Creating brand awareness on Amazon is more important today than ever before. And that’s because there’s more competition for shopper eyeballs, and more brands vying to secure sales on the platform, than at any other time in its history.
Amazon dominates ecommerce with more revenue generated from online sales than any other platform in the world.
This dominance is only set to grow. Research carried out by Edge forecasts that Amazon will overtake Tesco as the UK’s largest retailer within the next two years. This scale naturally attracts large numbers of brands, all of whom want to be able to sell to Amazon’s growing shopper base.
With millions of options available to marketplace visitors, you’ll need to find ways to stand out from the crowd (whatever category your products fall under), in order to grow your Amazon business. That’s where building brand awareness comes in.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness puts you in contention when shoppers are ready to buy. It’s the secret sauce that helps shoppers to remember your brand even if they haven’t purchased one of your products previously or interacted with your business for years.
That said, brand awareness as a concept can be hard to pin down. As a marketer, advertiser, and business owner, you’ll likely be comfortable working with absolutes.
Metrics like return on investment, cost of sale, profit and loss can all be easily measured. They’re tangible. Brand awareness is less rigid. It’s much harder to measure.
Why? Because when we talk about brand awareness, what we are really saying is, how well known is our brand amongst our target audience? How much are we front of mind? How well do they remember us? If our target demographic is looking for a product we sell, how likely is it that they’ll think of us?
Those kinds of questions can’t be answered with specifics. They’re much harder to measure and assign a figure or number too. Afterall, it’s hard to assign any kind of scale to how popular you are.
As per HubSpot, “Brand awareness represents how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how well they recognize it. Brands with high brand awareness are generally referred to as ‘trending,’ ‘buzzworthy,’ or simply ‘popular.’ Establishing brand awareness is valuable when marketing and promoting your company and products, especially in the early stages of a business.”
Why Brand Values Matter
As we’ve seen, brand awareness is a measure of how popular your brand is. Interestingly, the way consumers feel about certain brands is a lot like how they feel about certain people. “Most of the choices we make every day are based on how we feel, how we see ourselves and the people around us. The same principle applies to our brand choices,” explains branding expert Serkan Ferah.
This means that your brand values matter. They determine how consumers feel about your brand.
If your brand was a person, would you be their kind of person? Would you have shared interests and opinions? Would you feel the same kind of way about topics that matter to them?
In short, would you be popular? If the answer is yes, they’re more likely to remember you when it comes time to choose between your product and other items displayed on Amazon’s search result page.
Your brand values influence purchase decisions
Research confirms that 8 in 10 consumers choose brands with values which align with their own. On the flip side, 68% of consumers admit that they have stopped spending money with brands that don’t share their personal values.
Brand awareness can help your target audience to better understand your brand values.
By reinforcing shared values, you’re able to positively influence purchase decisions. That means you’re in the running to make more sales and stand out above competitors who haven’t done as good a job in conveying what their brand stands for.
Brand values can build trust
As consumers, we feel comfortable buying from brands we feel we can trust.
Telling shoppers what you’re about as a brand – what your brand values are – goes a long way towards building that trust. This is important because when a consumer feels they can trust your brand, they’re more likely to remember you. Or, to put it another way, to have brand recall.
They’re also more likely to choose your brand above a brand they haven’t heard as much about when shortlisting products on Amazon.
Brand values can help nurture loyalty
Today’s consumers have a great deal of choice. As the shift online accelerated during the pandemic, more options emerged. This has tested consumer loyalty like never before.
Only 38% of shoppers remained loyal to their usual brands in 2020. 35% of shoppers say they frequently try new brands.
The fight to retain your customer base is very real. Having well communicated brand values can help here. By raising awareness of your brand, you can remind existing consumers why they chose you before, and why they should continue to choose you now.
There’s an opportunity to win new customers here too. Working to build your brand awareness and communicate your brand values means you can also target those brand agnostic shoppers who are willing to try something new.
That can help to grow your customer base and increase your sales on Amazon.
Branding Awareness on Amazon
Your brand is what makes your business and its products recognizable to shoppers.
Developing a strategy to grow your Amazon brand awareness is key to ensuring you’re able to compete against rival products for sales on the world’s largest online marketplace.
Luckily, there are plenty of ways you can grow your brand awareness on Amazon (more on that shortly).
As a seller, you can use a range of methods to grow your Amazon brand awareness, including via targeted Amazon ads, Brand Registry, social media, email marketing and reputation management. You can use indirect tactics such as PR and content marketing, too.
Advantages
If you want to make sales on Amazon, consumers must be aware of your brand.
They need to know who you are in order to factor your products into their purchase decisions.
Taking time to grow your Amazon brand awareness may feel daunting, with so much competition and noise to cut through. However, don’t be discouraged. The rewards for that time and resource investment are significant.
Building brand awareness can help at every stage of the funnel
Shoppers turn to Amazon at every stage of the funnel. Regardless of whether a customer actually adds a product to their basket and checks out on Amazon, the majority of purchases begin on the platform.
Research confirms that 74% of consumers now start their product search on Amazon – significantly more than the traditional starting point, Google.
If you have a good level of brand awareness, you’re immediately in the running for that sale as the consumer moves through the consideration and decision-making phases.
It can help shoppers to find your products faster
A good level of brand awareness can give you a clear competitive edge.
A consumer without a specific brand already in mind may go to Amazon and perform a search. They’ll then be presented with a wide range of products on the results page.
That means you’re not the only brand in contention to secure the sale and it may take a while for that shopper to reach your product.
If you have a good level of brand awareness on Amazon, that same shopper could type in your brand name as their search term, rather than something more generic.
That’s a huge competitive advantage. Right away, that shopper will be presented with your products rather than alternatives.
It can drive related product purchases
Another advantage of growing your brand awareness on Amazon is the potential to increase your sales via related product purchases.
If you’re an online pet store for example and an Amazon customer buys a dog collar from you, the fact that they know your brand means they are more likely to make a related purchase.
That could mean they go on to order a harness or doggy coat from your Amazon store, rather than seeking out a second supplier.
Using Amazon Ads for Brand Awareness
Whether you’re targeting new customers or keen to encourage repeat business, using Amazon ads for brand awareness is a smart move.
Use ads to grow your brand in new territories
Brand awareness doesn’t have to be confined to the UK. If you sell and ship to other locations (or want to begin expanding internationally), you can use Amazon advertising to easily develop your brand overseas.
Creating ad campaigns that target other regions is an easy way to begin boosting the visibility of your brand amongst consumers in international markets.
As an Amazon advertiser, you can create and launch ad campaigns in numerous regions including the UAE, Americas and Australasia.
You can use ads to engage new customers
As we have seen, the majority of consumers use Amazon for product research. Amazon ads offer an easy way to get your brand in front of shoppers who may not have heard of you before.
This is a good way to engage with new customers, who otherwise may have no way of hearing about your products or discovering your brand.
Ads can re-target existing shoppers to build repeat business
Growing customer lifetime value is crucial to scaling your Amazon business. Amazon ads allow you to retarget previous customers with precise messaging and relevant products.
This is a good way to remind them about your products and services as they approach the consideration stage of their journey. It’s also an efficient effective way to inform existing customers about new additions to your product catalogue.
Amazon ads drive product discovery
With Amazon’s Sponsored ad solutions, you can reach relevant audiences as they are browsing for specific products similar to your own offerings.
Enabling product discovery in this way not only introduces new customers to your offerings in a targeted, relevant manner, it also helps you to stand out at the exact moment a shopper is searching for something they need.
Share your brand story
As we saw earlier, today’s shoppers prefer to buy from brands they feel connected to. Brands with values like their own.
Creating an Amazon Store and pairing that with Sponsored Brands adverts allows you to share your brand story in a visually compelling medium.
This can help to create closer connections with shoppers and set your brand apart from others.
Examples of Successful Ad Campaigns
If you’re looking from some inspiration before you get started with your own Amazon brand awareness campaign, we’ve found a few examples of brands getting it right.
ICONI
ICONI is an inspirational activewear company created by a Black-owned, woman-owned, and veteran-owned business. Founder Angel Johnson has a focus on lifting others up and giving back to her local community. She set out to create an inclusive brand that would make every wearer feel good about themselves.
ICONI stands for ‘I Can Overcome. Nothing Is Impossible’. This is front and centre on the brand’s Amazon ads. Angel and her team have used their Amazon storefront to clearly communicate their brand values and beliefs.
Inspirational messaging includes “Our mission is to motivate you and remind you of your own strength, power, and versatility. 10% of ICONI’s profits are donated to non-profit organisations. We want to help make a difference in the world – one legging at a time.”
This kind of messaging helps Amazon shoppers to clearly understand the brand and its values. It also taps into the psychological element of advertising to build a connection with like minded shoppers.
L’Oreal
L’Oreal has demonstrated just how effective doubling up on Amazon ad formats can be. It coupled brand Stores with Sponsored Ads campaigns to build brand awareness and reach new audiences.
In 2021, it ran a campaign to build brand awareness in the Middle East, using Amazon’s first-party audience insights. Its objective was to create mass awareness amongst shoppers browsing for related products.
To achieve this, it focused on helping shoppers easily discover the most relevant L’Oreal product based on their search (for example, mascara or lipstick). The ad campaign resulted in a 59% uplift in overall Amazon sales and saw 50% of sales come from non-branded queries thanks to the new audiences reached.
How to Improve Brand Awareness on Amazon
Now we’re clear on the business benefits that come from building brand awareness on Amazon, let’s take a look at how you can get started, the different tactics you can deploy, and what you’ll need to consider along the way.
Consistent Branding & Customer Experience
Consistent branding and a consistent customer experience are non-negotiable when it comes to creating better brand awareness. Brand awareness means your brand is instantly recognisable to an Amazon shopper.
That recognition becomes difficult if you’re confusing the audience with varying brand messaging, different logos, a range of colour palettes and inconsistent imagery.
Maintaining the same look and feel is imperative. If you don’t yet have documented brand guidelines, now is a good time to sit down and create a rulebook.
Setting out exactly which logo to use, what fonts are acceptable, what your colour palette is and what style of imagery should be used makes it easier to be consistent.
Sponsored Products
Sponsored Products are a smart choice when you want lots of Amazon shoppers to see specific products from your brand. These ads are displayed in search results and on product pages, displaying to shoppers when they are searching on related keywords.
Sponsored Products are especially useful for raising awareness amongst shoppers in the consideration and purchase phases of the buyer journey.
Using broad or phrase match keywords will expose your ads to the highest number of searches, thereby increasing reach. Amazon figures suggest that Sponsored Products can increase impressions by a factor of 55x when paired with optimised product listing pages (more on that shortly).
Sponsored Brands Ads
Sponsored Brands ads allow you to use custom headlines, imagery, and video content to showcase your brand in search results and product detail pages.
This type of advert is suitable for both raising brand awareness and building brand loyalty. Sponsored Brands occupy prime real estate both on top of search results and within them. For this reason, they’re the perfect way to reach shoppers while they’re browsing.
Sponsored Brands’ rich content format gives creative freedom to tell your brand story and communicate brand values – something that can also help to grow brand loyalty.
As well as being eye catching, you can use Sponsored Brands to funnel traffic through to specific product detail pages, product collections, custom landing pages or your Amazon Store. The product collection option is useful if you’re keen to build awareness of new products amongst existing customers.
Sponsored Brands Video Ads
Sponsored Brands Video campaigns drive a 28% increase in impressions on average, making them an essential component of your Amazon brand awareness strategy.
This ad format auto plays in shopping results, so they’re an easy way to generate visibility and put you brand right in front of shoppers at the exact moment they’re searching the marketplace.
Our Ultimate Guide to Sponsored Brands Video ads will help you make the most of this powerful advertising tool.
Amazon Brand Store
Using as many different ad formats as possible ensures that your brand visibility is amplified across the Amazon ecosystem. Amazon Brand Stores are multi-page brand destinations within the Amazon marketplace.
With space to communicate your brand values, tell your brand story, showcase images, spotlight products and share multimedia content, they’re one of the best ways to build awareness of your brand.
Brand Stores are only available to members of Amazon Brand Registry so if you haven’t yet submitted your application, now is the time to do so.
Once your Store is set up, it can occupy very prominent space within Amazon search results, including at the top of results pages and within product listings. This means Brand Stores present lots of opportunities to get your brand in front of shoppers.
Optimizing Product Detail Pages
Amazon Ads are a vital component of building brand awareness, but your work doesn’t end with campaign setup. You’ll also need to optimize your product detail pages.
Not only does this help to give you naturally better visibility in the search results (therefore creating more brand visibility and awareness), but it also helps to build credibility and cement trust in your brand.
The very last thing you want is for the shoppers just discovering you to land on a product page and find a lack of information, uninspiring content, or incomplete product descriptions.
Product Title
The product title is one of the first things that shoppers see. It may be the very first introduction that a shopper has to your brand. It should clearly communicate what the product is and be specific to that product.
Depending on what the product is, your product title should also include the manufacturer name, model name, model version, plus colour and size if applicable.
Including a very specific, product-related keyword can also help with search visibility and boost click through rates.
Product Details
You can use up to five bullet points to share more information about your product. This is a chance to include useful information for the shopper, so they can feel confident about buying from your brand. Include your product USPs right at the start, be clear and descriptive.
Beyond those initial five bullet points, you have 2000 characters to convey product details.
You can expand on the information shared in the bullet points. Focus on sharing helpful information about the product, so the shopper feels confident that it matches their needs. Use keywords throughout to help with search visibility.
Images
The human brain can absorb information delivered via images much faster than it can text-based detail. Images are also more easily recalled, making this part of your product listing one of the most vital to get right.
Optimised images can improve your search ranking, leading to greater visibility. Aim to include between five to seven images. To ensure that you retain brand credibility and trust, select a mix of images which show your product from all angles.
Superimposing useful details such as dimensions can also help shoppers to feel that they’re making the right decision.
The Buy Box
The Buy Box appears on the right side of product listings, making it easy for shoppers to add the item they are viewing directly to their cart. It’s thought that 82% of purchases made on desktop devices are via the Buy Box. That percentage is higher for shoppers on mobile devices.
Buy Box eligibility is strict and not all product listings will have this box. It’s only available to Professional Sellers and for brand new items (not used).
It tends to be awarded to more established sellers, who offer efficient delivery, a good standard of customer service and competitive pricing. This means that it can add credibility to your listing and help to build trust. In turn, it leads to more sales.
You can check if you are eligible for a Buy Box from Amazon Seller Central. Click Preferences and then choose the Buy Box Eligible option.
Customer Questions
Amazon shoppers can ask questions about specific products on product pages. It’s in your best interests to answer these questions, as this is another chance to build a strong brand reputation. Prompt, clear, and helpful responses can build trust and increase overall conversions.
Focus on Reviews
Consumer reviews play an intrinsic role in buyer decision making. They help shoppers to build an impression of a brand and the quality of products being sold. The more good reviews you have, the more confident Amazon shoppers can feel about purchasing from you.
You can request shoppers leave a review for a product they have purchased from your brand via Seller Central. Use the ‘Request A Review’ button to send an automated invitation. Keep in mind this can only be done from four days to 30 days post of purchase.
Having a strong review profile can help to turn a shopper who has just discovered your brand on Amazon into a customer.
Responding to Customer Feedback
You can’t publicly respond to customer feedback on Amazon. You can however contact those leaving a negative review using the Contact Customer feature via Seller Central.
You can use this for any review that has a one to three-star rating. The bad news is that you can’t create a personalised response. You’re limited to using one of Amazon’s templates.
However, don’t let this discourage you from replying to reviews on other review platforms. Today’s consumers are known to read the business’ response to reviews (both good and bad).
How fast you respond, and the tone of your reply, can help shoppers to get a better idea of the brand experience.
Rewarding Customer Loyalty
You can use email marketing to reward customer loyalty and build good will on Amazon. The marketplace’s email marketing tool allows you to send personalised codes to previous customers.
Do this to create a positive impression of your brand – and hopefully a few word of mouth recommendations!
Amazon’s Brand Registry Program
The Amazon Brand Registry allows brands to closely control their brand on Amazon. It also provides a series of tools to brand owners to help them build their brand on the platform.
This includes the ability to create a Brand Store, use Sponsored Brands and Brand Analytics.
It also unlocks A+ Content to highlight products and showcase your brand’s story. Importantly, enrolling in Brand Registry can protect your brand from counterfeits which may damage your brand reputation and the brand experience.
To enrol in Brand Registry, you’ll need to have a registered trademark. More eligibility information can be found here.
A+ Content / A+ Pages
Once you’re successfully enrolled in Brand Registry, you’ll be able to use A+ Content to grow your brand’s visibility. A+ Content allows you to add custom descriptions, images, and text to product detail pages so you can better tell your brand story, and more accurately represent your brand experience, on Amazon.
Using A+ Content can make your brand easier to discover via search results and increase sales.
Tracking Brand Performance
Measurement is a crucial part of brand building. You need to know what’s working, and what isn’t in order to hone your strategies and ad campaigns.
Amazon provides a range of analytics tools and datasets so you can keep tabs on the impact of your actions.
Once enrolled in Brand Registry, you’ll be able to use Search Query Performance to track your brand’s performance on Amazon across the search funnel. Our complete guide here tells you everything you need to know.
Getting Started
Are you ready to grow your brand awareness on Amazon? ClearAds is here to help. Our experienced team can help you develop a brand-building strategy and execute it to drive increased brand awareness, visibility and grow your sales. Schedule a discovery call with us to find out more.
