – it’s up to you!
You can create your own content and post it for free. Or you can boost this activity and find specific audiences by paying that particular social media channel for ads or promotions. Experiment and see what suits you. Or start free and see how you go!
The 12-Step Guide to Social Media Marketing for Amazon Sellers
Let’s start with a golden rule. With social media, you get out what you put in. Generally speaking, this rule refers to effort. But it also refers to quality. Quality, that is, of your content. The two are closely linked and nurture each other. You’re wasting time and money if you put too much emphasis on one and neglect the other.
Let’s look at these steps.
Step 1 – Identify and understand your social media target audience
Start with the initial assumptions you’ve already identified while selling on Amazon. From there on, the easiest way to set about focusing and fine-tuning your targeting is to study your social media stats from the get-go.
Time in analysis is seldom wasted. Adjust your social media strategy and activities based on what the stats are telling you. For example, if you see more engagement on Friday nights and none on Monday mornings, increase your spend (if advertising) or enhance your Friday night content and remove Monday from your activity schedule. The latter will save you money and improve your return on investment (ROI).
Step 2 – Brainstorm the benefits of your Amazon product – again!
You’ll have done this before, probably when you were coming up with the idea of your Amazon product, creating it, and writing your Amazon listing. Well, take a deep breath – and do it again!
This time think about your product in a social media setting. Of course, you can still use your existing original core benefits, but this time see what you can add as extras. Try hard and have a big think. Push yourself to come up with new angles on and new aspects of your product. Think about benefit-led pictures, videos, case studies, stories, conversations and customer feedback, questions you can ask your customers, or even how to solicit opinions (about your product).
Try and do this for about an hour, jotting everything down. Then put your jottings aside for when you start creating your social media content. You won’t regret the time spent now as later on, you’ll have lots of other things you’ll be having to think about too.
Step 3 – Define your social media marketing strategy or plan
You don’t need to overthink this. You don’t even need to write it down, though using a diary or calendar and reminders might be useful. In essence, your social media marketing strategy should involve deciding what social media channels you are going to be active on – and when and how you’re going to participate. It’s that simple.
Step 4 – Don’t bite off more than you can chew
It’s better to start small and modestly than overstretching and compromising your quality and consistency. What do we mean by that? Well, maybe just pick one social media channel to start, like Instagram. When you’ve got in the swing of that, and you find it becoming easier as you go along, add another social media channel like Facebook (Meta).
Step 5 – Decide how you’re going to communicate
While this might sound obvious because, of course, you’re going to refer to, push, market or showcase your products, it’s not quite that simple. It works to a degree, but you can do so much better.
How?
The way to do better is to think about your customers (or followers). What are they looking for? How does your product help them ‘improve their lives’, give them what they want or what they’re looking for? Yes, you got it; there’s a subtle difference there. If you’re selling grass seed, don’t overtalk the features of your grass seed – talk with your customers about their lawns and the benefits to them. See how it enhances relevancy to your customers?
Remember also to stay on-brand across all your channels. If you start using a different tone or style in your social media posts compared to, say, your website, it could confuse or discourage customers.
Create some interactive content ideas for social media
Ask questions, ask for feedback, run a survey, have useful content about how to get the most out of your product and outline the benefits of your product to customers.
Step 6 – Decide what you’re going to communicate
This is a lot easier if you’ve taken on board the social media marketing strategy steps above. Jot down your ideas for stories, story morsels, snippets – and add all that preparatory thinking you’re now pleased to have done already from step 2. You should have a nice little collection of content you can share on social media. Consider also if what you’ve got falls naturally into some sort of order – if so, jot that down too.
A secret to easy social media success is to learn to cross-pollinate or recycle your content or ads: you don’t have to write something brand new for each social media channel. Just tweak your content slightly – or change the media (eg video) you’re using.
Each channel has its own way of thriving. Instagram, for example, is very much a visual social media channel. A blog, while using images and sometimes video, is usually more dependent on words or a story whereas TikTok is a short-video platform. See where we’re going with that? You got it – you reconfigure your core content or ad to complement the characteristics of that social media channel.
What’s upcoming for your products on Amazon?
Have you got any new products launching? Are you introducing a new colour or size? Do you have any recent glowing customer feedback you can show off or refer to? Make some notes and add them to your content idea stack.
Step 7 – Produce quality content
We’ve touched on this above. Compelling, shareable high-quality content can help you drive sales and awareness of your product – and enhance your search rankings. For example, if your content is helpful, useful or insightful, it’s more likely to be absorbed and shared.
Try and mix up the way you present your content. Be creative. Perhaps use a video one time, a how-to [use your product] guide another time, or even consider infographics.
Step 8 – Take advantage from being an Amazon seller
You can refer to some of the tools, elements or content you have on your Amazon listing in your social media posts. For example, promote the Amazon promotion or plug the Amazon discount you might currently be offering on Amazon in your social media posts. This can be a powerful way of driving people to your Amazon listing, but only do it occasionally, as people can tire of promos if they’re done too often.
Use this Amazon tool: Amazon Attribution
Amazon Attribution is a handy tool you can use to help you measure and get results on your social media marketing activities. It’ll help you identify what’s working best and help you refocus and enhance your social media marketing strategy moving forward. It’s a great way to be more efficient and increase your ROI.
Step 9 – Be consistent and regular with your posting on social media
Imagine your followers eagerly awaiting your posts. Don’t let them down by posting irregularly; use a timetable to help you manage your social media activities. There will be times when you send occasional ad-hoc posts – like when you launch another product on Amazon – but these should be over and above your scheduled baseline of regular posts.
Step 10 – React or reply to comments and feedback
Always remember that you’re having a conversation with your followers and potential followers. There’s no such thing as a one-way conversation, so get in there and communicate in a thankful, helpful and active way. It’s a fantastic way to engage with customers and enhance loyalty.
Step 11 – Don’t be shy when it comes to sharing content
It’s a two-way street. If you find another business or organisation’s online content clearly complements your product offering, link to it with an acknowledgement. And seek opportunities to do it the other way round – with third parties plugging content about your product.
Step 12 – Don’t give up
Keep an open mind when you’re up and running and active in your chosen social media channels. Some audiences will respond. Some won’t. With the latter, be versatile and happy to try different media types (eg video) or approaches (like questions rather than stories). If that doesn’t work, walk away and find a new audience or concentrate on existing audiences that are responding, and enhance them.
Remember this acronym: TARATA.
Think. Act. Results. Analyse. Tweak. [Do it] Again.
Good luck!
Follow all these steps, loosely in this order, and you should be able to increase your reach and revenue over time. Good luck. And have fun.
