The overly-crowded and hypercompetitive D2C brands have changed the landscape of the entire market. Being in the spotlight and reaching “rightly” to the consumers is everything. For this, a brand has to apply smart marketing strategies that can directly touch the audience’s hearts – which is quite hard to pull off. So are there any impressive e-commerce D2C brands you saw that blew your mind away? Numbers are slimmer because not all D2Cs have the bandwidth to market themselves. And the ones that have flourished in the competitive market have had brand aggregators to back them up!
Brand aggregators like us always use contextual marketing techniques to promote a D2C brand. When a brand comes under our umbrella, we set our main focus on getting eyeballs and revenue for the brand. Rather than simply deploying some digital marketing tools, we look at the bigger picture.
We start off by asking some pretty fundamental questions:
How do consumers feel about the brand?
How popular is the brand in the market?
Is the strategy giving a competitive advantage?
With the answers as our compass, we firstly pull out the entire history of the brand, get to know its current potential, set marketing communication objectives, lay down the techniques, present the brand on the right platform, and attract the target audience for a potential call-to-action. In brief, brand aggregators like us, get to know the D2C brand – head to toe, before starting off with the marketing process.
At Ergode, we draw up the marketing strategies by assigning a popularity rating to a brand. Based on popularity or brand awareness, we figured there are broadly three types of brands:
Generally Unfamiliar – a brand that is known to a few
Somewhat Familiar – a brand that is known by many, but has the potential to grow its reach
Quite Popular – a brand that already has a brand image among a wide set of audience
These types set the pretext of our marketing strategies. Let’s go deep.
Generally Unfamiliar
When we acquired the D2C brand Morning Star, we knew that the brand needs visibility. We focused on the single objective – increasing the audience. Before the acquisition, the brand managed to get only a few impressions as it did not invest a lot in marketing.
To introduce the brand to the “people,” we kept the audience funnel as wide as possible without using specific demographics or geography as targeting filters. With a 197-million global audience, Amazon became our first choice, as additional support, we picked Walmart for its nearly 386 million annual traffic.
Pivoting our strategy that aims at Amazon users, our team started with the Amazon attribution program as it allowed us to attract customers through off-Amazon marketing. Under off-Amazon, we used two main approaches – ads and brand referral programs. We placed ads on news and blog sites associated with our domain. Knowing that these website visitors are already aware of online purchases as a practice, getting a “click” on our advertisement became easy for us. It was supported by the brand referral program. Our promotion was designed to benefit any user who would promote the brand name on their social media handles. As a result, Morning Star gained a decent percentage of traction.
The off-Amazon was strengthened with Amazon Live. Under Amazon Live, micro-influencers engaged with the audience by speaking about Morning Star. It fetched two benefits – first was gaining an extensive reach and second a stack of quality inquiries. When these influencers addressed the audience, describing our brand, the session participants ended up searching for your brand.
In tandem, we started creating a buzz on popular social media platforms. To gain an audience without spending big money, we designed the first phase of our strategy with an organic outreach campaign. We established our presence on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest and reached out to brand communities and social accounts.
While the social platforms were offering analytics and reports free of charge, the team invested in an attribution management tool to keep track of promotions.
Somewhat Familiar
When a brand is already known to the customers, marketing techniques should aim at nudging the customer to dig deep about the brand.
We executed a similar strategy in the case of Red Cup Living (RCL). As the brand was already familiar to a wide range of consumers, we prepared a whole new set of activities that were directed to communicate how RCL can solve their problems and what value it will deliver.
The marketing objective was beyond reaching the audience and spreading awareness. This time it was about engaging with customers deeply. We decided to go with a selling point-based communication. Such communication always encourages customers to make an educated decision, and when the communication is promoted across geography, it brings home more warm leads for the product. Hence, for RCL our strategies revolved around talking about “how our product can help” and for this, we picked up different selling points of RCL. The outcome was as expected, prospective customers not only started processing the value of the product but also started thinking about buying it.
We fine-tuned the activities by carrying out sponsored brand videos and sponsored product ads to target customers who are already surfing products on a marketplace or in the middle of a purchase. The paid product targeting campaigns also brought our branded products straight up on the category search results. It wasn’t a wonder for us when we collected enough impressions to analyze the data and arrive at a near accurate predictable sales number.
It was important for us to know how many customers considered RCL as a potential product. We tracked two types of customers: first, who searched for party accessories, and second, who bought a similar product in the recent days.
We knew sponsored display ads will do the job for us. As this adoption targets customers based on their interests and shopping behaviors, we could drive preferred actions from both types of customers.
At the end of the first run of the campaign, we knew for sure that if a D2C brand carries an existing market, product targeting is the way to go.
Quite Popular
Aggregators are extremely careful when a brand is known and is performing stably in the market. Such brands actively try to get conversions. In this case, the strategies are designed to determine whether a customer will:
- Hit the “Buy now” button
- Save for later
- Remove from the cart
The key reason aggregators are able to easily decode the consumer behavior and can persuade them to buy the product is the available data from the execution of past strategies – they help in deciding “what makes a customer click the ‘buy’ button.” We had the same advantage when we acquired Vizari.
In this case, we did not put money in sponsored activity, instead, we started working on creating A+ content. Over the years, Vizari Sports has been building great content. This content is prepared with the focus to leave an impact on the customers’ minds. We continued with the same strategy. By crafting optimized titles, product descriptions, encouraging review generation, and visual aids, we won half the battle. Each title of the Vizari accessory got sprinkled with top-performing keywords for gaining dual benefits – attract the Amazon and Walmart’s algorithm to promote them on the search results page and attract a user to click on them and arrive at the product pages.
For a brand like Vizari, we knew that a customer may compare our soccer cleats with the competitors’. Besides, we knew the biggest downside to e-commerce is the absence of touch or feel. At the same time, we couldn’t discount the fact that a customer would like to know whether a shoe has a two-tone design or a well-padded collar. So we worked on adding a spark to the visual aid. We not only introduced high-resolution images but also brought in product videos to mimic the real-world 360-degree viewing experience.
It’s More than Just A Strategy!
A D2C brand owner reading this may think that their way of marketing is clear. However, using these strategies isn’t easy. There are thousands of D2C brands, drafting their marketing plans and discarding them after a month of test runs, as they can’t manage to allocate bandwidth in gaining an understanding of their brand’s condition.
This story changes with the involvement of a brand aggregator like ours. Every brand under Ergode, from Morning Star to Vizari Sports, is going through a successful transformation because we could study the brand, test the brand’s potential, understand how popular they are, lay down the strategies as per the brand’s popularity, identify what’s pulling the brand behind, reach out to the target audience, create performance results, and implement a long-term strategy. With our pool of experts and availability of tools, it becomes easy for us to map a growth path for a brand.
If you want to know how we can promote your brand, feel free to contact me. In case you wish to know how we strategize the holistic growth of a brand, I invite you to read this blog that covers the topic in detail.
Cloverbites By Rupesh Sanghavi 
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