Monday, September 18

The 5 things in DTC you need to know today

#1 - 💄 How this beauty brand is advertising on Reddit

📰 TL;DR - Here’s a look at how one brand is leveraging Reddit to reach customers. Leneige, a K-beauty brand, has been targeting users of subreddits like r/skincareaddition and r/asianbeauty. While they initially saw this as a top-of-funnel strategy, they actually found that the ads pushed users further down the funnel. Also: “The results showed that Laneige succeeded, with a 50% higher click-through rate than Reddit’s beauty vertical benchmark and a 42% higher video completion rate than Reddit’s beauty vertical benchmark for six-second videos.” Note: if you hit the paywall, try an incognito tab.

💡 Insight - I think Reddit is a rather underutilized platform for campaigns. Whether or not it will be useful for you really comes down to if there’s a large enough community that is interested in your niche. Targeting the big subreddits like r/pics or r/funny probably wouldn’t yield great results, but this Leneige example shows how a niche subreddit can bring you a hyperfocused and interested audience. Reddit’s ad options aren’t as sophisticated as other platforms, but it may be worth exploring.

#2 - 🔥 Explore AI-generated creative that actually converts

As creative elements become the new frontier for targeting, the rise of AI-generated creative content is unmistakable. Many brands are now delving into the capabilities of genAI tools, enabling swift production and testing of ad creatives.

This is why we are excited about Treat AI. They uncover design concepts that resonate with your best customers. Then effortlessly generate on-brand, high-converting, ad creative, and lifestyle photography.

With Treat AI, you can cut down on creative costs and lengthy creative meetings while effortlessly generating and testing new ad creative faster.

📣 If you want to reach our audience of 10,000+ DTC store owners, tap here 

#3 - 🤔 How to be memorable on social media

📰 TL;DR - A new study looked at what makes brands memorable on social media, and the findings may give you some inspiration. The study comes from Sprout Social and surveyed UK and US consumers. More than half, 51%, of respondents said the most memorable thing a brand can do is to simply respond. Engage with comments, reply to DMs — make people feel noticed and that a real person is running the account. One in four also think it’s important to speak out about social issues. As well, 76% said being able to use social media channels for customer support is important, and they expect both a same-day response and a personalized response. There are also some insights here about AI in social media.

💡 Insight - The results are pretty clear — you can’t treat social media as a one-way form of communication. You can’t just toss up some content and log off. The best brands on social media have a manager who pays attention and interacts with viewers. A solution that can help you with this is a help desk app that pulls in DMs from your social channels into the same dashboard as your emails, so you never miss a message.

#4 - 🛠️ Things worth checking out

👩🏼‍⚖️ LAWSUITS - Here’s one founder’s take on how to deal with frivolous lawsuits.

🎄 HOLIDAYS - Here’s what kind of growth to expect over the holiday season and the factors making it a bit “unspectacular.”

🧴 AI PERSONALIZATION - This brand is receiving major investment in its products that are personalized using AI.

🚨 MARKETING - Read about how brands are using customer marketing content strategies.

😎 INFLUENCERS - Read the latest creator and influencer trends brands need to know about.

#5 - 👀 TikTok is coming for Black Friday

📰 TL;DR - TikTok is determined to be a major e-commerce player, and that means participating in Black Friday—Cyber Monday. According to this report, TikTok is planning discounts of up to 50% to attract sellers to its Black Friday program, which will run from Oct. 27 to Nov. 30. The platform wants to compete with the likes of Amazon and Walmart. In case you missed it, TikTok Shop launched in the US last week to quite a bit of a media frenzy. It comes along with live shopping and a substantial affiliate program. So far, TikTok Shop feels pretty Temu-like with cheap goods from China although some DTC brands have signed up as well.

💡 Insight - BFCM might just be a make-or-break moment for TikTok Shop in the US. If it goes well, it will solidify TikTok as an e-commerce player. If it doesn’t go well, they may have trouble attracting new brands to the program. That said, if you’ve been thinking about signing up, getting in ahead of BFCM seems like a smart play as I think users will be curious to see what the experience is like.

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