Table of Contents
1. Create Useful Content for Specific Platforms
If you plan to market a clothing line on social media, you need to understand that your social content forms an important research phase. However, it is not necessarily the final step in the purchase journey of your customers. This needs to inform the type of content you offer the audience. Avoid overloading users with links to your website or buy now CTAs. Use social media as a way to offer users insight into the product, tell stories, and help them get to know your brand.
Fashion could learn a lesson from good digital publishing here, which has to do with the type of content you put out there. According to Refinery29 co-founder, Christene Barberich, fashion and publishing are both incredibly malleable mediums when it comes to evoking emotions, telling personal stories, and shaping an identity or voice more than ever. She says that it is important to not only create content but also share real-life experiences with a worthwhile and sincere impact.
Just like good journalism is reliant on personal stories, proper fashion brand storytelling relies on your ability to transfer what your brand represents in the customer’s personal life into actual content.
Obviously, there’s a place and time and place for campaign assets and editorial photography. However, for the most part, the social media campaigns of fashion brands should be meaningful content specifically intended for social media. So, hire a photographer to capture Instagram shots, edit videos so that they are short enough to be feed viewed, and create blog posts that actually load on Facebook instead of taking the user away.
2. Find the Right Combination of Organic and Paid
It is worth noting that there isn’t any hard and fast rule when it comes to striking the right balance between organic social content and paid ads. It will depend on the user, your brand, as well as what your brand means to your users. With Facebook’s freshly unveiled changes to the News Feed that deprioritizes organic content from both brands and publishers, the reality is that you might find yourself having to invest more in paid if you wish to get your content in front of an audience.
Contextual marketing is all the rage today. You might assume that you have just discovered an effective strategy for targeting, but you need to take time to think again about where, when, and with what type of content you are offering them. Work with DIVISA Fashion Marketing Agency to find the right balance between organic and paid.
3. Make C2C Part of Your Business Model
Peer-to-peer sales might be seemingly retro, but in the beauty industry, something of a Renaissance is currently underway. Contemporary brands have found success in a digital revamp of the old Avon-style model, which is currently powered by social media.
It is hardly surprising that social selling is very effective on social media. The new Group Community Pages on Facebook seem to be a good match for network selling. Social selling does work. Beauty Corner, which is a safe-ingredients touting brand that was established in 2011 and relies mostly on direct sales via a network of about 25,000 independent consultants. The company generated about 225 million in annual revenue back in 2017 and doesn’t even spend any money on traditional advertising.
Glossier, the cult brand, similarly found a way of translating its blog community-based roots into an ingenious C2C model. Currently, the brand offers a referral scheme that entitles customers to 10 percent off if they refer a friend and a more formal representative scheme, which has about 500 hand-picked “reps” at the moment.
Fashion brands have been relatively hesitant about adopting this as part of their strategy, especially those focused mainly on ready-to-wear pieces. Still, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any place for C2C in fashion. It is already quite evident that customers can become an active social media marketing channel in their own right. Just think about the different ways you could empower customers to become an additional sales channel for your brand.