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The DTC Insider - Weekly Newsletter - 19/04 - Issue #2

The DTC Insider - Weekly Newsletter - 19/04 - Issue #2

Where the Big Brands are Investing Their Dollars

Welcome to this issue of The DTC Insider newsletter. 👋

We'll send you weekly emails, every Wednesday, trying our best to deliver great value to your inbox.

In this newsletter, you'll find:

💠 Where are brands spending their ad dollars?

💠 Why your ads are probably not working

💠 Don't trust audience names

💠 The Journey to Building a Successful Skincare Brand for Men

Where are brands spending their ad dollars?

As you can see in the chart below, provided by Northbeam, almost every platform showed an increase in CPC and CPM (Tax Sale campaigns?).

That company has also provided the Month-over-Month Budget Share:

👉 Facebook: 67.74%

👉 Google: 23.46%

👉 TikTok: 4.02%

👉 YouTube: 3.27%

👉 MS Ads: 0.94%

👉 Pinterest: 0.56%

It seems like brands complain about Facebook/Meta Ads performance, but yet it's leading the MoM Budget Share chart 🤨

Why your ads are probably not working

Things have changed...

Most digital marketers were all about leveraging laser-targeted audiences with avg. ads, and it worked.

Why?

Well, I personally think that happened mainly because it was possible to reach a very specific audience…

So it was enough to deliver an "okay" message that made sense for them to see results.

But that doesn't work anymore...

There are many reasons for that, some of them are:

❌ The lack of tracking after iOS 14 was released back in April 2021

🎯 "Targeting expansion" is on by default (and cannot be turned off) on Conversions campaigns. This means Meta will find people beyond the specific target audiences you choose at the ad set level.

Thus, now more than ever, it's really important to level up the marketing and design better ad creatives.

As they will be the real filter to get the right audience to click on the ad and convert.

So, what can you do about it?

1️⃣ Identify your Customer Avatars: how are you going to trigger your audience into action if your message is not even relevant to them? Identify the avatars that actually buy your product for different reasons, and relate to different stories, problems, and desires. How will your product change their lives?

What words/phrases do they use to express their needs, problems, and feelings?

What actions or behaviors attract your audience?

Why should they choose you over your competitor?

2️⃣ Keep in Mind the Levels of Awareness - Are they aware of their problem? Do they know what solutions exist? Have they ever heard about you? Do they see you as the solution to their problem? Do they trust you? Think of this before creating an irrelevant ad for them.

3️⃣ A/B Test Hooks: you'd be surprised about how differently two similar creatives perform when using different hooks. Test multiple ones to see what gets people's attention.

4️⃣ Iterate and optimize: create more of what works. Depending on the budget, some brands are creating 50 new creatives a week. If it sounds like a lot to you, then fine, try creating 5 new creatives a week. Still a lot? Okay, then create 1 new a week, but NOT 1 new a month/year.

TL;DR:

👉 Before this worked: laser-targeted audiences and "okay" ads

👉 Now this works: broad(er) audiences and laser-targeted ads

Don't trust audience names

Last week we were auditing a Klaviyo account, and we saw something was off about one email flow.

It wasn't the email content...

Nor the timing between emails...

Nor the audience...

WAIT! 🛑

It was the audience!

They were using a segment for the Winback email flow that was defined as follows:

Placed Order zero times in the last 90 days OR Ordered Product zero times in the last 90 days
AND Opened Email zero times in the last 90 days.

Did you spot the mistake?

Basically:

This includes EVERYONE who didn't make a purchase in the last 90 days (even if they have never bought)
AND also includes those who didn't open the email in the last 90 days (why should we even include this rule for a winback audience?)

We replaced it for:

Placed Order at least once overall time
Placed Order zero times in the last 90 days.

Did that change the performance at all?

Well, after a few days of that implementation, we now see some traction (before, it was 0% for all metrics) 🙌

The lesson? Double-check your segments to see if the name matches the definition.

SPONSOR

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The same way we have done it for hundreds of DTC brands since 2013.

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The Journey to Building a Successful Skincare Brand for Men

In our latest podcast episode of The DTC Insider, we interviewed Jake Rosenberg.

He is the founder of Krete, a skincare brand with a performance at the core, and a simplistic design that would appeal to the modern man.

Jake suffered a ski accident in 2019.

Leaving him with a scar on his face.

At the time, he felt that there wasn’t a solution for him because the products found were either impractical.

Marketed to women

Or didn’t address his needs.

From there, he learned every aspect of an e-commerce skincare business, product development, supply-chain management, and digital marketing to build Krete.

Here are some of the key topics we covered in this insightful interview:

👉 The Life Adjustments You Must Make To Be Successful

👉 From Inspiration to Creation: How Krete Skincare for Men Was Born

👉 Overcoming Challenges: Product Development, Supply Chains, and the Age-Old Debate of Free Shipping

👉 Digital Marketing That Delivers: Strategies That Work for Krete

👉 Scaling Up: How to Handle Fast Growth in Your Business

👉 Breaking Ground in Men's Skincare: A Startup's Journey

🎧 Tune in to our latest episode: https://thedtcinsider.com/

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