Not the usual meme you’re used to… but a little mid-week motivation! We’ve all gotta start somewhere 🤷♂️
Catch ya back on the memes next time!
If you’re new to DTC, welcome! You’re in good company with fellow newcomers from Royal Locks Curl Care, Birthdate Co., Ārepa, Santevia Alkaline Water, L’Occitane en Provence, and Protein World. 💪
In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇
❣️ Tips for building your content and community: Part 1
💸 Youthforia's Fiona Co Chan creates an organic TikTok to Amazon pipeline
🔥 Optimizing your TikTok funnel
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
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BUILDING CONTENT & COMMUNITY: PART 1
Check out these tips from brands 👇
Brands that grow through community have one thing in common: great content.
Content brings your brand's values, mission, and culture directly to your audience—wherever they are.
According to House of Wise, Doe Lashes, and Tortuga Backpacks, here are the best tips for building community through content.
1️⃣ Your audience comes first, always
The most important part of your community is your customers. By knowing who your audience is, how they speak, and their interests, you can create content that resonates with them.
Here’s a step-by-step what you should do:
Maria West, the Head of Content at House of Wise, says, “content should be used to educate readers about your products and your customers’ problems.”
“Know what you want to be known for and start with the basics—with your own take. For example, “[Topic] 101” posts are great and allow room for the ‘what’ with the ‘why.’”
Here’s an example of how she did this to educate House of Wiser customers on CBD with a “CBD 101” link in the nav menu:
2️⃣ Build your own unique personality
Brands should find their unique voice that resonates with their audience. If every creator followed the same template or checklist, there wouldn’t be any individuality.
We recommend checking out Duolingo on TikTok, which narrowed in on a Gen-Z demographic and created a community around their TikTok personality.
Take note of how Duolingo gets involved with various trends and trending sounds with their videos.
By building off what’s already popular, they’ve developed a unique voice with the Duolingo mascot as the main character.
3️⃣ Focus on solving customer pain points and answering questions
According to Jason Wong, founder of Doe Lashes, two successful channels have been Doe’s blog and TikTok account.
“They're both digestible forms that educate our readers. Tiktok allows us to be discovered by users that weren't looking for us, and educate them on our brand and product in a way that is easy to understand.”
4️⃣ Understand what your community values
The things your community prioritizes may be different than what you expected. This is why audience research is so important.
Once you understand what type of content interests customers most and where they could use help, you’ll see better results from the content you’re putting time into.
A great example is Tortuga Backpacks, a lightweight travel backpack brand.
Fred Perotta, co-founder and CEO of Tortuga Backpacks, says, “We write to solve the same types of problems for customers that our products solve—almost exclusively how and what to pack.”
Tortuga’s air travel, packing tips, and packing lists categories are designed just for this reason.
5️⃣ Hire creators who specialize in a specific channel
One general best practice Jason shared with us is the importance of hiring people who specialize in one channel—people you can trust to do the job better than you could.
“Find people who can do it better than you and give them the platform to perform. This applies to writing blogs, making Tiktok videos, or designing Instagram posts,” said Jason. “Our growth came from finding content creators that are successful on Tiktok and giving them the freedom to create what they think will work for us as a brand.”
🚨 For more community and brand building tips, look out for Part 2 on Monday!
🛑 Stop hurting your brand and wasting your time by spamming creators.
Instead, invite high-quality influencers to apply to work with you using the world’s only creator marketplace: Aspire.
Aspire’s Creator Marketplace allows talented creators to raise their hands as true brand fans.
With Aspire, you can:
Plus, no fees or commission taken… ever.
Where else can you go to tap into incredible inbound demand at no cost?
👉 Learn more about Aspire’s Marketplace today.
🎧 This week on the pod, we chatted with Fiona Co Chan, Founder and CEO of Youthforia.
If you’ve ever fallen asleep in your makeup (guilty ✋), Youthforia is for you. They create makeup that acts like skincare, using high-quality skin-friendly ingredients with luxury textures, packaged together with a hint of nostalgia and fun.
In this episode, we learned how Fiona built her business from scratch during the pandemic and tested all her products by sleeping in them overnight (and might have made her husband help, too).
The Takeaways: 👇
🔥 Going viral on TikTok: a method to the madness
Around 90% of Youthforia’s traffic and revenue is from organic content—mostly TikTok videos.
Fiona still makes almost every video herself, and after “going viral” several times on the channel, believes she’s found a method to the madness:
🤔 Can TikTok ads affect organic performance?
When Youthforia started running ads on TikTok, they noticed a significant downfall in organic performance.
“Our weekly organic views dropped to 25% of what they normally were.”
Since then, they stopped running ads, and their views have climbed back up to baseline.
❓ Any other brands out there experiencing this on TikTok?
💰 What Fiona would do with $50K
“I would allocate some of it to Facebook ads, just to keep that on… But I would do something experimental… I would maybe put it on Amazon [experimenting with ads].”
👉 Listen to the full pod with Fiona Co Chan at Youthforia here!
Does your company’s “data analysis” still look like manually crunching numbers in a 40-tab spreadsheet?
🛑 Stop right now.
It’s time to automate your analytics!
Peel is a fully automated analytics tool built for Shopify that helps DTC brands make smarter data-based decisions and achieve exponentially faster growth. 🚀
This tool helps you and your team quickly and easily answer questions, like:
And unlike those headache-inducing spreadsheets, Peel analyzes your data in a way that’s data easy to understand, customizable, and powerful.
(You’ve got nothing to lose… well, except hundreds of hours in Excel.)
Did you know that the average time spent on websites when redirected from TikTok is 70-80% lower than traffic sent from Facebook?
The Pilothouse TikTok team used funnel testing across 5 different brands and found that the best funnel for TikTok is a simple funnel.
Take users straight from the ad right to the product page!
Although some longer funnels have performed well around holidays and sales, it still doesn't outperform a short funnel in the long run.
Make sure your product page is ready for a ton of traffic!
Remember that 99.9% of your TikTok traffic will be coming from either a smartphone or tablet. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly!
🚀 What makes a great brand? Find out in Pattern’s first installment of their Definitive Guide to DTC.
📍 Pinterest tests new idea pin highlights to showcase specific content.
🍪 What's next for advertisers as Google changes course again on cookie alternatives.
🔥 7 metrics, 21 tactics & one scorecard to thrive amid DTC Disruption.
📕 TikTok launches 'TikTok Tactics' online course to help marketers level-up their platform approach.
💄 Youthforia's Fiona Co Chan Creates an Organic TikTok to Amazon Pipeline.
💗 Changing the World's Pleasure Baseline with Jen Batchelor CEO and Founder of Kin Euphorics.
🍪 How HighKey Raised Their AOV by 40% with Chief Digital Officer Ryan Rouse.
🍫 Muddy Bites CEO Jarod Steffes on Growing 1000% YOY By Delivering Delight and Mastering Memes.
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Thomas Schreiber, Tina Donati, Kelsey Hess, and Rebecca Knight. Edited by Claire Beveridge.
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