Campaign planning

Campaign planning entails crafting a compelling and inspiring message, selecting appropriate channels and deploying insights-driven tactics to effectively reach the intended audience, all while continually measuring and analysing performance to optimise the campaign’s impact and achieve business objectives. It requires creativity, adaptability and a deep understanding of consumer behaviour to drive brand awareness, engagement and ultimately, successful conversions.

Insights – which can give information about consumers, purchasing behaviours, shopping journeys and more – provide fuel for inspiration in this undertaking. But without the ability to drive actual impact, insights aren’t much more than signals with little value or power. We will review how you can leverage insights to drive better campaign plans.

Careful campaign planning is necessary for brand awareness and revenue generation as it directly influences a company’s ability to attract customers, increase sales and drive profits. A well-executed campaign can effectively communicate a product or service’s value proposition, creating a sense of urgency or desire among potential customers, leading to increased demand and higher conversion rates. By strategically engaging with the right audience and utilising an insights-driven approach, marketers can optimise their campaigns, minimise wasteful spending and maximise return on investment, ultimately contributing significantly to revenue growth and business success. Without proper planning, campaigns may not resonate with the target audience, leading to decreased engagement and sales, potentially resulting in missed revenue opportunities and reduced profitability.

To accomplish this, use Amazon Ads pre-campaign planning tools to get a baseline understanding of how your brand and products compares to your competitors. At this stage, these tools can help you get a sense of where you brand is and where it needs to go, based on your goals.

Here are two pre-campaign planning tools that can help you achieve this:

Amazon Ads audience insights and planning solutions help advertisers quantify the opportunities available to them at each stage of the customer journey, and recommend the optimal media mix and budget solution to reach relevant audiences. By using our custom and curated insights solutions, advertisers can create objective-driven goals, optimise messaging strategy and surface key strategic audiences across the marketing funnel. Insights can also highlight the pathway for consumers to move from one phase of their journey to the next.

The Amazon Ads Brand Growth Science pilot programme uses machine learning to identify KPIs and objectives and key results that can be indicative of revenue growth. The Amazon Ads team can work with you to define your objective, whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving loyalty or something else.

Brands of all types and sizes can reach and connect with customers using comprehensive holistic audience solutions from Amazon Ads. You can choose from more than 20,000 pre-curated audiences informed by our and your first-party insights with our audience catalogue, or create tailored, composite audience expressions that embody the varied interests and complex purchase pathways that brands see today using tools like persona builder and canvas.

The Amazon Ads audience insights tool will help you determine the size of the audiences you can reach via the channels you’re considering. Depending on what you find, our tools can help you reach a larger audience wherever they spend time with omnichannel insights from our shopper-panel, advertiser and third-party audiences. You can create relevant reach strategies using the audience builder tool, to help reach relevant customers at the brand, channel and ASIN level (for Amazon sellers). With modelled and contextual audiences, advertisers don’t need to rely on third-party cookies, which will become obsolete over the next few years, helping them reach and engage with customers at the right moments in real time.

Step 3 empowered advertisers to understand who their audiences are and how best to connect with them. In Step 4, we will figure out where that connection needs to happen. Let’s say you have a finite advertising budget and know you want to leverage Streaming TV ads, audio ads and Sponsored Display. With our holistic media planning tools, such as cross-channel planner, you can plan your reach, create your budget and allocate a media plan, all in one place for audience connection wherever they spend time

Advertisers are able to create machine learning based cross-channel plans within seconds based on their audience and objective strategy across a range of channels. This enables advertisers to reach users on a variety of channels and devices, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion to captivate their interest across the shopping journey.

This is when you’ll determine the details such as an optimal budget or dayparting for each channel, with the help of our tools, such as the channel planner, which enable you to simulate reach and cost.

If your campaign involves Streaming TV or audio, for example, you can create reach plans based on your budget in our channel planner tool. You can even compare off-Amazon formats such as linear TV to on-Amazon efforts, including Streaming TV and audio plans that use reach curves, helping you efficiently optimise your reach and spend.

At this stage, you could also leverage the Amazon Ads media insights hub API to compare your reach curves against your full portfolio of media plans. You can utilise metrics that we provide on reach and spend, ready to be directly ingested for your analysis.

Amazon Ads offers numerous ways for you to analyse your performance, including both standard and custom reporting, optimisation and measurement.

With Amazon DSP, you can measure and optimise while your campaign is in flight, as well as after it has reached its conclusion. Brands can elect to leverage our marketing mix model solution, which helps advertisers measure and plan how they will allocate their investments across media channels based on the ROI of each channel. For teams with data science expertise, Amazon Marketing Cloud can help you determine your highest-performing audiences, which you can then re-input for activation into Amazon DSP, helping improve performance for your future campaigns.

It’s important to highlight here the cyclical nature of running an ad campaign. Once you’ve achieved reach and budget optimisations, you can take your learnings and employ them to any media plans you build in the future.

When it comes to getting started, you can use the tools mentioned above or our API libraries that helps you analyse and understand insights your way.