8 Reasons Why DTC Brands Choose Leaf For eCommerce Marketing & Growth

The days of traditional eCommerce marketing are behind us.

No longer can you easily achieve 50X ROI from Facebook ad campaigns.

Say goodbye to more than 60% accuracy when it comes to tracking and attribution.

The Facebook versus Apple war, the death of third-party cookies, EU/California privacy laws… Digital marketing has been on a three-decade-long journey fuelled by technology.

And because of this, profitable eCommerce growth is so complex now that your average digital marketer cannot keep up.

Take Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for example. It’s the latest version of GA set to replace GA3 / Universal Analytics. Setting up GA4 properly and preparing for the shift over from GA3 is a tech-intensive job, and not just about putting a bit of Javascript code on the website anymore. This is just one of the now many tech and data-led aspects of eCommerce marketing.

Which is why…

Traditional digital marketing agencies lose out to tech-first specialist teams

These agencies are unable to combine marketing expertise with the more technical code and data requirements of ad and analytic platforms.

This is a recurring theme for any business that has approached us to help them with end-to-end DTC eCommerce performance.

So that’s where we come in.

At Leaf, we don’t just use tech, we build it. And we’re not talking about cutesy plug-and-play apps either, no.

We’re talking about a proper suite of proprietary performance tools – Leaf Grow – that help us save time and make smarter decisions on your behalf.

Check ’em out:

• ‍Launcher – automates campaign launching & optimisation‍
• Pacing – monitors budget pacing & distribution across region, funnel stage and objective‍
• Performance – monitors performance of campaigns against specific target metrics (CAC, ROAS etc)‍
• Cohorts – analyses customer lifetime value across region, time and channel‍
• Answers – all the insights you need in one place: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, GA, WebStore & Offline.‍
• Chewie – a fuzzball of automation that onboards clients and manages tasks across our project management systems.

Not only that, most of our people are software engineers and data scientists. Even our CEO is a software engineer!

As a company, we solve complex marketing challenges with code, data and tech. Exhibit A.

Why? Because we’re on a mission to redefine the marketing agency model of the 21st century.

Here are 9 things that set us apart from your more traditional eCommerce marketing agency:

1. We’re specialists in transactional digital commerce‍

End-to-end – that’s our thing when it comes to your eCommerce funnel.

We control the entire journey from ad-click-to-purchase by focussing on signal processing.

How do we do this?

We have a dedicated team of signal processing engineers that take care of conversion tracking & analytics setup, enhancement and maintenance.

2. You save time and cost on data via our data warehouse‍

We’ve built our own data warehouse that can plug into any platform and ingest, organise, analyse, and report on phenomenal amounts of data, at lightning speed.

All your customer, product performance, site performance and marketing data – unified.

If you’re thinking, “Wow, that’s probably a ton of data, what about privacy?“…

We’re experts in data compliance such as cookie policies and GDPR, so no need to worry.

3. We’re able to run multivariate creative testing for you‍

Testing is important. But it takes a lot of time.

Especially on the prep work.

Coming up with different ad variations, setting them up, and running them – hours can be used on just one ad campaign.

Our technology, however, allows us to easily create many ad variants and test these against lots of audiences to determine winning combinations at a fraction of the cost and time doing this in Ads Manager.

For example, our ‘Answers’ tool spits out granular insights on each part of the ad unit has performed (text, CTA button, URL, image/video, headline, etc.).

Less time taken, more testing done, smarter decisions made.

4. Audience mining‍

Our Launcher tool enables us to mine interest and behaviour-based audiences that you cannot get in Ads Manager.

It also allows us to structure our campaigns around hyper-relevant ‘interest clusters’ to deliver superior reach and conversion.‍

5. We are ‘product’ AND ‘marketing’ specialists‍

We’ve built our own consumer and B2B products and taken them to market (see here) – growing and nurturing a global community of users stretching into the millions.

We REALLY understand acquisition and retention.

Using our data strategy methodology in replacement of regular digital marketing – we capture, structure, and use data to drive our digital performance efforts for our clients.

6. We focus on ROI modelling over ROAS‍

When it comes to profitability measurement and tracking, most agencies shy away from this because they’re generalists – it’s too sophisticated and time consuming for them.

We’re excellent at it.

We take time to establish a deep understanding of your unit economics – factoring in variable costs, fixed costs and customer value into cost of acquisition targets – because we care more about sustainable growth over quick wins.

Don’t get us wrong, that 10X ROAS hit in the beginning does feel great, but it’s usually not long before you end up seeing a decline.

Profitability is our preferred performance metric.

Hence our focus on ROI modelling.

7. We dovetail paid & organic marketing efforts

Our background in building consumer facing products and also providing services to the music industry has enables us to bring proper audience development methods to the brand world.

We turn ‘brand awareness’ into ‘brand performance’ through a fusion of paid and organic strategies.

This is especially important as we move towards the death of the cookie.

Native engagement audiences are key!‍

8. We provide a 360 solution for eCommerce, D2C, and online retail‍

We have the experience, expertise and technology to provide a turnkey, one-partner solution for growth for our clients.

From conversion tracking and analytics, to creative production, channel management and web store development, we provide and end-to-end service designed to help you achieve your growth potential.

Let us take the guesswork out of eCommerce marketing, so you can focus on scaling your business.

The only question now is… Are you ready for a new dawn of eCommerce marketing and growth?