If we consider the buyer’s journey a road, advertising is our GPS, guiding customers from awareness to their final destinations: purchase and loyalty. If used the right way, the journey will be smooth sailing, constantly attracting new customers while maintaining good relationships with existing ones—a testament to our advertising strategies.
The buyer’s journey synonym is also known as ‘marketing funnel’ because it looks like a funnel when represented visually. It narrows down as it goes through each stage, making selections on each part of the journey based on customers’ needs and how well the brand is advertised. Each funnel stage is interconnected—neglecting one part weakens the entire strategy.
The First Stage of the Funnel – Awareness
In the awareness stage, we are reaching out to the highest number of people who might be interested in our products and what problems they can solve for them or fulfill their needs. We are showing in front of many eyes and telling them: “Hey, we are awesome, and we are here to help!”
Here, we can use Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP to target broad audiences with custom creatives, on and off Amazon—images and/or videos, brand logos, and catchy headlines. Lifestyle, Life events, and Interest-based audiences are the perfect match. For example, we reach people interested in healthy lifestyles for the supplement brand or readers of maternity and pregnancy magazines for the maternity brand.
Amazon DSP plays a big role and serves more efficiently, as it offers more audience control than Sponsored Display. We can refine audiences based on Amazon first-party data from Brand Analytics – refine it by gender, age, income, occupation – anything that helps our niche. For a skincare brand whose target audience is women aged 50+, we can aim toward them if our budget is modest. If we are more aggressive, we can omit that and go broader, and there might be some daughter or husband looking at perfect gifts!
We can mix that with Sponsored Brand campaigns featuring all the custom creatives mentioned above to tell the brand story and Sponsored Products targeting broad keywords like ‘vitamins and supplements’ or ‘maternity must haves’. Those keywords are audience terms used by those who only research what’s out there without high purchase intent.
Going down the Funnel – Consideration
Narrowing down our audience to the next stage, we are reaching shoppers, which helps build product relevance and keeps our brand top-of-mind when they’re ready to buy. We tell them, “Hey, we can also solve your problem.”
With Sponsored Display and Amazon DSP, we can reach customers in-market and in our categories and target competitors by showing our product on their product detail pages or off-Amazon. We can also use it to remarket our products to customers who have already visited our listings and are showing interest in our brand but might still need to make a purchase.
We can achieve the same with Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands ads by targeting competitor products and categories or keywords closer to purchase intent. For supplement brands selling Fruits&Veggies supplements, those would be:
- Direct competitors: Fruits&Veggies from other brands and their search terms
- Substitute products and keywords: multivitamins, wellness/energy supplements that offer similar benefits to Fruits&Veggies
- Complementary products and keywords: other supplements that complement our fruits and vegetables, such as gut health supplements and hydration supplements.
Final Destination – Purchase
Advertising in this phase is crucial to reaching shoppers ready to buy. Sponsored Products and Brands drive the final purchase decision by positioning your product at the point of intent. We tell them, “Hey, we have what you need.”
Keyword targeting helps us appear in relevant search results, increasing the chance of conversion. Here, we target high purchase intent keywords such as product terms or our brand terms. In our examples, for supplement brands, keywords would be ‘fruits and vegetable supplements’, ‘fruits and veggies capsules’ etc. In another example, for our maternity brand, such keywords would include: ‘ maternity belly band’ or ‘over the bump leggings’.
By using both Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products to show up on high purchase intent keywords, we are closest to the customer as they move into the purchase phase.
Note here that brand terms are also part of this funnel, but demand for our brand directly correlates to our awareness and consideration efforts. If we are only sometimes working to bring more eyes during awareness or stay top of mind during the consideration phase, we are not feeding demand for our brand.
Bonus Stop After Final Purchase – Loyalty
Depending on what you sell, you can more or less benefit greatly from customer loyalty. Those customers bought from you and had a great experience with your products. They want to buy again or buy more different products from you.
Rest assured, there are strategies here to keep loyalty ongoing and lasting. We can use Sponsored Display or Amazon DSP for remarketing to purchase audiences, to remind them to buy again, or cross-promote our other products to our brand audiences.
There is also an excellent tool on Amazon called Brand Tailored Promotions, which allows us to craft promotions for specific audiences, such as brand top-spending audiences, promising audiences, or brand followers. Apart from that, the tool goes beyond loyalty with additional audience segments to offer promotions to, such as brand cart abandoners to move customers from consideration to purchase or at-risk customers to help move into loyalty those who are moving away from the brand or didn’t make recent purchases.
Building Strategies Using Amazon’s First-Party Data
Now that we know all combinations of ads and targeting available across the funnel, we can build out our strategies yearly, quarterly, and monthly. It’s essential to know your products, seasonality, and shopping events and plan around them.
For success, it’s crucial to always appear across all stages. What will vary with time will be the efforts and budgets assigned to each stage and campaign you are building.
Amazon has a great Brand Analytics tool available to sellers in Seller Central, where you can analyze and build around different data. Customer Loyalty analytics will show you which funnel you might be missing; Search Query Performance will give you more insights into keywords; Demographics will help you build out audiences in DSP and how to refine them more efficiently, etc.
Plan ahead, consider both internal and external factors, look for significant shopping events like Prime Days or Black Friday, and craft your appearance across different funnel stages accordingly, Even if the bottom of the funnel might be closest to getting the highest return on investment, never underestimate the power of feeding demand for your brand through awareness stage.
Reach out to the BellaVix team if you need help building strategies. Our team of experts will be glad to help. Let’s grow together!
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