“That ad tanked. It’s a waste of money to test it again.”

Sometimes, yes. Other times, it’s as simple as aligning the right messenger with the right message.

DTCo kicked off with Hilma, a for-women, by-women running shoe brand in Q4 2023. Like many brands, they were struggling to sustain efficiency with ads while scaling and their current agency was just flat and not bringing new ideas forward.

When we looked at Hilma, we saw the opportunity—their founder is a subject matter expert, ultramarathoner and makes a lot of reels content. Her content was incredible, stacked with solid value props and stuffed with the Founder’s “Why,” but there was a clear point of friction between the raw UGC vibe of the videos and the message being delivered by a brand that no one knows.

DTCo proposed re-running existing founder creative from faux-founder handle—a strategy that we call Owning the Medium. This is a go-to DTCo method for serving bespoke whitelisted handles to cut through the noise of brands in feed telling you about their product and letting the right messenger/message align with an audience.

In other words: Own the Medium shifts perception from “ugh, not another ad,” to “wow, she’s awesome — let me learn more about these sneakers.”

This is how we did it:

And this is how it performed:

Are your landing pages working as hard as your ads?

Shifting gears: content strategy that’s designed for new customer growth does not end at the ad level—it ends with a profitable purchase.

There are a number of ways to optimize post click content with conversion rate optimization, eg. price testing, promotional strategies, merchandising, etc. One of the most accessible levers for DTCo is creative landing pages that build on ad level Content Pillars.

Late last year, we kicked off with Asystem, a brand we’ve looked forward to working with for awhile. They have a topical pain solution that’s gone viral on TikTok many times over—our goal was to find scalable wins through paid.

We saw quick wins with PMS Cramp ad content but traffic landing on the PDP wasn’t converting where we thought it could. The hypothesis was straight forward: DTCo ads highlighted a specific problem-solution and that messaging was not reflected on site, hurting CVR.

So, the team crafted a new landing page, highlighting the product’s formulation and 7 reasons how this product solves for PMS Cramps. Super simple, 1:1 messaging.

Now that prospects were landing on a page that was entirely dedicated to their specific pain point, rather than a panacea of problems to be solved, CVR skyrocketed — it 4x’d, to be exact.

Whether we’re talking ad creative or site experience, it’s the same problems to solve: what’s the customer point of view message? How should we test it?

If you can’t tell, we’re obsessed pre-click, post-click and everything in between. Join the conversation at [email protected].