9 Best Fashion Marketing Strategy Tips You Should Know
Updated on January 30, 2023 in Ecommerce by Alifiya Mustafa
Fashion has become the unattachable part of almost every individual. It is a way of reflecting your personality, style, and even status.
That data reveals that the fashion industry is valued at more than 3 Trillion Dollars worldwide. The competition is tough and every fashion brand is leveraging its own Fashion Marketing Strategies to beat the heat.
From brands like H&M and Zara to Chanel and Gucci, every fashion brand has its own fashion marketing strategy to engage more customers, stand out from the crowd, and win over its competitors.
There are multiple ways to anchor fashion marketing that can help your fashion brand grow successfully. And, that’s what I am here to explain today 🙂
What is Fashion Marketing?
Fashion marketing is the process of managing the flow of products from the selection of designs to be manufactured to the presentation of products to retail customers, with the aim of increasing a brand’s sales and profitability.
Fashion Marketing deals with the creation of marketing campaigns, strategies, and promotional events for the items of apparel, footwear, accessory, and everything related to fashion.
It is done with the aim of promoting a fashion brand, its products, and making its styles popular among the audiences.
Fashion marketing is often done through print media like magazines as well as online.
The best ways through which fashion marketing is leveraged are through fashion lookbooks, offline and online magazines. The lookbooks and articles about fashion are released weekly, monthly, and sometimes seasonally to reach the customers with fresh pieces of knowledge.
These are created with the goal to aware consumers of the current fashion trends, seasonal outfit styles, accessories, and new and emerging fashion brands.
How to Perform Fashion Marketing That Leads You to Success?
There are some amazing ways that can help you perform fashion marketing effectively and lead you to success.
1. CREATE A FASHION LOOKBOOK
Fashion lookbooks can work as a portfolio for your fashion brand. Focus on your best-selling products when you create one.
Your fashion lookbook can be a mix of both, trending as well as your most revenue-earning products.
You may want to create a physical as well as a digital fashion lookbook. Share it over social media, feature it on your website, and also make sure to share it within your newsletters.
2. DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Without knowing whom you are targeting, your fashion marketing efforts are a waste. There are trillions of people in this world, and you must accept – not everyone is your potential customer.
You must define the customer demographics that are likely to buy your products. Define these things:
-The age group
-Income
-Job type
-Location
-Gender
-Interests
These are a few common things that can help you identify who are your potential buyers.
For example, if you’re only selling women’s clothing, your primary prospects must be women aged above 20. Men may come later if you’re offering any offers related to the birthdays and anniversaries of their female partners.
The children below the age of 18 may not be of any interest to you. Based on these demographics, you may identify where these prospects spend most of their time and what fashion marketing approach will work on them.
3. LEVERAGE SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is a wonderful place to connect and engage with your audience. There are 4.48 billion people using social media every day. Imagine if you put up a post on a social channel, what are your chances to reach a number of audiences?
Even if you manage to successfully reach 1% of these audiences, you’re roughly reaching 40,000,000 people over the social media🤯
That’s intriguing, I know. But again, it is important to choose the social channels that can work best for your business.
If you’re engaged with the fashion industry and happen to be a B2C brand, the platforms for you are:
Channels like Twitter and LinkedIn are more useful for B2B businesses. Although, you may choose to leverage them if you can make them work for you. After all, it’s all about the efforts and approaches you take.
However, you might not be able to find your potential audience easily over these platforms.
Invest your time and effort wisely. You may start with spending your efforts like:
-Instagram – 50%
-Facebook – 30%
-Pinterest – 20%
Again, this is my opinion. You may start investing yourself based on the results you get from this. If you believe that Facebook is working better for your business, you may switch and start investing more into that.
I recently posted on my LinkedIn profile – Do not go over using every marketing tool and strategy, do what your data reveals to you.
You may initially start with what everyone’s doing, but you must customize your strategy as per your needs.
IGTV and FB videos
Creating Instagram or Facebook videos is a great fashion marketing strategy. People grasp 68% better with images than they do with texts, and an astounding 90% better with videos.
These videos are highly engaging and you must use this Instagram feature for your benefit. Create engaging, fun, yet informative videos that reflect your brand and promote your products.
Be gentle on your fashion marketing and don’t bark about your brand. Allow your audience to enjoy your content while they subconsciously are allured into trying your product.
Instagram Reels
People are crazy about these 30 to 60 seconds videos. They are short, engaging, and don’t make them feel that they’ve spent a lot of time on one video!
This psychology of the customers can genuinely help fashion brands like yours to grow. You can create various reels that reflect your brand and products like:
-Tips reels
-Hacks reels
-How-to reels
-Product trailers
-Quick product detail reels
This fashion marketing tactic becomes very useful in exposing your brand to a number of potential customers and meanwhile helping you gain credibility on Instagram.
Once you’re consistent in posting videos, posts, and also reels, Instagram starts to consider as a valuable and legit business account. It helps you reach more people, suggests your account to the people who are already interested in fashion, and helps you gain better goodwill.
Instagram Live Shopping
You might have gone live on Instagram, but have you considered Instagram Live Shopping for your fashion and apparel marketing?
Instagram Live Shopping allows you to sell your products by adding the shopping experience to the Live sessions.
This means you can go live, talk about your products, show them in use, and also embed a link to buy it directly. People joining your live videos can now directly watch the live video and place the order at the same time.
This feature allows the buyer to make the decision right away which helps the fashion brands in making instant sales.
Instagram and FB shop
73% of the people want to finish their purchase without leaving the app. Build your own Instagram Shop and FB Shop and let the buyers enjoy the experience.
Here, they do not need to leave the addictive Instagram, go to your website, and make the purchase.
Where buyers might become lazy or forget to check out your website, you can make them finish purchasing your product within the app itself.
Pinterest Rich Pins
I believe you’re already using Pinterest and sharing pins and boards of your products (if not, do it now!).
Now, Pinterest Rich Pins are exclusive to Pinterest business accounts. These are well-optimized pins and fit in a search type according to the keyword used.
Rich Pins are of four types
-App rich
-Product rich
-Recipe rich
-Article rich
The most helpful for your fashion brand is Product Rich Pins. Along with that, you may choose to utilize the App and Article Rich Pins whenever required.
It is best to use this apparel marketing technique since your pins are now categorized under a dedicated theme. Thus, the customers that engage with these pins are likely to be more potent. And, when a potential customer searches for a keyword related to your niche, these pins are ranked higher organically.
4. TAKE ON YOUTUBE MARKETING
YouTube is another most beloved and widely used platform to watch videos of all kinds. Among the most trending videos are fashion and outfit inspiration videos.
There are fashion videos about outfit styling tips, seasonal outfit inspirations, wardrobe collections, lookbooks, and the best – Brand hauls!
Creating such videos is a must-use fashion marketing strategy. Every individual from every corner of the world is highly interested in these videos.
As per Semrush, fashion and beauty-related videos like clothing hauls, dressing tips, makeup tutorials, etc. are the MOST popular content on YouTube.
With this fashion marketing strategy, you can gain a lot of attention and valuable customers. The customers coming through YouTube marketing are often considered the most interested buyers and hold the potential of becoming lifetime loyal customers.
5. EMAIL MARKETING
Email may seem old school, but is still the best mode of communication with your customers. It’s professional, it’s free, and more than 70% of the customers want brands to communicate via emails.
Email marketing is among the best fashion marketing technique. I’d suggest you use email marketing for the following purposes without fail:
-New product launch emails
-Sales and discounts emails
-Back-in-stock alerts
-Abandoned cart emails
-Cross-selling and down-selling
Making sure of these 5 important emails will never let you fail in retaining and regaining the customers.
However, ensure that your email marketing strategy is personalized and customized for your fashion marketing. Do not go on shooting hundreds of generic emails at once.
This is what your competitors are doing, you must think one step ahead. Make every email personalized for each customer.
Address every email with a name. Add a line or two about their past purchase. What we’re trying to do here is to build a connection.
Your customers must know that your value them, you remember them, and you care for them.
Offer discounts and suggestions based on their past behavior. For new customers, you may want to take surveys or put up a questionnaire to understand their preferences and interests better.
Personalized emails tend to have higher open and response rates. For your fashion marketing strategy, this could be the best way to engage your customers one on one.
6. SMS MARKETING
More than 80% of the customers get up in the morning, roll towards their smartphones and check for notifications. What does this mean? – Leverage SMS marketing.
People often check notifications first thing in the morning and this habit of your customers can help you with fashion marketing.
Reach out to your customers with promotional notifications. These notifications could be the same as the things you reach out for through email marketing. These could be regarding new products, back-in-stock products, abandoned carts, and more.
7. OFFERS AND ATTRACTIONS
Offers are the most enticing things for buyers and the best strategy for apparel marketing. These include:
FOMO
Fear of Missing Out, FOMO is an incredible fashion marketing strategy to entice your customers to buy products instantly. Customers may let a product go out of stock until they are triggered with fear of losing it to others.
Sometimes, whether or not a customer likes it or not, if it belongs to their interest, they are likely to buy it if they feel they might miss out on a sale on it or the entire product itself.
Here are a few ways with which you can create FOMO:
– Only 2 left!
– Hurry now!
– Limited period offer
– The sale ends in the next 2 hours!
– Use a countdown timer on the home page and product pages for a sale
– Send a personalized email to the abandoned cart customers for the product in the cart going out of stock soon or put on a sale
Such worlds like only, hurry, and limited is best to trigger FOMO within the customers. This fashion marketing technique demands the customers to make a decision quickly and by the product rather than losing it.
Discounts and coupons
Who doesn’t like discounts? The 30% to 70% offs on products tend to encourage the buyers to make a purchase the most.
If they like your products, they can never deny a discount, especially a discount attached with FOMO.
Offering discounts is a common fashion marketing strategy. In apparel marketing, you can also offer different discounts to different sets of customers.
For example, you may offer an exclusive higher discount to your new customers as compared to the existing ones.
You may also want to offer special discounts to your long-term loyal customers to promote brand loyalty and professionalism.
Here’s how you can find out your loyal customers:
– The customers who have been frequently buying from you for more than 2 years
– The customers who have purchased the items from you of worth XYZ dollars in total. (You may decide the total worth of products purchased based on the average sale you make)
– The customers who have referred your brand to at least 2 new customers
Apart from these examples, you may choose your own metric to find your loyal customers. If you’ve been maintaining a CRM for your fashion brand, this process must be easy.
Taking care of your existing customers is necessary to reduce the churn rate. This also helps in improving your goodwill and making you more classy and credible.
Buy 1 get 1 free
If people like discounts, why won’t they love free? Such fashion marketing ideas are very effective at catching the eyes of the customers. The simple use of the syllable ‘free’ can trigger the emotions to make a purchase.
Here, the focus is shifted from the product bought with the price to the product coming free with it.
This fashion marketing for eCommerce works wonderfully and effortlessly. All you do is add a word, and of course, a product for free😄.
Referrals
Referrals are a great way to ask your customers to bring in new customers.
Why would they do that? Because you will be offering a discount to the new customers and also to the customers who referred you😎.
This is a win-win-win marketing plan for fashion brands since the referred, referee, and you, all three get the benefit.
E-Gift cards
E-Gift Cards are virtual cards that customers can use to avail a discount or offer on their next purchase.
This is a very clever fashion marketing strategy. With this fashion marketing strategy, you entice the buyer to buy from you to receive the gift card. At the same time, the buyer becomes liable to you to buy again.
Offering e-gift cards is a great way to retain a customer and make sure that they come back to you.
You may also suggest your buyers gift these e-gift cards to their friends and family. This way, you can indirectly reach out to their close ones and have a chance to acquire new customers.
8. ENGAGING WEB CONTENT AND SEAMLESS EXPERIENCE
Your website is the ultimate platform for your buyers to engage with you. All your fashion marketing efforts, email efforts, social efforts, and investment come down to getting your customers on your website.
Now, once your customers are there, what’s next?
Your website is your representative and your web pages are your 24/7 employee. They never take any lunch breaks, they do not go on holidays, and they do not ask for any sick leaves.
Thus, it is your responsibility to keep them well-optimized, good-looking, and equipped with converting copy to make your customers fall in love with your brand.
For your fashion marketing and marketing plan for a clothing boutique to pay off, your website is another great platform to perform this strategy.
Website appearance
– Keep your website pleasing to the eyes. Use pleasant colors and professional and readable fonts.
– Do not use more than 3 fonts and 3 colors on your entire website
Website layout
Keep your website layout user-friendly.
– The options like the search bar, product categories, profile (login/signup), wishlist, and cart must be easy to access
– The filters and sorting options must be working effectively
– The offers must be visible at a correct place
– Do not clutter your website with huge pop-ups and too many options that lead to confusion
Website speed
The speed of your website plays a major role in deciding the bounce rate. No one likes waiting. Your customers have thousands of options to leave your website and jump to another.
A slow website results in 60% of the bounce rate. More than 50% of the customers experiencing the slow website are never likely to return again.
Make sure of these things:
– The website is not taking more than 3 seconds to load
– Your website is in alignment with the Core Web Vitals
– It is mobile-friendly
– Your images are web-optimized for faster loading speed
Product description
Use your product descriptions as your fashion marketing strategy. Wite captivating descriptions to allure your customers into buying.
Create a short, engaging story to let the customers imagine how they would feel about your product. Make sure to include dreamy words about the product material.
Words like silky satan, baby-soft cotton, etc. can make the customers imagine the experience in a better way since these words give a better idea about the product fabric.
Apart from the captivating copy, do not forget to mention the important details like:
– Product measurements
– Neck type
– Print type
– Color
– Sizes
– Size chart
– Product discount details, if any
– Delivery options
– Payment options
Product images and videos
Do you know, 75% of a shopper’s buying decision is dependent on the product images? If your product images are unattractive, distorted, and dull, you can’t expect the buyers to buy from you.
Your product images must look enticing. Before you put up a product image, ask – Will I stop doing everything on my phone and click on this image as soon as I see it? If not, you genuinely need some product photo editing.
You can either choose to edit your product images in-house or get a professional eCommerce Product Image Editing Service to edit thousands of images professionally within a few hours.
Your products’ colors, design, and appearance must look similar to what the product looks like in real life. More than 30% of returns occur because the customer feels that the product looks different in real life.
Make sure to make your product photos enticing. To top it off, add product videos. Videos, as explained above, are highly engaging.
Also, videos are very helpful in making the customers finalize their purchases. Using a model for your fashion marketing videos can help the customers to understand how the product looks on a real person and in movement.
Good product images and videos increase the chances of purchase by an astounding 80%.
Return and refund policies
Having flexible and favorable return and refund policies are a must. More than 50% of the buyers will resist buying if they do not see an easy return or refund option.
This does not mean that the customers will be returning the product, but it just gives them the assurance and trust to buy from you.
When customers feel safe in their buying decision, they are more comfortable in buying. If your brand is offering the best quality products, then you must not hesitate to openly offer an easy return or refund policy.
9. PAID SOCIAL
A good strategy should not resist great investments. Investing some dollars in your fashion marketing can reap big results when done wisely.
Ads
Running social media and Google Ads is the best-paid fashion marketing plan. These sponsored ads rank higher on the Google search results and help buyers to discover you faster.
However, I’d still prefer you first tally the organic results and then decide to invest accordingly. After implementing the second fashion marketing strategy mentioned in this article, find out which social channel is reaping you the best benefits.
If it is Instagram and FB, you may want to start investing in Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads.
It is better to invest minimum initially and later you can maximize the investment as required.
Influencers
People will buy anything that the influencers they follow recommend to them. These folks already have a large pool of audience and have the power to influence their buying and in fact, living decisions.
Collaborate with influencers to promote your products. You may suffice the deal with cross-marketing, social shoutout, money, or free products in exchange. Generally, it depends on influencers what method do they accept to do the marketing for you.
Collaborating with influencers could be one of your best fashion marketing decisions. It is because you do not need to individually reach out to thousands of people to promote your product.
The influencers already have thousands of followers, Just reach out to one popular influencer and they can reach the thousands for you.
10. COLLABORATE WITH THE RIGHT PARTNERS
The final best fashion marketing tip to leverage is to collaborate with the right partners. You must consider this because of its 3 major benefits:
– You gain trust and credibility among the audiences (yours and theirs)
– You get exposure to the consumers of the other brand
– Having partners is the next step towards success, fame, and more conversions
Run a partner program or become part of others’ partner programs. This gives you leverage over your competitors.
When you become part of the partner dictionary of a better brand, it improves your brand visibility, credibility, goodwill, and helps you gain more customers.
What are the Advantages of Fashion Marketing?
Fashion marketing benefits your brand just as similarly as marketing helps other businesses. However, it becomes more important and a little different when it comes to fashion.
Improves fashion brand visibility
Fashion marketing helps your fashion brand to catch the eyes of the customers. Since you market your products and fashion brand over multiple channels, it enables you to engage more customers.
With fashion marketing, the consumers can now know about your brand, what products you sell, and why they should choose you.
When you make your fashion brand active through fashion marketing techniques, the customers can stay in constant touch with you. This helps them stay aware of your existence and are even likely to recommend you to others
Makes you stand out
The customers are well-satiated with the thousands of fashion brands online and offline. You must engage in something that makes them drool over you and forget about the rest.
Fashion Marketing allows you to do just that.
The campaigns you create and the unique approach you take to target and engage your audience makes all the difference.
If your product is unique, fashion marketing helps you to convey that to your customers. If your service is unique, you convey that too.
Show your uniqueness through fashion marketing while keeping your marketing campaigns unique too. Fashion marketing exposes your brand to millions of customers and helps you grow rapidly.
Engage more customers
Your website with thousands of amazing fashion products might never get the attention you desire without fashion marketing. To let your customers know about your products, it’s quite important to market them.
Fashion marketing allows you to reach and engage more customers with attractive campaigns.
The more you market your products, the better you engage your target audience.
Improved conversions
Since fashion marketing helps you engage more customers, these customers are likely to convert better. It’s simple math, the more the customers, the more the conversions.
This simple metric helps you increase sales and grow better. With fashion marketing, the customers you engage are more refined and filtered.
These people know what they are getting themselves into, what they are liking and are likely to make a purchase.
However, it’s important that all your fashion marketing is channeled towards the correct set of audience to get the best results.
BONUS READ
Fashion marketing is essential for every fashion and apparel brand. I hope this ultimate guide covered everything that you ever need to implement a successful fashion marketing strategy.
It is necessary to make sure that whichever fashion marketing you choose to implement, you stay consistent with it.
These fashion marketing strategies are great at promoting your fashion products, earning the credibility of your brand, and boosting your online conversions.
I have used and spoken about many fashion eCommerce marketing strategies and ways in this article to boost your eCommerce success like:
– Buyers persona
– Instagram Reels
– Instagram Live Shopping
– Facebook Shop
– Pinterest Marketing
– YouTube Marketing
– Email Marketing
– Consumer behavior
– Product image editing
– Omnichannel experience
If you wish to learn in detail about any of the topics covered, you may simply visit PixelPhant Blogs, search the term and start learning better.
These articles are written from the perspective of an eCommerce business owner and are dedicated to helping you grow your business in the right direction.
Before you leave it here, if you’re an eCommerce business owner, start to make your product images look professional and captivating with PixelPhant. Get thousands of images edited professionally within a few hours.
Beautiful product images across your website.
Background Removal, Clipping Path, Color Correction, Cropping & Resize, Retouching, adding Shadows, and more.
Try PixelPhant for free
No Card Details Required