What brands need to unlock growth

Your weekly dose of growth marketing news & tactics for DTC brands.

Author

The DTC Insider
February 12, 2025

In partnership with

Welcome to this issue of The DTC Insider newsletter. 👋

We strive to deliver the latest growth marketing news and trends in the DTC space straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

Topics we'll cover today:

💠 Meta's AI-Powered Advantage+ Updates
💠 What Brands Need To Unlock Growth
💠 The Power of Creator-Led Brands

Turn your Shopify brand’s email marketing into a profitability engine

  • Increase welcome flow revenue by 50%

  • Generate 15% more repeat purchases

  • Send shoppers to branded storefronts with a 20% conversion rate

Did your brand grow in 2024?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Meta's AI-Powered Advantage+ Updates

Big news for advertisers!

Meta is rolling out new AI-driven tools to help businesses maximize their campaign performance. Here’s what’s coming:

⤷ A streamlined Advantage+ campaign setup
⤷ Advantage+ leads campaigns
⤷ Expanded opportunity score

Let's go through each of these.

A streamlined Advantage+ campaign setup

With this update, advertisers won’t have to choose between manual or Advantage+ campaigns. Instead, sales, app, and leads campaigns will all benefit from AI optimizations by default.

To make this clearer, Meta is adding an Advantage+ "on" label to campaigns using AI-driven audience, placement, and budget settings.

Oh, and one more change: Advantage+ shopping campaigns are getting a new name. They’ll now be called Advantage+ sales campaigns to better reflect their broader impact.

Advantage+ leads campaigns

According to Meta, many advertisers have asked for Advantage+ automation to extend beyond shopping and apps. Now, it’s happening.

The new Advantage+ leads campaigns will help businesses find high-quality leads more efficiently. Early tests, Meta says, show a 10% lower cost per qualified lead when using Advantage+ optimizations.

Expanded opportunity score

This tool assigns a 0-100 score to show how well a campaign is set up for success. Plus, it provides real-time recommendations, like enabling Advantage+ AI features.

Meta claims that early tests show that advertisers who follow opportunity score recommendations see a 5% median decrease in cost per result.

--
Follow me on LinkedIn for more growth marketing content in the e-commerce space.

Want to Make 2025 Your Brand’s Best Year Yet?

In 2024, we audited over 120 brands, and we found that many of them have been stuck in a revenue plateau for 2, and even 3 years.

So, the question is: will you stay in the same place for yet another year, or will you draw a line in the sand and start a new chapter for your brand?

At BSR Digital, we have just 1 spot left for brands that want to unlock the next level of growth.

Will you be one of them?

What Brands Need To Unlock Growth

A few years ago, looking at the in-platform metrics (ie. Meta/Google Ads) was enough.

Those days are over.

Back then, on the Ads Manager, we saw a very good picture of what was going on for a brand:

⤷ Full-funnel data
⤷ Accurate tracking
⤷ Laser-targeted audiences

The problem?

Many brands are currently trying to grow while operating almost exactly that way.

And I say "almost" because now they add...🥁 🥁 🥁 

...an attribution tool...
...AND a thousand creatives.

Problem solved? Not really.

To keep growing, brands need to start paying attention to what's happening off-platform.

The thing is, there's a lot to look at and it's very easy to get lost and confused.

That's why I put together this framework.

To help you understand what to focus on to unlock the next level of growth for your brand.

Let's go through the framework!

It's divided into 4 phases:

⤷ Diagnose
⤷ Discover
⤷ Design
⤷ Deploy

Diagnose

Conduct a comprehensive audit of the entire customer journey, including off-platform touchpoints, to uncover hidden bottlenecks and stagnation points.

Key Activities:

⤷ Map the customer journey from initial touch to repeat purchase (using tools like Lifetimely)
⤷ Evaluate existing strategies to pinpoint gaps and inefficiencies
⤷ Analyze sales data to identify low and high sales peaks

Here's an example of a simple customer journey map we did for a client:

In this case, we're looking at the Product Journey report, where we can understand what product type customers typically buy in each order.

Discover

Identify untapped opportunities both within and outside the usual ad/email channels.

Key Activities:

⤷ Highlight opportunities for offer optimization and customer retention improvements
⤷ Look at seasonality or cyclical trends that may signal hidden revenue windows
⤷ Gather qualitative insights from customer feedback and competitive analysis

Design

Develop a tailored growth strategy that includes both a 12-month strategic plan and tactical 90-day roadmaps to keep the initiative laser-focused.

Key Activities:

⤷ Craft a 12-month action plan aligning on- and off-platform initiatives
⤷ Break this down into focused 90-day roadmaps that target specific growth areas
⤷ Define KPIs that matter off-platform (ie. customer journey friction points, time between orders)

Deploy & Optimize

Implement the roadmap while continuously monitoring performance and making agile adjustments.

Key Activities:

⤷ Roll out initiatives across ad/email platforms and off-platform touchpoints
⤷ Use regular check-ins and analytics to refine tactics and measure improvements
⤷ Iterate the process to ensure sustained growth and long-term strategic alignment

It's a lot, I know.

But TBH, it's what it takes to achieve the next level of growth for most brands I know.

—
If you’re looking for a growth partner that helps you make 2025 your best year yet, let's chat.

The Power of Creator-Led Brands

What happens when a creator with 8M followers starts a brand?

Let me put it this way:
⤷ Faceless brands: can still succeed
⤷ Those w/founder content: higher leverage
⤷ Creator-led brands: exponential growth 🚀🚀🚀

Don't believe me?

Tune in to this episode of The DTC Insider podcast, where I interviewed Cody Allen, co-founder of Cuso Cuts.

And listen to their story.

Check it out 👇

We discussed:

👉 The impact of co-founder Jack’s influence on brand success.
👉 How Cuso Cuts achieved over 20% YoY growth during Black Friday.
👉 Content marketing as a powerful driver of customer acquisition.
👉 Adapting to consumer needs: The shift from knives to seasonings.
👉 The role of natural ingredients in elevating home cooking.
👉 Community engagement as a key factor in brand loyalty.
👉 Prioritizing profitability over aggressive growth in 2025.
👉 The complexity of sales attribution and multi-touchpoint tracking.
👉 Appealing to home cooks vs. professional chefs in brand positioning.
👉 The strategic approach to transitioning from online to retail.

Tune in:

📺 YouTube
🎧 Apple
🎙️ Spotify
🌐 Website

More episodes our listeners love:

Also Happening in the DTC space

Promote your Business to 11,000+ People in the DTC Space

The DTC Insider newsletter + podcast reaches a highly qualified audience of DTC founders, directors, and marketers. Learn more about the sponsorship opportunities we offer for your business.

What did you think of today's newsletter?

Your feedback helps us create the best newsletter possible.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Show us some love!

If you love the value delivered on our podcast, please subscribe and leave us a review.