Digital Marketing For A Fashion Brand: How To Build A Profitable Business Online

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. Digital marketing, if used in the right manner, can increase your sales, improve brand presence and make your brand more profitable. It makes your product available to your target audience. When done right, it increases brand awareness, boosts sales and turns users into 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 brand online:

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. If for instance, the visitors don’t revisit your website for a specified period, you can make the deal lucrative by offering discounts. Also, there are some people who add things to their shopping cart but later ditch it so, those people should also be retargeted as it would increase turnover.

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 fashion brand’s product offering includes different clothing items, you can create style guides on the website. This way subscribers and visitors can visualize different combinations to get an idea about how to match different clothing items. 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.

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. Want to know how to connect and work with influencers in your niche? Here’s an awesome guide by Hubspot to help you get started.

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, Fathers 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 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 competitions will increase the brand awareness and increase the followers.

Digital marketing provides you with the right tools to engage with your audience and increase your brand awareness and profits along the way.

Source: DigitalAgency Network