Social Media is a key component for any business of every size. It has leveled the playing field, allowing anyone to show the world what they’re about and allow their voice to turn a business idea into an empire. Presentation and quality is where many brands get stuck. Without a large budget and limited bandwidth you can quickly fall behind. Amaze has developed an incredible software allowing brands of any size to create content at the highest level. I had the opportunity to sit down with Sara Stoddard VP of partnerships and integrations at Amaze to hear more about their amazing platform. Take a look!
Jay: Give me a little bit of background about the Amaze brand and what you’re doing to help small businesses.
Sara: Our mission is to help anybody sell anything anywhere. And our initial focus is empowering individual creators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses to craft a premium-feeling digital experience for their brand and to enable them to sell their products in a much more intuitive way within the sphere of social commerce.
What we really specialize in right now is the ability to create mobile selling pages that work very well within social native applications.
Jay: Are there any particular industries that you focus on?
Sara: Right now, we tend to work best in the fashion industry, food, furniture and home goods. Even health, wellness, and beauty products perform extremely well. Anywhere where there’s going to be a big visual piece of that product or buying experience is certainly our main focus.
In addition, we’re fast expanding into other verticals including giving users the ability to create selling pages for NFTs. I personally am really excited to get into that space and launch some new features and capabilities to help digital creators sell their goods.
Jay: What is the biggest pain point that Amaze solves for customers?
Sara: There’s a couple of key pain points. A lot of it is primarily around time, budget, and knowledge.
When you’re a small business, […] understanding where your customers are and tailoring your experience to where they are with the right messaging at the right time is what is going to allow you to win in the end. And understanding your customers can be really difficult if you don’t have the analytics capabilities to give you all of that information.
What Amaze is able to do is allow you to do a lot of hypothesis testing by spinning up and publishing a number of different variations of a selling page and, then, testing out what works better.
Also we’re able to help create a more seamless selling experience. Not only allowing them to promote their products within either a social app or as part of the click-through URL for a paid ad or a display ad, we also offer an embedded checkout.
If you can shorten your path to purchase, if you know where your customers are, when they’re using that social platform, and you know what content resonates best, those are the four magic ingredients for success.
Jay: What has been the response from sellers using Amaze?
Sara: I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a one-size-fits-all platform for every seller ever.
For small businesses, solopreneurs, creators, Amaze is one of the only ways that you can create a premium presence. We give you the tools, the templates, even the assets in some cases, to create a digital selling page or even a brand awareness experience that is on par with some of the big players out there.
You can create very specific selling pages for any product – a single product, a collection of products – and tailor whatever content is in that selling page to the ad that is customer facing.
When you have that message matching – matching the messaging from front end ad all the way through to the clickthrough experience – and you pull in those four magic ingredients we were talking about earlier, that’s how you’re going to really engage and capture your audience’s attention.
If you don’t want to use Amaze and you plan to do all that yourself, that’s weeks of work. We’re able to shorten that process and democratize the quality, the message matching, and the experimentation that typically would only be available to companies with much bigger budgets.
Jay: In social media, there’s been a big awareness into messaging beyond the graphic, which means being able to share your story, what you stand for, what you care about. Can you integrate that type of storytelling into the imagery?
Sara: Think of an Amaze page as being content agnostic.
We have a team in house that is dedicated to creating all kinds of templates for all kinds of use cases at every level of the funnel. You can tell your story through words, through gifts, through videos, through any other type of navigational or UI layout. We give you full creative control at the end of the day.
With so much competition out there, you have to be able to tell your brand story in a meaningful way. Not only just tell it in a meaningful way, but create an experience. We’ve crafted our technology stack to allow merchants and creators to do that through any kind of content.
When you pair that brand content with the authentic messaging, with the right audience, with a buy button to then continue on the journey, either through a purchase or even to convert over to your larger website where you have even more content, that’s all very important.
Jay: What would be your biggest piece of advice to small brands looking to sell their product and grow?
Sara: My number-one piece of advice would be, understand who you’re talking to. You can’t do anything without understanding who your audience is and where they are.
So, invest some time into where your audience is, where they’re spending their time with social platforms. Invest time into experimenting with content. And that’s where Amaze can really help you. You can do some experimentation to see what’s resonating. And then, once you see what’s sticking, invest in honing in your authentic messaging.
That’d have to be a continuous exercise. Customer behavior is constantly changing and adapting. As an entrepreneur, a small business, a creator, you need to keep tabs on how your customers and audiences are changing, so that you can adapt your own strategy to align with them and stay connected, not only to your existing audience, but connect with a new audience as well.
Originally published on Thesbjournal.com.
