In this episode, host Josh interviews Vincenzo Toscano, CEO of an Amazon consultancy, about influencer marketing strategies for Amazon sellers. Vincenzo shares practical tips on finding and negotiating with influencers, building long-term ambassador relationships, and tracking campaign results. He emphasizes the importance of authentic partnerships and outlines team roles needed for effective influencer outreach. The discussion also covers expanding Amazon brands internationally, with advice on operational compliance and market selection. Listeners gain actionable insights on leveraging influencers and scaling brands globally, highlighting the need for proactive marketing and community-building to succeed on Amazon.

Chapters:

Introduction & Guest Background (00:00:00)
Josh introduces Vincenzo Toscano, his expertise, and the focus of the episode on Amazon influencer marketing.

Finding and Filtering Influencers (00:01:29)
Vincenzo explains manual YouTube search strategies to find relevant Amazon-focused influencers and bloggers.

Negotiating Payment Structures (00:02:50)
Discussion of different influencer payment models: matching Amazon commissions, flat fees, and ambassador/commission-based arrangements.

Ambassador Relationships & Revenue Sharing (00:03:46)
How to turn influencers into brand ambassadors and structure revenue-sharing based on sales uplift.

Tracking Influencer Performance (00:05:48)
Debate on using brand referral bonus links versus influencer affiliate links for tracking and compensation.

Combining Affiliate and Brand Referral Links (00:06:36)
Clarification on whether influencers can use both their affiliate link and the brand referral bonus link.

Influencer Link Preferences & Negotiation (00:07:17)
How agreements determine whether influencers use their own affiliate links or the brand’s referral links.

Tools for Evaluating Influencers (00:08:25)
Recommended tools and methods for analyzing influencer engagement and performance metrics.

Team Structure for Influencer Campaigns (00:09:50)
Roles and team setup needed to manage influencer outreach, relationship building, and campaign execution.

Manual vs. Platform-Based Influencer Outreach (00:12:34)
Comparison between manual outreach and using platforms like Refersion for influencer management.

Outreach Conversion Rates (00:13:50)
Typical response and conversion rates from influencer outreach to actual partnerships.

The Future of Amazon Marketing (00:14:42)
Why brands must proactively drive traffic to Amazon and build communities to succeed in the evolving marketplace.

International Expansion & Agency Services (00:16:37)
How Vincenzo’s agency supports brands with compliance, localization, and launch strategies for international Amazon marketplaces.

Top European Marketplaces & Revenue Expectations (00:17:32)
Advice on which European Amazon marketplaces to enter first and expected sales percentages compared to the US.

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Websites
“YouTube“: “00:01:29”
“Perception“: “00:08:52”

Affiliate and Referral Links
“Brand Referral Bonus Link”: “00:06:01”
“Influencer Affiliate Link”: “00:06:46”

Services and Partners
“Ask (Partner for compliance and services)”: “00:16:37”

Transcript:

Josh 00:00:00  I am super excited to introduce you all to Vincenzo Toscano. Vincenzo is an expert in optimizing and scaling brands on Amazon. He is the CEO of e-commerce, where they have helped more than 1000 local, national and international brands. Sell more on Amazon globally. E-commerce is a full service Amazon consultancy providing tactical execution support and strategic consulting services for Amazon sellers and vendors focused on mid to large size brands. E-commerce uses a specialist consulting framework, deep analytical ability and powerful technology to grow their customers revenue on Amazon. So with that introduction, welcome to the show Vincenzo.

Vincenzo 00:00:46  Thank you. Josh, it’s a pleasure and thank you for having me on Vincenzo.

Josh 00:00:49  I’m super curious to dive into like the influencer marketing in the blogs, like how are you reaching out to these influencers and how are you Negotiating, you know, payment for these because a lot of influencers, it’s like you have to pay me a thousand bucks just for me to post it, and then it will be on my story for 24 hours, and then it’s gone.

Josh 00:01:12  Right? And you’re like, wow, I’ve got to make a lot of money. I’ve got to make a lot of sales. Yeah, in those 24 hours to make it worth it. So tell me about, you know, a how you’re finding these influencers and bloggers, and then B, what type of payment structure are you coming up with.

Vincenzo 00:01:29  Sure. So the first tip and this would be for YouTube. One thing that my team does, and of course the only downside of this is that it’s very manual work. So it’s going to be time consuming if you don’t want to use a platform, but still it’s an option to do it. So what you will do is you go to YouTube and let’s say you want to do vitamin C, right? So you’re gonna put all is the name of the product. And then then you put Amazon. So it could be vitamin C, Amazon or top vitamin C Amazon. And the reason why you put Amazon is because at the end of the day, YouTube is a search engine.

Vincenzo 00:01:59  And that is gonna matches most of the time with videos that say top ten vitamin C on Amazon, or even if it’s not title, it’s gonna match it with the link of the influencer. Because if these guys do influence, they have an Amazon influencer account. The links that they put in the description have the Amazon world on it. Therefore, the search engine is going to match me with those videos. And that’s the first filtering. I already know. Which ones are the guys that have been working with Amazon brands in the past. They know how the whole ecosystem works, and it’s easier than working with a person that, you know, they just do blogs and they don’t even have an idea about what is selling on Amazon. So I want to make sure they speak the same language. That’s the first thing. The second thing is when it comes to payment terms. So these are different ways you can do it. So the first way of doing it is a matching the Amazon Commission as I mentioned.

Vincenzo 00:02:50  So for example if they do 3% or 5% for Amazon with double, so we give 610% to them. Another option that we do is to write them matching the the commission. We might do just a flat fee, right? Maybe initially, when you know that relationship still doesn’t exist with influence, it would do a flat fee, which I know sometimes it can be heavy, as you mentioned. But again, there there are many ways for you to, you know, analyze the, the actual YouTube channel. There are tools that you put the, the hashtag and it gives you like the history, the views, engagement and so on. And that can give you like a good idea about how good this influencer is. And based on that, if this guy asks you for 1000, but then you see that the average likes for videos like two likes, you see that that traffic is fake. So that’s a red flag. And the third option, which is this is the most difficult to get. But if you get this, I would say this one is the best way.

Vincenzo 00:03:46  It’s basically you you transform this person into an ambassador, right. So an ambassador means that basically they become like the face of your product, and they basically talk about your product and pretty much every single video. Like it could be a banner at the beginning or you start sponsoring your your hair trips to? Let’s say she does hiking and you sell like camping tents, right? So she use always your camping tent on all her trips. And you basically sponsor a what we call some of the trips. That’s an option. Or it could be also a hybrid in terms of instead of paying a fixed amount on, on, on let’s say one time video, it would be a commission. But this commission, rather than be the influencer one, it would be more a filtered down to a specific period. So let me give you an example. Let’s say this person is going to do a trip to Spain, and she’s going to do a one month of traveling. And she’s she she needs to commit to this.

Vincenzo 00:04:48  Of course, she’s going to commit to every single week. She’s going to do two videos, a blogging talk about the product, etc. then we do a reporting comparison of the traffic of let’s say she did a trip on March and on February we didn’t have any influencer. We compared the increase in in revenue and we can come to an agreement giving an actual percentage of of sales of within Amazon account. This one of course, needs to be done with somebody that really brings a difference. It’s not like, I mean, you do this and then the person doesn’t really bring any any difference to us. But once we did win an influencer and just by doing this engagement with them over one month we increased around, I think was 2020 17% increase in revenue. Just because this guy all the whole month was using the product into their vlogs and the Instagram stories and all that. And basically what we did is on that 20% incremental revenue, we gave them a cut of percentage clean cut to him. So that’s another thing.

Josh 00:05:48  Interesting. Yeah. Are you are you having them use your brand referral bonus link so that you can track that. Or are you using their influencer affiliate link. You know, like what links are you giving them.

Vincenzo 00:06:01  Yeah. So for the we give the brown referral. So we get the 10% commission there. But in some instances when that cannot be implemented in some way, like for example, TikTok doesn’t really track properly the 10% and it’s not very efficient for that in in those cases we just do basically, they share the information within their account or reporting where they can share us and we do some kind of matching there to see the reality behind the numbers. Yeah, that’s why this one needs to be a very good relationship, because sometimes they need to give you information that you from outside the account you cannot see. You see. Right.

Josh 00:06:36  Yeah. So ultimately, could somebody use their affiliate link and combine it with the brand referral bonus link or no.

Vincenzo 00:06:46  Hey, so you mean a combining the influencer one in this case with the the 10% commission, right.

Josh 00:06:52  Yeah. Yeah. But I like so it’s kind of like double dipping right. The influencer is still going to get their affiliate commission. But then on my side I’m also going to get the 10% brand referral bonus.

Vincenzo 00:07:05  Yeah, I think I think it’s not possible. Even a mistake. I think you can’t really do that. but yes, I think you can’t. It would be nice. I think you kind of know.

Josh 00:07:17  So what are most of your influencers doing? Are they using their own affiliate links then, or. Because I know that’s how they’ve typically monetized all of their content. Right. Is with their affiliate links to Amazon. Are you seeing people willing to say, oh, yeah, let’s not use my affiliate link anymore. Just give me your brand referral bonus link. And do you see people shifting that way or not?

Vincenzo 00:07:43  Yeah, I would say it’s always going.

Vincenzo 00:07:45  To come down as well to what is the agreement you come to? Right. So if the agreement is based on, for example, on the total revenue increase they can bring to you, it can be that, you know, let’s use your brand referral bonus.

Vincenzo 00:07:58  We track everything through the link because I know that when you do the brand referral bonus, that link has a unique ID and you can track how much traffic goes to that link, and you can also reward them with that information. You make it very transparent to them. But again, if the influencer sometimes is, you know, is not open minded to do that. What we do is we use the influencer one and then that 10% that we are losing there, we try to, you know, negotiate that into their commission or something like that. Yeah.

Josh 00:08:25  Okay. That makes sense. What are the you mentioned there was a tool that you used to, look at the engagement for a YouTubers account. Like, do you know what those tools are that come to your mind?

Vincenzo 00:08:38  Yeah.

Vincenzo 00:08:39  So the one that we use, I think is called, I forgot the name. I think a blade a yeah, that’s a good one. I, I forgot the name. Let me see it. I have it here on my notes.

Vincenzo 00:08:52  So. Yeah. The ones I would recommend perception of politics. These are some of the ones that the team has been using lately. But again there are so many tools out there they know that they. What I will advise you to do is just try a different ones. Because at the end of the day, you may find discrepancies and what the team does. And that’s why I have so many names in my head, is that we, we put a profile most of the time through 2 or 3 apps at a time. Then we conglomerate the numbers and we calculate an average, because sometimes you might see some discrepancies on the calculation.

Josh 00:09:24  Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. So what he talked about was snap lyrics write snap and then lyrics behind it. And again we’ll have the links here in the show notes. So Vincenzo that’s awesome. My last follow up question on the influencer stuff, is I know you’re not doing that. I assume you have dedicated team members because you actually have to build a relationship with these people.

Josh 00:09:50  This is not a well, I signed up for this program and then it out came the result. Right. This is a this is like, you know, creating an actual relationship and partnership, especially if you’re getting ambassadors. So, Vincenzo, would you mind explain to us, like how many team members do you have working on this? And if we were to even do this for our own business, like, what are the different roles that we would need to hire in order to kind of execute this influencer ambassador strategy?

Vincenzo 00:10:20  Sure.

Vincenzo 00:10:20  So if, for example, within our team, we have around ten people just doing this influenza side of things because the the downside of everything I just mentioned is that it’s very manual, right? So if you want to do it yourself, you need to have people that, you know, reach out to this influencer doing the filtering through the methodology. Like for example, YouTube put in the name of the product on Amazon, finding the influencer and all that. And then on top of that, just to give you some numbers, out of 100 people you reach out on.

Vincenzo 00:10:47  And my team were having a meeting earlier this week about this. Usually just 10% get back to you. So at 100%. So the conversion is very low because you need to remember that this influencer gets messages every single day. Like everybody send emails and all that. So you need to also make sure that we actually do that split test the copy you send to them. Try to not be very self orientated. We try to build a relationship with them because at the end of the day, you know they are also humans. They are there are people like you and and you want to make sure that you actually build that connection before trying to oh, I want I want you to give me this commission. I want you to do this video and all that. So try to do that. so yeah, we’ll say in terms of a time, you have two options. So the first option is try to hire, I will say for myself with 1 or 2 ways you can do this. So try to find a VA that helps you do all the filtering.

Vincenzo 00:11:39  So filtering is basically find influencers and using these tools basically to find which are the best influencers, which are the ones that have the best engagement, try to analyze the analytics and then have another VA that takes care of everything. When it comes to reaching out to this influencer, which also takes a ton of time. So that means sending emails to them, sending direct messages on their Instagram or Facebook, etc.. And then with these two combination you have one person doing the betting. One person doing the communication. And when once the communication goes and basically get filled to a very nice stage, that’s when usually you may have it could be you as the brown owner or in our case we have a brown manager which takes a call with influenza. Explain why they call for the brand. What we’re looking to achieve with this relationship and then try to come to an agreement. So that’s one option. If you don’t have the time, you don’t really care about managing people. You want to just go through as quickly as possible.

Vincenzo 00:12:34  You can use also another tool which we have to use and is called a reference Reference.com. And I’m going to put also the link on the description. And this is a platform version.

Josh 00:12:46  Yep. Reversion. Definitely want to check out.

Vincenzo 00:12:49  Yeah.

Vincenzo 00:12:50  So I mean the downside is of course if you need to consider that it’s a little bit more expensive because it’s a platform of course. But at the end of the day, it takes all the headache of what we need to do as an agency go manually with an influencer communicating within the relationship. I would say using this platform is more. If you want a one time thing, like you just want a video gun, but you want a certain campaigns during a specific period. Because the only downside of most platforms is that it doesn’t give you the freedom to build that relationship. Person to person. Yes, I mean, so but yes, that’s that’s that’s the thing I would advise you have those two options and then it depends on your goals, you know.

Josh 00:13:29  Yeah I love that. And you know you mentioned like you’ve got to reach out to a hundred people just to maybe hear back from ten and then from those ten that you even hear back from, how many of those even turn into kind of like influencers or ambassadors. Is it like one of those ten will even kind of agree to work with you?

Vincenzo 00:13:50  Yeah.

Vincenzo 00:13:50  So when it comes to a conversion, I would say out of 100 people, usually the conversion rate is is around 10%. So a no. Sorry. So 100 people, ten people respond. And out of the ten people usually you end up with 3 or 5. So I will say 3 or 5. Yeah. So that’s why it’s very time consuming. No.

Josh 00:14:12  Yeah. So you end up. Yeah. Ultimately, if you’ve reached out to 100 people, you get maybe three to 4 to 5, you know, influencers that agree to work with you. So ultimate conversion rate 3 to 4%. there. Well, Vincenzo, I know we spent a lot of time on that, but I believe that it’s super, super important because what I believe is going to change over the next decade with Amazon is the brands that are going to win are going to be the brands that bring the traffic.

Josh 00:14:42  Yes. I think long gone are the days of just mooching off of Amazon’s free traffic. I mean, there’s still some they’re right and there’s different niches that you could get into. But over the next decade things are definitely going to shift. You have bigger brands that are coming here and brands that are that are large and established, and they’re now directing traffic to Amazon because they see the flywheel that it can create. And so I think it’s important that, you know, our audience hears this message because if this is not something that you see is worth your time, it’s like, oh, it’s too much hassle. I don’t want to have to manage team members. I don’t want to have to manage relationships. You will lose at the end of the day. Yeah, because you need to be progressing and growing. And that’s where Amazon is heading.

Vincenzo 00:15:27  Yeah. Yeah 100% I think it’s super important what you just said. I think if if you didn’t start adapting with the things that you know, are really important to your brand, and it’s all the things we’ve been talking about.

Vincenzo 00:15:39  I mean, you need to understand that when it comes to these influencers and to basically incorporate this into your brand, these things that most people are not doing right, and you need to basically take the advantage of that, start building this relationship with these influencers. And then once you’ve been that into your, you know, your family in terms of becoming your ambassador, then you know, they start using your product all around the different lifestyles. I think that’s where you actually become into a proper brand, because I think most people think that having a brown Amazon is just, you know, having a logo and a nice packaging that’s even a brand is actually a community. You need to actually build that thriving a community that talks about your product, go to a party and test to their friends. They follow their influencers doing tutorials around your product. So you need to make sure that you’re serving those those communities, which for my clients, those are the ones that have even seen getting the biggest multiples when they exited, basically their business.

Vincenzo 00:16:37  Some of them. Yeah. Taxes. And now that we have partners that help us with that. So one of our closest partners and we use for all our services is a ask if you want a recommendation. And basically they help our clients to do everything from A to Z. So let’s say we we tell them we have this brand. There are seven figure sellers that they are selling, let’s say a baby product. They need compliance basically to import this product, the taxes, the incorporation in Spain, whatever the country, they want to do it and they do it. And then we as an agency, what we do is actually focus on the things that really move the needle, which is the launch strategy, localization of the content, the images, PPC strategy, external traffic strategies on those countries to make sure you hit the ground running. And then with the combination of these two things, that that’s where we have found the most successful clients. Yeah.

Josh 00:17:26  Makes sense. What type of revenue as a percentage of US sales do you see.

Josh 00:17:32  You know, the European marketplace bringing and I know there’s so many different marketplaces. You got the UK and Germany and yeah, different ones maybe. What are some of the top marketplaces that you would encourage people to go to first, and then what percentage of their US sales should they expect from each of those marketplaces? Yeah.

Vincenzo 00:17:51  So I would say the one that usually we start the first with is the UK and Germany. Right. The reason why those two is first of all and then now because the the manufacturing that he found due to the volume that he does, he also does big volumes. He’s able to.