Marketing your fashion brand on Instagram and Pinterest seemed like a good idea until you realize how fashion-saturated these platforms are.
Big fashion brands are getting bigger on these platforms, but you can’t say the same for the lesser known brands. Winning over the customers the big fashion brands haven’t reached yet is difficult.
Now, you understand that you have to be creative, you have to come up with outside-the-box ideas that could help you better market your fashion brand and sell more.
That’s why we’ve come up with 15 creative ways that you can use right away to market your fashion brand and sell more without relying on Instagram and Pinterest:
Focus Your Promos For Pay Days
One of the fundamental things you should know as a fashion business owner is your ideal customer. You have to know them deeply in such a way that you even know their favorite music and their favorite film.
Why do you have to do this?
Because that’s how you connect with your customers on an emotional level and convert them beyond being a customer: you turn them into your brand’s loyal supporter.
One of the best advantages of knowing your customers is that you know exactly when they’re getting their monthly salary. From here, you can give promos and discounts when they have the money to buy it.
Rolling out campaigns when they don’t have the money isn’t only ineffective, your customers might resent you for it. Focusing your promos during their salary dates will definitely make them love you and become a huge supporter of your brand for being considerate about their situation.
Promote OOTD (Outfit Of the Day) Games
Since you’re in the fashion industry, it’s highly likely that your audience is the type who loves to dress up and flaunt their fashion statement everywhere they go—even online!
That’s why it’s a great idea to promote OOTD games: you get to connect with your audience and it’s an easy way to extend your brand’s reach to the right people, as most fashion enthusiasts hang out with other fashion enthusiasts.
Make sure that your OOTD games revolve around your fashion brand. It could be your brand’s mission or your fashion products themselves, then make sure the prize you give away is relevant to what they want and enticing enough to participate.
Work With The Right Influencers
When you’re a fashion brand owner, aiming to land huge fashion influencers isn’t always a great idea. Here’s why:
- Huge fashion influencers are almost always already connected to other huge fashion brands. It’s probably difficult to persuade them to promote your brand or even pay for their fees.
- Even if they did, your brand might have limited exposure, or worse, be outshined by other brands.
This could end up as a brand nightmare.
What you can do is approach influencers who you believe your fashion products can help.
Just imagine how your influencer’s followers would react if your fashion item dramatically improves the influencer’s looks and style. You’ll find yourself with a lot of customers raring to purchase your fashion products knowing that it can do wonders.
Up Your Email Game
You can’t rely on Instagram and your Facebook alone to drive traffic to your business.
You have to make the most out of your email list, considering that it’s still the best way to sell online and build a lasting relationship with customers and would-be customers.
With a buyer persona in hand, you can craft compelling emails that resonate with your audience and engage them. You don’t have to sell every email, you have to converse with them like a friend would.
You wouldn’t want to buy from someone who’s visibly looking for a quick buck. You’d rather buy from someone who took the time to know you and talk to you. That’s how your email game should look like.
Sell in Sets
Most fashion brand owners make the mistake of not selling in sets.
Selling in sets is not only a huge sales booster, it also helps in dealing with your inventory and pitching in items that are difficult to sell. Plus, a customer who loved your set will automatically be a loyal brand follower and help you promote your brand.
The key here is not to sell the whole set at a retail price but to sell them at a ‘wholesale’ price. You, of all people, know your margins so you can strategize on how you can pull this off without denting your sales.
Be Heard in Relevant Groups
When you’re starting out or stuck in promoting your fashion brand, it’s always a good idea to hang out in relevant groups on social media.
You can join Facebook groups that are into fashion, engage people on a Fashion subreddit, or answer burning fashion questions by users on Quora. That way, you’re not only selling more of your fashion products, you’re also slowly and steadily building your perceived fashion expertise—making customer’s perception of your brand as top quality.
Always Have a Special Response Ready
You can’t win all customers. Sometimes there are bad days when people are out to give you a negative feedback, which will hurt your brand.
Doing this without a plan is emotionally exhausting. That’s why you should always have a special response ready to handle negative feedback right away.
Strive to respond to the negative feedback as soon as you can, from a few minutes to a few hours. Then you can request a private communication channel where you can offer them a freebie or a discount to lessen their dissatisfaction. While it’s not a guaranteed way to win over an irate client, it’s still a lot better and less damaging than doing nothing at all.
You can also do this to your happy customers as well. You can offer promos and discounts for leaving a great feedback, which could turn them into your own loyal brand supporters.
Master Retargeting
Retargeting is the art of winning over the potential customers you’ve lost in the first wave of your campaign.
The beauty of retargeting lies in its ‘If-Then’ logic: If a Facebook user clicks on your Facebook ad but didn’t push through with your landing page, that probably means the user didn’t find the value of what you’re offering. Then that means that the ad you’ll use for retargeting must be focused on highlighting the value of your fashion product.
Because of how laser-focused retargeting can get, it gives a sense of personalization that improves your conversion. A potential customer thinks your fashion product is too pricey? Retarget with the value of your fashion product. A potential customer thinks the delivery time takes too long? Retarget with a detailed look at your delivery process.
That’s the reason why retargeting is a strong component of social media campaigns. It plugs the ‘holes’ of your campaign. It provides laser-focused angles that solve and removes objections and hurdles potential customers may have about your fashion product.
Give Something for Free
Giving away something for free helps you get the initial momentum going. If you’re a fashion brand starting out, this will help you in getting that much-needed traction.
Here are some ‘Free’ ideas that you can use for your fashion brand:
Free Shipping
Free shipping is a great idea because potential customers are buying your product with the price exactly as advertised. It’s far too common to find good deals only to find that it costs way more than the advertised price because of the shipping fees.
This ruins customer experience and makes your brand look deceiving. By clearing the shipping fee from the customer’s burden, you’re making it easier for them to buy your products.
Bonus Items
This might seem counterintuitive, but most of the time, people tend to buy because of the bonus products attached to their true purchase. It makes the purchase look like a steal, pushing potential customers to actually go out and buy your fashion products.
Offering bonus items is a good way to clear your inventory and get rid of fashion products that are either too hard to sell or offer razor-thin margins.
Free Item-Pay for Shipping
This is the exact opposite of free shipping and one of the most popular ‘free’ ideas these days. This is all about giving your products away for free as long as the customer is paying for shipping.
Now, why should you do that? If you’re a new fashion brand and you know that you have great designs that will storm the industry once enough people heard and used your brand, then this is the best step towards getting the market penetration you badly need.
Free Item-Pay for Shipping is the best weapon for up-and-coming fashion brands who know how good their product is.
Lead Magnet
Lead Magnet is a different free offer. Here, you provide exclusive information for free in exchange for the user’s email address. Lead magnets should be highly helpful and relevant to your potential customers wants and needs.
The beauty of lead magnets is that you can position yourself as an expert while getting the most important source of your sales: customer emails.
Build Your Value Proposition
Think of value proposition as your brand’s battle cry. It’s what separates you from the sea of competitors, makes you easy to remember, and say exactly what your fashion products can offer to the ideal customer.
Most fashion brands make the mistake of thinking that a value proposition is like a tagline or a slogan. That’s why they end up coming up with witty slogans that don’t resonate with the ideal customer or enigmatic taglines that don’t really explain what the fashion brand is all about.
While using your value proposition as your tagline or slogan is definitely possible, it functions beyond that. Your value proposition is your personal guide to navigating your way to market dominance.
If you’re selling highly customizable belts, a brand that doesn’t know much about using value proposition might write this:
“Highly customizable high-quality leather belts.”
A brand that knows value proposition will use this:
“Get new handcrafted Italian belt designs in under 10 seconds.” or “Never run out of belt designs that match your OOTD 7 days a week.”
The first example is overused and boring. Everybody claims their product is of high quality. No brand will claim otherwise. It just says that it’s highly customizable and high quality, it doesn’t say how.
The latter examples show you specific details that show that the product you’re selling is indeed high quality by mentioning ‘handcrafted’ and ‘Italian’. It also shows that the product is highly customizable because you can change the design in under 10 seconds and you have 7 unique designs you can use every day of the week.
See that difference? That’s how you stand out from the crowd and attract the right customers.
Keep the trolls at bay
Leaving trolls to thrash your brand unchecked will slow down your campaign momentum and might even ruin your brand’s reputation.
Good thing social media sites offer a ’filtered words’ list that you can use to keep them from harassing your brand. Even better, you can customize your filtered words list, so that means you can always add and remove specific words and phrases that trolls might use.
Dominate Google Search
Nothing beats free quality traffic, that’s why it makes a lot of business sense to make your fashion brand website more SEO-friendly.
Here are some ways to rise up through the search rankings:
Consistent Quality Content
Posting content that is helpful and relevant to your ideal customers on a consistent basis is the battle-tested solution to getting quality search rankings on Google.
Mobile-Friendly
Google has penalized a lot of websites who are deemed not Mobile-friendly. By making sure your website works well on desktop and mobile, you’re getting quality SEO points. Since most users now are spending their time on their mobile devices, it makes a lot of sense to become mobile-friendly even without Google’s penalty/reward system.
Fast Site Loading Speed
A few months ago, Google has unrolled another update that seeks to reward websites that loads under 3 seconds. There are various tools you can use to measure your fashion brand website’s loading speed. If it’s not up to standards, it’s time to upgrade your website and fix the speed bottlenecks that might prevent a crowd of ideal customers from finding your brand.
Right Alt Tags
Using the right tags on your website makes your website a lot easier for Google’s search bots to index, meaning your website can get better search results.
Go For Videos
Videos are the heavyweights when it comes to attracting and keeping the attention of your ideal customers.
You can use videos to show how your products are made, the delivery process, customer success, and other behind-the-scenes stuff that endears your fashion brand to the ideal customers. You can upload these videos to your website and social media sites.
It’s also a great idea to create a Youtube channel for your fashion brand. Here you can build a community and promote your products in the most natural way possible. You can show unboxing videos, reviews, and materials test that would always put your fashion products in the best light possible.
Best of all, you can also earn money on Youtube, giving you multiple streams of income for your fashion brand!
Join The Right Events
Offline campaign isn’t dead, but you should be extremely efficient with your time and money.
That means you can’t be joining every fashion event available out there, a typical mistake made by most fashion brand owners.
You have to consider if the event caters to the ideal customer of your brand. Events that are relevant to your ideal customer is a perfect opportunity to gather key information:
What are your competitors doing that is working well for your ideal customers?
What are your competitors’ weaknesses and mistakes when catering to your ideal customers?
Where do your ideal customers naturally gravitate?
What do your ideal customers say and do when they found a fashion product they like?
Getting the answer to these crucial questions will help you gain a huge advantage over the competition.
Look for Affiliate Marketers
Affiliate marketers are people who will promote and sell your brand at an agreed price.
This is probably the fastest and most convenient way to promote your products. Imagine having dozens of people promoting your products to their audiences. You’re getting massive quality traffic, leads, and conversions literally overnight.
Here’s some “quick maths” (had to make that reference 😊) that shows how effective partnering with affiliate marketers can be:
Let’s say you’re selling a fashion product for $100. You bought or made it at $50, so you have a 100% profit margin. By offering $5-10 to your affiliate marketer every time you make the sale, you’re actually investing merely $5-10 dollars (which is already part of your profit) to get access to a wider audience without spending a lot of time and effort attracting them and building a community around them.
Did you learn a lot?
There’s more where that came from!
Search Insights is Australia’s leading e-commerce digital marketing agency. The insights we provided on fashion marketing right now is just the tip of the iceberg. We could help you consistently make sales every single month and grow your brand for expansion into overseas markets.
We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. The only question is, will your fashion brand be our next success story? Discover the answer right away: Contact us today!
