You’ll Find it at the intersection of direct selling & direct to consumer
To say this is a dynamic, exciting and pivotal time for direct selling is an understatement. The landscape has shifted more in the last three or four years than in the previous couple of decades. And it’s bringing us new challenges and new opportunities—how we evolve, adapt and react to those opportunities and challenges will determine our relevancy for years to come.
There are positive dynamics driving these changes. People are more open than ever to sharing products and services with friends, families and followers. Everyone is looking for additional sources of income, but they want to engage differently. Direct selling pioneered this entire business model but we’re no longer the only game in town. We’re not the only way for people to earn additional income and be rewarded for sharing.
So, let’s look at some important ways we can make sure that we stay relevant and viable in a complex, evolving competitive world.
The Power of Flexibility
It’s time for us to be more responsive and open to the changes going on around us.
Years ago, we built carefully crafted brand worlds. The brand was the brand, and the field and individual markets shouldn’t change anything. It needed to look and sound exactly the way corporate intended. I know I was guilty of that early in my career.
Now distributors co-create the brands with us. What used to be fixed is now becoming really, really flexible. And we need to allow for the personalization and customization that makes our brands feel more authentic and relatable.
We also need to be more flexible about our stance on lifelong distributors. We still want distributors who will be with us (and only us) for the long haul, but that is not the reality in today’s world. Distributors may just be with us for a season and maybe even represent multiple brands during their tenure with us. We must get more comfortable with that.
The field of competition is changing rapidly. Social selling used to be considered direct selling’s superpower. But many direct-to-consumer (DTC) and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies have adopted affiliate models and multi-tiered commission structures. There is a blurring and blending of the lines, driven by consumers who don’t think in terms of sales channels—they only care about convenience and availability.
Today’s consumers want to buy products when, where and how they want to. Our distributors are demanding (rightfully so) that we show up the same way. They want to be alongside other brands that aren’t even in the channel. They want us in the feed next to those other products to help build awareness and preference and help soften the beaches.
All this points to where I think the future lies, which is somewhere at the intersection of direct selling and direct to consumer. And by taking the best of both: the very personal, relational elements of direct selling and the behavioral and transactional aspects of direct to consumer, we can create something that will pioneer the next hundred years of direct selling.
The companies that do this are the ones that will win market share over the next decades.
Master the Marketing
So, with all the change we’re enduring, what does the marketing organization of today even look like? There’s a lot of different aspects to marketing. But ultimately, we can boil it down to three different areas.
The first is brand marketing. We still must have an effective brand strategy to make sure that we’ve carved out a unique spot in the marketplace. This encompasses your visuals and your voice and all the other things that distinguish your brand, your products and your opportunity.
The second is field marketing, which is absolutely foundational. We need to communicate with the field. We need to motivate them. We need to provide them with amazing tools, compelling offerings and promotions that activate them to bring in new customers and distributors.
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Third, and somewhat overlooked, is performance marketing. First, let’s define what performance marketing is. Performance marketing, or pay-for-performance advertising, is where the purchaser pays only when there are measurable results. It seeks to drive a specific action, and advertisers only pay when that action—be it an acquisition or sale—is completed.
As direct sellers, we need to build out incredibly effective performance marketing teams. We need to not just have somebody that owns digital, but rather build a dedicated group solely focused on customer and distributor acquisition and conversion.
That’s the new muscle memory that we need to be developing in our organizations. And to date, we haven’t been very good at it. So, it’s time to get those internal stakeholders up to speed and bring in new talent and new understanding to help drive those behaviors.
With performance marketing, there’s two fuel sources: spend and content. DTC and CPG companies have large advertising budgets they can dedicate to building the awareness.
But for direct sellers, a lot of those dollars go to commissions and incentives. It doesn’t take a lot of spend to get started. And the goal is for it to be self-funding. Meet weekly with your performance marketing team and have them report back that for every dollar you gave them, you’re getting a return of $2, $3, $4 per ad spend.
It’s something you can literally watch on a weekly basis. And if the campaign’s not working, simply turn the faucet off. Develop new assets. Try new messaging. Initiate new calls to action. Then, when you’re ready, turn that faucet back on again.
A lot of risk goes away when you’re tracking it so closely. And luckily, we know day by day, moment by moment, how our performance marketing dollars are doing.
From a content perspective, make sure the focus is on the consumer, not the company. As direct sellers, we excel at talking about ourselves and our executive team, but that doesn’t matter to consumers. They want to know how we are solving their needs. So, focus content on how you are a solution for them.
Make it emotional, not transactional. No one wants to be sold to all the time. We want them to feel something—make them laugh; make them cry; educate; inform; shift their emotional state. Think of it as an emotional bank account so every time you educate or inspire, you’re making a deposit. So, when it’s time to do the hard sell, you’ve built that trust and you’re able to withdraw from that emotional bank.
Bite-Size Visuals
All content should tell stories, which is one of direct selling’s superpowers. One of the things we’ve been amazing at for 120 years is telling distributor and customer stories. There was an interesting Stanford Research Project that said stories are 22 times more likely to be remembered and to drive a sale than just facts.
We’re emotional creatures. Every purchase is an emotional decision that we then rationalize with facts. And all that great content needs to be video first—the days of the 14-minute video (which I know I’ve done many times in my career and used to be so proud of) are absolutely gone.
Six seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute. If we can’t tell a story about a product or our company in 30 seconds that drives someone to buy, we’re in serious trouble!
It’s fairly straightforward. Educate. Demonstrate. Entertain. Inspire. Shift their emotional state. Motivate them to action. All of this is really just shorthand for creating content that you yourself would want to interact with and see.
Recognizing Traffic Patterns
Algorithms are starting to favor paid content. They are changing every day. So, if you don’t have a paid content strategy, you must buy traffic. If you don’t have a paid strategy, you’re not going to get traffic to your website, and you’re not going to have an acquisition strategy.
I would argue that in direct selling, SEO is focused on defense, not offense. It’s more about reputation management than pulling in traffic. But I believe a lot of the dollars we spend on SEO and organic efforts would be better served on paid efforts.
One exception is influencers. Not macro influencers that do one post that has little impact. I’m talking about micro influencers, people with 10, 20, maybe 30,000 followers. My advice is to give them product. It shouldn’t cost you anything. Don’t pay for that post. Just give them free product to try and hopefully their followers are your demographic. Influencers help position your products and your brand.
The best converting ads right now are coming from user-generated content (UGC). So, if we’re talking about driving traffic—whether organic or paid—where does that traffic go? Where do you want it to go?
We must make sure we’re talking about the consumer and helping them move through that decision journey, whether it’s enrollment or buying product. Make sure your home page is optimized for conversion.
If you haven’t done that, then you should send traffic to a landing page that targets a very specific audience. Think of it like a mall. If you’re convincing someone to buy a product, you don’t just drive them to the mall and drop them off in the parking lot. You drive them to the mall; open the door; walk them to the store, put the product in their hand; and help them swipe their credit card.
That’s what landing pages and optimized home pages are there to do.
It’s our job to understand the behavior of our customers and distributors and prospective customers and distributors—and not just on our websites. We need to know where they came from and where they are going. We need to know what type of content they engage with and what products they’re looking at.
What content did they start for three seconds and then scroll away from? We can all have that information now. But if you don’t have a Google or Facebook pixel on your website, then you don’t really understand what’s going on with your customers and distributors.
And this informs our campaigns. We know how to nurture them and move them through the funnel.
Test. Learn. Scale.
The days of huge quarterly and annual campaigns where you launch them into the world and cross your fingers…those days are long gone. The new normal is daily micro campaigns. And when you have a new asset, give the algorithm about 5-7 days to see if it’s working or not. If it’s not performing, put those dollars behind ones that are.
We should always be looking to grow and deepen the relationship. When someone buys product, when someone visits the website, looks at a product, abandons a cart—they should get an email from you. This no-to-low-cost strategy is one of the best ways to increase lifetime value and drive revenue.
Bottom line? The future is direct, and the future is social.
Globally, social commerce is expected to grow three times as fast as traditional commerce to $1.2 trillion by 2025 and predicted to reach $3.8 trillion by 2030.
We must be there as well—building the brand, converting, connecting…and growing.
WAYNE MOOREHEAD has deep experience in marketing and brand strategy. Wayne’s rare blend of experience and success has shaped his philosophy on effective growth strategies, and he believes the future of the channel will blend the best of direct selling with the best of direct-to-consumer. He also hosts the DSN Direct Approach podcast.
From the December 2024 issue of Direct Selling News magazine.
