How Social Media Can Boost Your New Fashion Brand: Instagram
Online fashion sales account for nearly 50% of fashion sales. Social media drives those sales. The leading social media platform for fashion is Instagram. Your fashion line needs an active presence on it. Here is why it is so important and useful.
Social media is replacing many of the traditional forms of fashion marketing. Move over fashion magazines, social media is now the primary influencer in over half of all sales of fashion brands and apparel. It is too big and important to ignore as an essential marketing tool.
In the previous blog, I explained why your fashion line needs social media and I named some platforms that you should maintain a presence on. In future blogs, I will take a deep dive into each of these platforms. In this blog, the focus will be on Instagram. I will explain why you need it, what you can achieve on it, how to create content to build trust with your niche target audience, and how to make money using it. Instagram is extremely versatile and it even allows you to sell within the Instagram platform. Now your buyer doesn’t even have to leave the site. This Instagram shopping option can be a great source of instant sales and revenue.
Currently, Instagram is the most influential platform for fashion, and should be your first priority in establishing a social media presence. It’s important to learn how to utilize this platform, and understand how it can be extremely valuable to a successful launch.
Every day over 100 million apparel images are shared on Instagram. Some of those could be yours, and if you have an Instagram presence, they will be. In this blog, I will explain the importance of Instagram to launching a new fashion line and describe a few ways how you can use it to directly sell your product.
Why Instagram?
If you simply look at statistics, you’ll understand why Instagram is so important for fashion brands. It has reached 1 Billion active monthly users, and 70% of the activity is fashion related. Consumers engage with the brand 10 times more than Facebook, 50 times more than Pinterest, and over 80 times more than Twitter.
These numbers tell a compelling story for Instagram, but it is so much more than simple numbers, follower counts, and likes. Instagram is image centric. That means it is a visual marketing opportunity which is essential to any fashion brand.
People see your brand and what it looks like. Users love to share images and actively share over 100 million images a day on Instagram. Some of those should be yours.
Your visuals and posts help drive brand awareness, build community, and create brand loyalty amongst your target audience. Your profile and posting activity differentiates you from your competitors. When your followers share your images, they are engaging with others who are very likely potential buyers for your fashion line. They are also giving your product a personal endorsement simply because they cared to share it. Coming from a friend, that share can be a powerful promotion.
Instagram has enormous potential for building brand awareness and the metrics back this up. It is a social media platform all fashion entrepreneurs should learn, master, and use often.
What you can do on Instagram?
Instagram gives you many ways to engage with your audience. The most basic way is with a single photo or graphic post and a caption. If you want to create a more elaborate post with several images and even video, you can create a Carousel that the user simply scrolls through from image to image.
A very effective engagement tool is called a Reel. This is a short video that can feature you, your product, or a combination of images. Reels get the most viewership and remain visible to users for the longest time.
Many brands like to create Instagram Stories which can be images or video of something going on with your brand that day. They are only visible for 24 hours; however, they are great for some “behind the scenes” footage of a photo shoot or a recent experience you have had. They are entertaining to users and help add the “human” touch to your brand.
You can also extend the life of an Instagram story by adding it to Highlights which is a feature that goes under your Bio. You can repurpose interesting Story posts and turn them into Reels which will be visible much longer.
With all types of posts, you get to add a Caption. These can be short or long messages about what is being posted. They often have a call to action, or a request to DM you, or share. Captions are important because they can express your personality and build trust. Instagram does not allow live links in its captions; however, one large fashion brand used this call to action: “for more information, type this into your browser: hm.com” This was not a live link, but it did get the website into the caption.
Most likely, you are already familiar with Hashtags. These are key words prefaced by a # - called a hashtag. They allow users to research a topic and see what posts are available that are related to the topic. The value of a hashtag is that it can make your post available to someone who is not your follower but searching for that topic.
It is important to research what keywords your competitors are using to attract a similar audience that you are looking for. Also, you do not want to use Hashtags that are too broad - an example would be #womensfashion - this hashtag is so broad your post is going to get lost in the thousands of other posts that may use that tag. A good rule about using hashtags is to use words that are relevant to your brand and targeted enough so that your posts do not get buried.
There are other useful features on Instagram. People can Share your posts which is a great way to get exposed to other users who may not know about you. Users can also Tag your brand in their own posts. These posts might feature you or your product. It is a good idea to share any post that has Tagged you. It helps build community between you and the user that tagged you, and it gives your brand additional exposure and credibility by showing that others like and are using your product.
How to Sell and Make Money on Instagram?
One of the most important features on Instagram is Instagram Shopping. With a business account, you can create an Instagram Shopping page. This allows users to specifically shop for and buy from your Instagram posts. An Instagram Shopping page allows you to set up a storefront within the Instagram app that can sell your collection. You don’t even need to have a website.
This option is very important. Within a day or so, you can literally create your profile, showcase and promote your fashion line through your Instagram feed, and sell that product directly off Instagram Shopping before you have even created a landing page, capture page, website, and shopping cart. Having this option allows you to start generating sales and revenue while you are still getting your entire online selling system set up.
The important thing to remember is that you don’t need thousands of followers to begin selling. You simply need a few users who trust you and have a need for your fashion product. After you start selling, that revenue helps build your confidence in your product and you can begin to realize that your dream of launching a new fashion line can be reality.
There is no doubt that social media platforms are replacing traditional methods of promoting fashion lines, collections, and products. Fashion magazines are moving online, and social media has begun dominating fashion marketing. This opens the door to incredible new opportunities to fashion entrepreneurs and innovative designers who want to launch a new line. It no longer takes an enormous investment to make an impact.
Social media platforms, especially Instagram, are very strategic for promoting a fashion line, attracting a niche audience, and building brand loyalty and a sense of community amongst the target group.
If you embrace social media, sell your product online, and build a community of loyal buyers in your target audience, you can successfully launch your fashion line and minimize start-up costs. As a fashion innovator and entrepreneur, social media can hold the key to your success and growth.
Stuck on product Production? At V.Mora we can help you through the entire production process from designing, to sourcing and so on through our Production Development services. If you are in need of the following Development and Production services:
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