There are numerous fashion brands out there, but how do you make yourself stand out from the crowd? That is the real challenge. A good solution for this is deploying an effective digital marketing strategy.
If used correctly, digital marketing can boost your sales, improve your brand presence and make your brand more profitable. It puts your product at your target audience. When done correctly, this increases brand awareness, boosts sales and makes users brand ambassadors.
According to Derek Robinson, founder and CEO of Top Notch Dezigns, digital marketing is the next step for your business due to its global reach and effectiveness.
There are several digital marketing strategies that you can apply to your fashion store to maximize profitability. Any fashion brand at all – whether old or new – can deploy a winning digital marketing strategy. If you want to market yourself better, keep on reading.
Here are some ways you can build a profitable fashion brand with digital marketing:
Retarget Visitors
Whenever you visit a website or see an ad, you don’t immediately purchase the product right away. But the ad somehow stays with you, especially if you liked the product or found the campaign interesting.
You can target such visitors by showing reminder ads that make them recall the product that they saw earlier.
For example, if the visitors don’t revisit your website for a given period of time, you can make the deal lucrative by offering discounts. There are also some people who add things to their shopping cart but later ditch it so they should be retargeted as it would increase turnover as well.
A survey by Uhuru monitored Facebook ad management of several brands. They found that on average the return on investment on retargeting campaigns was 398%. For some, it even rose up to a whopping 660%! So your social media strategy for your fashion brand is very critical.
Holiday Promotions
During the festive season, you can roll out emails to your subscribers informing them of discounts on a variety of products. For example, you can have a 10-day period of discounts where you may give a discount on one category per day.
So on day 1 there could be a discount on jackets, day 2 on shoes and so on. For example, Gap’s online sales in the festive season were 2.3 times higher than that of other months.
This way you will not only be promoting your products to the subscribers, but in turn prompting them to share those unforgettable discounts with their social contacts.
You can even create a discount on pairings such as shorts and shirts or glasses and jackets. Or you could have giveaway schemes where there is a gift item such as a hat for orders above $50.
This would encourage customers to spend more. Moreover, all such discounts and promotions should be shared on the website and all social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Style Guides
If the product offering for the fashion brand includes various clothing items, on the website you can create style guides. This way you can visualise different combinations for subscribers and visitors to get an idea of how to match different clothing items and it can be part of your online marketing strategy.
You can even create multiple style guides. These could be based on special occasions such as picnics, or weddings or based on seasons such as summer or winter or even themes such as for work or travel.
You can have a special section on the website dedicated to style guides. Make sure to provide detailed descriptions of all the items used in the guide.
Digital Marketing for Fashion: Work with Influencers
To cater to your target market better, work with influencers such as fashion bloggers and vloggers who have a large following. Influencers with a large following are usually well reputed and respected for their views. They can really increase your sales by reviewing or recommending your products.
Working with influencers allows you to have your products advertised to a different group of potential customers. If you’ve chosen the right influencer, it can lead to new customers.
The Leather Skin Shop, a leather jacket online store, used product reviews and outreached a number of bloggers, vloggers and fashion industry influencers to grow their following. Products that had solid referral traffic and generated good leads were given to influencers to create a buzz and influence customers to make informed buying decisions.
Focus on Events All Year Round
People don’t buy gifts just on birthdays and Christmas anymore. Numerous other occasions have now popped up or gained significance in recent years. There is Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, friendship day, baby showers, bridal showers, graduations, anniversaries and the list goes on.
So, depending on the type of store you run and the products you sell, it is a good idea to market customized items that are relevant to specific occasions taking place in your target audience’s life.
For example, if you own an apparel store, you could promote matching couples’ clothing for Valentine’s day, or men’s shirts for Father’s Day. This will persuade your audience to make purchases all year round and strengthen brand loyalty.
For example, Combatant Gentleman’s father’s day campaign asked fathers to share pictures of their old jeans. The person with the most worn out jeans photo would win a new pair.
Engage with Your Audience
Another way to build brand loyalty is to constantly engage with your target audience. This helps improve their perception of your brand and establishes a sense of community within the buyers and sellers.
The best way to make your engagement effective is to come up with campaigns that connect and resonate with your audience. For example, you could do so by running contests on Facebook and Instagram that highlight the shared values between your brand and the customers.
Consider the campaign by Under Armour and Gisele Bundchen. They got involved with their audience by using the hashtag #iwillwhatiwant which carried the message that with the right attitude and will, anything is possible.
Giveaways on Instagram
For the top-selling items, you can conduct a giveaway competition on Instagram. For example, Catparty had a giveaway competition where the winner would get a bundle of products worth $14.
Before the competition, they had roughly 200 followers on Instagram but after the competition, the number rose to 340 followers – a 70% increase. Such giveaway competitions may be done every alternate month or may even be organized monthly.
One thing that needs to be taken care of is that proper hashtags are used which help the users to easily keep track of the competition. Such competition will increase brand awareness and increase followers.
Bonus: 5 “Must-Haves” For A Fashion E-Commerce Site
There are key considerations that apply to any e-commerce venture, of course, but when it comes to making money on fashion products there are five “must-have” things to include in your website:
1. Great Photos
Good visuals are necessary for selling any product or service online, but they are particularly important for fashion and clothing websites. That’s because buyers want to get a sense of the way they will look after your products arrive. Custom photography can come at an extra cost but might offer big value if it leads to more purchases and fewer returns.
2. A Great Internal Search Tool
There are many different ways to sort clothes and accessories, online or at a brick-and – mortar retail store. But it’s not enough to have what buyers want – customers may leave if they can’t find their preferred style , colour or size fast enough. That’s why a great internal search engine that helps them locate what they want within your fashion e-commerce site could make a big difference in your sales figures.
3. Targeted Search and Social Advertising
Every online store needs customers, and Google remains the most popular portal for attracting buyers to your website. Still, social media platforms can be just as important to fashion retailers, since it’s so easy to share photos, reviews, and online coupons. Search and social advertising could be just what you need to jump-start the marketing process quickly and affordably.
4. Reviews from Real Customers
Unfortunately, most of us have had the experience of buying something online and regretting it later. Through that process, we learn that we can’t always trust things like product descriptions. What we do put more faith in, though, are the real-life reviews from other customers who are similar to us. By posting buyer feedback on your fashion brand website, and encouraging reviews, you generate more content for your pages and make it easier for customers to feel confident in their purchases.
5. Buyer Safety Guarantees
Speaking of confidence, it can be a bit unnerving to enter your credit card number on to an unknown website for the first time. A good way to calm your customers’ minds and worries are to offer money-back guarantees. You could also show off your membership to the Better Business Bureau, and let them know you’ve invested in high-quality encryption and secure merchant accounts. When buyers know they are safe doing business with you, it’s one less reason for them to abandon a purchase.
Digital marketing provides the right tools for engaging with your audience, raising awareness of your brand and maximising your profit along the way. You can also check the best social media campaigns in the fashion industry to be inspired.