A brand manager wears many hats. You might find yourself getting pulled in different directions—business development, product differentiation, nurturing relationships with customers, and more. In this guide, we’ll cover top tips for success—online, offline, and in the Amazon store.
What is brand management?
Brand management is an umbrella term for a range of activities and strategies you can use to promote and grow a business more effectively. The goal of brand management is to improve brand awareness and recognition, which in turn can help grow brand equity—the value customers place in your business.
Strategic brand management improves the customer experience by providing consistent, positive associations with your brand, which can lead to repeat purchases and enhanced brand loyalty. For example, a customer who reads your backstory on an About page and has a positive interaction with your products might share your brand with their family and friends, expanding your brand awareness and reach.
Key components of successful brand management
As a brand manager, you can find yourself working on many different aspects of a business. Here are a few focus areas:
- Physical assets: Your brand name, logo, and color scheme or palette are examples of tangible assets that can work together to create an impression on customers and convey your brand image and personality.
- Digital assets: Your brand’s website, social media presence, and other digital assets might be a home for your value proposition, mission, and values. They can also help you showcase product offerings. Digital assets can include other spreadsheets, software, or project management tools too.
- Intangible assets: While they might be harder to define or calculate, brand awareness and recognition can be valuable assets for a business. Along with a business’s reputation, intangible assets contribute to brand image and equity and can have a direct impact on sales.
Being a new brand, you don’t have trust yet. How do you build that? It was very easy to get that trust from customers by being on Amazon.
9 ways to position your brand for success
Strategic brand management can help guide you and your team’s decisions as you engage with customers and shape the shopping experience both online and offline. In the following tips, we cover how to establish, grow, and maintain your brand.
1. Select products and packaging with care
Strong brand positioning starts with product selection. Select the wrong products, and you could run into issues in other areas. To avoid this, conduct product research to help ensure products can help you meet your selling goals.
Your product design and packaging should also be on point. It might make sense to tap into expertise for these two complex areas. Customer satisfaction depends on products meeting the expectations set by product listings. Likewise, packaging needs to safely transport products while also doing a good job of representing your brand. Invest in both to maintain your brand’s reputation.
Find more tips for picking a product
2. Create a compelling customer experience
Great branding can have a big impact on the shopping journey, ultimately translating to higher sales volumes. From your web presence to digital marketing campaigns and the packaging products arrive in, make sure every touchpoint conveys your brand in a consistent, engaging, and unique way.
If you choose to sell in the Amazon store, you can make use of resources like the Amazon Stores builder and A+ Content. The Stores builder lets you design a multi-page, immersive experience tailored to your brand, while A+ Content enhances product detail pages so customers can learn more about your products.
If you’re focused on strategic brand management, it might be worth investing in expertise. Consider working with professionals in branding and design. If you’re an Amazon seller, the Service Provider Network is one source for third-party service providers who can help with content, as well as other areas.
Explore the Service Provider Network
3. Optimize your sales channels
The right sales channel for your brand could be a website, social media, or an ecommerce storefront on a site like Amazon. How do you manage sales from each and make sure all your channels work together? If you sell on more than one channel, solutions like Multi-Channel Fulfillment can help.
Make sure you have all the infrastructure and software you need to manage projects effectively. The more you work with a channel, the more you might spot opportunities for optimization. Small tweaks to pricing, fulfillment, and customer service can have an outsized impact on efficiency and sales, so make project management and channel optimization an ongoing part of your brand management strategy.
Learn more in our guide for beginners
4. Advertise and use marketing to boost conversions
One of the upsides of managing a brand with an online presence is that it provides ample opportunities for marketing and advertising that might not be an option for a brick-and-mortar store. Choose from a wide array of cost-per-click (CPC) ads, digital deals, virtual coupons, and other ways of helping a global audience connect with products.
If you want to advertise in the Amazon store, you can make use of Amazon Ads. For example, you might be interested in product bundling as a way to increase your average order size. Product bundling is where you group multiple products to help customers discover your offerings and purchase more items.
Learn more in our guide to ecommerce marketing
5. Measure performance to spot growth opportunities
Another exciting thing about ecommerce is that it can allow you to get access to in-depth data and reporting so you can make strategic decisions about how to position and grow your brand.
For example, brands enrolled in Brand Registry can get access to Amazon Brand Analytics. This collection of dashboards allows you to explore metrics like clicks, cart adds, and conversion rates for your products. Dig into the numbers to uncover insights into aggregated audience demographics, repeat purchase trends, and much more.
Another strategy? Look at pricing trends. If you offered products at different price points, could that impact your sales? Do some research and make use of pricing automation to boost your bottom line.
Learn more about ecommerce automation
6. Reach more customers with SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to a number of methods you can use to increase the visibility of content like product listings and your website. You can use keyword research to improve product titles, descriptions, bullet points, and other elements in order to reach a wider audience, or help a more specific set of customers find the exact products they’re looking for.
Learn more about SEO in the Amazon store and beyond
7. Run A/B tests to increase sales
A/B tests are another tool in your arsenal as you manage a brand. They allow you to analyze data for two versions of content to determine whether one performs better in terms of impressions, clicks, and conversions. If you want to give A/B tests a try, check out Amazon’s Manage Your Experiments, a tool for comparing product titles, images, and other elements. We’ve found that experimentation can help increase sales by up to 25%.
8. Earn repeat business with excellent customer service
Make sure you have systems in place to provide customers with the support they need to get their questions answered, and to process returns and exchanges. Bonus points if you have a mechanism for gathering feedback so you can continue to enhance the customer journey from beginning to end. Although it can be discouraging to get negative feedback, look at any problem areas as valuable opportunities to make improvements.
Does your business have a way to reward customer loyalty? This could be as simple as a designated place where customers can sign up for marketing emails and be the first to know about deals, discounts, product launches, and more.
9. Monitor your brand and protect what you’ve built
Building a business is one thing—maintaining it is another. Pick key performance indicators (KPIs) and get a system in place for regularly checking them to make sure your business health is in good shape and the numbers are headed in the right direction.
Business development techniques like strategic planning can be useful as you evaluate and tweak your strategy. For example, a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) can reveal new changes or trends that could either threaten your success or bolster your efforts.
Once you’ve invested the time, energy, and resources it takes to build a thriving business, you might find your attention turning to proactive measures so counterfeiters and other bad actors don’t take advantage of your hard work. One step you can take is to enroll in Brand Registry to gain access to tools like Report a Violation, which lets you search the Amazon catalog for potential violations of your active trademarks, copyrights, and patents.
Learn more about Report a Violation
Brand management in the Amazon store and beyond
You’ve probably heard about the importance of staying “on brand.” As you shape a brand customers can rely on, watch for rewards in the form of lasting trust, emotional connection, and enduring loyalty. A focus on online brand management can also help you:
- Improve systems for greater business efficiency
- Stand out from the competition and differentiate products
- Increase sales and conversion rates
If you want to make use of Amazon resources and support for launching and building a brand, get started with a Seller Central account by signing up for a selling plan. We can help businesses of all types and sizes get established in a niche, reach a wider audience, and thrive in ecommerce.
