Mumbai: In today’s times, Direct-to-consumer is an extremely exciting space, primarily because there are so many interesting brands coming up in multiple industry verticals. Right from food to technology to health and many others, there are home-grown D2C brands making it big while raising investors' money handsomely. And we are seeing some very interesting products and services rolled out for the end-users.

Here are some focus areas on the top digital marketing activities that the D2C brands need to keep in mind when they want to market their products and services in 2022 –

Advertising on Google, Facebook, and Instagram

While this is something that most D2C brands are already doing to a very large extent, there is still a big gap in the way these campaigns are executed. Funnel wise break up of your ad campaigns on these platforms is going to be very crucial to be able to run profitable ad campaigns for your brand. In our experience of working with D2C startups, we have always advised having - remarketing campaigns right from the start, campaigns focused to maximise conversions, and using lookalikes as much as possible.

Retention Marketing

I primarily would like to talk about the usage of user engagement tools that help you retain. You want to focus on the lifetime value of your customers and while you do that the prime objective of your campaigns should be to use sophisticated tools like Webengage to bring the audience over and over again to your website and to have them purchase from you more than once in a year as per your product life-cycle.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

While D2C brands have spent quite some money in the acquisition game, the bleeding cost of sale has always been quite an important matter of discussion. In today’s time and age when the bottom line is super important from day zero, it becomes imperative that you focus on the conversion rate of the website as much as the number of conversions on your website. Reports which will help you understand where your users are dropping off and where you probably need to do a quick fix need to be generated regularly.

Do not take an SEO any less seriously than earlier

SEO is still one of the primary factors that will give you a long-term arbitrage on your cost per sale or cost of acquisition. This is primarily because when you are spending a lot of money in your acquisition campaigns using advertising models there is a very good chance that your organic growth will help you lower the overall cost for acquisition in your acquisition spree and help you remain sustainable in the long term. In our experience working with several D2C businesses, long-tail keywords with high intent and medium competition work best.

Social Media Marketing

Connecting with your customers is going to be much more important in 2022. With customers determining the persona of a brand depending on the kind of content they publish on their social media handles. If you want to be a cool brand you will have to have cool content on your social media channels for your customers to take interest and be connected to your brand in the long term. Start talking to your customers like a real person and not a suited-up brand.

Similarly, the kind of influencers that your brand intends to associate with is going to matter a lot. The kind of content your influencers have been pushing is going to also affect the kind of personality you’re going to build for your brand in front of your customers. Personalisation, thought leadership, and focusing on building a strong brand image will separate you from the crowd.

Being present omnichannel

Being present omnichannel is going to be as important in 2022 as never before. This is primarily because of the kind of user behaviour that customers today have started from checking out a product online but probably going off-line and purchasing the product. You have to be in sight so that you are in the top of mind recall for your customers And hence being available at their favourite offline or local stores is going to impact your sales numbers more than ever.

Creative Packaging

Having great packaging for your products will be important. This is primarily because no matter how good or bad the eventual product is, the way it is packaged paints the first impression for the customer.

(Deep Mehta is the co-founder of DigiChefs. The views expressed in this column are personal, and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)