Why Your DTC Brand Needs a Hero Offer
If you want to build a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand today, or even bring an existing brand to digital, you need to ask yourself a simple but tough question. Does the consumer truly, genuinely need what you’re offering? Only if the answer is an unequivocal “yes,” should you move to the next step — crafting your hero offer.
A hero offer is built around a single powerful product or service. Not a dozen SKUs to solve multiple needs and capture multiple consumer segments. That sounds great in a business plan, but with rare exceptions, it simply doesn’t work to try to be all things to all people online. Especially for new brands. Here’s why.
The Consumer Won’t Do the Work: She or he is just too busy, distracted, and impatient to figure out what you stand for, let alone which product is right for them. If it’s not clear and relevant in seconds, the consumer is moving on.
Targeting Keeps Getting Harder: In what now seems like the heyday of DTC, say 2015 to late 2020, brands had a wide range of platform data at their disposal and could effectively retarget segments on Google and Meta. Not so easy anymore. First came Apple’s iOS14 privacy restrictions. Now Google is phasing out cookies. What even more restrictive privacy measures are coming next?
Ad Fatigue Abounds: With the growing limitations on targeting, a hero message is essential to make your ads and content more urgent and actionable. Even so, you will still need to refresh creative monthly if not weekly. Few founders or brand leaders think often about ad fatigue, but it’s one of the biggest challenges brands must overcome to engage consumers consistently, let alone keep digital sales flowing at a sustainable cost. The eye glazes over what you’ve already seen. Heroes help keep it fresh.
No Hero, No Journey: The consumer, like all of us, loves stories, and brands who can construct a journey consumers want to take will win again and again. And as everyone knows, you cannot have a journey without a hero. The right hero offer is the threshold into your brand’s story and ultimately the path to sales. More bluntly, it’s how you get consumers to click three times, enter their credit card information and buy. If you have too many offers, and too complicated a digital funnel, it simply won’t happen.
The next question is how to build a hero offer. The foundation, of course, is product-market fit, but that alone isn’t enough. In part two, we’ll get into steps that have worked for several successful brands and draw some lessons to help build your hero offer!
