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Maya Mulgaonkar – VP Client Services, Ranjit Mulgaonkar – CEO and Founder, Flatworld Group
Amazon’s Creator Connection program is designed for brands that sell on Amazon to engage social media influencers (Creators) to generate incremental sales. The Creator Connection is the matchmaking between Brands and Creators without complicated contracts and excessive fees. What is the cost? Only a commission on each sale generated by a creator.
The program is still in Closed-Beta mode and has only been rolled out to a select few sellers. We at the Flatworld Group are able to participate in this program and our clients have already seen promising results. Your goals may vary-increased sales, brand awareness, product education etc.
What is the Amazon Creator Connections Program?
Depending on your product category (beauty, home, outdoors, toys, baby, gardening, fitness etc.) using the Creator Connection platform you can recruit specific creators that match your requirements and have them drive sales on Amazon. Brands seek and recruit creators through the program, creators promote the product via social media platforms, consumers buy the product on Amazon, creator gets paid a commission from Amazon and/or Brand. Amazon provides the technology platform, ability for brands and creators to communicate and payments to creators with reporting.
How does the brand set up the program?
Brands approved to be in the program can create a campaign in the Creator Connection portal which is part of Amazon Advertising. Brands can set-up information such as campaign start-end date, number of creators needed, product category, commissions paid to influencers (creators) for each sale and specific products to promote. They can also provide the creators a camping related promo code for them to give their subscribers and followers. There is also the option to message creator to see if they are the right fit for the campaign. Some brands may opt to provide the creators a sample of the products to help them understand and better demonstrate the products. Brands can monitor the performance of the creator connection campaigns within the campaign and on Amazon Seller Central Advertising dashboard.
How does a creator participate?
If you want to be a creator, you can join the Amazon Associate program by providing your photo, name, interest, links to your social media to Amazon. To qualify as a creator, you need to have YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok account. Once approved you can access Creative Connections using your Amazon Associate login information. Amazon also enables creators to send and receive direct messages in Creator Connections— making chatting with brands, asking campaign questions, and more even easier. Once creators generate posts on social media (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok), they can provide the link to the brand. Within Creator Connections, creator can view the performance within each individual campaign detail page and under the “Earnings Reports” tab, where your specific commission earnings can be seen. Amazon pays the creator once a month on orders that have shipped.
How much can a creator make?
Amazon gives a commission of anywhere between 1% and 10% to the creators – the commission rate depends on the product category and product price with higher price products getting more % commission. In addition, the brand can also specify additional commission they would offer the creators. The creator will get the total of these two commissions. For example, Amazon offers 4% and brand offers 8%, then the creator will get 12% of the sale price for each order the influencer generates.
Conclusion: If you are a brand looking to increase brand awareness and sales, this is a program you should try. There is no upfront investment (besides setting-up and managing the program) and you only pay the commission you pre-determine on a sale generated by the creator. This can be seen as a set the ‘ACoS’ (Advertising Cost of Sales). Depending on your product and the creator you choose there can be a huge upside for the brand. Even if the campaign does not generate the expected sales, the creator has produced positive content for you brand. Vetting the creators and communicating with them is time consuming and you will need a semi-dedicated resource to drive the program or outsource to an agency that can help. Note that your conversion will be impacted by your listing quality (headline, bullets, description, images, videos, A+ page, Storefront). The better the listing quality, the better is the conversion.
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