Establishing a fashion business and selling fashion products is now easier to do. You have a lot of resources to help you establish your own fashion line, from the manufacturing capabilities of third-party suppliers to the many opportunities to reach potential customers in different markets. Of course, starting the fashion business is only the beginning. You have to think about marketing in order to take your new business to new heights.
Thanks to the internet, marketing your own fashion products is easier these days. You don’t have to spend a lot of time and money to get your brand to the right market segments. Even better, you now have more instruments to use, including social media and video sharing platforms. Before you dig deeper into all that, here are the five things you need to push your fashion brand to the market.
A Capable Website
Regardless of how you push your brand to the market, having a good website is a must. You can’t succeed in converting followers, viewers, and potential customers into buyers when you have issues like an overly complicated checkout process or a site that is difficult to access. A good website needs to be well-designed, user friendly, easy to use, and very reliable.
There are many ways you can establish a good website for your fashion brand. CMS platforms and self-hosted solutions offer a nice balance between flexibility and reliability. Setting up your online store website is incredibly easy now that you can use services like format.com. Format even has a iOS app that allows you to create the perfect site and portfolio page for your brand from your phone.
Put yourself in the customers’ shoes. You too have expectations when shopping on other online stores, so use that insight to help fine-tune your site to perfection. There are a few things you can do to optimize the site, starting with simplifying the checkout process to a maximum of two steps. Depending on the way you want to portray your brand, you can also adjust the site’s design to better match your key messages.
A Strong Online Presence
Now that you have a good website acting as the anchor for your online brand and marketing activities, it is time to branch out to social media. Social media allows you to connect with existing and potential customers alike; in fact, social media sites allow fashion brands to be more personal and give you plenty of opportunities to win the heart of customers.
A strong online presence is not easy to establish, but the investment is well worth the long-term return you get from having an active set of social media pages. One of the ways you can do this is by building a story around your fashion brand and your products, and then telling that story in a compelling way.
Everyone loves a good story. You can take the viewers on a journey, starting with how you come up with the art, designs, and ideas you use for your products. Take the viewers through every crucial step of the product development process. You can get them involved in the process too, mainly by utilizing the feedback you get from customers or viewers and converting that input into real actions.
As mentioned before, a strong online presence isn’t easy to build. The two secrets to building good social media profiles and a strong online presence are consistency and engagement. Stay consistent, post regularly, and always take the time to engage your audience and build a stronger relationship.
A Call to Action
One thing that many digital marketers, especially fashion brands, often forget is the importance of a call to action (or several of them). One of the best things about digital marketing is that you can experiment with your message, the key visuals you use, and other elements incorporated into the brand. That said, you still need to convert viewers into customers in order to sell products, and the way you do that is by adding a call to action to your marketing activities.
A strong call to action can make or break your digital marketing campaign. At the end of the stories you tell, you can direct viewers to the next action you want them to take. The action doesn’t always have to be making a purchase. You can get customers to sign up for your newsletter or to share the content you produce to more viewers.
Adding a call to action to your marketing messages is a bit of a balancing act. You want the call to action to be strong enough for it to be compelling, but you also want to remain subtle and classy about marketing your products and services to potential customers. Use a combination of appealing visuals and text to really make an impact.
A Combination of Instruments
We’ve also discussed how digital marketing gives you so many instruments for marketing your fashion products and your brand as a whole. Now is the perfect time to utilize those marketing instruments to your advantage.
A good website and social media are small parts of your big marketing push. Aside from these two elements, you have search engine optimization or SEO helping you gain more traffic from search engines. Customers naturally turn to search engines like Google and Bing when they are looking for information, including information about the hottest fashion products on the market. With your products appearing in search results, your fashion brand can gain a lot of traction early in the game.
You also have email marketing. This may be an old trick in the book of digital marketing, but it is an old trick that works. Starting your own newsletter, implementing retargeting to win customers with dropped cards, and even using emails to offer aftersales service to customers are also great things to add to your digital marketing campaign.
A Continuous Effort
We haven’t even gotten to the best instruments yet. Content marketing lets you build credibility and the opportunity to gain more exposure. SEM or search engine marketing – along with many advertising networks currently available – is also a great way to gain traction as you are just getting started with marketing your fashion brand.
One last tip to keep in mind about marketing your fashion brand: it is never a one-time deal. You can’t expect to do a big marketing push once and have the brand succeed immediately. Brand image and value are built gradually through continuous marketing efforts. The more you invest into connecting with the audience – your potential customers – the more you will get in return.
At the end of the day, viewers and customers connect with the people and the messages behind a brand, not the brand itself. Your digital marketing efforts need to include compelling stories that the audience can follow. That’s how you gradually build a strong connection with people, even before they become your customers.
These are the five things you need to have a successful marketing campaign for your fashion brand and to sell fashion products online. It all starts with a good website acting as the anchor to your marketing activities and converting the traffic you direct to it into customers. All you need to do now is get started with your own campaign.
