Posted by The following excerpt is from Timothy P. Seward’s book Ultimate Guide to Amazon Advertising. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Apple Books
If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness and are eager to build marketing momentum, don’t miss the opportunity to use Sponsored Brands on Amazon. This banner-style ad allows you to express your brand message using logos, customizable ad copy, and featured products. The Sponsored Brands format is available to vendors and those sellers who are enrolled in Amazon’s Brand Registry.
With Sponsored Brands, you pay only when a shopper clicks on your ad, but these ads tend to carry a much higher cost per click (CPC) than Sponsored Products ads because of the more prominent placement of these ads on the search results page. Sponsored Brands ads can appear at the top of, alongside, or within the search results. Amazon determines where your ad appears depending on your bid.
When you build a Sponsored Brands campaign, you’ll need some sort of baseline for bidding to begin to capture traffic. Amazon will recommend a “suggested bid.” While you can certainly adjust up or down from there, I’m generally comfortable getting started with Amazon’s suggested bid with two important caveats:
- You have an airtight daily campaign budget that does not exceed what you’re willing to spend. This is critical.
- You observe your campaign’s performance over the next few days and weeks against those “suggested bids” and adjust your bids up or down based on those results.
Think of Sponsored Brands as “top of funnel” marketing, building awareness for your brand and buyer discovery for your products.
Related: How an Amazon Store Can Increase Shopper Engagement
Before you get started, determine how much you want to spend, what products you want to advertise, and what keywords you want to target. Sponsored Brands campaigns should be structured around keyword themes.
If you’ve already created an Amazon Store, you can direct traffic from Sponsored Brands campaigns to your store. This means that when a shopper clicks on a Sponsored Brands ad, they’ll be taken to your Amazon Store instead of a product list page. You have a couple of options for driving traffic to a store. You can choose to send traffic to the store officially associated with your account, but you can also send customers to a different store. For example, if you have a hybrid account (i.e., if you run ads through first- and third-party accounts), you can use Sponsored Brands in both accounts to drive traffic to your store even though your store lives in only one of those accounts.
Capturing new customers through sponsored brands
To help you see now a Sponsored Brands campaign can work for you, let’s look at how one of my team’s clients used a Sponsored Brands campaign to catch the attention of potential customers.
Burke Brands is a high-quality organic coffee company. At their core, they are coffee growers; they have multiple small-batch coffee roasting and packaging facilities while also boasting a state-of-the art cupping lab. Their mission is to “create value for our customers by using the highest-quality green coffee and roasting it to order to ensure maximum freshness.”
Related: The 5 Biggest Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make in Amazon Product Listings and How to Fix Them
But as we all know, having a superior product is only a small piece of the marketing puzzle. Because buying on Amazon is becoming second nature to many consumers, they’re more likely to start by searching for organic coffee on Amazon before going to a traditional brand’s website. The CEO of Burke Brands, Darron Burke, was trying to grow sales and defend the company’s position from its competitors. He knew Amazon was only going to become more important in this equation. But with little digital presence and unfamiliarity with Amazon, he and his team reached out to my team for guidance.
“Amazon had become a full-time job, but it was definitely worth it,” Burke said. “We could see the return, we could see the sales and the building of brand equity, but we were learning as we went, and it was not extremely organized.”
They had found the limits of what they knew how to do, but they thought they could gain better traction through a targeted campaign. Our team helped them realize that Sponsored Brands was the way to do it. They were just missing the step of targeting category terms through their ads.
By implementing this strategy, Burke Brands reached a previously untapped gold mine of new potential customers who knew what they wanted but didn’t yet know who to buy it from.
Since implementing Sponsored Brands in April 2018, Burke Brands has had five of their best months ever on Amazon. Their flagship offerings, Cafe Don Pablo and Subtle Earth Organic Coffee, have begun to establish themselves as prominent coffee brands. “Overall sales have been growing basically nonstop, every day, every week, and every year,” said Burke.