DTC brands are cracking influencer marketing. Learn what other brands can do.

Partnering with social media influencers to raise brand awareness, build emotional connections with their online community, and drive sales is quite common for DTC brands too.

But as influencer rates have gone up over the past few years, many DTC brands have begun to reduce their influencer marketing investments. For instance, Stix, a direct-to-consumer brand selling products like probiotics and pregnancy tests, invested roughly 10% of its marketing budget in influencer marketing. But by 2022, the company had reduced its budget far less than before, as they couldn’t see a tonne of value from Stix’s influencer activations.

Amid all this, DTC shower brands such as Jolie and Outlines have used innovative influencer marketing and social media tactics to great success.

Jolie: Jolie is a brand that sells shower heads with filtration systems. It was founded in January 2022 and made a revenue of $4 million at the end of the year. Its products were sold direct to consumer (DTC) for the first four months, but with its unique marketing strategy, the company has since moved into big retailers.

Outlines: DTC is a bathroom product company popular for its shower curtains. Outlines' revenue increased by 20% to 30% per month after its launch in January 2022.

The creator strategy used by these brands:

Many of these brands began offering products to creators as early as possible. At the end, these brands used the resulting content that many of these people shared on social media to fuel a more robust paid strategy.

For instance, before the shower heads were officially released, Jolie began seeding them with influencers. Jolie distributed approximately 100 shower heads prior to the launch and continues to distribute more than that per month to influential people in various industries, whether they are social media content creators or not. Ultimately, the brand used the content created with their products for paid ads. This way, currently, 90% of Jolie's influencers are unpaid.

This strategy helps DTC brands stand out and increase conversion rates.

Getting audience attention on the internet is becoming increasingly difficult considering the insurmountable amount of noise and distractions in the digital world.

It compels brands to chase influencers and strive to execute successful influencer marketing campaigns. However, with the rise in influencers’ costs, many brands are pulling back on their influencer marketing investment. Nonetheless, no brand has decided to eliminate it entirely from their media mix.

Why?

With the number of options for audiences to choose from when purchasing any type of product increasing, they seek recommendations. In that regard, influencers play a significant role in influencing consumers purchasing decisions.

It also emphasises the significance of influencer marketing in today's competitive digital landscape.

However, sometimes a change of approach will kick-start the new game.

In that regard, the DTC shower brands' novel approach towards influencer marketing looks much more effective, budget-friendly, and beneficial to brands. In our opinion, more brands will soon begin to embrace this strategy to make the most of their influencer marketing budgets.

Furthermore, here are a few lessons marketers can take away from their successful influencer marketing strategy:

Begin your game early: It is important to circulate your products to influential people as early as possible. So that marketers will be able to generate more content through influencers. As a result, they can use those multiple variations of content for their paid ads. And, as it won’t appeal to salesy or pushy audiences, the chances of it positively influencing the target audiences will be relatively higher.

Don’t restrict their creative freedom: In an effort to have some level of control over the content produced by influencers, sometimes brands restrict their creative freedom. While it is important to understand what influencers’ post, it is critical to let them add their own opinions to the content so that it looks authentic and natural.

Never hesitate to experiment with new approaches: Trying out new approaches adds more competitive advantages for brands—just like Julie and outlines. In addition, it may lead them to discover a new meaningful path to reach large audiences at a lower cost and drive conversions far more effectively than traditional methods.

Overall, in our opinion, the DTC brands' new approach towards influencer marketing is something marketers must pay attention to so as to reap the most of their influencer marketing investments.