Every brand relies on marketing to survive and thrive. But not all marketing is focused on the same demographic nor has the same goals. That’s because not all business models or customers are the same, and thus, their marketing can differ, too.
DTC marketing is vital for many brands, especially those that offer products or services to be purchased by the customer to whom they directly sell and thus market. Here, we break down DTC marketing, how it works, and how you can rely on a qualified marketing agency to help you reach your target audience and drive success for your DTC brand.
DTC or direct-to-consumer marketing is advertising aimed directly at a consumer or end-user. For example, imagine that you run a retail business, creating and selling apparel directly to users, without a third-party retailer or wholesaler. You need DTC marketing to reach those prospective customers and convince them to shop your brand.
Previously, many consumer brands that created goods directly had to rely on retailers to sell and distribute their products. For instance, a footwear brand might have had to rely on big-box retailers to sell their shoes, giving up some of the profits in the process.
With DTC marketing, brands that manufacture their goods can sell them directly to consumers and market to their needs. They cut out the middlemen who previously dominated their business models, and in turn, their marketing efforts. Effective DTC marketing is necessary to drive growth and is vital to stand out in a competitive marketplace.
A few examples of DTC brands that use DTC marketing strategies successfully:
In fact, these brands started the DTC revolution and paved the path for the over 20,000 DTC brands now competing in this ever-evolving space.
When leveraged properly, DTC marketing provides many advantages and benefits to brands that utilize it.
One of the core aspects of DTC marketing is performance data. Brands can grow their business successfully and optimize marketing campaigns by analyzing real-time performance data. This enables every campaign, like a TikTok video advertisement, to be more successful and give you more bang for your marketing buck.
But how exactly does DTC marketing benefit your brand? Let’s take a look at some of the advantages in more detail.
Good DTC marketing grants you greater access to quality first-party data. First-party data is any data you gather directly from your consumers or end-users. It differs from third-party data that you purchase or receive from data aggregators.
First-party data is far superior to third-party data in many ways. Here’s why:
First-party data is robust, reliable, and resilient. With it, you learn about your customers in particular and can use it to make pivots in strategy to ensure you’re retaining them and acquiring new ones.
Furthermore, DTC marketing gives you much greater control over your branding than you would have otherwise. With DTC marketing, you need to focus on the full funnel in order to drive sales. One of the biggest advantages is that you have more control over top-of-funnel efforts – which help boost brand awareness – because you have full say over your branding and how you want customers to recall your brand.
This is highly advantageous if you have a small business or if your business is relatively young, but is enormously beneficial for any brand, especially in competitive verticals.
But, at the same time, you need to control how people perceive your brand and how your brand identity evolves over time. DTC marketing requires you to market directly to consumers, not rely on other retailers or third parties to market for you.
Perhaps most importantly, DTC marketing allows you to effectively and consistently grow your e-commerce business from the ground up.
Specifically, DTC marketing allows you to leverage paid media and real-time performance data to inform your strategy. This in turn enables DTC brands to:
Each of these metrics is highly important when growing an e-commerce business regardless of which niche or shopping vertical they belong to, and strong DTC marketing will lead to improvements across the board.
While DTC marketing can be very beneficial, you need to know how to leverage it properly in order to take full advantage of it. Fortunately, since no two brands are exactly the same, there are many different forms of DTC marketing depending on your goals and target audience.
Firstly, much of DTC marketing relies on strong SEO or search engine optimization. In a nutshell, SEO means improving, streamlining, or optimizing your online content so that your brand shows up more commonly on organic search engine results pages or SERPs.
For example, one common SEO strategy involves lacing keywords throughout your website copy or blog posts. Depending on the keywords you choose and how competitive they are, your website may show up more often for competitive keywords searched by your target demographics.
Strong SEO is important because it’s a cost-effective way of gaining organic search engine traffic. The more organic traffic you get, the more your brand appears before customers, and the more revenue you can expect in the long-term (assuming prospective shoppers like what they see once they click on your website, that is).
Then there’s SEM or search engine marketing. This form of marketing takes place primarily on search engines. A typical example is a Google PPC or pay-per-click ad.
You “bid” on certain competitive keywords in your industry or niche with a Google PPC ad. If you bid the highest, whenever a potential customer types in one of those keywords, they’ll see your PPC ad at the top of their search engine results.
Search engine marketing is an integral part of DTC marketing since you put your marketing campaigns directly in front of the eyes of your potential customers. It’s another good way to get Internet searchers to your e-commerce site as directly as possible.
Email marketing is also crucial for a well-rounded DTC marketing campaign. Email marketing involves sending promotional offers, new collection launches, and automated emails (such as welcome emails or cart abandonment reminders) to those who have opted-in to receive messages or who have made a past purchase.
Email marketing can be used for:
Again, since email marketing sends messages directly to consumers who have expressed interest in your brand, it’s a core part of DTC marketing overall.
Social media marketing, naturally, also forms a key component of DTC marketing. Social media marketing includes Meta (Facebook & Instagram), Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest.
Depending on the goals of your campaign and the customer you are marketing to, social media marketing could leverage campaign ads to engage customers and direct them to your website to complete a purchase. But, social media marketing can also include promotional offers, sale countdowns, launch campaigns, and UGC to boost brand awareness.
Social media marketing is critical for boosting brand awareness and acquiring new customers, especially in the earliest days of your brand. But, it’s also important for driving consumer traffic to your e-commerce site or storefront on other sites like Amazon during important shopping events, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Lots of DTC marketing campaigns also leverage SMS marketing. SMS marketing involves sending marketing texts directly to consumers’ smartphones or tablets. This type of marketing can complement email marketing as another channel to engage with, nurture, and convert customers.
For example, a retail brand could use SMS marketing to blast texts about early access to new collections. SMS is great because these customers already expressed interest in your brand by opting in to receive these messages and thus have a higher likelihood of acting on your offer and completing a purchase.
Overall, each of these marketing channels contributes to a robust and effective lifecycle marketing strategy. With a well-oiled marketing strategy in place, you’ll be able to guide new and existing clients throughout their customer lifespans, converting them into loyal customers for the long-haul.
Naturally, major benefits are contingent on you improving your DTC marketing strategy over time. If you’ve already tried DTC marketing to little effect, here’s the good news: There are ways you can improve your DTC marketing over time as you acquire more data to learn about your customers.
This industry is competitive and the paid media channels that promote DTC brands are leveraging that by rolling out so many features to market your brand to the audiences you want most. As such, it’s important to strategize a strong omnichannel DTC marketing gameplan that takes advantage of all the marketing opportunities out there and ensures you keep up with the competition.
One of the most effective ways to improve your DTC marketing is to work with a qualified marketing agency experienced in this space. A strong performance marketing agency for DTC brands is the best way to maximize your marketing campaign’s effectiveness in the short and long term.
When you partner with MuteSix, you’ll benefit from our deep industry knowledge spanning Paid Social, Paid Search, and Lifecycle Marketing media buying, as well as award-winning content creation. As a performance-driven agency, we are well-equipped to assist with your DTC marketing campaigns and goals, no matter which vertical you fall in or what your budget looks like.
Another smart way to improve DTC marketing is to embrace all that paid media has to offer brands. Many brands fail to fully capitalize on the potential benefits of DTC marketing when they only leverage one or two potential channels or ad formats.
Instead, you should take advantage of all the potential each platform has to offer and create an airtight omnichannel solution that allows each channel to work together so as to take advantage of efficiencies, reach as many audiences as possible, and truly learn about your customers.
Every way you can communicate directly to your customers is a way that you can market effectively to them. Experimenting with different platforms to see which ultimately drives the greatest success for your brand, then configuring your marketing mix accordingly for efficient scaling, is at the heart of any sound DTC Marketing plan.
Building and maintaining a consistent brand voice, identity, and experience can also help you improve your DTC marketing. The stronger and more consistent your brand is, the more effective your marketing will be for your target audience. A consistent brand message also allows for a more seamless customer experience, and thus helps build customer loyalty and brand equity.
You can build a consistent brand by:
Most importantly, you can maximize your DTC marketing results by extensively and consistently collecting marketing data and analyzing it in-house or with a marketing agency like MuteSix.
Robust performance data, preferably in real-time, is your brand’s best tool to ensure your advertising efforts are paying off. The more data you have, the better you can:
DTC marketing, in particular, relies heavily on reliable data, which may require turning to advanced data measurement solutions as the world of data grows more complex given privacy measures. While it can be an investment, remember the more data you feed your DTC campaign, the more likely you will be to meet customer needs and thus business goals.
Every brand can benefit from strong DTC marketing strategies. Even better, you don’t have to go through this journey alone. You can rely on MuteSix’s industry-leading paid media strategists, data analysts, and content producers to produce an efficient omnichannel solution backed by data to ensure maximum success.
With MuteSix, your DTC marketing will become stronger thanks to our signature feedback loop between data, creative, and paid media. Each media channel will learn from and complement each other, maximizing omnichannel success.
Reach out for a complimentary omnichannel audit so that we can start strategizing on the solution that’s best for you.
Sources:
Why First-Party Data is More Important Than Ever and How to Use It | Digital Marketing Institute
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – Definition, Formula, and Example | Corporate Finance InstituteWhat is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)? Definition and Guide | Shopify Blog