A digital marketing strategy is essential to have in a business. It demonstrates the company’s current position (compared to competitors), discusses strategic goals, and sets out how to achieve them. Business start-ups must first assess competitors in the industry and find a gap in the market. The company then specifies its target demographic and differentiates itself from already existing brands.
Using the SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis represents strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats a company may face. It provides an overview of essential aspects to consider. We begin by completing one for fashion e-commerce start-ups.
Strengths
- Cutting the cost of expenses, e.g. save money on not leasing a store
- Market fragmentation illustrates the declining behaviour of brand loyalty to big companies
Weaknesses
- The fashion eCommerce business is very competitive; therefore, it is challenging to stand out among the already established businesses
Opportunities
- You will have the opportunity to market your product worldwide, therefore, possibly gaining an international consumer base
Threats
- It may be hard to gain recognition due to the competitive industry and bigger fashion eCommerce businesses already having an established and committed customer base.
Demographic segmentation
Demographic Segmentation is a process to help define the target market in categories such as age, income, gender, location, occupation and family status. For Fashion eCommerce Startups, their target market would be someone with access to the internet, someone who is fashion conscious and wants a product that is different from those offered at big stores. Many consumers are turning away from businesses that are proving fast fashion under non ethical standards and are looking for more reliable and sustainable products.
Potential fashion eCommerce business could target teenagers and young women from the ages of 16-30. It would provide affordable and sustainable clothing for students in university and high school and cater to people in a lower economic status. Items offered would be trendy and will adhere to ethical practice standards.
Create a website consistent with your brand
This is the first step in creating a successful brand. Your website should include all the brand features including the same font, colours and designs as mentioned in the brand guidelines. Making sure that the website is interactive and the customers can provide their feedback along with providing virtual customer assistance is crucial.
The web designer should be familiar with all the brand features and the company should communicate back and forth with them to create the desired design. It may take 3 or 4 months to build the website of your choice.
Establish a social media presence of the brand
The fashion and clothing industry is highly competitive therefore establishing a unique social media presence of the brand can help differentiate your company. Social media helps to increase your brand awareness to a large audience, therefore posting regularly and consistently is crucial to get customer exposure. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Pinterest should be used with an aim of attracting attracting atleast 100 followers in the first month.
Develop your customer base
Getting consistent feedback from every customer is important for a startup to grow and improve. Giving more attention to the customers resembling the brand persona, helps you to create this group of loyal customers who further promote your brand to others. It takes years for a startup to develop a loyal customer base and it is important to attend to the needs of such customers to make your brand popular.
Strive for profitability and expansion
After reaching the previous goal of developing a loyal customer base, the startup should start to focus on profits. The company should aim to achieve a profit $100,000 one year after completing its goal of customer base establishment. As the business is an eCommerce with a global social media presence, you should expand into a global market delivering products overseas.
Creating and implementing marketing strategy
Paid Social media marketing: There are paid promotions on platforms including Instagram, TikTok, etc. whereby you can advertise your products to a bigger audience.
Influencer marketing can also be incorporated involving sponsoring beauty and fashion influencers on social media apps like Instagram and YouTube to attract a larger audience and increase potential customer base.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of your website traffic. For a fashion eCommerce this can be done by posting blogs including trendy fashion tips.
Google Ads can be used to advertise your website on Google Search results. Although it can attract a massive audience, this option may be expensive for a startup on a budget.
Key performance Indicators
Use Google Analytics to keep track of the behaviour of users such as data on customers bouncing back to search results after seeing the first page of website. This kind of information can be useful to make changes to the website to make it more user friendly.
Social media analytics: Keeping track of the number of followers and likes, comments and shares on posts, etc. can help you analyse the current business position. For more accuracy, we can use free tools like Business Suite which keeps track of the followers’ demographics on Instagram and Facebook.
Conclusion
Fashion eCommerce is an expanding industry that is on the rise. Have you been considering opening your very own fashion eCommerce startup? Are you ready to unleash your creativity and share your passion with the world? Let us know your thoughts on this blog and share your journey in the comments below.
Authors
Chaitanya Chandrika Raghuvanshi – Brand Marketing Analyst at IIDM™
Marina Oraha – Content Marketing Analyst at IIDM™
For more information visit our website, www.thedigitalmarketinginstitute.org
References
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/swot-analysis-fashion-industry-3295.html