As a company that specializes in the use of multilevel marketing to sell its health, beauty and home care products, Amway also takes a multilevel approach to its social media and marketing strategies. The company reaches two different audiences through social: Amway Independent Business Owners (IBOs) and their customers.
“Amway has a unique, two-pronged marketing approach – we market on behalf of our brands and on behalf of IBOs,” said Arturo Rojas, Director of Product Marketing for Amway North Americas in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “While we focus on creating awareness for Amway and its product brands, we channel our social media efforts into empowering IBOs and encouraging their personalized, authentic approach to marketing.”
Amway’s social strategies proved themselves with its launch of the G&H bath and body care brand. A coordinated campaign that leveraged Facebook, Instagram and blog content brought users who clicked to the appropriate web site for more than three minutes – a significant amount of time online.
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Retailer Offers Social Media Training And Customizable Content
Amway offers its IBOs extensive education and training, which includes best practices, videos and guidelines that help them grow their businesses on social media. Since IBOs have more direct engagement with their customers, they are in a better position to understand what kind of social content to share with their audiences. Recognizing this, Amway created a Resource Center content hub containing customizable assets their IBOs can share on their social media platforms to help them better sell goods.
“We engage [customers] through Amway-owned social channels via sponsored and organic posts, as well as indirectly through IBOs’ own social properties,” said Rojas. “The latter is particularly important, as IBOs truly serve as a ’first line‘ of social engagement for Amway and its products. They are in the best position to understand what their customers may be interested in and have the relationship that makes sharing that content appealing.”
To reach beyond its IBOs to end consumers, Amway delivers lifestyle content on its branded social channels. Each brand — including beauty brand Artistry, bath and body brands G&H and Satinique and home brands Atmosphere Sky, eSpring and Legacy of Clean — has its own Facebook and Twitter account. The Artistry brand has a bigger presence on Instagram in an effort to reach consumers who are passionate about beauty through visuals.
“We also use paid social — including a recent content partnership with Inc.com around entrepreneurship and the gig economy — and tap influencers for an extra boost, particularly in the beauty space,” said Rojas.
Amway Launches Bath And Body Care With Social-First Campaign
Earlier this year, Amway introduced its new G&H bath and body care line to its roster of brands. The campaign consisted of promotional posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and the company also provided social-ready assets in the IBO Resource Center.
“The campaign did exceptionally well, with an average of 8,500 engagements per post on Facebook and an average of 4,130 engagements per post on Instagram,” said Rojas. “Related blog content had the highest reach of all Amway blog posts in April. Those that clicked on the link stayed on the blog an average of 3:15 minutes (average read time is 1:19 minutes). Across the board, G&H content has been the most popular resource downloaded on the Resource Center to date.”
Through a centralized, fully integrated suite of tools, Amway is able to manage social publishing, community management and measurement to ensure all its efforts are aligned. “This infrastructure is critical to ensuring clear and connected communications across Amway’s social media landscape, and most importantly allows us to learn what customers want and what IBOs need, so social media can truly serve as a common thread between the two,” said Rojas.
Amway Measures Social Success With Sophisticated Metrics
Amway’s social media measurement efforts go well beyond the traditional counting of likes and followers. The company now focuses on more meaningful measures such as comments and replies that indicate deeper engagements with its brands, products and IBOs, as well as click-throughs to the company web site, shares and other engagements “that speak to the stickiness and effectiveness of the content we and IBOs produce,” added Rojas.
“We also employ a similar measurement approach to our Resource Center, an internal site where IBOs are able to download templated social media content to customize for their own use,” concluded Rojas. “Understanding how often they log on to the site, what they download and share, etc. is yet another important measure to ensure we’re delivering what they need to be successful in the social media space.”
