Must-know Performance Marketing Tips For D2C Brands Stepping Into The New Year

Ashmeen Sabharwal Jan 03, 2023

If there were a billboard for industry sectors, D2C would be in the top 5 for the last 2 years. Considering the oscillations the industry took since its rise, the way forward has always been a little incomprehensible. While marketing, brands are still facing the same problems of audience overlap, low conversion rate, frequent changes in ad strategies, ad sets and audience sets, scaling campaigns without noticing the impact on other metrics, etc.

One of the biggest myths that have continued to prevail is that the higher the traffic, the higher will be the conversion rate. Sadly, but honestly such is not the case with digital marketing. 2022 has been a year of great reflection for both large and small size D2C businesses, especially on their digital spending. With big names spending chunks and small-scale industries using fast-paced tactics, the industry with agencies has had a bumpy ride while navigating through these uncertainties. The need of the hour calls for clarifications and a deeper dive into the kind of adjustments one should make to have meticulous ROI on ad spending.

Such problem statements take us on a step-by-step journey to understand a few important updates that happened throughout 2022 on the meta interface.

Updated Objectives & Additional AI and ML-powered Features

Earlier this year Meta, upgraded its ads manager interface, especially for medium and small-scale businesses to navigate through it in a refined manner. In its efforts to do the same, Meta reduced the number of ad objectives to 6 broad categories, namely, Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, Promotion and Sales. Marketers can now use these refined objectives to craft effective ad strategies that can be quantified without getting puzzled by numerous metrics.

Meta’s launch of Advantage+ shopping campaigns to help advertisers reach more prospective shoppers this holiday season is a great try for marketers and small and medium-sized business owners. It largely relies on automation to find the right audiences for your ads, as opposed to intricate, manual targeting. Advantage+ shopping campaigns are designed to simplify the ad creation process, by taking care of the audience targeting and ad creative elements for you. You just select the campaign dates and budget and upload your creative assets and Meta’s machine learning-powered processes will do the rest. While it might seem like putting a lot of trust in Meta’s system, according to them it works, and we suggest having an expert once you have tried it out.

Meta recently conducted a test with 31 advertisers, and it saw an average 17 per cent improvement in cost per acquisition and a 32 per cent jump in return on ad spend (ROAS) compared with campaigns not using Advantage+ shopping campaigns.

Another introduction was Instagram multi-advertiser ads, which allow brands to get discovered by people who are in a shopping mindset and have engaged in some form with the brand before. This format leverages Meta's machine learning to show ads that we think may be interesting to people at the moment and help people discover, consider, and buy products. Enabling the multi-advertiser format makes your ad eligible to appear alongside ads from multiple advertisers, including in some instances, ads from related or complementary businesses (for example, a wedding dress ad next to a wedding cake ad).

Conversational Commerce is here to stay!

We believe it is of paramount importance to use Meta’s messaging APIs to drive engagement with their customers. We have had case studies of clients who have completed entire purchase cycles by providing personalised shopping experiences like you would at a retail store. In a recent study commissioned by Meta, 55 per cent of consumers said that they feel personally connected to a brand by messaging them and that 59 per cent of people prefer messaging brands due to a faster response time. So whether you make a sale through it or not, your customer engagement and experience rely heavily on conversational commerce.

As a certified consultant who speaks and provides insights to 100+ D2C brands, below are some tips and ad strategies that brands, especially, D2C must use to ace in 2023.

● Not a popular opinion, but encourage using broad audience sets rather than going very detailed

● Using platforms like FB, IG, or Messenger to engage with brands and create a personalised experience

● Simplified account structure to develop better learning of campaigns and get better results

● Experimenting with your audiences continuously to understand what is working well in terms of audience and creatives

● Emphasising a gradual scale-up of 10-15 per cent every 2 days and ensuring that the same is done in the morning to evaluate its full-day performance

● The most frequently asked query on how to choose an interesting audience set and the answer is to use relevant keywords. If the USP of the brand is natural ingredients and cruelty-free, then terms related to it can be targeted

● Use CTX (Click To Messenger / Instagram / WhatsApp) to talk! It is vital to encourage conversational campaigns, especially for ecommerce brands. Growing brands can incorporate WATI (WhatsApp Team Inbox) to upscale their business and encourage proper management

New features, new campaigns and automated marketing are some upcoming trends to watch out for as we step into the new year, but the insights of a marketer shall always remain fundamental to helping brands navigate the plethora of tools.