The spotlight on e-commerce is shining brighter than ever these days. So brands are researching and re-examining the ways they reach customers online to better understand which channels, tools, or features are worth their time and effort. One that you might have heard of is Amazon Posts. Get up to speed on how to use Amazon Posts, including what it is, why it could be a good fit for your brand, and how to efficiently weave it into your strategy.
Amazon Posts is a new approach to social commerce. As brands level up their Amazon strategies or create a presence on Amazon for the first time, they’re discovering new real estate to pick and choose from, including Amazon Posts. We’ve all grown quite comfortable with social channels moving into the e-commerce space but Amazon flipped it and reversed it. A primarily e-commerce platform dipping it’s toe into social requires a bit of a mindset shift, but thankfully it’s all much simpler than you would expect, and you probably already have the knowledge base needed to get started. So, what is Amazon Posts? Well, in Amazon’s own words:
“Posts is a new image-based browsing experience on Amazon. Shoppers can explore brand-specific feeds or browse by product category to discover products and see what’s new from brands. Posts link to detail pages, making each post in a feed shoppable.”
Amazon Posts gives brands the ability to create a social-like feed with lifestyle imagery, captions, and, most importantly, a direct link to your product page. The buying journey for an Amazon user can be more like a “get in, get out” checklist than the rabbit-hole experience that brands want. To enhance discoverability, marketers need to focus on drawing consumers to similar or suggested products, and use photos that the customer can relate to. We all know the difference between seeing a product on a white background compared to seeing it in action—that extra context can spark inspiration, leading to a few additional items per customer, which can make a big difference for brands.
With budgets and capacity stretched thin in 2020, additional projects like creating new content and more captions might seem quite daunting. Luckily, many brands have cracked the code to seamlessly integrating Amazon Posts into strategy, and the feature is completely free. These savvy brands have been repurposing high-performing Instagram content and giving it a new home on Amazon Posts. Not only do they save tons of time by using photos that have already been signed off on, and are known to be high performers, but a quick copy and paste of a caption that has previously been approved makes life much, much easier. Others are taking this a step further, not even waiting for a photo to perform well on social and instead simply using Dash Hudson’s Vision AI tool to determine which visuals from their content library has the best change to perform, and will appeal to their audience on Amazon. The beauty of both of these methods is brand consistency. Whether a customer comes across your products on Amazon, on social, or on your website, the content should always look and feel like your brand. Amazon Posts gives you another opportunity to reinforce that.
As with any new initiative, you and your team will want to easily see what’s working and what’s not. On Amazon you’ll have some high-level analytics to determine that and adjust your strategy accordingly. You can dive into impressions, clicks, and click-through rates for each of your posts to see which are proving the results you want.
So how can you get started? Even though it’s been around for a little while, Amazon Posts is still limited to brands in the USA who are enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. If your brand is outside of the US, you now have all the info you need to hit the ground running once Amazon Posts comes your way.
Blending an Amazon and social strategy is definitely a no-brainer, and Amazon Posts is a great place to start. Each one can learn from and support the other. And you already have the knowledge base to choose content that will hit home with your customers efficiently and effectively. It’s now just a matter of applying those honed skills to a new place, and enjoy the rewards.