Many businesses are now taking a direct-to-consumer approach to improve customer experiences and revenue. This approach also involves driving brand awareness and acquiring customers online. We have a few tips for your direct-to-consumer strategy with the example of how Pinterest can play a role in your marketing plan.
About 79% of all U.S. customers are shopping online, and 15% buy online weekly. This rise in e-commerce has led many businesses to adopt a direct-to-consumer strategy with more marketers focusing on direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel and plans.
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In this article, we breakdown the direct-to-consumer model and how it is now an important part of businesses master plan, with tips on how you can get started.
What Is a Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) Strategy?
The direct-to-consumer strategy is a model where retailers and marketers promote and sell their products or services directly to the end consumer without any distributors, wholesalers, or third-party intermediaries. In an era where customer expectations continue to rise, selling directly to them is one way to guarantee a seamless customer experience, as opposed to being at the mercy of your retailers and distributors.
DTC allows brands to convey their message in the brand’s tone, which helps create brand recall. The strategy also helps brands collect customer data responsibly, which helps to build and maintain a relationship with their customers.
What Are the Benefits of DTC?
Legacy and upcoming brands are toying with the idea of DTC for several reasons listed here:
- Margins are much smaller in the multichannel retailer model. Direct-to-consumer is a win-win for both customers and sellers, as costumers can buy at a lower price (as intermediaries are excluded) and manufacturers can reduce capital expenditures, thereby improving margins.
- The businesses are no longer restricted to a geographical location or distributors’ reach, when they sell their products online, hence expanding their market reach.
- Brands have better control over how they merchandise and advertise their products. Using the DTC model, they no longer need to rely on sales reps or advertisers to promote their products or worry about the placement of their products.
- The direct-to-consumer strategy creates an opportunity for brands to collect an incredible wealth of customer data. Leveraging digital tools and channels can help companies pull together insights on customer preferences, behavior, their purchase journey, demographics and pain points.
- With better customer information and control over how they sell their products, brands can foster lasting relationships with their customers. They can thus concentrate on customer satisfaction, overall customer experience and tailor personalized experiences for them.
To go the DTC route, brands begin by optimizing their content for search engines, such as Google, and promote it through social media channels, such as Facebook and Instagram. Pinterest, on the other hand, is a social channel that is also a visual platform to discover new ideas and products. It is slowly gaining popularity and is much more economical to advertise on, compared to most social media marketing platforms.
Let’s see why Pinterest could be the next step in your DTC strategy.
Learn More: Why Marketers Must Build a Pinterest-Based Strategy
Why Pinterest for Your Direct-To-Consumer Strategy?
Pinterest is a discovery and inspiration platform where users can explore innovative ideas, research about their upcoming purchase, ‘see’ what they are going to buy and connect directly to a brand.
Here is why you could leverage Pinterest as part of your DTC strategy.
According to the Pinterest business blog:
- Pinterest uses visual content to replicate the shoppers’ in-store browsing process digitally.
- It is a great place for brand building and attracting new customers with 97% non-branded searches!
- A typical shopper starts searching and saving pins, three months before purchase. Businesses can thus hook the customers in the search phase of their online purchase path.
- Video marketing on Pinterest is an excellent idea as videos don’t have a lifespan here and re-emerge from time to time, making your strategy timeless.
According to Digiday, platforms like Facebook, are falling out of DTC favor because of rising advertising costs and limitations on customer insights.
Pinterest can indeed play a significant role in your marketing mix, provided you play it right.
Learn More: How Amazon and Pinterest Plan to Change the Search Advertising Industry
Here is how you can create your DTC strategy with Pinterest.
How to Create a Direct-To-Consumer Strategy with Pinterest?
Here are some pointers that can assist you with your direct-to-consumer strategy on Pinterest.
1. Brand Discovery
Pinterest is extremely useful for the top of the funnel traffic and lead generation. Being a social platform and a visual search tool, Pinterest offers businesses to market their products to users who are already engaged (or are for something).
“Pinterest is uniquely positioned as a platform for brand education and visual discovery. Its focus on imagery and user-driven content architecture gives social marketers a powerful opportunity to tell their story, co-create with their communities and drive purchasing decisions,” said Justyn Howard, CEO, and founder of Sprout Social.
2. Customer Insights
Users visit Pinterest with search intent and generally organize their pins and save content that interests them, which is of exceptional value to marketers. These inspiration boards inspire users to shop and businesses to discover users’ interests. Marketers can tap into users’ search-save-plan pipeline to understand their tastes and personalize their experiences to propel them to make the purchase decision.
3. Product Pins
As you capture shoppers’ interest in the discovery phase, you can use Pinterest’s Product Pins and shopping recommendations. Product Pins come with up to date pricing and stock information and are a click away from your checkout page, therefore bridging the gap between search and sale.
4. Lens
Pinterest Lens is an excellent tool for an immersive search experience and is exceptionally valuable when a customer can’t articulate what she wants to look for. She can capture an image of the object in the Pinterest app and voila, Pinterest suggests similar or related items for purchase.
Your product or brand should pop up when a user searches a related image — identify the right keywords for your brand and products, use popular search terms to create a visual identity, search your brand icon, product images, etc. with Lens and optimize your content for better results.
5. Taste Graph
Taste Graph is an intuitive feature to woo users with diverse interests in food, décor, fashion, and so on. Gathering insights on user’s tastes, Taste Graph enables you to make organic recommendations, enhance targeting based on user interest and run your campaigns effectively.
6. Conversion Optimization with Pinterest
Conversion optimization is Pinterest’s new campaign type to optimize Promoted Pins for specific actions (not just clicks), where you can set campaign goals, inspire more users to take action, and drive conversions. Setting objectives will help you plan better and acquire more customers.
Learn More: How to Market on Social Media: Genius Pinterest and Instagram Marketing Tips for 2019
Key Takeaways
Pinterest is now evolving to be the go-to platform to understand customer intent and drive brand awareness.
You don’t have to bet all your dollars on Pinterest yet, but while adopting the direct-to-consumer strategy, focus on the following:
- Be discoverable online.
- Understand your customers’ needs by capturing behavior traits and interest targeting to personalize experiences for them.
- Ensure that the sales journey is seamless with easy (minimal clicks) checkouts.
- Create immersive and compelling shopping experiences.
Direct-to-consumer strategies can lead to better brand-customer relationships and have much potential to create an impact with storytelling like never before.
Are you using Pinterest for your Direct-to-Consumer efforts? Do share your tips with us on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook; we’re always listening!