Challenge the Challengers with These DTC-Inspired Strategies

It can be tough to adapt to the relentless pace of change in digital. From a need to meet and engage with customers on new channels to the rise of digitally native competitors, there are many ways that established, legacy brands can improve their digital maturity—and they might begin that process by taking inspiration from what’s worked with DTC brands in particular, whose close connection with consumers is arguably unmatched.

The secret? Adopt a challenger mindset. DTC brands have honed their digital prowess by necessity. Newer and lacking the big marketing budgets of legacy brands, they’ve shifted focus away from broad-reaching TV spots to instead focus on digital marketing. Through this practice, they’ve developed measurable marketing strategies that aid in discovery and are backed by data.

Shift Toward Data-Driven Messaging

“DTCs opt for targeted appeal over mass appeal (at least initially),” write Ryan Skinner and Sarah Dawson in the Forrester report, “Lessons In Customer Acquisition: Learn From DTC Disruptors’ Awareness Strategies.” “Only when DTC brands more firmly establish themselves do we see them branching out into more expensive channels like broadcast TV.”

Remco Vroom, Head of Business Growth and Platforms Solutions at MediaMonks, notes the role that experimentation has played in getting to know what resonates with their customers, helping them increase the effectiveness of communication through fresh content. “Brands can learn from them by getting to know their audiences better, getting a feel for them how they operate,” he says. “In this area, these smaller, digital-native companies aren’t afraid to try things out, producing hundreds of pieces of content to see what sticks, then taking those things that were successful and building more content.”

It’s a strategy that we’ve used with skincare brand Gladskin, enhancing the creative of their awareness campaign by mixing (and remixing) an initial set of assets, seeing how they performed with different segments. Depending on the performance, we tweaked the creative even further while also reassessing the media spend for those segments, incrementally zeroing in on the most effective and interested groups per each channel. The tactic provides a dependable way for budget- or resource-strapped brands to optimize creative and better understand their audience while avoiding the strain that even digital native brands may feel in a need to refresh branding and content at an increased rate.

Elevate Social’s Role in Your Marketing Strategy

The focus on the role of data above should drive one point home for brands that aim to take a page out of the DTC handbook: they must not treat social media as an afterthought. Instead, they must elevate the role of social media earlier in the planning cycle.

With a leaner and more agile approach, brands can strike close, one-to-one connections with consumers through smart use of data that leaves their audiences feeling heard. Yet bigger brands limit themselves by focusing their investment on traditional formats that focus on broadcast rather than the interactive elements of newer social channels like TikTok.

“Traditional formats like TVC or OOH are safe bets for the larger companies, because it’s something they’ve done for the past 20 years,” says Vroom. “They tend to put millions into these channels and pennies in social media, but that’s not substantial enough if one of your goals is to connect with your audience.”

There are a couple ways that brands can adopt a challenger mindset by upping their social strategy. One way brands can adopt a challenger mindset is by helping consumers see themselves in the brand by breaking down barriers between audience and what goes on behind the scenes. For example, our influencer activation team IMA worked with womenswear brand Noisy May to help the brand partner connect with six regional influencers, who each designed a series of products for a capsule collection titled #NoisyMayInfluenced. The influencers documented and shared every step of the design process, reaching their target audience in an authentic and community-driven way.

Consider Building Brand Passion by In-Housing

Not every brand is going to be so radical in breaking down the barriers between product development and their audience. But they can take initial steps to a greater strategic investment in social by building a task team dedicated to seeking the potential benefits of tapping into novel, new formats and user behaviors on social platforms, which Vroom compares to the trend of brands taking their creative in-house.

“If you want to be successful, you have to bring the message really close to you—which is key for new channels like that,” Vroom says. When brands give creative freedom to passionate teams like this, they can break free from tradition while still remaining true to their core values.

And that gets at the heart of what legacy brands must do to keep up with digitally mature brands: connect authentically with consumers where and when it matters most. Through adopting data practices that inform the creation and delivery of content to elevating social media within the marketing mix, brands can do more than just weather disruption from competition—they can cut become challengers in their own right.