Digital Marketing for Fashion Brands

11 tips to make more sales and maximise profit

Fashion brands face a highly competitive online marketplace. It’s no easy task to generate sales, even for many established fashion brands. We’ve compiled our top 11 tips for success with digital marketing, drawing on our years of experience helping dozens of fashion clients to sell more products and maximise their profit.

1.   Get to know your customers better than anyone else

Knowing your customers isn’t the same thing as taking educated guesses about them, based on general data or knowledge. To truly know and understand your customers, you’re going to need to dig deep into not only the data you have on them, but also by speaking to them and finding common factors for various segments of your audience.

You’ll need to find out things like:

1. What are they looking for from you exactly?
2. What current trends are they into? What colours, sizes and styles?
3. What search terms are they likely to use to find what they want?
4. Where do they hang out digitally? Where were they before they visited your site and where are they likely to go afterwards?
5. What Instagram accounts are they likely to follow? What is the messaging style for these accounts?
6. What are their online shopping habits? When do they buy? On what device? What is their typical basket size?

Only once you truly understand your target audience can you make sure that your digital marketing activity provides them with exactly what they need to make a purchase, and hopefully keep them coming back for more.

2.   Be consistent with your marketing activity across all of your channels

Shoppers are likely to see your brand’s messaging across more than one channel before they make a purchase. You can make it easier for them to remember you if you run consistent messaging and promotions across all channels. This may incorporate:

1. All of your owned media, like your website
2. Facebook page
3. Instagram account
4. Twitter
5. Pinterest
6. YouTube
7. TikTok
8. Email Marketing
9. Any offline marketing you do, such as catalogues, direct mail and in-store merchandising

Your activity for channels like social media for fashion marketing, will work alongside your other channels, like SEO and PR, to provide a consistent experience for potential and existing customers.

3.   Make it easy to buy from you

No one will want to buy from you if it’s an arduous process. If you can make online shopping from your brand a really simple and positive experience, you’re also more likely to enjoy repeat customers too. You can try:

1. Personalisation to remember the items that this visitor browsed on their last visit, or what they bought last from you
2. Ensuring the site loads quickly and works well on all devices.
3. Ensuring your site accepts the payment methods that your customers want to use e.g. offering PayPal and Apple Pay as well as standard debit and credit card payments. Do ‘buy now, pay later’ credit solutions fit with your audience and company ethos?

4.   Protect your margins

The best ways to protect your margins can vary, depending on your business model and the kind of margins you currently work to. One fundamental though, is to ensure you are closely monitoring your sales attribution, to fully understand how your channels are working together to drive sales. Incentives can be useful and can kick-start a sales snowball, but coupon codes and affiliate marketing can sometimes be a danger to your profit margins too, such as when:

1. Affiliate sites target your brand term or try to get their own organic listings for coupon related terms that will essentially ‘steal’ traffic from your own website.
2. Having a coupon entry field in your checkout process means that visitors could leave the site to search for one. If they return via an affiliate site after finding a coupon there, you’ll have to pay that commission.
3. Having potential multiple incentives that can combine on one order e.g. a coupon, an affiliate click and paid media clicks might wipe out most or all of your profit on an order, or even leave you with a loss.

5.   Get your products seen and reviewed elsewhere

Early adopters are few and far between when it comes to fashion. British consumers especially are not generally known for being the first to buy something. Seeing your products worn elsewhere is a strong trust signal and can increase desirability. You can:

1. Outreach to few carefully selected influencers who have an audience that closely matches your customers and are also a good match with your brand ethos
2. Target influencers with a presence over multiple platforms if possible, to maximise the exposure of your products. Look for those who have a blog or website, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and potentially YouTube and TikTok too.
3. Supply your partner influencers with images, videos and other assets to make it as easy as possible for them to share content that helps ‘sell’ your products.

6.   Monitor your competitors

It’s highly likely that your target customers also visit your competitor’s sites and social media profiles too. If you can keep an eye on what they are doing, it provides a foundation on which you can do a better job for your brand. You can:

1. Monitor their SEO performance – do they appear in organic search results for the same terms as you?
2. See which influencers are talking about them and what they are saying
3. Follow their social media profiles to keep an eye on their output
4. Sign up to their email newsletters for the same reason
5. Make a purchase from them and compare the experience to what customers get with you. Including the returns process!
6. Use the best bits of competitor strategies to inspire your own. Don’t just copy them – what can you do differently to make it uniquely yours and better than theirs?
7. Read their reviews and try to work out their strengths and weaknesses from what people say about them
8. Include activity in your marketing strategy to be better than your competitors in each of these areas

7.   Use PET tactics to increase urgency

PET stands for persuasion, emotion and trust. It’s a suite of tactics that are used by many large retailers, travel companies and any sector where a sense of urgency can help increase sales. The aim is to prompt an immediate purchase by showing messaging that persuades, whilst connecting with the shopper’s emotions and also instilling trust. A magical combination! Examples of this in fashion digital marketing communications and across your website could include:

1. New in stock
2. Last few remaining
3. Highlight great reviews
4. XX people are looking at this now
5. XX sold today
6. Limited availability

8.   Upsell, cross-sell and bundle

Making a sale at all is the most important goal, but maximising the value of the basket of goods is also a great way to boost revenue – as long as you keep a close eye on your margins! You can make it easy for customers to add products to their basket, or make a ‘small’ upgrade or additional purchase that offers them good value and means you generate more revenue. You can try:

1. Upselling a slightly superior version of the product already in their basket
2. Cross-selling items that complement the product, such as a purse that goes with the bag they are buying, or a belt, hat or scarf that works well with the garment they want
3. Bundle items like the above together for a slight discount as long as the margin is still there for you

9.   No one buys on their first visit – work this into your strategy

Consumers want the product they are looking for at the best possible price from a trusted store. This makes it unlikely that someone will buy from you at their very first visit to your website, so you need to factor this into your wider marketing strategy by utilising tactics such as:

1. Basing your paid media bidding strategy on the fact that first click is unlikely to produce sales directly
2. Retargeting to remind customers about you and the product(s) they looked at on your site once they have left it. Remarket via Google and Bing, retarget via Facebook and Instagram.

10.   Plan for repeat purchases

A single purchase is great, but there is no need to stop there. Every first purchase can be looked at as the start of a great relationship with a new customer that could have a significant lifetime value, and can also become an advocate that drives even more revenue. Make it easy for people to buy from you again and make the entire process something effortless that they’ll be happy to repeat. You can look at:

1. Fulfilment – the delivery process
2. Quick and easy returns and refunds
3. Automated emails asking for reviews on third party sites (and monitor these sites so you can respond to reviews)
4. Only send relevant follow-up emails so that there is minimal chance of causing annoyance and driving unsubscribes

11.   Get the right marketing partner

Successful digital marketing for fashion brands requires expertise in multiple disciplines, including:

1. Great retail and sales experience
2. Digital marketing specialists
3. Great content that engages your audience
4. The ability to accurately monitor and measure results and attribution
5. Customer care

This doesn’t mean that you need a huge in-house team, but no individual marketer will have all of these skills either. A digital marketing agency with a proven track record in fashion marketing can do all of the heavy lifting. At Hitsearch, we’ve been successfully working with fashion brands for 15 years – just take a look at some of our case studies. We’ve got the perfect blend of technical excellence, marketing expertise and creativity to assist your business in getting a great return. Get in touch today for a free 15-minute consultation to find out how we can help you. Call us on 0800 011 9715.