Three Creative Angles to Test Today

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Banter

Monday, November 7, 2022

The pain is real.

P.S. Check out DTC’s TikTok account for more DTC content.

In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇

📦 Three creative angles to test today

📦 Generating the social proof your campaigns need

📦 Tips for creating a consistent brand identity

📦 How to make the most of every transaction by accurately targeting specific customer groups with the most impactful ads

📦 Education on cybersecurity to safeguard your data

Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎

👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe, so you never miss out.

Creative

Have a New Product or Brand You’re Looking to Launch?

Just like the popular Vogue dance from the 1980s, we’re all about angles. Angles paired and developed with key creative styles can be the recipe your brand needs for success.

📐 First: What’s an angle?

A creative angle is a theme or reason for the use of your product. Think beyond the unique selling points of your product and look for the real emotionally charged reason behind why shoppers think your brand is the best!

If you haven’t quite worked out your angles yet, try the following:

1. Define who your customer is
2. Understand or hypothesize what motivates them

Once you’ve got your answers, it’s time to start building your angles (messaging) and create content (visuals)!

For example:

• You sell water in a bottle, and your company makes all the bottles from recycled material to raise awareness for the poor use of plastic recycling practices.
• Your angle? People should buy your product because it represents recycling in their community and signals change that benefits the planet.
• This doesn't mean you shouldn't tell people that your water tastes amazing or comes from a spring; it just means that your unique selling points support your key message of WHY they should choose your brand.

🔑 Next: Key creatives to showcase your angles

Within each angle you create, you should showcase it across different forms of creatives to see what best resonates with your audience. Here’s what we suggest: 👇

1️⃣ Creator video content

Just any ol’ content is not going to do. You want users within your key demographic that have actually used the product.

This video content shouldn’t be scripted and needs to come across as an authentic customer showing what they enjoyed about the product and what stands out to them.

Example: Have creators talk about how the water bottle makes them feel, the benefits of a reduced carbon footprint from recycling, and why they genuinely love it. The more genuine the better!

2️⃣ UGC imagery

Showing your product from the user perspective is key to connecting and relating with your audience. You will want to make sure that you show off some of the benefits, the product in a lifestyle shot, and how it is used. Make sure the image is crystal clear. No blurry images, please!

Example: With your water company, showcase users carrying around the bottle, use it in their day to day routine, and toss it in the recycling after using it.

3️⃣ Article feature review

Customers trust other people and their experiences with your product. Even better, if the review is from a credible source, you’ll build trust and social proof!

It's your choice to try something scrappy or polished, but remember that the idea is to come across as an authentic review.

Reviews are also a killer add to your landing pages! They showcase features and usecases for your product from consumers your potential shoppers can relate to.

Example: Use your reviews that showcase unique recycling experiences people have with your water bottle. Did their kids use it for arts and crafts before it landed in the blue bin? Is both the bottle and cap recyclable?

You’ve got the angles, so now you’re ready to make like the ’80s and Vogue.

What creative angles or ways of showcasing them are key for your brand? Reply to this email and let us know!

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Brand Identity

Creating a Consistent Brand Identity

Let’s be honest. Sometimes we like things the easy way:

• We like the convenience of a drive-through McDonald’s breakfast.
• We prefer to make mobile purchases with the quick tap of Apple Pay.
• And we would love it if all we had to do to sell DTC products was set up shop on one platform and wait for customers to come rolling in.

But that’s not how shopping in today’s digital world works.

To engage your customers across the buyer's journey, you must be where they are. And that’s everywhere!

Wait. There’s more…

Not only do you need a strong presence online, across social media, and via mobile marketing methods, you also have to nail your brand identity. 🔨

🤔 What do we mean by brand identity?

Providing a consistent branding experience across all platforms, so when consumers see your logo, they instantly recall who you are and what you’re all about.

For example, when you see that black swoosh, you know you’re buying from…We don’t even have to say it…Nike. ✔

Double arches? McDonald's.

Little blue bird? Twitter.

You may be thinking, “but those brands are HUGE and have tons of money to put behind building a consistent brand identity across platforms.” 🤷

That’s true. But even smaller DTC brands can take steps to build a powerhouse brand. 🔥

Here are three essential tips for creating a consistent brand identity for your DTC business.

📕 Create a brand book

Building a DTC brand requires the help of several talented creatives, marketers, and business people — who all have great (but different) ideas.

Even if you have the most talented team in the world, if you don’t have a frame of reference for what your brand is all about… your branding won’t be cohesive.

Before you move forward with any design or marketing, create a brand book. A brand book is like an instruction manual for everyone on your team to follow so that everything coming outta your biz looks and feels the same. 👍

It tells all your team members everything related to your brand, including your vision, mission, logo, colors, fonts, and visuals.

😍 Keep your branding simple and streamlined

Simplicity is essential when it comes to nailing your DTC brand identity. After all, you want your customers to instantly recognize your brand and what it represents.

This means you need to decide on a logo, colors, fonts, and visuals that you will use to represent your company. Remember, simple and easily recognizable is better than intricate.

Once you have a solid and recognizable brand design, it’s essential to streamline your brand across all assets and all platforms.

This means if a customer picks up one of your brochures, goes to your TikTok account, gets a piece of direct mail, or visits your business page on LinkedIn, they will immediately recognize your brand.

🗣 Establish a tone

With the growth of video advertising and marketing in recent years, branding is just as much about tone as it is about visuals.

Part of establishing a consistent brand identity is considering what tone your DTC brand will take in social media videos, on your website, and in your assets.

Take Kicking Horse, for example.

Kicking Horse is like any other premium coffee roaster. You can find the same notes and flavors among their competition, like Lavazza, in stores or online.

But, where Kicking horse stands out and why they’re so popular as a brand is because they’ve nailed their tone. 🐎

Kicking Horse isn’t just coffee.

It’s coffee that embraces their community with a playful and casual tone. If you visit their website, you’ll find comforting flavors, a great story, and a few laughs.

You’ll also find the same tone resonates throughout their product line.

Yes, Kicking Horse is all about roasting great coffee, but they make it fun and don’t take themselves too seriously. 🐴

Sponsor

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• Only 17% of your BFCM customers will buy again
• 50% of your revenue during BFCM will come from existing customers.

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Use Segments data CRM to make the most of every transaction by accurately targeting specific customer groups with the most impactful ads. Get very specific with data on:

• Customers in the last 30-90 days
• BFCM customers from last year
• Top 5% and 10% lifetime value customers
• High retention customers

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Cybersecurity

Businesses have a lot of data to safeguard. This is especially true with lists of recipients for your marketing campaigns.

We don’t wanna scare you but APWG reports that in March of 2022, there were nearly 400,000 individual phishing attacks, and phishing is likely to outpace the growth of almost any industry with over 1m attacks in Q2 of 2022 alone! 😱

Accessing software to conduct phishing attacks has never been easier. You’ve heard of Saas, but we now have PhaaS and MaaS.

PhaaS: Phishing as a Service

MaaS: Malware and a Service

These services offer access to data-breached email lists in exchange for a subscription fee. Business is booming and likely sustaining the cybercrime market for the foreseeable future.

A lack of technical expertise is one of the leading causes of successful cyber attacks so here are some of the first steps you need to follow to keep you and your client's information safe.

🧠 Knowledge is the best defense

Check for these major red flags in your inbox. They usually mean you are being phished:

• Urgent messages or emails requiring immediate action
• Unusual greetings or grammar mistakes
• Email and URL discrepancies
• Visual or design errors
• Offers that are ‘too good to be true’

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1️⃣ Urgent messages or emails requiring immediate action

These emails often request you to change a password or billing information and are almost always malicious. They may even provide a phone number to call so that the phishers speak directly to you and request information like account numbers.

Threats like shutting off a service without payment or unexpected debt repayment are great icebreakers for these bad actors. 🙅‍♀️

2️⃣ Unusual greetings and grammar mistakes

Easily spotted in the subject line or body of the email, a single letter can give them away. Large companies pay a lot of money to hire writers and editors to ensure there are no mistakes in outgoing communication.

3️⃣ Email and URL discrepancies

Check to see if the sender of the email is really who they say they are. The sender email should correlate to either the brand or person you are speaking to. For example, Shopify Support will send follow up messages from support@shopify.com. If something doesn’t look right, it probably isn’t.

You can also copy and paste the links from suspicious emails into Google’s transparency tools to ensure that there isn’t any harmful content within the webpage.  

4️⃣ Visual or design errors are identified in the company’s logo or signature

Phishers will imitate popular logos with JPG or PNG files. You may also be able to see a background in the image that doesn’t match the color of your webpage.

5️⃣ Offers that are too good to be true

Let’s face it, times are tough, and people want financial relief. Phishers know this and will leverage any personal data obtained through interactions with them to exploit those needs.

When you’re knowledgeable, you’re protected.

Have a discussion with your team about any suspicious activity or what can be done to ensure everyone is equipped to keep you and your clients safe in 2023. 🙏

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Quick Hits

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✅ Building more durable and effective audience strategies in Google’s ads platforms.

🛍 A resale ‘revolution’: Affluent shoppers embrace secondhand shopping.

🐭 Disney to offer toy and merchandise deals via Disney+ app.

🎥 Musk looks to revamp subscriptions, considers bringing back Vine in first Twitter moves.

🕶 Snap and Amazon partner on AR shopping in the Snapchat app, initially for eyewear.

🔊 Have you heard our latest podcasts?

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📈 Scaling SPF and Finding Your Most Affluent Customers Ahead of the Recession with Supergoop and Lexer.

🏆 VKTRY Gear, Drew Arciuolo: How to Achieve Saturation With Your Target Market.

💧 Bryan Alston, Greater Than - How Greater Than Became Inc’s #198th Fastest Growing Company In the US.

❌ Attribution is a Dead and What To Do Instead with SegmentStream’s Constantine Yurevich.

🖋 Nathan Thompson & Stu Jolley, Stories and Ink: Growing with SEO and Artist Collab Content.

💡 Listen to The Biggest Marketing News Stories Today.

Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight, Ashley R. Cummings, and Michael Venditti. Edited by Claire Beveridge and Eric Dyck.

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