Digital Marketing agencies are an invaluable partner in achieving new success, however, not all agencies work the same.
A (Direct-To-Consumer) D2C digital marketing agency requires quite a different approach and can help you get your company on the map in the long run and keep your brand relevant in our ever-changing times.
Expert marketers come with years of experience, handle tons of tedious processes for implementing optimizations/ad campaigns, and utilize lessons learned from other businesses in the same industry. Therefore hiring an SEO agency, or hiring PPC management experts is an appealing option and should be on your mind to consider.
Usually, D2C companies have a strong eCommerce focus. The 2020 hit pandemic has shifted the shopping behaviour worldwide to a more internet-first one. Why this works is because a D2c digital marketing agency empowers a business to sell its products and services directly to customers without the involvement of any 3rd party retailers, middlemen, or distributors. Some of the best direct-to-consumer marketing strategies agencies offer to revolve around search optimization, paid advertising, social media, and content. These not only help you build a strong brand image as it communicates your company’s message to potential employees but also to your customers and competition. Thus, being a great benefit for any business, no matter how new or established.
This brings us to, what are the most successful strategies D2c digital marketing agencies offer which works for D2C marketing:
- A content-first approach
- Map Discovery to Customer Acquisition
- On-page SEO strategies
- Facebook marketing
- Instagram ads
- YouTube ads
- Search PPC Advertising
- Social media commerce
- Search engine “shopping”
- EAT Content
- Use micro-influencers
- Incentivize & promote UGC and word of mouth
- Optimize the Landing page
- Amazon marketing
It is a rat race to keep up with changing consumer expectations. D2C channels provide instant access to consumer data such as buyer behavior and habits.
Take a content-first approach
D2C brands now don’t need to rely on a complex vertical network of buyers, retailer partners, and brick-and-mortar stores anymore but focus more on relying almost entirely on their own distribution system. Their website and online eCommerce platform are where all of their business takes place. This means that a well-done reliable SEO is essential to any D2C digital marketing strategy.
Some statistics claim that 53% of web traffic is generated by the search. 40% of internet revenue comes from searches. Nearly 1/3 of marketers claim search engine optimization has the highest ROI. However, 41% claim it only offers a medium ROI.
A brand’s website can rank higher in search engines when it has good SEO. This includes both technical and on-page SEO. To get traffic from search results, your d2c digital marketing agency must optimize your site to meet the complicated best practices of search engine ranking algorithms Google or Bing. Keyword research, quality content, and backlinks are the most important factors to rank high up in the SERPs. A sound, well-thought-of strategy can help improve each of these.
Map Discovery to customer acquisition
D2C Digital Marketing agencies do this via short-term and long-term growth marketing strategies via search-engine ads/display ads (PPC), Google shopping results, and paid social advertising as well as social media, SEO, and direct traffic. Companies that want both short-term growth and long-term sustainability are usually suggested to employ methods and effective D2C marketing strategies that can be used for both.
Search-engine ads/display advertisements (PPC), Google Shopping Results, and paid social media ads are all good short-term strategies, as paid advertising is a great way to get sales quickly, has a high ROI and almost always works. It can also be used for many business goals such as:
- Help D2C brands compete against dominant competitors
- Give chance to new businesses without any online reputation to establish brand recognition
- Sell products quickly, or in short time frames like holidays, sales and seasonal events
- Generate Cash flow faster than any other strategy
- When new products are often released
- Helps subsidize multi-channel strategies
While long-term direct marketing strategies like SEO and content marketing take slightly longer to produce results, these strategies deliver fantastic results. If done right, SEO and content marketing can passively drive organic traffic for D2C brands’ sites for years! These strategies put brands in front of tens to hundreds of thousands of searchers for high-value keywords that match their brand.
Long-term D2C strategies help with:
- Long-term reliable growth
- Increased Site visibility and widely distributed content.
- Increased traffic and shares across social, referral, and organic segments.
- Increased sales and revenues without spending a lot of money on advertising
- Engage with eCommerce shoppers at all stages of the shopping funnel
- Increased brand recognition
SEO strategies for on-page
Every business wants to rank its website high in search engines such as Google and Bing. This is often a difficult task because search engines use more than 200 signals to rank and index websites. To boost search engine results, specific on-page strategies include changing certain parts. These are SEO elements your d2c digital marketing agency can manage.
Direct-to-consumer brands rely heavily on their eCommerce platforms and lead generation. It is therefore essential to drive traffic towards your website. On-page optimizations are best for this. To seek out what search queries drive traffic to your site and which ones best match your brand, your d2c digital marketing agency must do keyword analysis. Direct-to-consumer marketing involves the identification of low-competition keywords that are relevant to your pages.
SEO D2C marketing strategies should have short-tail keywords that are best suited to high-level cornerstone pages or navbar pages. This may ensure they have the highest-ranking chances. To help net searchers find the most likely conversions, they will include keywords that are intent-driven for eCommerce categories.
Long-tail keywords are also a key part of a D2c Marketing strategy. These keywords have intent and can be searched by search engines at the end. These keywords work best on product pages. Meta-data optimization is an important SEO technique for D2C marketing strategies.
Meta-descriptions are used by search engines to determine page content, establish keywords, and set rankings. Meta-descriptions are crucial in driving click-through rates (CTR) and traffic to the SERP. It is difficult to stress how important it is for SEO to have accurate and keyword-optimized metadata.
Facebook marketing
Facebook ads can target and retarget specific audiences. Many brands are taking advantage of Facebook’s eCommerce feature. Shopify states that over 85 percent of all orders come directly from Facebook.
These are the foremost most popular sorts of ads:
- Photos that show products directly in users’ feeds are called photo ads.
- Stories ads that feature photo/video/multi-media ads in platforms with stories features like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook etc.
- Video ads
- Carousel ads that scroll with product-listings and multiple photos/videos, which look like a horizontal album
- Multiple “cards” are used to advertise a collection of products. These ads act as an instant storefront.
- Messenger ads, like on Facebook Messenger and LinkedIn, allow marketers to sponsor messages and content directly to individuals.
- On-platform shops. These shops are new to Facebook and Instagram. They offer additional opportunities for eCommerce D2C advertising because users can shop/purchase from within the app.
Instagram ads
Instagram is used by more than a billion people. There are also over 25 million business profiles. Instagram has introduced a number of paid advertising formats over the past year, including the 2015 “Shop Now” button and the swipe up feature in stories and IGTV which directs users to the site. Instagram also accepts ads of other types.
YouTube advertisements
People tend to recall video ads better than textual ads. In fact, 50 percent of viewers can recall an advertisement. Even if they don’t interact with it, they will still remember it.
YouTube offers many options to deliver ads. There are skippable ads that allow users to skip ads after 5 seconds. Non-skippable ads are ads less than 30 seconds. Bumper ads are non-skippable, and last up to 6 seconds. YouTube allows you to control your spending and stick to a budget.
PPC Advertising
Digital marketing is not complete without paid advertising. The “pay-per-click advertising has been a huge part of digital marketing. This model can be used in search engines, display-ad networks and social media. It has the highest ROI.
PPC is crucial because it can quickly bring eCommerce sites sales. It’s also one of the most common forms of D2C marketing and it has amazing ROI. Google data has shown that search ads visitors are 1.5X more likely than organic visitors to convert. Businesses can also get up to $2 in revenue per $1 spent. PPC is an important part of D2C marketing.
Search ads, display ads, and social media paid ads are the most popular online types of paid ads.
Social media commerce
Social media is one of the largest, fastest-growing, and most important channels for marketing and even eCommerce. One of the big pros of social media marketing for D2C advertising is that it lets brands extend the reach of their existing content, grow brand visibility off-site, and direct traffic back to their store. Organic social media marketing is like SEO because it is a cost-effective, long-term strategy, meaning you don’t need to have a large budget to get started. It can also improve D2C marketing through SEO by increasing shares and back-link growth.
Popular platforms – like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. – all offer ad networks that use very similar pay-per-click (PPC) models. But instead of keyword bids for search queries, these ads show in user feeds and are based on target audiences, locations, interests, demographics, and more. In fact, the Facebook/Instagram ad network now includes an audience of 2.7 billion people and more.
Social commerce is crucial for D2C marketing strategies since it gives brands a way to expand the reach of their products without 3rd party distributors, marketers, and retailers. Instead, they can sell products off-site using built-in eCommerce tools and ads. Plus, social-media ads offer incredible amounts of data, KPI tracking, and extremely precise targeting with far greater control over audiences and budget.
Social ads vary from platform to platform, but Facebook, Instagram and other platforms offer similar styles that allow brands to set specific goals/objectives, which means businesses can set up ad campaigns specifically for their D2C marketing strategy.
Search engine “shopping”
Google’s “Shopping” tab is Google’s answer for online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. This allows brands to market directly to consumers and gives them extra space to sell their products. Google Shopping campaigns can be used by retailers to promote their online product inventory, “local inventory”, and increase eCommerce sales.
The grid looks like a product listing including additional information such as photos, average user rating (or pricing), brand/manufacturer, description, and pricing. Your d2c digital marketing agency can filter/sort search results using the Shopping tab.
This section of Google offers a huge opportunity for D2C marketing. It’s a fast-growing way to sell products directly and also enhances existing SEO and PPC strategies. Brands must import their product data to a Merchant Center account in order to have products appear in Google Shopping. Shopping ads, also known as Product Listing Ads or PLAs, use Merchant Center product data (not keywords) to determine how and where to rank ads. However, the results are still heavily based on search terms.
Paid-ads can be run with pay-per-click advertising (PPC), which is run through campaigns that are linked to the Merchant Center. It’s possible to have products show up in Google Shopping as organic results even if you don’t have a paid campaign. Shopping campaigns offer the possibility for products to appear on “surfaces across Google”, including Google Images, Google Lens and Google Search.
Content that’s EAT
High-quality content is at the core of D2C marketing since it affects basically every other strategy. Channels like search engines, social media, email marketing, and paid-ads traffic have no value if there’s no content for people to see once they visit your site.
Content is one of the single biggest SEO ranking factors and fundamental to receiving ad traffic for sales on a website. Inbound marketing and SEO are key to generating greater shares, returning/loyal customers, and referral traffic from links. Each piece of content should be built with the consumer in mind. High-quality content should meet the needs of visitors, answer questions, and guide them easily through their shopping journey. It should be well written and thorough. Google uses quality rate guidelines called E-A-T which stands for ‘Expert, authoritative, and trustworthy’ to evaluate the overall quality of a webpage.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines describe that best practices for content must include a useful, information-rich the site, a particular design for a clear conceptual page hierarchy, the website should include appropriate SEO keywords in the content, make pages language wise primarily for users and not for search engines and not indulge in deceiving or fraudulent practices.
It is best to avoid black-hat tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. Always aim to ask 2 questions – 1) Does this help my users? 2) Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist? to ensure the success of your pages. Focus on what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. As part of a site’s D2C marketing strategy, good content should always focus on visitor intent and help to lower the barrier to conversions for shoppers.
Use micro-influencers
You don’t need to reach out to celebrities to influence your brand, but your d2c digital marketing agency may be able to reach out to micro-influencers within your niche. You should partner with people who have 1,000 to 100,000 followers on Facebook. They are often well-known in their area of expertise and receive high engagement rates from their followers. D2C companies can work with micro-influencers in order to publish reviews, write posts about product offers, and share the product with their communities.
Incentivize your customers to spread the word
Encourage customers to invite their family and friends to sign up. The more people they can invite, the greater the chance of winning prizes. An incentive-driven program is very effective. Referrals due to such activities increase manifolds.
Landing page optimization
Landing pages are a great way to get visitors and keep the ones you have. It is an essential element of digital marketing. The landing page is the page on which visitors “land” on your site when they arrive from outside. Optimizing landing pages to improve user experience, load speed, content, and click-through rate (CTR), is an important part of direct-to-consumer marketing. D2C sites are heavily dependent on netting customers and reducing bounce rates.
Optimizing pages, categories, and blogs on your website can help your d2c digital marketing agency offer a better landing experience to traffic from search engines, social media, referrals, and other sources. All of the strategies mentioned above, plus more, such as title-tag/meta description that focuses on accuracy and search intent. Website structure, UI, and performance are all important factors in reducing exits/bounces.
Google encourages marketers to optimize for user experience SEO by adding new metrics to its ranking algorithm. These metrics include page load time, first input delay, cumulative layout shift, and cumulative layout shift. Likewise, Google has also emphasized loads of other web-development elements like mobile-friendliness, navigation/structure, top-heavy advertising, and interstitials. These elements are important for SEO and landing page design. They can have a negative impact on D2C marketing’s conversion rate (CR).
Google data actually claims that UX/speed dramatically affects visitor retention. The bounce rate rises by 32% when page load times increase from 1 to 3 seconds to 6 seconds. By contrast, bounce rates go up to 106% when it takes between 1 and 6 seconds to load a page.
Amazon marketing
For D2C eCommerce, the dominance of showing up and selling Amazon just cannot be ignored. Similar to search engine “Shopping” results, Amazon is one of the single most prominent ways to sell products without a complete vertical system for brick-and-mortar stores, wholesale distribution, partner retailers, etc.
Quite a few marketers don’t agree that the definition of “direct-to-consumer” includes 3rd party marketplaces like Amazon. Regardless, it’s still an option for D2C brands to sell through Amazon but ship themselves (without using FBA). It’s a huge opportunity for eCommerce.
Amazon now represents nearly 8% of the digital ad market and has close to 200 million visitors a month with over 2.5 million sellers who use the platform. Increasing Amazon sales & rankings means using both “SEO” and paid ads; which work together to boost product visibility and conversions. Amazon’s A9 algorithm more or less revolves around concepts like clicks, conversion rate, and reviews. This means boosting these metrics in any way will improve Amazon’s search rankings and sales. That’s why D2C marketing involves things like Amazon A+ content, and sponsored products.
