Case Study: Increasing Brand Awareness through Amazon Advertising

Breaking through to new customers can be a daunting challenge, especially in a highly-competitive marketplace like Amazon. It’s true that Amazon provides brands with access to hundreds of millions of customers, but access and visibility are very different things. Access comes with launching on Amazon. Visibility needs to be earned.Over the course of four months (September 2020 - December 2020), Netrush’s advertising team helped an industry-leading supplements brand increase their visibility and win new-to-brand shoppers. 

Sprouting the idea

Natural Factors is one of the largest nutritional products manufacturers in North America. Their product offerings span the nutritional space and include everything from vitamin supplements to performance protein powders.

Since partnering with Netrush in 2014, most of Natural Factors’ efforts on Amazon have been focused on retaining a loyal customer base. But after seeing online shopping surges in the wake of COVID-19, Natural Factors began to think more about expanding its brand awareness online.

“More and more people are shopping online, there's no secret there,” said Shawn Fenton, global e-commerce strategist at Natural Factors. “So for us, we saw the trends, and we saw what was happening, and we felt like this was a really crucial time for us to invest, to really get our awareness out there with all these new people coming to the online market.”

In September, Netrush received the go-ahead to run a series of brand awareness campaigns to grow new-to-brand customers. 

Cultivating brand awareness

Netrush’s advertising team took a two-pronged approach to raise Natural Factors’ brand awareness.

Create demand with Amazon’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) - DSP is a great tool for getting in front of new shoppers. It uses buyer personas and audience segments to reach shoppers with characteristics that closely resemble a brand’s current customers. When done correctly, DSP is highly effective at creating demand in untapped audiences while also complementing other demand-generation strategies.

Harvest existing demand with Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) - Unlike DSP, PPC advertising is great for reaching shoppers that already have an idea of what they’re looking for. DSP creates demand, and PPC harvests demand that already exists. Reaching new customers through PPC comes down to understanding shopper behavior and bidding on the right keywords to reach high-to-mid-funnel shoppers.

Gathering the results

We were super impressed with the results, not only on the top line side, but also from the wholesale perspective, which is a great stretch for us. It's always nice to see wholesale sales and topline sales move together. Shawn Fenton, global e-commerce strategist at Natural Factors

After four months of running our brand awareness campaigns, our team saw great results, including:

Year-over-year increase in new-to-brand customers

Our goal in setting out was to introduce Natural Factors to some new customers. We were able to achieve a significant new-to-brand increase by the end of the campaign.

An increase in total sales

The main goal of the campaign was to attract new shoppers, but they still have to be the right shoppers — the ones that are most likely to transition into repeat customers and even brand advocates. Seeing a boost in sales over this same period confirms that our campaigns were successful in targeting the right audience for Natural Factors.

An increase in branded search for the Natural Factors website

A brand’s efforts on Amazon affect other channels, and this result is a perfect example of that. The brand awareness campaigns our team ran were through Amazon. As more shoppers began to see Natural Factors, they turned to Google to find out more about the brand they were seeing, meaning that brand awareness increased both on and off Amazon. 

Key takeaways

While Amazon gives brands access to hundreds of millions of shoppers, finding the right audience for your brand requires strategy and hard work. Over the course of four months, our team was able to help Natural Factors grow new-to-brand sales and increase brand awareness both on and off Amazon. 

Creating brand awareness on Amazon begins with the alignment of a brand's holistic brand-building approach. The customer experience needs to be consistent across every touchpoint in order to build trust and affinity. This is the approach we took with Natural Factors, and the approach we continue to use with our other premium brand partners. Jackson Hathaway, Netrush’s director of advertising and optimization