Digital Marketing Strategies for Fashion and Luxury Brands

Introduction

Digital marketing for the fashion industry in a post Covid-19 world: the pandemic has given rise to an unprecedented health crisis and has imposed new and stringent security constraints that companies in the fashion industry are also called upon to measure themselves against. Among these, companies who are successfully riding the wave owe much to their digital know-how, which has been and will be crucial not only to ensure continuity and minimize the consequences of the lockdown, but also to help them emerge from the crisis in a strong position.

Why Do You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy refers to a master plan for achieving short-term and long-term goals or objectives. Developing a digital marketing plan will help you identify what makes your business unique and how to get your message out to your audiences through a variety of digital channels.

To make your company’s work more effective, you must take advantage of all the most valuable marketing resources and technologies, Internet tops that list.

Digital marketing, if used in the right manner, can increase your sales, improve brand presence and make your brand more profitable. It makes your product available to your target audience. When done right, it increases brand awareness, boosts sales and turns users into brand ambassadors.

Here are the some of the biggest challenges a fashion Brand faces:

• Unable to choose target customers.
• Inadequate SEO Strategy
• Poor marketing.

How to Analyze and Improve Marketing Performance

1. Measuring Current Performance:

You can measure your brand’s performance by looking at metrics such as awareness, familiarity, consideration, and advocacy. Having a great brand is important for any business to be successful – it’s that all-important first impression that lasts in people’s minds and helps them trust the business.

• How to Measure Awareness?

There are two key and easy ways to measure the awareness of your brand.

First, look at the overall traffic that comes to your website each day, month, or year, and see how many of those visitors are coming directly to your site by putting in your website’s URL. This tells you that people know and recognize your brand.

Another way to measure brand awareness is to see how many people are searching for your brand name. This is another good indicator of brand recognition in the market.

It is important to measure the awareness of your brand over time to see how your marketing efforts affect the recognition of your brand. This will help you focus that marketing for maximum impact.

• How to Measure Familiarity?

There are two indicators when looking at familiarity: bounce rate and time on site. What these do is help you understand if the visitors to your site know and understand what you do before they visit – if they don’t, they are highly likely to leave your site quickly.

What this ends up telling you is how well you communicate your offerings and brand in your marketing campaigns. If you communicate poorly, you can expect a lot of direct visitors to leave quickly.

2. The Goals for the digital marketing plan

Now that you have evaluated your business analytics, you need to set your goals. Goals need to be extremely specific as they will help you decide what explicit action plans you have to achieve your goals. 

Goals can either be short-term (ranging between 0-6 months), or you can have a long-term goal (6 months +).

For instance, if you just started an at-home bakery where you sell donuts, cakes and cake pops from the comfort of your home, here is an example of what your goals may look like: 

3. Focus on your Unique Selling Position 

Unique Selling Position or Unique Selling Proposition (USP) can be defined as the element of factor that makes the brand stand out or appear better than the competition. This stance or consideration that your business aligns itself with, ties into your brand image to produce something specific that you are known for.

Gucci

The unique selling proposition (USP) of Gucci is its exquisite Italian craftsmanship, providing customers with high-quality products and great attention to the design of its products. A USP may include words such as the “lowest cost,” “the highest quality,” or “the first-ever,” which indicates to customers what your product or service has that your competitors do not.

Nike

Nike is yet another company known for selling shoes. Yet they are differentiated from Zappos and Toms because they focus primarily on athletic shoes with prominent sponsorships with star athletes. Their USP is that they provide the best quality shoes for athletes and fitness in general.

Digital Marketing Strategy Implementation

1. Design Your Website

We don’t often think about web design as a marketing tactic, but it influences the amount of time and attention a user will spend on your page. Your website is the center of all your digital marketing efforts, so if your page is not clean, easy to read, and interesting, it won’t matter how much time you put into strategy development – you’re still going to lose customers.

Give a recognizable face to your website, so your customers can know exactly what your website is about just by clicking on it. For a fashion brand, aesthetics are crucial in generating an audience and making sales. An aesthetically pleasing website attracts more customers who are excited by the product and therefore they are more likely to make a purchase.

• Maintain a Blog 

Your blog should be used for a number of reasons, including allowing you to consistently post new keywords and optimize your search engine strategy. More than that, your blog becomes somewhere you can offer advice, share bits of information, and really connect with your customers. A lasting relationship begins with trust, and your blog is a great way to build that.

• Use Search Engine Marketing and Optimization

Search engine marketing and optimization are part of what helps make your business appear higher on a list of search engine results. With a strong SEO strategy, your company website will become associated with the keywords used to find your services. This increases your chances of being the company an individual chooses to work with after searching online.

2. Create Interesting Content for Social Media Channels

Problem: 

Many websites and businesses in the fashion industry have set up social media accounts. While they are aware of the importance of social media, they are unable to convert their engagement on social media into profits for their company. As a business, you need to build up and strategize your social media and interactions to drive traffic to the website and increase sales.

Solution:

The best way to use your social media in the fashion industry is by sharing new products, sneak peek of campaigns and exclusive discounts, which will drive the social media followers to visit the website. In case you want to get twitter followers free – and your curiosity piques you to learn how – then you must get your hands on this pretty quick guide on how to get twitter followers written by Dave Sumter.

The interaction on social media also reinforces a positive image of the customer. Answering queries and listening to feedback makes the customer more likely to trust the company and therefore they will be more prone to make a purchase. 

3. Affiliate and Associate Programs 

With an affiliate program, people who believe in your company can share your information and grow your market on a commission-based platform. An affiliate or associate program doesn’t make sense for every business. However, if you do use these, you can quickly see your marketing efforts improve without needing to do much yourself.

4. Email Marketing

Use email for announcements, newsletters and promotions. Just as with social media, email frequency and timing matters. While incorporating email into your marketing plan is important, overdoing it can backfire. People don’t want to be overrun with emails and if you are overzealous you could risk losing potential buyers.

You should always try to collect visitor’s emails to continue to share quality content or offers to them over time. For example, with your free program or offer you should require them to sign up with their email then send them their download link or ship out their product. With their email even if they do not purchase anything that day they just might in the future when you send out a great deal.

Automation is very important; it can save a lot of time when it comes to working online due to the vast number of visitors that can see your website on a given day. An email auto-responder that can automatically send and respond with e-mails to everyone who is on your website’s email list will make your life easier Furthermore, after your customer does purchase something from your website it will be a relief for them to receive a confirmation email letting them know their order is on the way.

Few Other Fashion Marketing Strategies 

1. Using CTA’s:

By having a good call to action on posts and promotions, you can persuade consumers to visit your website. One way of doing this is through coupons, offers, discounts, and even contests. However to get further information about any of the campaigns they will have to visit your website or reach out to your social media accounts. Thus the customer will not feel as if they are being pressured to visit the website and it happens more organically.

2. Consistency and Compatibility:

Whatever the medium maybe it is important to stay consistent with your message across the board. Having multiple campaigns on different platforms will only confuse the reader. It is best to incorporate your promotion with each other and send the same messages across. One way of doing this is having a promotion or coupon code sent through the mail.

3. Get Into Articles or News Stories 

Work with a public relations professional to get your business into articles and news stories on topics related to what you do. It will not only help establish you as a trusted expert, but it will introduce your business to an even broader base of people. You can also sign up for free services that connect you with writers looking for sources, such as Help a Reporter Out.

4. Hold Contests and Giveaways 

• 

People love contests and giveaways. Anytime you can encourage promotion from your customers in exchange for a free product or service, you will usually see a surge in purchases or connections.

5. Sell Items on Multiple Sites and Marketplaces

If your items are not showing up where the customer is choosing to search for them (Google, Amazon, mobile, etc), then your company isn’t even in the running to win their business. Today’s commerce industry is multichannel, and it is the retailers quickly embracing the “sell anywhere to sell more attitude” that are the most successful.

Sell Online on 100+ channels – Amazon, Lazada, Flipkart, Zalora, Paytm, eBay etc.

6. Create Scarcity and Exclusivity

The idea of having something nobody else has, yet with the elegance of not being pretentious about it. The new exclusivity will be about valuing unique qualities, not about the price tag. From this perspective, exclusive means that which is unique: a stark contrast from mass production.

7. Form a Community

Imagine having customers that continue to engage with you beyond your products. This is a sign of a loyal brand community, and some of the most successful businesses are strong because of it.

Building a great brand community can be done in three steps:

• First, you need a captivating reason for members to join.
• Secondly, you need to make it worth their time to engage with each other and with your brand.
• Finally, it has to be easy and valuable for members to share your community with others and help it grow.

Conclusion

If you don’t have a physical store the only place your customers will find you is online, on social media channels. Your digital presence is the same as your physical store. That is why it is important to make a plan, set your goals so you can map out the actions that you are going to take.

If you are eager to improve your business and to become more creative you can learn more information and tips on the digital marketing world and how it can help your business you can find on the blog of International Institute of Digital Marketing.

References

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/top-10-internet-marketing-strategies-2295375

https://www.thebalancesmb.com/top-10-internet-marketing-strategies-2295375

Multichannel Selling: How To Boost Sales Across Online Marketplaces

Top Marketing Strategy Challenges Solved for the Fashion Brands