You’re a growing DTC brand at £10-30 million in sales and now want to enter the USA. How do you do it with Meta?
Lots of talk on LinkedIn/on webinars wafting “proprietary strategies” that preach the need to go granular, targeting specific US states.
Whilst there’s always nuance, and each brand needs to objectively assess their own situation, pushing a targeted approach as standard is bad advice for 99% of brands.
- Are you a brand with a very specific customer demographic who only really live in certain states?
- Do you have very specific operational challenges that limit you to certain regions?
- Are you an outlier, sat heavy on cash, resources and time, enabling you to effectively undergo hyper-localisation for what’s essentially an MVP test at this stage?
If so, going granular to begin with is potentially a good move.
But if you’re like most high-growth DTC brands, you’re not in that position and you don’t have these constraints. In fact, you probably just want to give yourself the best chance of verifying the upside with minimal risk.
So the only reason you’d deploy a granular strategy is:
A) You’ve been sold you couldn’t go it alone – you need this special approach to succeed.
Or B) You’ve been told your ad spend would somehow be wasted by targeting irrelevant people across the USA more broadly – better to concentrate it.
A valid concern.
…If it wasn’t a misrepresentation of how Meta’s auction actually works.
Think about it.
- Your best guess hunches are often proved incorrect – one thing your prospects love to do is humble even your best marketing ideas.
- You have a big available audience in the USA – one thing Meta really needs in order to drive lower acquisition costs for you.
- You have no true data yet on who your USA customer is – one thing Meta is exceptional at discovering for you.
Why would you arbitrarily limit your options – results – and guess upon launch where you sell? It’s like being given 50 different dartboards and being told to hit a specific bullseye, only you’re blindfolded and don’t know which board you’re aiming for.
In 99% of cases it makes no sense.
If you’re entering the USA market for the first time, it’s an exciting opportunity for your brand. Don’t guess, no matter how clued-up you think you are.
Instead, let the data lead you: give yourself a large area to aim for and get yourself on the board in a controlled manner.
Then, and only then, think about making informed tweaks to strategy based on your specific (real) insights.
We’ve launched like this for a number of our clients in the past year, all of them profitably, with one of them already sat at +£10m in incremental sales.
Any other brands opted to cut the fat and seen the same? If you’re entering a new market, don’t get caught up in the minutia or fall for a plug-&-play new business strategy. Get in touch if you want an honest sense check on your plans.
This was also posted on LinkedIn. Join the conversation here.
