How Social Media Can Boost Your New Fashion Brand: Pinterest
In the fashion world your look and style is essential, and showcasing it with high-impact visuals is critical to generate interest and brand awareness. Pinterest is one of the leading photo and idea sharing social networks. It’s a very strategic and effective marketing tool for a new fashion line.
Imagine a mall filled with over 400 million active shoppers every month and 85% of them are shopping for fashion inspiration. This is not a figment of your imagination. This is Pinterest, the photo sharing social network that emphasizes fashion inspiration, personal discovery, and curation of ideas. Pinterest simplifies shopping for and buying fashion products. People primarily use Pinterest to shop and to discover new brands and styling ideas that they can fall in love with and purchase.
Major fashion brands like Kate Spade, Louis Vuitton, and Mejuri have already established a huge presence on the platform. Fashion startups and unique small brands are also capitalizing on the enormous opportunity to showcase a new fashion line to their niche target market, build brand awareness, gather followers, generate website traffic, and sell products right in the moment.
Pinterest works as a very organized virtual shopping assistant. Users create “boards”, which are like virtual cork boards where you pin ideas up with pushpins. With Pinterest, all they have to do is hit the save button. They have the option to save that image to one of their various boards.
One user can create a board for “everyday outfits”, “evening wear”, “formal shoes”, “casual shoes”, etc. You can name a board anything you like, and everything you save to that board is displayed so that you can see all the images you decided to save in one place at one time. This can be a fun, fast, and efficient way to shop for the user. For the designer or entrepreneur launching a fashion line, it can be a very effective way to gain exposure, build awareness, and even sell your product.
Why Pinterest?
Pinterest is designed for people who love to shop. It is different from the other social media sites because the goal is to help people discover and collect ideas and inspiration. Other social media sites focus on communication, connection, and interaction. What makes Pinterest such a powerful tool for launching a fashion line is that you can get started with a business or personal account for free. You can post pins as much or as little as you want. Within your pin, you can direct viewers to your shopping page and close the sale in a very efficient process.
Pinterest is one of the most effective ways to generate traffic to your website, landing page, or capture page. It gives you a tool that can help you grow your email list, showcase your product catalog, and sell online.
The sheer size of the audience makes Pinterest too big to ignore, and the features you work with can directly affect your bottom line and grow your fashion business.
Who is on Pinterest?
There are over 478 million active Pinterest users every month. About half of these users are in the United States, and they are evenly spread amongst three age demographics: 32% - 18-29, 34% - 30-49, 38% - 50-64. Over 75% of these users are women, and nearly 90% of users state that they visit Pinterest for inspiration especially when they purchase apparel and fashion items.
Pinterest can be a Promised Land for a new fashion designer. You can find your niche target audience, attract them with your content, and convert them with the selling features available.
What you can do on Pinterest?
The best way to learn Pinterest is to get started and open a Business or Personal account. There is no charge, and they have very clear instructions to get started. Create a profile that defines your brand and identifies your niche and your mission. You can then create various boards related to your brand. An example would be seasonal boards if your line changes from season to season. You could create a board for: Fall Fashions, Winter Styles, Springtime Parties, and Summer Fun. You can then put content in each of these boards that your followers can view and shop for. You can even make a “Mission” board to post pins that visualize a cause or issue related to your brand’s purpose or mission.
You have options to designate who can pin to each of your boards. You can give permission to only you, yourself and specific named people, or open your board for the entire community to pin to.
When creating your profile be sure to include a link to your website or shopping page so that an interested viewer can shop your entire line and purchase. Make the products featured on your website catalog or selling page “Pinable”. That allows viewers shopping on your website to pin their favorite items directly to their personal board on Pinterest. This way, if they are not purchasing right away, they can save it, see it again, and come back to your website when they are ready to purchase.
It is a good idea to use Pinterest for market research. Follow your competitors and watch their boards. You can find out valuable information including their pricing, the hashtags they use, what merchandise they are selling, and how they present their product line. The more you learn about the competition, the more you will be able to give yourself a strategic edge against them.
Posting consistently and often is a very good way to attract an audience. To make it easier for you to post, there are several automated content scheduling tools, like TailWind, that integrate with Pinterest and can make the daily posting process consistent, automated, and efficient.
Once you post a pin, viewers can react to it by giving it one of several Emoji’s. They can also re-pin it by saving it to one or more of their boards. They can share you pin with others, and they can send you a direct message. This interaction with your audience is a great way of building a community of brand aware viewers.
How to Advertise, Sell and Make Money on Pinterest?
The primary purpose Pinterest exists is to help its users discover ideas, organize them into their boards, and ultimately shop and buy easily. Pinterest has several different selling tools, like all social media platforms, the specific tools could change and evolve over time.
One of the most valuable selling tools on Pinterest is the option to create “Shoppable Pins”. These are mobile-friendly, secure, and one-stop solutions for the buyers. With a “Shoppable Pin” your buyer never has to leave Pinterest. They can buy your product within the Pinterest platform and return to their browsing.
You can also pay to promote your individual Pins. This option allows you to boost your exposure and target your audience by interest, age, and gender.
Pinterest offers a selling feature where you can add a “Shop The Look” Pin. This is where your model may be wearing several products in your fashion line. The “shop the look” option lets you tag each one of the products and those specific product shots are shown as shoppable below the main visual of the model. This can be very compelling when you get User Generated Content and you add a “shop the look” tag to each item that your user is wearing or using.
Pinterest has a promotional option that allows you to set up influencer marketing campaigns. If you can interest an influencer in promoting your product, this can help you multiply your content. Influencer generated pins can be very authentic and believable. As a result, they could be very effective. It is important to let the performance metrics indicate whether each influencer is converting at a rate that works for your marketing strategy.
If your website or selling page is on Shopify or WooCommerce, you can connect your storefront to your Pinterest Business Account and they will automatically add your entire catalog of products to Pinterest. This can make purchasing a faster and easier experience for the customer.
For more options, it is best to check the Pinterest Business Center. You can find out all of the various advertising, selling, and boosting features available to you and your brand.
Social media has created a valuable opportunity for fashion entrepreneurs launching a new line or scaling an existing one. Pinterest makes it easy for viewers to find inspiration, discover new fashion brands, curate them and store them on organized boards, and ultimately buy them from your website or within the Pinterest platform. The enormous size of the potential audience allows you to find many possible customers no matter how small your specific niche may be.
The potential to showcase your new fashion brand and sell it in a consumer-friendly cost effective way makes Pinterest a critical tool in your marketing strategy. Depending on your product and content, different platforms and their selling options may perform better or worse than the others. When you develop a social media marketing strategy, it is important to optimize the various platforms that work the best for your brand and fashion line. Test each one and analyze the results and ROI you receive versus the results from the others. When you find a mix of social media platforms that work best for your brand, it may be time to scale that strategy. As you scale, always analyze the performance metrics to monitor your success and give you data-driven insights into how best to grow your brand and launch your product line.
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:
Sourcing
Technical sketches
Pattern Making
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Sample Making
Fittings
Digitizing and Grading
Marker Making
Manufacturing
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