Brands Increase Sales and Awareness with Amazon Creator Connection

By Maya Mulgaonkar and Ranjit Mulgaonkar

Amazon’s Creator Connection program allows brands to connect with social media influencers and content creators through tailored campaigns 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 at the time of writing and has only been rolled out to select sellers. Flatworld Group can participate in this program, and our clients have already seen promising results.

What Is the Amazon Creator Connections Program?

Creator Connection allows creators to engage with your brand through a tailored campaign. Depending on your product category (beauty, home, outdoors, toys, baby, gardening, fitness, etc.), you can open your campaign up to creators that match your requirements via the Creator Connection platform.

Once they join your campaign, they can create content for their Amazon storefronts and other social media channels to help drive traffic, sales, and conversion. The creator is compensated with a predetermined commission from Amazon and/or the brand. Amazon provides the technology platform, the 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 set up information such as campaign start-end date, number of creators needed, product category, and commissions paid to influencers/creators for each sale, and specific products to promote. They also convey their specific campaign goals: drive product sales, build overall brand awareness, product education, etc.

Brands have the option to provide the creators with a campaign-related promo code for them to give their subscribers and followers. To communicate with creators, Amazon has provided a messaging feature where you can discuss campaign specifics and determine whether they are the right fit for you. Some brands may opt to provide creators with a sample to help them understand and better demonstrate the products. Brands can monitor the performance of the Creator Connection within the campaign and on the 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, and links to your social media to Amazon. You will need a YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and/or TikTok account. Once approved, you can access Creator Connections using your Amazon Associate login information.

Amazon also enables creators to send and receive direct messages in Creator Connections. For instance, you can chat with brands and ask campaign questions. Once creators generate posts on social media, they can provide the link to the brand. Within Creator Connections, creators can view the performance within each campaign detail page 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 percent and 10 percent 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 an additional commission that they would offer to the creators. The creator will get the total of these two commissions. For example, if Amazon offers 4 percent and the brand offers 8 percent, the creator will get 12 percent of the sale price for each order the influencer generates.

Is It Worth a Try?

If you are a registered brand looking to increase brand awareness and sales, this is a program you should try. There is no upfront investment besides setup and program management, and you only pay the commission you pre-determine on a sale generated by the creator. This can be seen as a set advertising cost of sale (ACoS).

Depending on your product and the creator, there can be a huge upside for the brand. Even if the campaign does not generate the expected sales, the creator will have produced positive content. 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 the conversion.

Maya Mulgaonkar is vice president of client services and Ranjit Mulgaonkar is founder and CEO at Flatworld Group, a full-service Amazon agency that helps brands to be successful on Amazon. They can be reached, respectively, via email at maya@flatworldgroup.com and ranjit@flatworldgroup.com. For more on Flatworld Group, click here.