The Sharma Brands Playbook: How Centralizing Data Improves DTC Marketing

Sharma Brands is a leading DTC marketing firm. Founded by Nik Sharma, aka "the DTC guy," the team operates and works with some of your favorite DTC brands, including Judy, Caraway, Juneshine, and even MrBeast's new brand Feastables. Plus, the Sharma Brands team runs HOOX, which creates optimized landing pages and website experiences. From building extraordinary landing pages to serving as a one-stop-marketing-shop, the Sharma Brands team does it all. 

At Sharma Brands, Ari Sadwick leads all things growth. Prior to joining the team, she worked at about-face, Poosh, Pressed Juicery, and SnackNation. She's an expert in all things DTC marketing and brand building.

We chatted with Ari to understand how the Sharma Brands team uses Tydo to make smart, strategic DTC marketing recommendations and helps DTC brands test, grow, and scale quickly. 

“What we needed was a tool that could help us manage multiple brands at once and pull accurate, data-driven recommendations on the go.” 

Phase One: Translating Data Into Action

As a fast-growing agency managing multiple brands accounts, the team at Sharma Brands needed a tool that they could turn to and immediately pull all the data they need. As the head of their growth function, Ari leverages Tydo Portfolio to access high-level metrics on the fly. 

For example, if an investor in the company or a team member on the client’s creative division wants to unpack why one product SKU is being returned more often than usual, she can dive into the data, pull info to find out why, and send it their way with tactical recommendations. 

While this workflow of transforming data into actionable insights is only one use case, Ari points out that this typically occurs multiple times a day, if not within an hour alone. Due to the pure volume of companies that Sharma Brands partners with, a multi-store dashboard was critical.

Ari adds that unlike most analytics platforms, Tydo came in and helped the Sharma Brands team stand up the software for all of Sharma Brands' brands. As a result, the team didn’t need to hire a retainer-based analyst to prep the data and integrate it into the team’s existing suite of tools. In her words, there was no legwork involved besides linking Tydo to Facebook, Google Ads, and a handful of other performance channels. 

“Tydo was a perfect fit for two reasons. It was insanely easy to customize to our needs, but it was also incredibly simple to stand up and get going.” 

Phase Two: Managing Multiple Brands at Once 

Sharma Brands leverages Tydo Portfolio to get a quick, high-level glance at all the brands they work with. On a daily basis, Ari checks Tydo each morning to make sure nothing is broken. 

Since the team works across a variety of brands, it’s helpful to have a centralized dashboard that Ari can use when she needs to answer recurring client questions around ROAS or AOV changes that may have occurred overnight. Critically, clients also have access to Tydo, which provides even greater degrees of visibility and alignment across their client engagements.

Even if Ari isn’t diving into a brand’s dashboard every day, Tydo helps her understand what is and isn’t performing well, especially when they have so many brands on their plate. With so many moving parts, the teams can zoom in and out to quickly uncover trends across their portfolio.

After distilling high-level trend lines through Tydo, Ari’s team can then decide where they want to dig in and allocate additional time and energy. Moreover, this high-level data allows the Sharma Brands team to compare what’s happening across brands and make smarter recommendations.

“Because we’re working with multiple brands at the same time, visibility and accuracy are key. With Tydo, that workflow has become much more fluid.” 

Phase Three: Balancing Creative and Performance

Sharma Brands constantly tracks the following metrics:  conversion rate, AOV, and revenue targets. 

In addition, they keep a close eye on acquisition cost and return rate. Return rate in particular is important to look into, especially if the cost to acquire a customer is more expensive than it needs to be. Ari drives home the point that the more data a brand can get their hands on, the better off they’ll be to iterate and deploy high-performing ad campaigns.

When designing creative assets, the Sharma Brands team focuses on drawing and retaining attention. Ari notes that it doesn’t matter if you have the most amazing copy or the most beautiful assets. Rather, a brand needs to put forward creative that’s tailored to the exact channel it’s living on. A brand can’t take something that works on one channel, drop it into another, and expect the same results. 

In fact, that piece of content will probably fail because every channel is inherently different. The key, in her words, is diversifying channels and specifically targeting white spaces. Plus, the customer journey from the first touch point to checkout should be smooth, fun, and easy. 

In the process of balancing a focus on creative development and high-performing ad units, Ari reiterates the importance of data as a differentiator. With data, you can cut through the noise of what’s working and what’s not, and in turn make optimized decisions accordingly.

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“To build creative that’s interesting and on-brand while also optimized for performance, you need data. With that data in hand, we can quickly deploy tests and learn much faster than before. That’s a game-changer for us.”