Fashion’s shift to online retail has skyrocketed in the last few years. With the U.S. fashion market expected to reach $295 billion by 2025, retailers are rushing to do everything they can to capture revenue in this rapidly expanding industry. To keep up with the competition and attract new customers, more retailers are investing in their social media strategy. In this article, we’ll discuss how investing in the right social media marketing strategy can help fashion brands gain more visibility in search engines, build more brand awareness, and drive more qualified traffic to their websites.
Why Do Fashion Brands Need Social Media Marketing?
With so many fashion brands out there, consumers have more choices than ever before. Fashion brands must ask themselves how they can reach a bigger portion of their target audience, as competing brands are never too far behind, and the window to engage new users has never been shorter. With the average global internet user spending 145 minutes on social media daily, running an online business means taking the necessary steps to make the most of consumers’ habits, meeting and engaging them at the most opportune moments.
Whether you’re doing everything in-house or with the help of a fashion digital marketing agency, social media marketing is at the core of every successful digital marketing campaign. It gives your brand the chance to tell your story to all your followers, inspiring them through your successes and helping them relate to your brand on a more personal level. Here are a few tips your fashion brand can use to optimize your social media marketing strategy.
Pick the Right Social Media Platforms
The key to successful social media marketing starts with the basics, and one of those basics is picking the right platforms to engage your audience. While every platform theoretically holds new potential customers, some platforms are more conducive to sales than others. Facebook, for instance, with its 2.91 billion worldwide users and counting, has long been considered a haven for eCommerce retailers looking to reach a broad audience. Adding to this, 4 out of every 10 Facebook users claim to have discovered fashion inspiration on the platform, with 18 to 34-year-old buyers comprising a large part of that sample.
Not surprisingly, Instagram continues to dominate the fashion market as well, with roughly 13 million mentions of the hashtag “#fashion” globally and a userbase that’s already crossed the 1 billion mark. With mobile-created story ads having a high chance of outperforming studio shot ads, smaller brands have an opportunity to compete with more established players.
Rounding out the list, both YouTube and TikTok allow you to show off your brand’s personality. YouTube Shorts can help build brand awareness through quick, highly-targeted video content, and fashion brands can easily hype up new products or share exciting news about up and coming trends with countdown-to-launch videos, celebrity fashion rankings, and more. Likewise, TikTok’s status as the fastest-growing social media platform has seen a number of brands jump at the chance to engage their target audience through dynamic, full-screen ads. If that weren’t enough, TikTok’s partnership with Shopify and the immense success of its “TikTokMadeMeBuyIt” hashtag has helped businesses of all sizes generate millions in revenue.
Make Your Facebook and Instagram Posts Shoppable
One of the advantages of social media marketing is how easily you can transform your Facebook and Instagram posts into shoppable experiences. Not only does this help to get your products in front of billions of trend-seeking users, but it also provides a consistent, user-friendly experience from product discovery to checkout. Whether you’re finding new customers through audience-building ads or adding discount codes to your social posts, shoppable Facebook and Instagram posts can help you engage your customers at every stage of the sales funnel.
Keep Your Social Posts Clear and Consistent
A consistent posting schedule is a necessary and effective element of any fashion digital marketing strategy. Along with a consistent schedule, you also need to be clear about your post topics, as your overall goal is a mixture of several different marketing elements. For starters, you want to promote your products with direct response content and strong calls-to-action (CTAs). After all, your goal is to encourage users to purchase your clothing and accessories.
Secondly, you want to make sure your content is educational, giving users insight into who you are as a brand and why they should choose you over your competitors. Next, you want to inspire users with your brand’s personality, stirring their emotions and connecting with them along the way. Should you pull this off correctly, you’ll find that users are more apt to trust you and eager to tell others about the quality of their experience.
Invest in Influencer Marketing
If you’re not budgeting for influencer marketing, it’s time to start. The global fashion influencer market was already valued at $1.5 billion in 2019, and the expected compound annual growth rate is 35.7% between 2020 and 2027. Influencers have the ability to connect with their audiences and drive real growth for the brands they work with. While not all influencers can deliver the same results, their content can often work to drive more qualified traffic to a brand’s website and influence purchasing decisions.
Nano influencers (those with fewer than 5,000 followers) are often the cheapest to partner with but might come with the bonus of a more engaged audience. On the other hand, a macro or celebrity influencer will potentially carry the weight of 100k to 1 million followers, offering much greater potential brand exposure. Try not to focus too much on follower count, as you’re ideally looking for influencers who generate high engagement rates. There are plenty of options, and it pays to shop around to find the best fit for your fashion brand.
Repost User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) can help get your fashion products in front of customers and even increase engagement in many cases. Rather than spend extra resources creating more content, your brand can encourage existing customers to post photos and videos of themselves wearing your fashion apparel.
This type of content works because, as a general rule of thumb, online shoppers want to see how others feel about products before committing to a purchase. In addition, recent data suggests that 73% of shoppers claim UGC can help increase their purchasing confidence, with 61% of those same customers claiming that UGC helps them feel more encouraged to interact with brands.
Partner with a Dedicated Fashion Marketing Agency
At the end of the day, staying competitive in the fashion industry relies on a cohesive social media strategy. It also requires a great deal of research and time, which many startup and even established brands are short on. This makes working with a dedicated fashion marketing agency one of the best decisions for your fashion brand. A qualified agency helps you optimize your fashion content marketing efforts to capture more qualified leads, and they can help you drive more conversions as well, ensuring you climb the ranks of organic search in this wildly competitive industry.