The fashion industry is rapidly moving online. eCommerce has captured a 21% market share of all fashion retail sales. Your new fashion line should have a marketing strategy that includes eCommerce and social media. Here’s why…

Every year, the fashion industry migrates more and more from brick and mortar retail stores to social media and eCommerce sales. Some popular social media platforms have emerged that allow you to directly sell to your audience without even having an eCommerce website. Your brand should have a presence online. It’s the biggest shopping mall in the universe. The potential audience you can reach is many times larger than the traffic in the largest, most crowded shopping mall during the Holiday Season. And online, this potential audience is an every day possibility. 

Since social media is primarily a visual medium, it is a marketing paradise for a fashion entrepreneur who is just starting out and launching a new fashion line. You no longer have to buy costly ad pages in the fashion magazines. You can post an infinite variety of videos and photos that showcase your line to an interactive target audience at an extremely reasonable cost. 

Why Social Media?

The popular social media websites I’ve discussed in previous blogs: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and Pinterest, all offer you the potential of building a massive audience. People are flocking to social media for fashion ideas, new concepts, inspiration, and shopping. The opportunity social media gives you to target your niche,  build brand awareness, showcase your line, and drive sales is unmatched by any other selling channel. 

Fashion magazines who used to dictate fashion trends and styles are not the “fashion bibles” they once were. Instead, social media platforms and the brand ambassadors and influencers have become the opinion-leaders when it comes to promoting fashion trends and styles and launching new ideas, products, and concepts.. 

Social media platforms offer a viewer the ability to see, consider, and buy nearly every fashion brand that exists from the comfort of their phone or desktop. Shopping on social media is a great form of entertainment and an efficient way to shop. What is even better is that the enormous audiences you have exposure to is growing every year. 

No matter how precise your niche might be, you can find a large enough target audience of potential buyers to support your fashion brand and make your new launch successful.  Each platform has specific demographics which are easy to find. The platforms that best fit your niche, are the ones you should create a presence on first; however, you should also explore the other platforms because you might be surprised and find that they are more effective than one you simply assumed would work. A brand you thought would sell great on Facebook might sell a lot better on TikTok. This is why it’s important to test them all. 

Finding your target audience

The greatest marketing opportunity of social media platforms is the massive audience of monthly users you can reach. One of the most effective tools to help you really drill down to find people within your niche is the Facebook Groups feature. By joining the groups relevant to your niche, you can come into direct contact with the people who have the most potential to be your buyers. 

Get to know your competitors as well. Study the groups they belong to, the hashtags they use, and even the content they post. If they are successfully reaching an audience similar to your target, you can reach them too.

Finally, nearly every social media platform offers you the opportunity to boost or promote your posts and also for you to advertise, and when you do, you have the opportunity to specify exactly who you want your post to be shown to.  This can be a very effective and efficient way to identify your target audience, speak directly to unknown viewers who may also be in your niche, and welcome them into your community of interested followers. 

Building a community

Once you start to gather interested followers you need to interact with them to build your community and forge an authentic connection between you, your brand, and them. It is important to spend time with your followers, respond to their DM’s and comments, ask them questions, and host surveys. It is important to get them involved with your brand and for them to know you are a real person and not some sort of soulless mega-corporation. 

There are several software tools you can find to automate your responses to DM’s. This can give you the ability to interact with your audience without losing any time in your day. Remember, if you have a presence on several platforms the number of DM’s can grow to an extremely large amount of messages. By automating responses to common questions and comments, you can eliminate the redundancy of responding to the same thing over and over again. This can save you time and money while it still builds your connection to your target market. 

Creating Content

Creating content is the most important task you have with making your marketing on social media effective. It’s important to create content that showcases your fashion line, builds trust in you and your brand, generates brand awareness,  builds interest and desire for your product, and gives proof that your fashion line performs the way you say it does.  That means you will need to create many types of different content. 

The various platforms offer you different ways to post your content, and much of it can be created for one platform and repurposed for most of the others. Behind the scenes footage of a shoot or the manufacturing process, great product shots, testimonials, “how to” videos, styling tips, surveys, polls, testimonials, and other creative ideas can all be useful across multiple platforms.

It can be very compelling to post User Generated Content (UGC) from your actual customers. These can be testimonials, unboxings, “how to” style your fashion line, a story about how they used your brand, or simply having a real buyer show off your product. User Generated Content comes off as genuine, authentic, and very believable.

If you can make a deal with some fashion influencers (ones with a large amount of followers) or even a fashion micro-influencer (one with less followers), the content these people create for your line is exposed to both your followers and their followers. You can attract new customers that come from their audience.  

The content you create and post can be as unique and creative as your imagination inspires you. It is important to be frequent and consistent with your posts. As you post more content consistently, the various platforms are more likely to expose your content to more people. Some of the algorithms, like TikTok’s, aggressively seek to grow your followers by exposing you to viewers who are not your followers. Other algorithms, like Facebook and Instagram, are more passive and require you to actively grow your base of followers. 

Managing Posts

Managing the posting of your content could absorb a great deal of your time. Individually making each post to each platform can become very time consuming. Fortunately, most of the platforms have automated content scheduling calendars that allow you to put your content into the calendar and have it automatically post on the day and time you specify. 

This way you can dedicate a day to create your content in batches, and load them into your calendar to be posted on the day you schedule. This can be a very effective tool to manage both your time and your content.

If you can stay a week or two ahead of your schedule, you can post consistently and frequently and keep your content fresh and compelling to your audience. They will begin to return to your profile every day to see what’s new. When they share your content with their followers, they are actually helping you build your own target audience.

Selling on Social Media

Building a community, creating brand awareness, and connecting with your target audience are very essential goals; however, your ultimate goal should be to sell your brand and generate revenue so that your fashion business can grow and you  can be successful. Fortunately, all the most popular social media platforms are designed to make it easy to sell your fashion line. Some platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, allow you to sell your product directly on the platform so your buyer does not even have to leave the site. In fact, you don’t even need an eCommerce site to sell on Instagram or Facebook. The Instagram and Facebook Marketplace lets you create your own platform-specific shopping cart for a small percentage of every sale.

Other platforms allow you to embed a clickable link either in your post or on your profile so that if someone is interested in your line, they can easily buy it. These clickable links take your potential customer to your brand’s eCommerce website where they can shop, find out more, and even buy online from your shopping cart. 

The marketing power of social media has totally changed the playing field for a fashion entrepreneur and offers more opportunity to a small, start-up fashion line than at any other time in history. It does not require an enormous start-up cost to begin building brand awareness and you don’t even need a large amount of followers to generate sales of your fashion line. Social media platforms reduce the cost and the time it takes to market and launch a new fashion brand and successfully sell it to your target audience. 

These platforms all give your brand potential exposure to millions of viewers, help you find and grow your niche audience, attract and interest them with your content, and ultimately, make sales and generate revenue. It’s possible to successfully market and launch your start-up fashion line entirely using social media marketing, and if your strategy is efficient and effective your brand can grow and your fashion business will succeed. 

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

• Prototype making 

• Sample Making

• Fittings 

• Digitizing and Grading

• Marker Making

• Manufacturing

Please contact us at: vmorainquiry@vmora.com