Three ways to build a customer-centric advertising strategy on Amazon

22 September 2020

By Emmeline Toyama
Manager, Product Marketing

The marketing funnel and the customer journey are complementary. The marketing funnel helps advertisers visualise how customers move from awareness to consideration, intent, then purchase. The shopping journey is a series of interactions and touchpoints that customers go through as they make their purchase decisions. The velocity of today’s customer journey creates new challenges for activating full-funnel marketing strategies.

The good news? Establishing a customer-centric framework can help. Focusing on customer needs and preferences creates positive experiences for shoppers beyond their first and last interaction (e.g. purchase) with your brand. Here are three tips to get started:

Build a comprehensive view of your audience

Combine different types of Amazon audience insights to amplify your marketing programmes. For example, a leading manufacturer of wearable smart technology came to Amazon Ads with a goal: launch a product line of smart watches aimed at connecting the brand to a new female audience. This brand leveraged Amazon insights to create three lifestyle personas – fitness, fashion and luxury tech – that matched with the attributes of the three smart watches being launched. This approach helped the brand increase the lift in purchases within female categories by 10 percentage points and increase lift in consideration of the brand as “top of mind” in the smart watch category by 8 percentage points.1

Create positive experiences for shoppers beyond their first and last interaction with your brand

Effective ads on Amazon share similar attributes according to internal Amazon research2: they contain clear and concise messaging, use high-quality product images, are not overcrowded with multiple products and include promotions to drive seasonal offers.

The types of advertising inputs we recommend to drive experiences across the marketing funnel vary by objective:

  • Build awareness – use educational content, product, lifestyle imagery or videos to illustrate product benefits
  • Drive consideration – develop a single product benefit or value proposition
  • Purchase – weave timely promotional messaging or deal badges into the creative

Similar guidelines apply to video – videos should include products in the first two seconds to help engage the audience.

Understand customers’ media preferences.

Today, audiences engage through a variety of channels – the average US household owns 11 different devices, 7 of which are connected to a screen (e.g. smartphone, tablet),3 – which means that if you’re only concentrating on advertising on-screen, you may miss an opportunity to reach audiences beyond the screen. For example, with audio ads, brands can deliver brand messages and reach customers in a screenless environment.

Putting customers at the centre of your approach can help you stay top of mind. Want to learn more about how to build better ad experiences on Amazon? Contact your Amazon Ads account executive today.

1Amazon internal, April 2020 and Nielsen Brand Lift Study
2Amazon internal data 2018–2019 multi-variant creative testing
3Deloitte Connectivity and Mobile Trends Survey 2019