It’s no secret that the key to running a successful multichannel brand is assembling a digital media team that optimizes your creative, and media targeting and your channels to move consumers towards the path to purchase. Over the years, media teams have operated in a very different way than is required for success in the current landscape. However, witnessing how darling D2C brands are winning has made it easier to pick up on marketing efforts that just aren’t quite right.
Whether your brand has an in-house media team or leans on an agency to execute these efforts, you should never overlook several important strategy factors. We commonly see these three areas where digital teams are missing the mark and, more importantly, missing opportunities.
Prioritizing Social Commerce
Whether they know it or not, your digital media team is playing an important role in eCommerce. Historically, digital teams have generated brand awareness using social feeds as a brand gateway only. If your team is still operating this way, they are missing the mark. The shift in shopping behavior has consumers leaning into mobile discovery and purchases. As a result, social feeds should be seen as shopping aisles, and no longer focus only on brand awareness.
Cultivating social commerce truly begins with content—that is designed to convert! Think about the last time you were scrolling your social feeds and what made you stop scrolling. What immediately grabbed your attention? As a brand, you have about one and a half seconds to capture the attention of a potential customer. Your visuals need to be disruptive and break through the noise.
A common mistake is video creative that doesn’t even show the product until the end, if at all. Avoid this missed opportunity and make sure the product is at the forefront.
When content planning, prioritize the product-first message. Show your product immediately in a value-driven way. How will someone benefit from your product? How does your product fit into their lives? What problems does it solve? Create a compelling visual and message that quickly communicates valuable details about your product.
Give scrollers a full picture out of what to expect from your product. Has your product been well received by a group of customers? Talk about it. Show before and after, share results from satisfied customers, and showcase positive testimonials.
Getting Real Value with Your Digital Spend
What is the real value of your media spend? More often than not, digital teams lack accurate reporting in real time to fuel their decision-making process. Investing in vanity metrics like follower counts or viewer stats doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t telling you anything about your consumers’ purchasing preferences and intent. Your spend should tell you where your consumers are engaging online, where they’d like to buy, and how you successfully encouraged them to do so.
To do so, digital teams must ensure proper use of the pixel. This allows you to collect the data you need to track conversions, optimize ads, build targeted audiences for future ads, and remarket to anyone who has taken some kind of action to engage with your brand digitally. Pixel monitoring is crucial so you don’t miss out on any of these key insights.
Once you gather these real time insights, your media team should compare the performance of purchase intent across different channels and use that insight to drive more sales. Each additional campaign should make your next campaign smarter. Adding layers of optimization will help you successfully target niche audiences, a tactic D2C companies employ and win with. These coveted insights can give your team a leg up when optimizing the sales channel through social commerce.
Hitting the Target (Audience)
If your media team isn’t diving head first into hyper-segmented niche audiences, then they need to start doing so now. Audiences built for brand awareness are broad, and in the past this made sense as media teams were focused on casting a wider net to communicate to the masses. However, targeting niche audiences that communicates a deep understanding of consumer pain points drives conversions.
Targeting needs to be granular. For example, imagine your shoe brand just launched a new pair of limited edition red sneakers in collaboration with a celebrity. A niche audience should be based upon a previous campaign on celebrity driven sport apparel launches. Last time you ran a campaign around a similar audience, you learned that this audience: (1) engages on YouTube, (2) responds to celebrity endorsements, (3) are located in the midwest via geolocation data, and (4) prefers to buy on Zappos. You can now optimize your digital spend on YouTube advertising, driving to multi-retailers that include Zappos, and focus on the midwest. Narrowing in on specific data for buyers gives you levers you can pull to drive purchase intent.
The most successful D2C brands know this and are capitalizing on it. Collect the data needed in order to segment these niche audiences and find the right groups that resonate with your product. Understanding consumer preferences, shopping behavior, and more detailed demographics will allow your media team to build audience segments that are more likely to purchase.
Putting social commerce as a priority, leaning on real-time analytics reporting, and building segmented, niche target audiences are just a few of the ways to steer your media team towards the right track. If present-day media teams can grasp these best practices, that’s when your marketing team will start bringing in eCommerce wins together.
