Retailers may have taken a hit from the COVID-19 pandemic, with non-essential businesses closed around the world. Online shopping on the other hand has been a lifeline for consumers and non-essential retailers alike, resulting in an extraordinary increase in online sales for businesses. Brands can enjoy similar success by making themselves and their products more widely available to customers online, taking inspiration from the direct-to-consumer (DTC) model.

“One of the biggest challenges CPG brands face right now is reaching their customers without relying on big box retailers to do the heavy lifting of increasing visibility,” says Kate Richling, CMO at MediaMonks. “But the advantage for brands is that you know your customers best. You may not know their specific demographics, but you know their interests, needs, motivations. You know why they ultimately buy your product.”

This highlights another benefit that the DTC model offers to CPG brands: a true understanding of the customer. Not knowing what your customers are feeling at every stage of the customer decision journey can feel like a liability these days, when everyone has been affected by COVID-19 differently. By investing in robust digital ecosystems and personalization, brands can better balance product availability and mental availability, making themselves ready to anticipate and meet consumers’ needs throughout and beyond the pandemic.

Supercharge Transformation in Just Weeks

In a disruptive moment, consumers seek many things from brands: assurance, accessibility, value and more. Now, brands have a responsibility and an opportunity to transform and meet those needs. “There’s going to be a rolling wave of COVID-19’s effects and the different ways we live,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “I think it’s a perfect time to think about how to authentically talk about your business post-pandemic. How do we reposition the brand?”

Going DTC may feel like a long, hefty initiative, but brands can make real moves in only a matter of weeks. In fact, speed over perfection should be the focus for brands as they rapidly shift to accommodate their audience’s new needs—in this case, product availability and a brand who really understands their concerns. And getting started with an ecommerce platform is actually easier than you might think: over at Forbes, MediaMonks Director of Business Growth & Platform Solutions Pablo Stefanini notes that you need only plug into one of the many ecommerce solutions available to get up to speed, followed by iterative testing and rigorous, yet turnkey reporting tools to improve from there.

Connect Ecommerce and Social Experiences

Embracing the DTC mindset isn’t just a matter of having an ecommerce platform set in place and calling it a day. In particular, consider how your brand engages through social media and how you can drive conversation toward conversion. The Forrester report “Lessons In Customer Acquisition: Learn From DTC Disruptors’ Consideration Strategies” notes that “Progressive Pioneers, who make up a disproportionate share of DTC shoppers, are more likely to rely on word of mouth or recommendations to find products online, more likely to say they frequently research products online before buying them online, and more likely to read what other people post about products or services at least daily.”

The finding suggests that building a holistic content strategy that accommodates users throughout the research phase by building social proof is a great way to support this behavior. Think, for example, about testimonials and tips for success written in the comments of a promoted post or the use of UGC shared via social media collected on an ecommerce page. UGC not only demonstrates the value that the brand is already providing to customers but serves as a great way to keep social content fresh and focused on the brand’s community, too.

Market research firm WARC writes that “[DTC brands] have a great product and service offering but beyond that use social media and great end-to-end customer experience to gain and maintain a connection with an increasingly devoted audience who evangelize and socialize the brand.” Likewise, consider the role that social plays in the overall brand experience, and how you can use this ecosystem in addition to your product to lend value to consumers during this time.

Anticipate Consumer Needs with First-Party Data

Many brands are finding now that they require first-party data to better understand the consumer throughout the customer decision journey. In the webinar “Next Wave: Respond & Thive,” hosted by The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s Group and Betaworks Studios, S4Capital Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell anticipated that brands will have to rethink their approach to build up data maturity. “Google and Apple nixing cookies will have huge implications in how clients use first-party data and use those signals to enrich the first-party data they have.”

DTC wield first-party data in a way that helps consumers feel heard—for example, when Quip asks new signups what type of product they would like to see the brand offer in addition to its toothbrushes. While brands might invest in the DTC model as a means to accommodate customers now, the benefits to building a strong personalization infrastructure will extend well into the future, transforming the brand’s understanding and engagement with its audience.

“If you have a DTC platform and are augmented with first-party data, that’s more robust,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “If you have the capability to reach out to people who love your service in a meaningful way with personalization, that’s more robust. Those with success will be those able to communicate with people and be more mindful where they are in the current situation.”

With that in mind, it’s important to note that robust personalization doesn’t necessarily equate to the need for more content and assets. Instead, effective personalization strategies aim to truly understand the customer by recognizing and responding to their unique circumstances. “DTCs are frequently cited as masters of personalization, but—while this may be a major component of subscription boxes such as Stitch Fix or BarkBox—it’s mostly absent from prospect emails,” according to the Forrester report mentioned above. “Out of 22 DTC brands’ initial emails we were able to review via email signup, not a single one featured any personalization beyond use of a first name, and only one DTC even used a first name. Later emails rarely reflected the brand’s awareness of activity on its digital experiences (a male shopper on a fashion DTC would still get emails about men’s and women’s fashions).” As brands transition to a DTC model, they must not diminish impact by limiting opportunities to personalize communication in smart ways.

We’ve long championed for brands to take a DTC-inspired approach to better know their customers. But now, when many retailers struggle to meet supply with demand, the model has become an imperative for businesses to remain connected to the consumer. Through a DTC offering that wields data to provide audiences with the information and solutions they need, brands may not only weather the storm through the COVID-19 pandemic but build loyalty and brand love into the future.

The DTC model is just one way to achieve customer obsession.

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.