D2C (Direct to Customer) brands are the ones that ship their products directly to the consumers instead of relying on a chain of distributors and retailers.
Some popular D2C brands in India include BoAt, Lenskart, Sugar, Zivame, and MamaEarth. These companies operate through their web stores and also have some official outlets, mostly in tier-1 and tier-2 cities.
D2C brands focus extensively on marketing and rely on modern customers who trust online brands.
As D2C brands don’t have retailers and distributors to communicate with the customers, they have to establish a direct connection with them. These brands usually target social media apps and channels to attract new buyers. Therefore, they attempt to engage the audience with effective content and personally engage them with their products.
If you are responsible for running the marketing activities of a D2C brand, you must be already aware of the term influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing means using social media influencers, celebrities, and technical experts to promote your products subtly. However, there is another breed of micro influencers who might not be as popular as macro influencers with millions of followers, but their audience trusts them completely.
D2C brands prefer to create campaigns with celebrities and influencers who have a huge following on social media. However, they often neglect the impact that micro influencers have. Here is how micro influencer marketing via an influencer marketing platform can help D2C brands:
Winning Customers with Genuine Reviews
Modern buyers like to know everything about a brand before purchasing its product. They like to look into the sustainability activities, ethics, and value their brands add to society. At the same time, their buying decisions cannot be influenced by celebrity ads and promotions easily.
Here is where micro influencer marketing can make a difference. They can share genuine reviews of the D2C brands after using their products. Moreover, they can also share some important news and insights about these brands that can turn the customers in their favour. Also, as micro influencers are not associated with any big brands or projects, their reviews will be regarded as more genuine.
Building trust among customers is easier with micro influencers. For example, if your company sells mother and baby care products, creating a campaign with celebrities might prove ineffective. Instead, you can reach out to micro influencers and shortlist the ones who happen to be young mothers or to be mothers.
Collaborating with them will provide more credibility for your brand while increasing your reach and impressing your target audience.
Supports Your Relentless Marketing Efforts
The D2C market is one of the fastest-growing markets across the globe. While this is good news for the D2C businesses, it also means that there is growing competition in the market. Therefore, D2C brands have to remain relevant by constantly curating fresh and engaging content for their audience.
Due to their relentless marketing efforts, collaborating with established celebrities and social media influencers can be a costly affair for these brands.
As a well-informed social media marketer, you can collaborate with micro influencers who are experts in their niches and charge a nominal fee for reviews and campaigns. It would not only be more affordable, but also more meaningful for your content marketing strategies.
For instance, if your brand sells study materials like books, geometrical sets, pencils, etc., it would be better if you put forward your products through an influencer who also happens to be a collegiate student. Also, an affordable influencer marketing platform allows you to collaborate and engage with multiple influencers at the same time.
This would expand the reach of your brand faster, and you would be able to make the most of your influencer marketing strategies.
Build Long term partnerships with Influencers
Creating long-term partnerships with micro influencers can help your brand in many ways. Micro influencers need sponsors to make their content more valuable to their audience.
For instance, a product reviewer needs to review products on a regular basis. Therefore, if you tie up with such micro influencers, you will gain their loyal partnerships for a long time.
You can chalk out effective micro-campaigns with such influencers by using their expertise. Also, as the micro influencers keep gaining new followers, you can access their growth potential and strike a favourable deal with them.
This will not only provide monetary gains, but also benefit your brand by showcasing your products to a new audience of influencers. As the influencer keeps attracting new audiences, your brands get introduced to them in a subtle manner. Find micro influencers who can produce high-quality content for your brand through an influencer marketing platform.
Their engaging and informative content will assist you in converting their audience into your customers.
Embrace new ideas and vision
New age influencers have lots of new ideas and ways to attract customers. Also, they are willing to learn and try new things and are flexible when it comes to accommodating the requirements of their clients.
As a marketer, you can utilise this opportunity to target new topics and ideas. Also, you can use social listening tools to figure out what your customers actually need. After that, you can include their requirements in your social campaigns and propagate them with micro influencers.
If you want to target a regional market, you can tie up with regional influencers and ask them to create a blog or vlog in a regional language.
Finding influencers on the basis of specific locations, age groups, and the target audience niche is possible through an influencer marketing platform that has a huge database of influencers. Such ideas will not only help your brand grow, but will also help you penetrate new markets. For instance, Licious is a seafood and meat brand that runs as per the D2C model.
It has not indulged in many social media campaigns so far. However, its reach expanded by many folds when its ads and campaign clips were translated into regional languages.
Improve customer communication
D2C brands need to build strong communication with their customers. Micro influencers don’t have a large audience to address. Therefore, they can reach out and resolve the issues and queries of each of their followers. Also, it is evident that micro influencers tend to comment, like, and react to most of the comments of their audiences. By including such micro influencers in your campaigns, you can request them to suggest or recommend your products to their followers.
Also, you can educate them about your offerings and convert their social media handles into a new communication channel for your business. While it is possible with a new influencer, established influencers may not oblige your request due to their association with other brands. Also, if they agree, they will charge a high fee which will not be feasible for you.
With micro influencer marketing, you can trace the micro influencers who excel in creating informative videos, blogs, and other forms of content.
You can place your products smartly in their content and try to present your products as a solution to their queries and requirements. Also, D2C brands need to keep a close eye on the demands and complaints of their customers. By collaborating with micro influencers, the brands can understand what their customers need and say about their brand or products.
Top D2C brands that have achieved growth through Influencer Marketing
To understand how influencer marketing initiatives can provide targeted growth to D2C companies, let us see the following cases:
1. Neeman Shoes
A new D2C brand in the footwear segment, Neeman Shoes managed to create awareness about their products and eco-friendly initiatives through Vir Das, a comedian who is known to curate honest and funny content. Click here to see what the promotional campaign looked like. After being successful in this campaign, the brand has collaborated with several other influencers to improve its brand visibility.
2. Sugar
Sugar is an emerging brand in the cosmetics industry. With the help of influencers, they focus on creating short videos to improve their audience reach. Their way of improving brand awareness and visibility is by educating the audience about different makeup and beauty products. To see samples of their creation, you may click here.
3. Country Delight
Country Delight is renowned for its milk and milk-based products. They have collaborated with celebrities and influencers who happen to be moms and grandmoms to promote their products without being cocky about their offerings. Here is how to create an impactful influencer video that builds trust among the audience.
Conclusion
D2C brands can use influencer marketing platforms to discover, evaluate, connect, and collaborate with micro influencers and creators. They can create effective micro campaigns with these creators to optimise their D2C e-commerce business. Also, they can learn from the D2C models of top brands to understand the marketing gimmicks and tricks that they employ to improve their customer reach, engagement, and sales. Eventually, their focus must be on keeping the customers happy. By keeping the customers at the centre of their marketing activities, D2C brands can grow exponentially and target new markets and audiences with the help of micro influencers.
