There's no question that consumer expectations have changed forever, especially within the fashion industry. Real-time and personalized shopping experiences have become the norm, and when customers have questions, they want immediate answers. Above all, today's fashion consumers aren't just looking to browse fashion sites to pick out new favorites—they want to be inspired, informed, and engaged.
Given this shift in consumer trends, fashion retailers must stay ahead of the latest digital marketing trends. With the U.S. fashion market expected to reach $295 billion dollars by 2025 and so many brands in the space, it's imperative that fashion brands do everything they can to increase their reach and stay ahead of the competition. For many fashion brands, this evolution of strategy begins with their content marketing. Here are five easy ways your fashion brand can improve and optimize its content marketing strategies.
What Is Content Marketing?
As the name implies, content marketing is a method of attracting new customers through content, whether that's through unique website content, company blogs, or content published across external sites and social media channels. For fashion digital marketing, content marketing tends to offer the best results when integrated with user-generated content (UGC), targeted imagery or video content, and blogs that highlight the latest trends and fashion advice. Effective content marketing can bring in shoppers first discovering your brand and could convince them to choose your brand over another.
Why Is Content Marketing Important for Fashion Retailers?
It's no secret that we live in an age of instant gratification, authenticity, and hyper-personalization. In fact, a quick look at the numbers will tell you that 57% of consumers who feel connected to a brand will increase their spending with that brand. Along with that, 76% of them will stick to that brand over a competitor if the connection feels strong enough. Additionally, Forbes highlights that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.
These stats showcase just how important it is for retailers (especially fashion retailers) to build relationships with their customers. More than ever, this relationship is happening through effective content marketing, meaning fashion brands need to stay on top of their distribution channels to meet their audiences at every stage of their buying journeys.
What Content Marketing Tips Should Fashion Retailers Know?
Whether your fashion brand focuses on general apparel, athletic wear, plus-size offerings, or the expanding sustainable fashion sector, fashion content marketing is all about staying on top of the latest consumer trends. Where some brands might choose to do everything in-house, others might decide to partner with an experienced fashion digital marketing agency. No matter what route you take, here are some of the most impactful ways fashion brands can leverage content marketing to build brand awareness, influence purchase decisions, retain customers, and ultimately increase their overall revenue.
Craft Creative Click-and-Shop Content: As one of the most "fashion-forward" tips on this list, click-and-shop content is also one of the easiest ways for fashion brands to reduce the friction between the content they produce and the buying process. Though the trend has been around for a few years now, recent improvements have enabled brands to seamlessly integrate their content and shopping experiences in exciting new ways. Facebook and Instagram both offer shoppable ads, while shoppable TV shows have evolved beyond their infomercial pasts.
Adding to this, some of the biggest names in fashion retail are finding success through shoppable UGC and blog content, helping drive even more engagement and authenticity across their social media channels. By combining product images, inspirational hashtags, and direct links to purchase them, brands can strike the perfect balance between content and commerce without feeling too corporate or salesy.
Leverage the Power of User-Generated Content (UGC): Online shoppers want to see how other people feel about products before committing to a purchase. They want to feel inspired by their tastes, and they want to set their expectations accordingly. While fashion is all about being seen, most customers would rather get a general feeling for how something might look before breaking out the wallet. After all, it's one thing to see a cute blouse on the rack. It's another thing entirely to see it paired with one, two, or three different outfits or on multiple body types.
To that end, UGC is an exceptional tool for fashion retailers to promote their brands. Not only does it provide the authenticity online shoppers crave, but it also supplies your content marketing efforts with a limitless source of quality reviews and valuable feedback. Best of all, UGC gives fashion brands the chance to put the spotlight on their customers, increasing engagement with current followers and likely attracting new ones along the way.
Embrace Personalized Email Marketing: Since 80% of consumers prefer a personalized experience from their favorite brands, it's important to understand the power of personalized email marketing. After all, when you're in somebody's inbox, you have a responsibility to make that experience engaging, especially if you're trying to earn their purchase.
To that end, sending all your subscribers the same email likely won't have the same positive effect on conversions or email revenue. Instead, focus on sending targeted emails to re-engage those with abandoned shopping carts, which your Google Analytics report should provide. Likewise, don't be afraid to send out birthday emails or top-round pickups based on past purchases.
Regularly Update Your Fashion Blog: No matter what your content strategy entails, blogs still provide one of the best ways to power that strategy. In fact, fashion blogs are among the most effective means of establishing brand authority, strengthening SEO, and building customer loyalty. They help drive traffic to your website as well, since each new blog post is a new page for Google and other search engines to index. Additionally, blogs help people discover your brand, as people love to share great content across social media channels.
If that weren't enough, a well-executed blog offers the chance to drive more conversions. For example, your fashion brand can embed shoppable content links and lead-generating calls-to-action (CTAs) that direct to landing pages containing relevant content. The more blogs you add, the more chances of converting new customers, especially if those blogs also contain answers to common questions or pain points that fashion shoppers might be trying to solve.
Invest in the Right Influencers: How much are you spending on influencers? More importantly, what's your return on that investment? With the influencer marketing industry expected to hit $15 billion by 2022, many of the top-tier fashion influencers are becoming too expensive and selective of the companies they endorse, leading some fashion brands to look for alternatives. Of these alternatives, a number of retailers have turned to working with what the industry dubs as "micro-influencers," aka those with loyal followings in the 10,000-100,000 range.
While these micro-influencers might be in the up-and-coming stage of their careers, their smaller following is often much more engaged and focused. If you can find a micro-influencer and audience that align with your brand, it might be a worthwhile investment. Like every fashion marketing strategy, however, influencer marketing provides the best results when paired with multiple content marketing strategies.
Partner with a Fashion Marketing Agency
When it comes to staying competitive in the fashion industry, you need a clear and cohesive digital strategy in place from the very start. It also takes a great deal of experimentation, which requires extensive time, something many upstart fashion brands might not have. Partnering with a dedicated fashion marketing agency is the answer for many. The right fashion marketing agency can help you optimize your fashion content marketing efforts to capture more qualified leads, drive more conversions, and climb the ranks of organic search in this wildly competitive industry.