How important is social media to a DTC marketing strategy?

Undoubtedly, the rise of ecommerce and digital platforms have transformed the conventional landscape of marketing. Gone are the days when businesses used to engage middlemen to promote their products and services. Now it is time for direct-to-consumer advertising to directly engage with customers. Social media is fast becoming a key tactic for DTC or Direct-to-Consumer marketing. We will discuss in this blog why social media is an important pillar for this form of marketing and how we can leverage its potential to secure marketing goals.
Let’s get the ball rolling!
Before we dig deeper to address our questions in detail, it would be appropriate to have a brief glimpse of what DTC marketing is.

DTC or Direct-to-Consumer marketing is a form of marketing strategy wherein businesses and manufacturers sell their products directly to end-consumer. Therefore, there is no need for middlemen resellers such as departmental stores or third-party online retailers.
In this consumer marketing strategy, businesses and manufacturers have more control over various business operations such as branding, pricing, distribution, and customer experience.

Corporations and organizations are employing multiple DTC strategies. Some commonly-used strategies are given below:

Out of all these DTC strategies, we will restrict our debate to the importance of social media in strengthening the direct consumer marketing strategy.

There are many examples where DTC brands have used social media effectively to establish their direct contact with end consumers. They have built a trustable reputation and are enjoying healthy business growth. You can take inspiration from these DTC brands:

Now, we come to our main point of discussion which is how important is social media for DTC marketing. Let’s dig deeper into the question.

Social media is no longer a mere platform to check in with your friends and relatives. It has become a powerful marketing tool. Social media enables businesses to build their brand identity, engage customers, ensure loyalty, and remain ahead of their competitors.
When it comes to ecommerce, social media offers unparalleled marketing power and outreach. With more than 4.9 billion social media users which are estimated to reach 5.86 billion by 2017, social media offers marketing opportunities that are vast, enormous, and extremely cost-effective.
The same is the case with DTC marketing. Social media has become an integral channel and enjoys a cardinal position in implementing DTC advertisement strategies. Through social media, DTC brands can promote their values, build their brand personality, accrue massive marketing benefits, and narrate their stories to end consumers.

It is helping businesses secure their marketing goals in numerous ways.

As stated earlier that social media platforms provide businesses with extensive outreach that helps organizations to showcase their products and services to a wide range of audiences across the globe.
If businesses develop engaging content and design effective social media marketing customized for each platform, they can enhance the visibility of their brands. This enhanced visibility and awareness would help them to directly contact end-consumers. Similarly, end-consumers can also easily discover and recognize their brands, which is a key goal of every DTC marketing campaign.

Various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. enable businesses to engage their audience directly. Through comments, shares, likes, and direct messages, DTC brands can ensure that they have a deeply motivated and right kind of audience.
Furthermore, through engaging in direct conversation, prompt responses to the inquiries and concerns of end consumers, and other tools, businesses can establish relationships with their customers. Social media in this way helps foster brand loyalty and advocacy.

Social media offers two-way communication that helps businesses develop personalized experiences for their end users. Various platforms of social media ensure that you can connect to existing and potential customers.
These customers use different tools to share their feedback, raise objections or even recommend suggestions as well. These feedbacks and suggestions help organizations design and implement services and products which are aligned with customers’ needs and requirements. You can also use this first-party data to run personalized and extremely targeted DTC advertisement campaigns.

Social media offers platforms for sharing and distributing informative content that businesses generate for showing the values, personality, message, and story of their brands. Business houses can share blog posts, videos, infographics, and other material for educating end consumers.

Multiple studies show that one of the quickest means for engaging customers is the use of social media marketing, in particular video marketing.
Some statistics make this point clear:

These statistics show how much engaging is social media. If you design social media content, particularly short videos, you can engage a wider audience scattered across the globe.

Business houses, in their bid to strengthen their DTC marketing outreach, can leverage the potential of social proof and influencer marketing. In this way, they can increase their credibility, and reach new audiences.
For instance, all birds, a show-selling DTC brand, collaborates with micro-influencers. These influencers share credible news, and wear the shows of All birds, and thus help in promoting their products.

The running of ads and promotions is another way in which social media helps this end consumer-oriented marketing strategy. For instance, you can run Facebook and Instagram ads to showcase your products, underline your unique value proposition, and can offer discounts as well.
It is worth noting here that Facebook and Instagram ads are highly effective for your DTC marketing goals such as an increase in brand awareness, leads generation, enhanced organic traffic, and a boost in sales. You must deploy social media-based ads and promotion because they are cost-effective and offers extensive outreach to a diverse audience.

Since social media platforms provide businesses with deeper and sustained engagement, they ensure higher conversion rates as well.
Reports suggest that more than 80% of Instagram users say that they purchase or try a product recommended by Instagram ads.

Users on social media can freely share their reviews, testimonials, feedback, and concerns on the platforms. DTC marketing experts can use this user-generated content for leveraging their marketing goals. User-Generated Content (UGC) is a great way to establish credibility and earn trust from would-be customers. This is one of the reasons why DTC marketing professionals deploy social media for their ultimate marketing targets.

Some social media platforms have integrated ecommerce features in their apps, for instance, TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, Facebook Shops, Twitter Shop Module, YouTube Shopping, etc. This feature helps brands directly sell their products to social media users and thus provide a seamless shopping experience.
DTC brands can take advantage of social commerce features and thus offer a seamless and user-friendly purchasing experience for their customers.

More importantly, social media platforms provide tracking tools and metrics to measure the success of DTC marketing efforts. Various metrics such as clicks, impressions, conversions, engagement, and return on ad give invaluable insights and data to identify weak areas and design and implement effective DTC marketing strategies.
In conclusion, social media has become a vital pillar of DTC marketing strategies. It helps businesses secure wider audience reach, directly engage their customers, build brand personality, promote brand awareness, and more. Hence, if you are looking for customer acquisition, enhanced traffic, improved conversion rates, and boost overall business growth, leverage the potential of social media in DTC advertisement.
But how can one leverage the potential of social media in furthering DTC marketing goals and targets?
Here is the answer!

You must consider the following factors for the optimum utilization of social media for crossing marketing milestones:

In direct-to-consumer advertisement, choosing the right social media platform is extremely important. First, you need to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience. Their interests, behaviors, demographics, pain points, and more importantly, which social media platforms they love to scroll.
Now, post content and other DTC advertisement on that platform where your target audience is the most active and responsive. For instance, if your target audience is millennials, you must run DTC advertising campaigns more on TikTok and Instagram rather than on Twitter or LinkedIn.

This is also an important DTC marketing strategy in running an effective social media marketing campaign. You can promote products and services in various content types such as eBooks, podcasts, blog posts, videos, webinars, etc. Further, you must adjust and restructure content suitable for every social media platform and format for maximizing its reach and optimizing results.

UGC is generally the result of satisfied customers who share with their friends and followers how excellent products and services your brand offer. For every DTC brand, User-Generated Content is gold. This serves many purposes. It is social proof, builds brand trust, and fosters a sense of community around your brand.
You should encourage customers to create and share content linked to your brand. It is recommended that you should incentivize your customers to leave comments, like the posts, and share them to make your brand a trusted name in the ecommerce world.

Social media provide your customers with the quickest and fastest way to express their issues, register complaints or show any concern. For ensuring the optimum ROI from a social media-based DTC advertisement campaign, you should keep a keen eye on mentions, comments, reviews, and messages. Your prompt response and regular engagement would go a long way in building trust among customers. You can use various options such as chatbots, FAQs, and other self-service options to ensure excellent customer service.

Influencers have earned the trust of their followers. They have a huge and loyal following. Influencers can easily change the opinion and purchasing behaviors of their followers.  They have a highly-defined niche that helps DTC brands leverage influencers’ shoutouts for promoting their products and services.
When potential customers encounter their influencers showcasing a particular product, they readily make up their minds to purchase that particular product. In this way, DTC brands can amplify the reach of their brands to a wider and more diverse audience with a massive prospect of generating sustained leads and enhancing sales.

With every passing day, social media is becoming vital for robust direct-to-consumer marketing strategies. The various social media platforms are a great help to DTC brands, DTC marketing professionals, and experts as they help in gaining invaluable data and insight as well as many other benefits.
If your business has successfully built a strong social media presence because of an effective and result-oriented social media marketing campaign, this is indeed a great marketing asset. It would help you earn brand loyalty, drive organic traffic, and secure many other marketing targets.
The optimum utilization of social media demands various steps such as selecting the right platform, maintaining regular engagement, prompt addressing of complaints, prioritizing user-generated content, and utilization of influencer marketing, among others.
There is no denying that social media is extremely important for DTC marketing goals and targets, and every DTC brand must develop and implement platform-specific social media advertisement campaigns.