If you found yourself stumbling towards this post, we assume you’re either a newbie interested in understanding the basics of D2C marketing strategy or a seasoned marketer willing to brush up on your basics. All this in hopes of regathering & reassessing your current D2C marketing strategy.
Before we get into the depths of discovering the nitty-gritty of some of the winning D2C strategies and some of the challenges of these strategies, let’s briefly understand what exactly D2C marketing is?
What is D2C Marketing?
A D2C marketing strategy is a complex but sound and detailed game plan to reach your target audience, turning them into customers. It promotes the company and sells the specific product or service directly to the consumer, cutting out the middleman.
There is a significant growth in adapting these D2C marketing strategies, especially among the Millennial & Gen Z population. As a result, the number of businesses seeking these tactics to manufacture, promote, sell and distribute their products/services is constantly increasing, especially in this age and day.
Why Do Millennials Today Prefer to Use D2C Marketing?
Millennials are the generation of people born between the years 1981 to 1996, and they find themselves drawn to choosing D2C brand marketing instead of B2C marketing models. They find it far more alluring and reassuring for the growth of their branding. Not only are the D2C trends in 2021 convenient, but they also speak volumes for other factors involved in the marketing processes, such as being low cost, having authenticity, and giving customers a seamless shopping experience.
Most D2C companies and brands are e-commerce based and thus hold a significant appeal for the entire generation, as they choose to purchase online regularly for all their immediate and long-term needs. The game plan is fairly straightforward, extremely streamlined, and perfectly convenient for today’s majority working-class population.
Top 4 D2C Marketing Strategies
A solidified D2C marketing strategy can thrive if the company/brand fosters an influential presence online on social media platforms. Brands should, therefore, focus primarily on building a strong customer relationship for D2C marketing to work. This process involves working on creating a seamless plan for content marketing for D2C.
Here are the top 4 Working D2C Marketing Strategies
- Strategy 1 | Lead Generation & Nurturing
Employing the use of Inbound marketing techniques is a sure-shot way of generating leads. Additionally, these techniques help nurture leads and introduce a plethora of sales prospects in the future. D2C brands can easily leverage this aspect to build a solid customer base, increasing sales and retaining these customers for a long while.
Lead generation is a complicated process that involves enticing visitors and converting them into leads. Piquing visitors with quality information beneficial for them conveys a deep-rooted level of trust in the brand, which speaks volumes about the hike in purchases.
Lead generation involves writing quality blog posts and creating online content to host a live event to engage with the brand. This strategy establishes a spiking trust between the prospective customers and the brand at every level of the sales funnel.
- Strategy 2 | Email Marketing
We cannot stress enough the importance of establishing an email nurturing sequence to build a solid relationship with your customers, anchoring in them, the need to purchase, come time. Email marketing is a powerful tool if used correctly.
By focusing on creating an exceptional campaign through email marketing, you will generate successful leads.
Make use of these factors to reel in customers through email marketing:
- Keep an updated marketing list
Having the right email address is crucial rather than having large volumes of unwarranted and incorrect email addresses. Wrong or outdated emails IDs could lead to a higher bounce rate in emails. In addition, outdated information could lead to plenty of unsubscription requests. Clean out your email list based on outdated information and wrong email addresses.
- Add to the data you have on your contacts.
As a D2C brand, you must have more data on your customers than just their email addresses. The more information you collect on your potential leads, the better you will customize the messaging to pique their interest and attention. Doing so will create a customer relationship that is mutually dependent and beneficial. Ensure to organize all the data collected relevant for future email marketing campaigns.
- Create a Visual Appeal
Most beautifully thought out and worded emails fail to capture the interest and attention of potential customers even with the right messaging, primarily because of a lack of visual appeal. Using quality and customized design elements for the email marketing campaign will ensure that all eyes are on the campaign and garner more attention span, reinforcing the branding and enticing the customers to purchase.
- Strategy 3 | Influencer Marketing & Creating Branded Content
A D2C marketing strategy will take off successfully, given there is considerable backing in terms of investment through the creation of branded content and advertising through influencer marketing. Direct to consumer brands benefit significantly when other customers deemed trustworthy and influential approve of the product/service.
A great example is how the brand “HelloFresh” is thriving today due to influencer marketing. They have set menus and meal plans that are customizable and changed according to one’s needs weekly. In addition, influencers have enjoyed their partnership with the brand creating branded content based on repeated trials and testing. This partnership sat very well with the American millennial and Gen Z population, thereby increasing their sales.
Select the right influencers for your brand and collaborate with them to create informative, desirous, and sellable content.
- Strategy 4 | Employing SEO Services
If you are a brand seeking a D2C marketing agency to streamline an effective D2C marketing strategy in place, know that all of it is of no use if without an SEO strategy in place.
A majority of D2C brands that implement an SEO strategy seek immediate results. However, SEO itself doesn’t deliver immediate ROI. Instead, it’s a plan for the long haul, and only the patient will be able to scale it using this methodology.
A great SEO strategy involves many aspects such as:
- Conducting keyword research.
- Prioritizing SEO for product/service pages.
- Maintaining a regularly updated blog.
- Investing in the right SEO tools to optimize the simpler but important things such as H1s, image ALT tags, meta descriptions to ensure they rank well on search engines.
It’s not only important to hire the right D2C marketing agency but equally important to hire a Search Engine Marketing company. This decision will make room to eliminate the possible D2C challenges.
If you’d like to know more about the challenges faced by D2C brands, be sure to find out how to tackle them here.
