• by Chris Novak , August 29, 2024

Marketing has more to prove than ever, starting with whether it works at all. This is particularly true for D2C marketers, whose efforts often get scrutinized on a weekly or even daily basis.

Their best defense, and offense, is a measurement strategy that connects marketing’s contribution to business growth, not just immediate sales. That’s routine for many of the world’s most established brands that have experience, people, and tools dedicated to strategic business planning. Having to be scrappier, many D2Cs focus on the simpler formula of attributing sales activity to media within platforms. Increasingly, that fails to satisfy the board or the CFO; they want to see marketplace sales, not platform-attributed revenue.

D2Cs can start to design for impact by making a few straightforward shifts.

Map your total customer opportunity. D2Cs unwittingly let media channels define their universe. Their performance models rely on trial and error to define who’s likely to convert.   That’s starting with a partial base that will narrow over time.

Instead, take the time to map the population of target consumers. Who can really buy our product, and are we getting enough of them? This creates a more accurate foundation for understanding growth. It allows you to calculate how you’re expanding your brand, not just how much you’re extracting from a channel audience.

Root in reach and frequency. Performance attribution is media-based and reactive, not market-based and predictive. That’s why the world’s biggest brands still depend on reach and frequency. Study the correlation between reaching a given percentage of your customer targets in defined time periods (e.g., 20% per week) to achieving sales levels. Establish that formula and follow it. You’ll see your effective market widen, because you’re no longer benchmarking against previous buyers (which happens when platforms’ conversions algorithms serve ads only to people who have bought from you before). 

Track ahead, not back. How are you doing against the consumer map, not just the platform dashboards? When you know your consumers and what affects their decisions -- not simply how audiences behave on individual channels and platforms -- you can predict results over a longer pipeline. And you can adjust performance targets to support reach and frequency, not just tight return on ad spend (ROAS) targets based on platform data. That’s looking ahead.

When a goat encounters an apple tree, its first instinct is to jump for the lowest-hanging fruit. After a while it realizes it can bend the branch to bring more into reach; but ultimately, it runs out of access. Humans can see beyond the branch and bring a ladder. For D2C marketers, that ladder is a quantifiable brand framework.

This post was previously published in an earlier edition of Marketing Insider.