Grow Your Amazon Sales With Amazon Influencers
By: Dan Stein
Tags: Founder Interviews, Startup Life, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Startup

Interview with Tanner Rankin, CEO of Referazon

Interview with Tanner Rankin, CEO of Referazon

Tell us about Referazon. What do you do?

Referazon drives sales and saves time for brands selling on Amazon by helping them quickly find Amazon Influencers to promote their products and to easily manage their Amazon Influencer Marketing campaigns.

What is your startup’s origin story?

It’s incredibly difficult to sell on Amazon without a presence OFF Amazon. Building your own audience is time consuming and resource intensive. With the rise of the importance of driving OFF Amazon traffic to your Amazon product listings, Amazon sellers needed a quick and easy way to harness the power of a tactic used since 1996 when Amazon launched their Affiliate Program, the Amazon Associates Program. We launched Referazon to make it simple for Amazon Sellers to find Amazon Influencers who already have audiences of their target customers and to manage their campaigns in one convenient place.

Had you been involved in the industry before this startup? What is your background?

As a top-rated Amazon consultant with 10+ years experience, I was steeped in the industry for a long time, making it simple to identify the need for Amazon Influencers and analyze shifts in the industry.

What’s unique about your company? What are the key differentiators between you and other players?

Referazon is unique from other Influencer Marketing Platforms in a few key ways. First, Referazon is not a marketplace. We do not have pre-existing relationships with Amazon Influencers. That means, our customers benefit from significant savings due to no middle-men. Second, Referazon finds Amazon specific Influencers. The Influencers you find on Referazon are already part of the Amazon Influencer Program and Amazon Associates Programs. This means there is no extra work for the brand selling on Amazon, there are no programs you need to get the Influencer to sign up for or nothing to explain to them. What’s more, the commissions paid to the Amazon Influencer for the sales of the product come directly from Amazon and not out of the Amazon Sellers account.

Take us through a day in your life. What does the typical day look like?

A typical day at Referazon begins by prioritizing customer service and feedback. The voice of our customer is the loudest in the room and we’ve found it invaluable to growing our company. We’re able to digest and synthesize that information in our meetings to prioritize our product development as with a SaaS product, we have the benefit of consistently being able to improve, sculpt and mold our product. From there, staying up to date and often times even ahead of Amazon Influencer Marketing trends and how they help Amazon Brands sell allows us to focus on our content strategy to help us create premium content that educates our customers. This could mean blogs & social media, but also in-software content for our customers to help them get the most out of our product as well.

What has been the most challenging part of growing your company?

The most challenging part of growing in this space is the space itself. Influencer Marketing on Amazon is in its infancy and every day more and more brands are discovering the marketing channel. Even though the tactic has been around since 1996, only the savviest brands were capitalizing. Luckily, Amazon itself is driving the industry forward and educating the brands selling on its marketplace in the importance of OFF Amazon traffic and Amazon Influencers.

What has been your best marketing channel? What are some channels you are looking to explore next?

Our best marketing channel by far has been SEO and content marketing. On the horizon for us is taking our content marketing and casting an even wider net with new platforms.

What apps do you use that you would recommend to others?

We manage our company with a combination of useful software from Slack, SEMRush, Trello, Later, Cyfe, Canva & Google Analytics to name a few.

Do you have a book, podcast, or Youtube channel you would recommend to other Entrepreneurs?

For my own entrepreneurial journey I’ve found subject matter expertise the most valuable to my own and my companies success. So while there are a lot of great books, podcasts and YouTube channels out there that paint in broad strokes on business, finance and business systems, I’d encourage Entrepreneurs to double down on books, podcasts and YouTube channels that increase your own knowledge on your particular subject matter, whatever that is; because at the end of the day, that’s what your customer is paying you for.

If you could go back in time to the day you founded your company, what advice would you give yourself?

I would encourage myself to find a balance between a lean MVP and something closer to a finished, polished product. Through customer feedback, you’ll find both your subject matter expertise and your gut intuitions are more often than not confirmed, so you should strive to achieve them.

What’s something you’ve learned from building your business that someone else can learn from?

After you’ve done the research, trust your subject matter expertise to build the company that you believe will give the most value to your customer. Then, be open to adapting and optimizing from feedback.

If you were writing an article about your company, what would the title be? *

This Simple Software Makes Growing Your Amazon Sales Easy With Amazon Influencers