In industry, as saturated as fashion, it can seem difficult for newer brands to grow and compete against already established companies.

While it may take some work, the fashion industry will never die so long as people need clothes and accessories, there is always an opportunity to start a successful brand, but of course, with the right strategy in place.

Fashion is a great realm of business to be in, as essentially many contributing members of society will make fashion-related purchases throughout their lifetime.

At Bold x Collective, their team specializes in fashion marketing strategies and has worked with brands in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, and beyond. In this blog, they will discuss fashion marketing strategies, tips, and how to succeed in marketing your fashion brand.

Recognize Your Demographic and Niche

One of the main errors upcoming brands perform is wanting to please and target everyone. This could mean all at once having both men, women, and children’s clothing options, or having clothing that is both targeted to younger adolescents and yet at the same time offering clothing for working-class middle-aged women.

Your brand needs to establish a clear demographic throughout its marketing, and its product offerings. If your focus is on being a more affordable brand for young adult women within their 20s to 30s, don’t release a clothing line focused on high-end businesswomen in their 40s; this will only confuse consumers.

Prioritize establishing a community from your brand’s main demographic and staying consistent within its marketing and products before branching out to a new target audience.

Our recommendation is to heavily focus on creating customer personas before starting any marketing. Some of the many key questions you want to ask yourself during this process include:

• What is your consumer’s gender?
• What is your consumer age group?
• What does your ideal consumer do for a living?
• Where is your consumer located?
• What does your consumer do for fun or entertainment?
• What are your consumers’ wants and needs?

This is one of the most important steps during the branding process, finding your target audience while discovering their pain points and figuring out your mission as a company.

Focus On Your Best Sellers

While this may seem like an obvious tip for some, fashion brands often feel tempted to hop on the latest trends to stay relevant and compete with other brands.

While this isn’t always a terrible idea, make sure that the trends and styles you follow are still consistent with your brand image and that your focus remains on your best sellers.

Your most popular items are your most popular items for a reason, so don’t get caught up in everything new and accidentally stray away from what has already been proven successful for you!

In addition to this, you also want to always keep your brand in mind. Branding is one of the key elements to success, not just in the fashion industry, but in business.

Branding is how businesses distinguish themselves and stand out from their competitors. When marketing items, be sure to always keep your brand in mind.

Regularly Instill FOMO Through Promotions

For those who don’t know, FOMO, which stands for “fear of missing out,” is commonly practiced among fashion brands on their e-commerce sites to instill exactly what the phrase says, a fear from the customer that they are missing out by not purchasing certain items.

This is an emotion you want to drive when it comes to marketing your brand. As twisted as it may sound, to create this emotion, you will need to convince consumers to believe that if they don’t purchase right away, they will miss out on an amazing deal that they will never find again!

For instance, your website should consistently have limited-time offerings and promotions that may persuade your shoppers to shop now, such as: “Free Shipping until 11:59 PM”, “15% OFF site-wide, today only”, or “Buy 1 Get 1 Free Only This Weekend.”

Including a countdown on your site to show consumers exactly how much time they have left and that this time is decreasing by the second.

This helps instill the sense of urgency to make a quick purchase decision before they miss out on a great deal.

FOMO has always been an excellent practice in the marketing industry, in fact, Bold x Collective agency encourages all their clients to implement this in their strategies.

Create Style Guides and Look Books for Your Brand’s Website

As a fashion brand, there is an obvious expectation that your brand knows how to style pieces of clothing together and create memorable looks for consumers.

With that in mind, having a section on your brand’s website dedicated to creating a style guide or a “look book” to showcase your products combined and paired together in numerous different ways to showcase their versatility and giving inspiration will instill the confidence many consumers need to make a purchase decision.

In addition to this, it’s also a great opportunity to upsell. The consumer will see a full outfit, and may love it, and become interested in purchasing the entire thing, which is great for your business!

TikTok’s and Instagram Reels for Fashion Inspiration

Like the point above, consumers love getting fashion inspiration through different sources. One of the most significant methods is inspiring your target audience through social media to give them ideas on how to style their own clothing.

Being that guide for fashion-oriented consumers will lead them to trust your brand and be interested in shopping with your brand. With TikTok being a huge and growing platform, it is well known for bringing overnight success and attention to many smaller and/or newer brands.

Instagram Reels, on the other hand, are being heavily pushed by the Instagram algorithm as an attempt to compete with TikTok. It’s a great opportunity to follow trends to create videos such as “OOTDs,” known as Outfit of the Day, or concepts such as “GRWM” also known as “Get Ready with Me.

At Bold x Collective agency, they always recommend posting your videos on both platforms, as it will widen your reach and attract many fashion-oriented consumers to your brand.

Partner With Fashion Bloggers and Influencers

Influencer marketing is continuously growing and there’s no shortage of fashion-focused content creators for your brand to partner with. With the fashion industry being so competitive, it is important to reach out to your target audience in any and every way possible. 

Partnering with the right influencer(s) that fit your brand’s style and demographic will help your brand get the right attention. Typically, when choosing the right influencer for your brand, you want to ask them for their influencer kit, so you can better understand their audience – age, gender, demographic, and more.

This is where the customer personas come back into play, as you want to make sure that their target audience aligns with yours.

Finding the right influencers for your brand could be difficult, especially when you are new to the industry, so they recommend partnering up with an agency like Bold x Collective, to help with your influencer marketing needs.

Encourage Testimonials and Picture Reviews on Your Website

One of the biggest challenges of being a new and/or small brand is getting consumers to trust your brand enough to make a purchase. With such a limited reputation, it often feels safer for consumers to stick to big brands that they are already familiar with and know they can rely on.

To try to limit this discouragement from consumers to branch out and try new brands, encourage the consumers you have so far to include written and picture reviews, where they showcase their outfits.

Written reviews are important, as consumers trust other consumers that are honest about the products, they spent money on.

On the other hand, photo reviews – reviews that include a picture of the item received either on or off the customer will help interested consumers imagine how the product will look and fit on them, as well as reassure them on whether the brand’s product image(s) are consistent/reliable or not.

A question Bold x Collective often receives – how do I get my customers to leave reviews? Consider giving them an incentive, whether it be free shipping off your next purchase or a 10% off discount code. Offer an even better incentive for those who leave photo reviews.

In addition, you can even offer a loyalty program or points system, where leaving a photo review will earn a customer higher points than a regular review, and these points accumulate over time to ultimately save customers money. 

Highlight Your Ethical Approaches

With a rise in ethically sourced and manufactured products, as well as environmentally friendly practices within the retail industry (especially fashion to go against the terrible impact of fast fashion and ethical concerns of sweatshops), highlighting your brand’s ethical approaches can convince and attract many consumers in choosing your brand over a larger, yet more controversial, brand.

Of course, this is only possible if your brand does, in fact, follow ethical approaches, but if your brand is connected to a specific cause, charity, or organization that positively impacts society, it is also worth mentioning within your marketing efforts. 

Conclusion

The fashion industry is one with numerous opportunities that will quite literally never go out of style.

While it may seem intimidating to enter such a competitive market, there are numerous ways to market your brand and get it noticed among your demographic through digital marketing initiatives.

The team at Bold x Collective is experienced in the fashion marketing industry and has assisted fashion brands with launching high conversion strategies in this competitive industry.

By specializing in branding, strategies, and digital marketing, Bold x Collective philosophy is to gain affinity from your target audience to achieve organizational goals and help your brand stand out from the rest, or as they like to say, be bold!

Contact Bold x Collective for a complimentary consultation.