How to Nail Your Brand Launch Strategy
Hereu
I’ve always been fascinated by entrepreneurship. Being involved in conversations about startups, brand ideation and in general, meeting people who decided to start their own business, is just so inspiring. Working with a DTC brand, gave me the opportunity to have a better understanding of the eCommerce ecosystem & overall brand strategy across channels primarily coming from connections with Shopify merchants, working with external partners and business owners.
Through conversations, articles and mostly from my day-to-day job, I believe the key of launching a successful brand comes from a solid business strategy combining product, marketing, customer experience, operations & finance. This post has an emphasis on the marketing side since the investment and effort across marketing channels is different in the early stage of the business.
Before I jump into marketing, let’s briefly touch about the product. Finding what to sell can be in my opinion, the most challenging part for any entrepreneur because innovation will drive the core of the business. I think the brands that truly succeed in the DTC market bring something new to the category or a significant improvement in existing products based on needs or gaps in the market. Most of the time, we tend to misunderstand the concept of product innovation with good marketing or a beautiful brand identity which in the long run can impact the scale of the business. When launching a brand, product development requires a lot of research and a deep competitor analysis to have a clear statement about what is truly the differentiator.
Marketing: How to Reach Your Audience
After landing on the product, the next step is to define all the efforts that a brand will take to reach its audience, so knowing who your customer is, it’s essential. The marketing playbook defers based on the stage of the business but when staring a business, the most powerful areas to focus on are:
Paid Media (this will become your primary spend)
Social (organic)
PR Partnerships & Affiliate marketing
SMS & Email
eCommerce (Emphasis on landing experience for prospect traffic)
Earn Social Proof
Paid Media
Paid can take a chunk of your budget so testing can be the best approach to find the sweet spot for your business before you decide to do a major investment. Select tentative 5-10 different creatives with a variety of assets (stills, video or even graphics). After a week or 2, you should be able to see which ones are underperforming and exclude them from the plan. I also suggest looking at what other brands are doing beyond your industry to gather inspiration and identify trending content. Key metrics to look at:
CPM. This refers to the cost to show the content to 1000 people. The lower, the better. That means Meta likes the content for the platforms.
CTR. The higher the better. This KPI measures the engagement of your audience with the content of the brand.
And lastly, CAC (customer acquisition cost). Creative plays an important role. Focused on the visuals and the message.
Organic Social
In the early stage, brand engagement is key. As paid ads start running, the online store gets traction and sales start coming up, your posts will start getting comments, likes, DMs. Make sure to interact with every single one. You want to start building a community even in the early state.
SMS & Email
Before thinking about a marketing campaign, let’s focus on basics. To launch a brand, the only emails you need are transactional, so start setting up the flows:
Order confirmation > “Thank you for your purchase”
Shipping confirmation > “Your product is on its way”
Post-purchase email > Use this one to earn social proof and ask for reviews.
We use Klaviyo and the platform offers templates for each of these emails which makes it straightforward to start running the flows. As your brand starts growing, you can include additional flows such as abandon carts, upselling or cross selling emails, back in stock and more.
From a brand point of view, make sure the emails reflect the brand identity. Especially when the brand was just launched. You want to start building brand awareness through the aesthetic, color palette and tone of voice.
SMS can be another channel to attract new audiences with a touch of personalization. We tested it during sale with a personalized note from one of our founders and we saw a significant lift in open rate compared with a regular email speaking about the promotion.
PR Partnerships & Affiliate Marketing
The best way to boost your paid strategy is with influencers to build brand trust and boost traction. I would suggest focusing on micro or nano influencers in your local market to reduce cost during the launch. For affiliate marketing, avoid going straight to larger publications and focus on content creators (maybe bloggers, if they are still a thing) which are align with your values and better represent your brand identity.
Ecommerce Marketing
“Marketing” may not be the best headline here but this area is more about strategizing the end to end experience coming from different marketing channels to your site. Think about your linking experience from paid, email, and affiliate marketing as the opportunity to onboard prospect customers, introduce your products and the brand value proposition.
This is something we have been testing in the past couple months splitting traffic between regular product landing pages vs a content page with shoppable elements. Take a look at Unbounce, it requires limited code and can mimic your online store experience.
Social Proof
Reviews are key to build brand credibility and facilitate purchase decisions especially when you are new in the market. There are tons of platforms to install in your online store just make sure to take a look at capabilities first to see which one aligns best to your needs. For example, we moved away from Stamped to Okendo due to some limitations with product grouping and the layout to display on PDP wasn’t aligned with our branding. User Generated Content is another powerful tool to explore not only in your online store but leverage across marketing channels.
