Guide
Audience engagement
Proven strategies for sparking meaningful customer interactions
Audience engagement is the ability to foster interactions between consumers and brands. Learn strategies for how you can do it effectively—helping encourage customer trust, sales, and loyalty.
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Audience engagement is a strategy for getting consumers to connect with your brand. This approach is not just about grabbing attention, but involves sparking meaningful interaction, action, and affinity through a variety of tactics—including sales promotions, interactive ads, livestream shopping, influencer marketing, and more.
What is audience engagement?
Audience engagement is the extent to which current and potential customers interact with your brand and content. Advertisers should incorporate audience engagement strategies at every stage of the funnel, as this approach can help support a full range of marketing objectives.
Why is audience engagement important?
Audience engagement is important because it helps advertisers break through the noise in a crowded media environment. If done effectively, audience engagement strategies can turn passive observers into active participants with your brand. Audience engagement is usually the first step in demonstrating a brand’s value and relevance, helping lead to stronger customer connections that drive full-funnel outcomes.
What are the benefits of audience engagement?
There are numerous benefits to increasing audience engagement, including visibility, credibility, brand recall, audience insights, and lasting customer relationships.
Benefit #1: Visibility
An engaged audience is more likely to share your content, helping to expand your reach. The more your audience amplifies your message, the more exposure you gain as a brand.
Benefit #2: Credibility
High levels of engagement on social media and other channels serve as social proof, enhancing your brand’s credibility and helping attract new customers. According to a report by TrustPulse, the average consumer reads 10 customer reviews before making a purchase decision, with online product reviews being able to increase conversion rates by 270%.1
Benefit #3: Brand recall
Consistent audience engagement can play a pivotal role in improving brand recall and recognition. When your audience interacts regularly with your content—whether through views, comments, shares, or likes—they form stronger mental associations with your brand and are more likely to keep you top-of-mind when making purchasing decisions.
Benefit #4: Audience insights
By engaging with your content, audiences can provide valuable insights into their needs, preferences, values, media habits, and pain points. Drawing on these insights, marketers can develop advertising strategies and creative outputs that are more likely to resonate with consumers and drive results.
Benefit #5: Lasting relationships
Strong engagement fosters brand trust and long-term brand loyalty with your audience. Engaged customers are more likely to stick with your brand and become advocates who spread the word.
What is audience engagement theory?
Audience engagement theory is a concept coined by the late author Jeremy Tunstall that posits audiences and the media have a dynamic relationship. According to audience engagement theory, audiences serve as active participants in (and not just passive observers of) the content they consume. This theory highlights that audiences bring their own backgrounds, experiences, and motivations to the table, shaping the way they engage with and find meaning in media.
Based on this theory, there are three types of audience engagement.
Primary audience engagement
Primary audience engagement is a type of audience engagement in which the audience is highly attentive and focused on the media they are consuming, actively processing the information. An example of primary audience engagement is interactive advertising, with audiences directly participating in the advertising experience through immersive elements like polls and quizzes, augmented reality, and in-game ads.
Secondary audience engagement
Secondary audience engagement is a type of audience engagement involving less focused attention, with the audience often multi-tasking or absorbing multiple pieces of information simultaneously. Examples of secondary audience engagement include listening to an audio ad while driving, or viewing a Streaming TV ad while watching a television program and also checking your phone. Although secondary audience engagement does not require intense focus like primary audience engagement does, it typically provides broader reach.
Tertiary audience engagement
Tertiary audience engagement is a type of audience engagement in which the audience is only passively exposed to a message, and may not even be consciously aware of its existence. Examples of tertiary audience engagement include driving past a billboard or seeing an ad while scrolling through your social media feed. Like secondary audience engagement, this approach can contribute to greater brand awareness among a wider audience.
Audience engagement strategies for brands
There are many ways brands can incorporate audience engagement strategies into their marketing, including the following.
Sales promotions can be an effective hook for getting audiences to engage with your content and increasing engagement. To go a step farther, consider offering limited-time discounts to consumers who engage with your ad, such as by downloading a demo or completing a poll or survey.
Interactive ads can increase audience engagement by giving consumers the opportunity to participate in, and directly influence, their ad experience in real time. Examples of interactive ads include playable ads, ads featuring QR codes, augmented reality-driven ads, and voice command integrations.
Customer testimonials
Customer testimonials can provide brands an opportunity to provide relatable examples of how your products and/or services may benefit audiences. This audience engagement strategy could include tactics like sharing short videos, carousel ads, or social media posts that showcase real-life customer stories and anecdotes.
Partnerships and livestreams
Creator partnerships, influencer marketing, and livestreams are audience engagement strategies that can help brands authentically connect with their core consumer base. Livestreaming services such as Twitch and Amazon Live enable brands to work directly with creators and influencers in real time, including through sponsorships and branded content that can be further amplified through social media.
Out-of-home campaigns
Out-of-home campaigns can be a highly effective way to expand the reach of your audience engagement efforts. Amazon Ads regularly works with a range of brands (including those that do not sell products directly on Amazon) to identify ways of engaging consumers through placements like on-package ads, digital signage, and locker wraps.
Tips for audience engagement
It is important for brands to be deliberate and consistent in their approach to audience engagement. Consider the following tips for how to engage audiences effectively.
Leverage customer signals
Brands can better engage audiences if they understand the needs, values, and preferences that help drive purchasing decisions among their core consumers. Amazon's trillions of authentic buy, browse, and streaming signals provide a holistic, singular view of audiences, helping advertisers understand customer behavior and deliver messaging with increased precision to drive meaningful results.
Create value at every interaction
Audience engagement strategies tend to be most effective if they create value for audiences at every interaction—whether by informing them, entertaining them, or validating their ideas, concerns, and choices. This customer-centric approach helps brands gain increased credibility among both existing and prospective customers.
Be relatable
Audiences are more likely to engage with brands that they can relate to—for example, because they share similar values, affinities, and associations. Research from the 2025 Higher Impact report by Amazon Ads supports this correlation, finding that 79% of global consumers are more likely to purchase a product or services from brands whose values align with their own.2 Similarly, the concept of selective attention suggests that people are more likely to remember information that closely aligns with their needs, beliefs, interests, and values.
Make participation easy and rewarding
To facilitate brand engagement, meet your customers where they already spend their time across a range of channels—including streaming TV, streaming audio, Twitch, and smart speakers. Consider implementing strategies that will help incentivize purchases and repeat business, including loyalty programs, discounts, and exclusive offers.
Show impact
It’s one thing to say you deliver impact; but to effectively persuade audiences that your brand can benefit them, you need to show it. Consider using compelling statistics, customer testimonials, and user-generated content within your storytelling to help verify the value you bring to consumers. By showcasing your results consistently, you can also demonstrate transparency and help maintain customer trust.
Audience engagement examples
Gain ideas and inspiration based on the following examples of brands that have implemented successful audience engagement strategies.
Case Study
Nissan UK and their agency partner Dark Horses helped engage audiences on a deeper, values-based level by launching the “Dare to Defy” campaign—a three-part docuseries on Prime Video highlighting the Nissan Possibilities Project, an initiative with the Richard Whitehead Foundation and Sported UK. The project has helped people across the United Kingdom overcome barriers to participating in sports activities. Campaign elements included a custom Fire TV page with episode preview videos (also available on YouTube), as well as a Twitch watch-along event featuring creator Brooke Lawson (@DexterityBonus).
Case Study
Building off of their high-profile commercial for the 2024 Big Game, e.l.f. Cosmetics worked with Amazon Ads to develop a creative, full-funnel activation that would draw in audiences by tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of courtroom TV shows. The campaign included a custom, first-of-its-kind Freevee sponsorship that brought courtroom-inspired TV shows to all Freevee viewers (including the Emmy Award-winning Freevee reality series Judy Justice) free of charge, with limited commercial interruption. The beauty brand also took advantage of Prime Video ads to engage relevant audiences alongside premium entertainment content. And finally, the teams redesigned e.l.f.’s Amazon Store to feature creative from their widely watched Big Game spot.
Case Study
Nespresso wanted to design a destination for shoppers that would create a tangible experience of their brand vision and products. This objective inspired them to design the Nespresso Brand Store—an Amazon storefront that included in-built tools like shoppable images and product tiles. These features helped capture shoppers’ attention and drive them to purchase. The storefront also featured meticulously crafted lifestyle images, videos, and content that felt authentic to the Nespresso brand (in contrast to stock product images) and reflected their commitment to quality and sustainability.
Case Study
Comfort, with a legacy of over 50 years in fabric care in the Unilever family, understands that clothing is more than just fabric—it’s an integral part of consumers’ identity and culture. So, in conjunction with Ramadan, the fabric softener company introduced a limited-edition fragrance in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia that they supported with a full-funnel campaign. The campaign included redesigning Amazon Fresh delivery bags into vibrant mobile advertisements for Comfort, with each design featuring coupon codes and QR codes leading to the brand’s online Brand Store on Amazon. This approach helped ensure that every delivery made a strong impression on customers and encouraged a seamless digital journey extending beyond the initial physical touchpoint.
Case Study
Baci Perugina, an Italian local confectionary brand by Nestlé, wanted to create a memorable campaign that would boost brand recall and customer engagement during the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day. To do this, Nestlé collaborated with Amazon Ads to create the first-ever seasonal sponsorship with Alexa. The Alexa team helped Nestlé develop an Alexa skill for Baci Perugina, so that every time a customer asked, “Alexa, unwrap a Bacio,” it would respond with romantic quotes and phrases to signal the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday while promoting the brand’s products.
How to engage audiences with Amazon Ads
Amazon Ads provides a variety of audience engagement tools and resources to help brands connect with customers.
Our vast range of marketing channels enable advertisers to deliver a consistent, integrated, and engaging customer experience throughout the many places consumers spend their time, including streaming TV, livestreaming, and audio apps, as well as physical and digital stores.
Our array of ad solutions can help you reach shoppers at key moments with engaging campaigns for businesses of any size and budget. We support every part of your media planning to support results across the entire funnel.
With billions of proprietary audience signals and a breadth of simple tools, Amazon Ads can help you build an insight-driven audience strategy to make more meaningful connections. Brands can leverage our solutions to build audiences, extend reach, remarket to loyal customers, or optimize campaigns.
Keep audiences engaged by accessing measurement of various metrics, based on a combination of first- and third-party reporting. These insights can help you understand and optimize your advertising for greater impact.
Additional resources
Sources
1 TrustPulse Social Proof Statistics Report, 2023.
2 Amazon Ads custom research with Environics Research. 2025 Higher Impact. Fielded December 2024. Data reflects CA, UK, and US aggregated. Respondents by country surveyed: Canada: 1,042, United Kingdom: 1,036, United States of America: 1,033. Total n=3,111. Year-over-year comparisons reflect regional respondent sample changes with CA, DE, FR, IT, ES, JP, UK, and the US being surveyed in 2023. In 2024, consumers in Canada, United Kingdom, and the United States were surveyed.