As India’s D2C sector is booming, social media is becoming a new route for the brands to reach their customers, create that much needed engagement, and build a strong community for their brand. According to research, 61% of D2C brands reach majority of their customers through social media platforms.
While the D2C brands are following a holistic, customer-first approach social media has played a strong role in building that. Major D2C brands are leveraging its reach and promoting easy accessibility by building a connection with the customers and focusing on community engagement.
The marketing spends on social media have drastically increased for the D2C brands, as social media is becoming a popular marketing tool to increase their revenue sales. According to a report, D2C brands are increasing their spend on Google Ads by 47% and more than one-third (36%) brands surveyed said that they are increasing their investment towards influencer marketing.
The D2C brands are using social media in many ways such as: growth of revenue, capturing audience’s attention and making the social media channel feed shoppable.
Shivam Soni Founder & CEO, Beyoung shares about it, that their brands don’t believe in selling products directly but also believes to create a bond with the customers. And, for this they have a prompt customer support team to organise frequent contests for the consumers to shop as well as enjoy the online journey. He further added,they’re able to understand customers better through social Media and began working to cater to their changing requirements.
With following all these innovative approaches, Beyoung is able to grow its customer base exponentially by recording a growth of 250%.
Shivani Poddar & Tanvi Malik Co-founders, FabAlley and Indya shared about their social media game and said, “Our strategy has always been to make our customers engage and relate with us and not just push out products to them. We’re able to achieve this through social media and newsletters, we’ve been engaging with our audience on aspects of their life that move beyond fashion.”
Soumya Kant , Founding Member, Clovia shared insights with us and told, that the growing power of social media and digitalisation has helped Clovia to connect with its customers and nurture relations through personalised experiences. She also added that, “The D2C model enables brands to speak to their target audience directly. This direct connection enables brands to track trends, growth and feedback in real time. It immensely helps a brand like us that operates in an essential category like innerwear where the audience has very little education about it. We are able to educate and guide our young customers and be with them as their bodies go through different life stages.”
By creating a community of their customers, Clovia is creating wonders in the market by growing at an impressive rate of 100% every quarter and registering a 100%+ run rate growth over FY’20 despite an inconsequential Q1 and a double-digit EBITDA.
The D2C brands in the food and beverage sector are also using social media to the fullest by creating a direct feedback loop from picking the conversations from online portals and using social media influencers in the promotions of their product.
Meghana Narayan & Shauravi Malik Co-Founders, Slurrp Farm shared with us, “Being an internet first brand, we are agile with social media and have built a digital first way of thinking about our new age consumers. We are in direct contact with them through various platforms – Instagram, Facebook, Events and WhatsApp”. They further added, The process of interaction with the customers is the daily routine and they are building a connection through customer feedback calls. Everyone from the founders to the company’s driver have to participate and listen to it and continue to strive to deepen the understanding and know how they can build customer love and stick with their products.
Following these strategies, the brand has grown their sales by 4x till March 2021 and had closed FY21 with revenue of 6.8 Crores .They have seen very strong growth in business in the last 6 months and their current annual run rate is 24 crores and growing.
Bharat Sethi Founder & CEO, Rage Coffee added to this, “ Now the brand also works with influencers to connect with customers to understand their coffee experience. They are looking at data very closely – the repeat cohorts, whether consumers are buying coffee in a 15-day cycle or a 30-day cycle, and many other aspects. They have created review systems or feedback processes – all these are to analyse customers’ demands”.
They have a community of over 250k customers directly coming on their platform. The brand calls them Ragers or Ragers’ community and with these innovations the brand is clocking a 250% year-on-year revenue growth.
With so much competition in the market, the D2C brands can readily capture their market by capturing their customer’s attention on the go and social media is a great tool for that. Increasing their social footprint and diversifying on social channels, the brands surely have a strong base to build via digital platforms.
This content was originally published here.