3 ways to help your brand become top of mind

October 20, 2020

By Emmeline Toyama
Manager, Product marketing

In the first part of this series, we discussed how to build a customer-centric advertising strategy. Today, we will explore how combining both brand and performance advertising can help inspire shopping actions from your audiences.

Amazon is a place for discovery: 68% of shoppers in a specific category report that they have discovered a new brand or product on Amazon.1 It’s important for brands to reach shoppers along their shopping journey, including discovery and purchase, but balancing the two often poses a challenge.

First, you have to reach consumers in the mindset of making a purchase. Another way to think about this is brand salience. Unlike brand awareness, which is the ability for customers to recall a brand name or product, brand salience is the degree to which your brand is thought of or noticed by consumers when they make a purchase decision.2 High brand salience means your brand is top of mind.

Increasing relevance and making an impression starts with connecting with relevant audiences for your brand. Suppose you are launching a new smart watch and you want your brand to be top of mind when customers are shopping for wearable technology—you may decide to reach audiences whose interests include fitness and technology by using video ads anyhwere customers spend their time.

Combining brand-building efforts with performance advertising can help increase brand salience and achieve incremental success. Here are three ways to get started:

Increasing brand salience

1. Assess your category opportunity with a brand lift study

A financial services company worked with Amazon on a third-party brand study, which found that their customers were not aware that they offered digital solutions like mobile banking. The brand implemented that insight by leveraging video and other awareness-building solutions to help boost brand visibility for their digital services.

2. Improve brand salience with video

A luxury car brand wanted to emphasize customer experience as their brand differentiator. The brand ran premium, in-stream video ads across Fire TV, mobile, and desktop to illustrate how they applied the same level of care and thoughtfulness to each aspect of the customer experience in the dealership as they put in their vehicles. This approach generated a 5% lift in brand favorability (2.9x Kantar norms), 8.9% lift in purchase intent (7.0x Kantar norms), and 7.0% lift in the brand attribute that the brand is “thoughtful.”2

3. Engage audiences by business objective instead of tactic

An immune support supplement brand wanted to test new approaches to grow their brand on Amazon beyond looking exclusively at ROAS (return on ad spend). The brand decided to shift their audience strategy from tactic (e.g., lifestyle, in-market) to goal-based, allocating spend to both acquisition and purchase/retention goals. The brand leveraged Amazon audience insights to guide investment allocation across the goals, resulting in an increase in new-to-brand customers by 50% year over year versus the previous month's average of 38% during category peak season. Additionally, sales from existing customers increased 78% year over year versus the previous month's average of 48% during category peak season.

Measuring brand advertising

Amazon Ads can provide ad-attributed brand reach, site visitation, and off-line sales measurement using integrations with measurement providers to help further quantify success—especially helpful when maximizing the ROI (return on investment) of your campaigns.

Brand awareness metrics

Metrics to consider as you develop your brand over time are:

  • How many new-to-brand3 orders did my product deliver? New-to-brand orders is the number of first-time orders for a brand’s products within a one-year lookback window.
  • How did my message compare to the performance of my peer set?
  • What’s my saturation by tactic? In other words, did I effectively move audiences across different stages of the customer journey, such as a consideration (e.g., high glance views, which indicate demand) to a purchase (e.g., Add to Cart)?

Interested in optimizing your strategy on Amazon? Contact your Amazon Ads account executive for more information. Don’t miss the last post of the series: Why measurement deserves more time in the digital spotlight.

1Kantar custom survey, 2019, US. The study was among 5,000 survey participants who purchased cosmetics, laptops, apparel, credit cards, and movie tickets in the past 3 months (June-Sept 2019).
2Kantar Milward Brown Brand Lift Insights, 2019, US.
3New-to-brand metrics determine whether an ad-attributed purchase was made by an existing customer or one buying a brand’s product on Amazon for the first time over the prior year.