What is brand building?

Brand building helps your brand become top of mind with potential customers when they begin to consider purchase decisions. After all, a strong brand with customer value is important, but to grow your business, you usually need consumers to know about it with the hope of eventually establishing brand loyalty.

Though the purchase journey is not linear, the traditional marketing funnel still provides a useful way to visualize it and to demonstrate the importance of awareness.

Awareness is at the very top of the funnel, where there are consumers who may be interested in learning more about your products. Here, a brand that can grab customers’ attention with a positive experience will help raise awareness and possibly inspire them to seek more information.

When customers begin to seek information, they enter the next phase of the funnel: consideration, the point when the customer begins comparing your brand to other options available. Their intent to purchase has increased, based on the inspiration they’ve received at the awareness level. Those who are compelled further, through additional information, then enter the conversion phase, when they’ll look to make a purchase.

Throughout the process, your potential customers are narrowing down their options. Companies that already have brand awareness with customers don’t have to explain who they are and what makes them different. Essentially, they’ve already introduced themselves, so they can focus on delivering more specific information that is relevant to a potential buyer’s purchase decision.

Of course, exposure to a large, potential audience is one of the key components when it comes to brand awareness. With Twitch as a potential advertising channel for Amazon Ads customers, you can reach over 135 million unduplicated viewers across the US, and only 9% overlap. Twitch and Streaming TV together deliver a highly unique and incremental audience to each other.¹

The first step when beginning a brand-building strategy is to establish what your brand’s intended goals are (awareness, education, an increase in favorability, etc.) and develop messaging around that goal. From there, brands will want to identify where their audience is and consider a multichannel strategy to maximize the amount of exposure customers have to your messaging.

For instance, Amazon Ads offers a number of potential brand-building opportunities via its suite of advertising solutions: Streaming TV, streaming audio, Fire TV/Fire tablet, and on Amazon.com.

But no brand-building solution is optimal without intent. While many brands concern themselves with lower-funnel objectives like conversions, the key to true brand building is to take a full-funnel approach that involves the entire customer journey and to know where your advertising budget will be most effective, without oversaturating your audience.

From a practicality standpoint, deliver the “wow factor” by engaging customers with innovative experiences, from shopping with their voice, to gamified ads, to top-tier content across Freevee and live sports on Prime Video. Next, deliver non-disruptive advertising by engaging customers throughout their day where they are intentionally spending time immersed in the things they love. Add value rather than disrupt.

Don’t be afraid of leveraging new ad formats and creative alongside precise targeting to get the right message to the right audience to connect in meaningful ways. And again, prioritize and analyze the impact of upper-funnel campaigns to truly understand campaign impact and identify opportunities for optimization.

When it comes to Amazon Ads’ extensive brand-building tools, good examples of brand building don’t focus on one tunnel-vision approach, but rather a multichannel strategy. For example, campaigns that include audio and display, used together, are more likely to see better purchase intent performance results (1.9x) than either channel individually.² See an example below: