Hibu has announced that Amazon ads have been added to its SMB-focused digital marketing bundle. First teased back in October and available starting this week, the partnership involves Amazon’s Sponsored Display ads, which are targeted to high-intent Amazon shoppers (more on them in a bit).
The move brings the option to Hibu’s clients for the first time, as Amazon Sponsored Display were long locked up for businesses that sell on Amazon. They’re now available to a wider swath of SMBs – everyone from home services to hospitality – and Hibu is one of the first to jump on the opportunity.
In that light, Hibu’s move to deliver this format to its SMB clients furthers its mission to be a one-stop holistic marketing suite. The goal is to add dimension to its bundle of digital marketing options, thus elevating the value it can offer to SMBs. That in turn elevates Hibu’s ability to attract and retain them.
“With the addition of Amazon Ads Sponsored Display, Hibu is continuing to expand our role as the one-stop provider of key digital marketing services,” Hibu VP of Product Strategy & Development Nick Hopkins told Localogy Insider. “In addition to market-leading online presence services, we’re now also able to target and deliver ads across the top four ad networks – Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft.”
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Intent-Driven
Going deeper into the operational workings of Amazon Sponsored Ads, they utilize Amazon’s deep and high-scale audience insights from shopping and Prime Video streaming data. Add in a dash of machine learning and it’s become an effective channel that continues to drive Amazon’s ad business.
As a quick sidebar, Amazon continues to ratchet up its market share in the broader ad world, challenging the Google/Meta duopoly. Beyond the above differentiators, Amazon’s potency as an ad channel stems from the magic word noted above: intent. Commercial intentions run high among Amazon shoppers.
Back to Hibu, the way this could play out in a practical sense is that home services providers could be promoted to Amazon users who are searching for related products (think: pool equipment and yard tools). There’s a strong venn diagram between Amazon’s targeted ad inventory and Hibu’s SMB clients.
“With their expansion of Sponsored Display to businesses that are not sellers on Amazon – i.e. many of the types of businesses that Hibu serves – Amazon Ads has created a really unique opportunity for local SMBs to leverage their unique audiences and inventory,” said Hopkins.
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Parallel Paths
In a broader sense, this move is a strong match due to Amazon and Hibu’s parallel evolutionary paths. Both continue to utilize machine learning to boost advertisers’ potency. For example, Amazon’s AI-fueled ad targeting mirrors Hibu’s recent machine learning and performance optimizations for 70,000 SMBs.
Similarly, all the above joins Hibu’s strengths in digital presence services (websites, listings, reviews, and reputation management), performance marketing (mobile, social, SEO, SEM, and display), and customer relationship management tools (marketing automation, email, and text messaging).
Integrating Amazon Sponsored Ads into this mix will not only be additive in all the ways examined above, but it could also create a “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” dynamic for Hibu. These and other benefits will be realized over time but are already starting to bear fruit in Hibu’s early testing.
“Hibu has been testing Amazon Ads Sponsored Display for a few months,” said Hopkins, “We’ve been seeing great results for our clients in the metrics they care about most – exposure to highly targeted local consumers, and incremental lift in lead volume. Scaling Sponsored Display to our client base, as we’re doing now, was a no-brainer and we look forward to deepening our partnership with Amazon Ads over time.”
