5 Marketing Tips for Brands to Scale

In order for any brand to make a splash, the marketing team must hit the ground running, moving fast but with focus. For Albert Chong, VP of digital marketing at ILIA Beauty, scaling is all about speed and prioritization of projects. Read on for his insights on how leaders at DTC brands can adapt a growth mindset, plus five tips for marketers building brands today.

ILIA

The most important question when I interview marketers is: “What are you working on?” The answer is very surprising – I’ve heard from very large beauty brands from C-levels that they are working on better “dashboards for reporting or cultural transformational projects or branded paid search,” which is typically not the right fit for a DTC brand.

In the early stages of a DTC brand, driving traffic is the #1 thing that is important to understand and to scale. I like to hear answers such as: “I’m working on creatives on TikTok with the objective to drive website traffic and ultimately sales” or “I’m working on a sales funnel for Instagram Reels everything from the video creative, to editing, to the landing page content, to the product page.” Or, I like to hear, “I’m working on capturing incremental non-brand keyword traffic with written, long form content.”

Additionally, there’s an order of operations – some brands I’ve seen also work on heavy brand awareness before they even have a solid product-market fit. I believe that projects that focus on the lower funnel (such as post-purchase flows, pre-purchase flows, welcome flows, retargeting funnels) should be prioritized over upper funnel projects (such as billboards, TV spend, etc.) in early stages.

I believe speed is more important than quality in the early stages of a DTC brand. The brand that is able to test, execute and re-iterate the fastest will typically learn the fastest, and will be able to leverage those learnings to drive future results. Prioritize speed: solve problems with a very small, focused group. Always keep nimble, check data in real-time, and make adjustments in real time whether that is a budget change or creative change. Do not overthink, just do it and see.

Using agencies for marketing channels tends to slow down the learning process because of five main reasons. First, agencies don’t have the big picture creating an attribution problem about business impact. Second, brands usually interact with an account manager rather than the individual contributor at the agency who actually does the work, creating a ‘middleman’ situation where reporting is filtered rather than raw. Third, agencies are working across multiple customers and multiple clients, which tends to see lack of attention when a marketing channel like paid social requires real-time monitoring and optimization. Fourth, agencies tend to focus more on retaining customers rather than driving growth creating a mis-alignment of expectations. And finally, marketing is becoming increasingly easier and more programmatic.

The days are gone where you have to have the best account structure, which decreases the need for specialized experience. I think if you understand business and understand the customer, you yourself can own the marketing channel and learn more in the process. When I first started media buying, optimizing a single account could have taken me 5-7 hours per day. Today, it takes me 10 minutes per day. That is the type of learning you want your team to become productive over time.

Here are my top five tips to help marketers scale their brands.

1. Every marketer should understand prioritizing by impact and effort – a loyalty program is a high effort project, but has low business impact if you are just starting out. In the beginning of a DTC brand, focus on new customer traffic projects and new customer acquisition projects that drive traffic.
2. Every marketer should focus on speed of execution – moving fast in a highly competitive environment when everyone is copying your every move is crucial. Launching an imperfect new feature in the next two weeks then improving over the course of a year is better than spending a year “perfecting” the feature than launching one year later. The former would have learned SO much more (customer feedback) then the latter in that same time period.
3. Every marketer should understand the impact of their work in terms of financial results. By understanding the traffic, revenue, conversions, conversion rate of a referral program or a social post or a publisher article or a blog feature or email newsletter partnership, the marketer is immensely more productive than one that focuses on completion of projects. Using these learnings, the marketer is armed with the knowledge of how to move the needle. There are typically 1,000,000 things a marketer can work on, but usually there are just a handful of projects that really make a meaningful impactful on revenue. That marketer is highly valuable because they know how to influence day to day results.
4. Every marketer should read every single customer comment on social media, every single customer review and every single customer feedback post-purchase. Customer experience is the performance marketing where marketers can turn actual customer frictions into conversion opportunities. After reviewing that almost every customer needs help to choose their own shade of foundation when buying makeup online, it’s clear that a personalized shade match experience was needed, which we implemented at ILIA. This is also the type of customer feedback that helps to prioritize projects based on what the customer needs.
5. Every marketer should focus on short-term results, in addition to long-term planning. Often, I find that marketers also focus on 1-2 years planning, which is great but often what that means is that they miss revenue opportunities that are right in front of them living in the day-to-day data. I find that the best ‘eureka’ moments for a brand are from marketers who live in real-time optimization and often these drive significant short term business results, that will help invest further into long-term planning.