Guide

How to launch a brand

Brand launch is a process of introducing your brand’s story, value, and products or services to potential customers. For an effective brand launch, use a combination of marketing tactics and ad solutions to help customers discover your business.

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Whether you’re just starting out your business or creating a new one, how you launch your brand to consumers can have a big impact on your business’s growth and your customers’ perceptions.

Depending on your marketing goals, your brand launch can be modest in size, starting with launching across a few digital channels or be grander in nature—with an expansive marketing plan that covers digital and physical activations. In this guide, you’ll learn the basics about how to launch a brand, why it’s important, and what are some brand-building techniques.

What is a brand launch?

A brand launch is the process of introducing your business to the world. A successful launch involves your brand having clear business goals, an understanding of customers, knowledge of your industry like how your business shows up among your competitors, and a solid brand message and marketing strategy.

During your brand launch, you have an opportunity to decide how you want audiences to experience your brand and how you’re positioning your business in the marketplace. You do this through your brand messaging and by communicating your core values.

How to pre-launch your brand

Ahead of any successful brand launch, there’s some prework that needs to be done. During this pre-launch stage, your brand should identify which consumers might be interested in your products, what value your brand or product brings to the industry, how you communicate that value proposition through your creative assets and messaging, and how much marketing budget you’re allocating to your launch campaign. The pre-launch stage is also a great time to test and learn which digital or social channels could best support your brand’s marketing needs.

7 tips for building a brand launch strategy

Building a brand launch strategy requires research, planning, organization, and implementation. For a success launch, brand leaders will identify their audience, understand their industry, know what problem they’re solving, solidify their brand messaging, and outline their launch goals. Below is a list of tips to consider when launching a brand for the first time.

  1. Identify your audience. Your customers should be top of mind throughout your brand launch plan. In order to help identify relevant customers, think about the problem your brand is aiming to solve. You should be able to answer who your customers are, what they care about, what their problems are, what products they are likely using or seeking out to address their issues, and how your brand is able to help them meet their needs. You can even make use of shopping signals and/or insights to get a better understanding of potential customers using advertising solutions. These additional pieces of information can help develop a more relevant marketing plan that resonates with consumers.
  2. Solidify your brand identity. From your brand’s logo design to your communication materials for your website to your social media presence, defining your brand identity is crucial to a brand launch. Having a clear brand identity can help boost your brand’s recognition with audiences, increase credibility of your brand with consumers, and help better define what makes your company unique. You can learn more about building your brand’s identity with Amazon Ads in this webinar.
  3. Create a brand launch strategy. A new brand launch strategy can help you weave together your pre-, peri-, and post-launch activities. Your strategy should include how you’re promoting your core product during your brand or product launch. These campaigns should be geared toward helping your brand reach the most relevant shoppers who may be interested in your products. During your strategy development, you’ll also be doing research and testing. This includes assessing which brands are in your category and how they market to their audiences. Also, you can use this time to gather feedback from consumers and try to understand what messaging resonates with them in order to better build an effective communication strategy. And once you do launch your brand, use this an opportunity to test your campaign messaging, your creative, and the channels where you’re promoting your messaging. Sometimes, small adjustments can help make a campaign soar.
  4. Put together a brand launch timeline. Brand launches typically extend beyond the initial Day 1 debut. By building a launch calendar, you can stay organized and better visualize your marketing road map. Your timeline should include your brand launch kickoff, the messaging and creative assets you’re deploying through your campaign flight, the digital channels you’re using to help promote your messaging, the destination where you’re driving your consumers, your paid campaign activations, and the campaign launch end date.
  5. Create memorable brand assets. You can have a great brand identity and a product that consumers want, but if you don’t have creative assets, you’re not going to effectively engage with audiences. Creative assets include photos and videos that help tell your brand story and clearly communicate your product and its value messaging. Brands that effectively use video assets during their campaign launch can see an uptick in shopper engagement. In fact, 73% of shoppers prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service, a 2022 Wyzowl study found. 1 And a study by Ascend2 and Brightcove found that 85% of consumers consider videos essential when shopping online. 2 About 48% of the respondents said videos increased confidence in their purchases.3
  6. Build hype. Even before you launch your brand, you have the opportunity to build hype with the help of influencers, paid campaigns, and strategic partnerships. Getting media or influencers to speak about your brand right before or after your business launch can help your brand drive engagement and connect with new customers. You can also build hype by using ad products like Sponsored Display, which can help your brand spread awareness wherever they spend time. Another example is using solutions like using Amazon Live, which can help your brand can work with content creators and influencers to promote your products and services during your brand launch.
  7. Set up advertising campaigns. Creating measurable campaigns can help you better track your marketing success. By setting up advertising campaigns with advertising tools that run during your brand launch, you can better ensure that you’re reaching a wider audience. For example, you might launch your brand on a digital channel, and during that flight, you might run some sponsored ads or display ads to further increase brand awareness.

How to launch a brand: 4 simple steps

Once you’ve done of your prep work, finalized your assets, and developed your campaign messaging, you’re ready to launch your brand.

  1. Identify where you’re driving your audience. Before you even launch your brand, you should know where exactly you’re asking your new customers to go. Are you encouraging customers to visit your website, online shop, social media channel? Having a clear destination and call to action (CTA) can help you not only communicate the action you’re hoping your customers will take when they see your marketing, but it will also help you better measure your insights post-launch to gauge your campaign’s effectiveness. Creating your own branded Amazon storefront by using Stores can help your brand create a centralized place where new customers can visit, learn about your brand story, and purchase your products.
  2. Pick a day to officially launch your brand. Whether you’re doing a soft rollout or a hard launch, you need to pick a day to officially debut your brand, and you need to know which media channels you’ll be using in order to communicate your brand launch.
  3. Implement your marketing strategy. After the official day of launch, your brand may run a campaign for a few weeks to generate buzz and excitement for your brand. During this time, you may choose to spend advertising budget to help promote your marketing so that you can better reach relevant audiences. Amazon DSP is one way your brand can potentially reach relevant customers wherever they spend time in order to drive awareness for your brand. As your campaign flight continues, use this time as an opportunity to analyze your insights to see which media channels have been the most helpful in driving audiences to your website or product pages.
  4. Optimize your marketing strategy. Once you’ve launched your brand, it’s important to track how your campaign is performing by analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) across the digital channels you’ve utilized. If you notice that your campaign on a particular channel is underperforming, you can adjust your marketing strategy, such as using different creative assets to boost engagement or, if you’re running a paid campaign, adjusting your tactics. Optimizing your campaign by making changes to your marketing strategy can help you reach a wider audience segment you may have missed initially when your brand first launched. Amazon Cloud Marketing can help your brand better measure key analytics from your on-Amazon marketing in a secure and efficient way. And Amazon Marketing Stream can help you get hourly Amazon Ads campaign metrics in near real time.

Brand launch pitfalls: What are the challenges of launching a new brand?

There are a lot of benefits to launching a new brand, but in order to do it successfully, you should try to avoid any confusion that might lead to launch complications or even failure. According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, about 30,000 new products launch each year, and 95% of them fail. 4 Here’s a list of some useful tips:

  1. Avoid confusing messaging. Your brand message, value proposition, and expertise should be clear. What are you offering your customers? Why should they care? What can they gain by interacting with your brand? The answers to these questions should be transparent to your audience when they interact with your marketing content.
  2. Be discoverable and memorable. Being memorable may seem simple enough, for example, having a great name or recognizable branding, but it’s important that your brand stands out to audiences. Choose a brand name that’s easy to spell. Create a catchy tagline or distinctive logo that helps audiences recall your brand quickly. Brands that are too vague or generic in their look, feel, and message will get lost in the digital noise that audiences face daily.
  3. Make the user experience as smooth as possible. Sloppy interfaces, broken links, and confusing websites can all lead to a bad user experience, which can turn off new customers. Make sure your website and your products or services are easy to find, access, and purchase for customers.

Boosting your brand launch with Amazon Ads

Creating a new brand is a tremendous achievement, and there are plenty of tools and products to help you make your initial debut to customers as successful as possible. Ad products like Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP can help your brand reach relevant customers wherever they spend time so that you can build brand awareness and consideration. Amazon Ads can help you reach engaged consumers in a transparent and measurable way. By creating a comprehensive launch plan, building a marketing strategy, and investing in your campaigns, there’s nothing stopping you from launching your new brand.

If you have limited experience, contact us to request services managed by Amazon Ads. Budget minimums apply.

1 “Video Marketing Statistics 2023,” Wyzowl, US, 2022
2-3 Ascend2 and Brightcove, US, 2022
4 “Common Mistakes That Can Lead to Product Failure,” Business.com, US, March 2023