Amazon has quietly been making a lot of noise in the advertising/marketing space… actually, scratch that, they’ve been making a lot of noise lately across many sectors.
Last week, Bloomberg covered news of Amazon’s growing efforts to fill their ecosystem with videos from merchants to help bring shoppers the content they often leave the retailer’s site to consume on YouTube before making a purchase. And for brands, like?Bose, with big marketing budgets, Amazon has a few new offerings to spruce-up their product pages with video to “create engaging, helpful content.” And it’s all happening just in time for the holiday shopping season. The cost for this premier branding experience: half-a-million dollars a year.
Don’t be scared off by the price tag though, there are other video friendly advertising offerings available for brands looking to drive awareness among Amazon customers including on-site video ads, targeting in-market shoppers off-site and other landing pages with a variety of video placements like this page by P&G’s laundry care brand?Dreft.
Video is known to drive higher conversions and increase basket size. Just this year, social media influencers surpassed friends and family, brands, celebrities and retailers as the most trusted source for product information before making a purchase based on a recent survey of U.S. shoppers (conducted by my company, gen.video, in partnership with Geometry Global). We also found that social media influencers are the number one source for product recommendations and video is known to lift conversion rates by roughly 30 percent. Here is a link to the research, The Influence of Influencers.
Thousands of influencers are present on Amazon (in part thanks to their recent?Influencer Program?launch) and every day more and more product videos that would typically be watched on YouTube are being made available to Amazon customers, thanks to services like gen.video.?Influencer video is in its infancy on Amazon, but there’s no doubt, thanks to Amazon’s efforts, will become meaningful, rivaling YouTube and Facebook, and merchants will continue to see the positive impact video has on their product pages and the added boost that comes along with that video being from an influencer.
Marketers have an opportunity to bring together video, advertising and influencer all while driving traffic directly to point-of-sale. With influencers as the most trusted sources of product information coupled with distrust of brand messaging, there’s a powerful formula involving taking trusted influencer content and promoting it with old school media dollars might. Here’s an example of an?influencer shop?featuring Old Spice products and influencer content as an ‘ad.’
Amazon’s strength as a commerce platform first, married with powerful marketing tools, is opening up unprecedented opportunities for imaginative, innovative marketers to bring together tactics across earned, owned and paid channels in ways never before seen.