As a fashion brand, having a good content marketing strategy in place is non-negotiable if you want to stay ahead of the competition. A strategic content marketing plan will not only help you thrive in the eCommerce arena but also supports long-term business growth. However, to some, creating a fashion marketing strategy for their content can seem like a daunting task.
Over the past few years, digital marketing has changed quite a lot for fashion brands, and it’s a game of adapting and evolving or risk being forgotten. Creating great content is one of the changes many brands harness to help build rapport with their customers and promote brand awareness.
If you’re ready to start creating and marketing outstanding content, here are a few pointers that can make the task less intimidating!
Photo by Ron Lach.
Are you clear on your content goals?
As with any other project, you can’t hope to see any tangible results or changes if you don’t have a clear goal. If you don’t know what kind of content to create, you can always draw a little inspiration from other brands. Essentially, you need to determine where to start building your social media presence, where you’ll share your content with your audience, and how you’ll engage with them on these platforms.
Ensure you use the right platform
Keep in mind that your content marketing strategy will only enhance and build brand loyalty if you’re using your audience’s preferred social media channels to share it. Have a look at the latest content marketing statistics to help you gauge your typical audience profile. These metrics will help you better understand whether you need to promote your content on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram and on just how many of these platforms you need to establish a presence.
It’s also advisable to consider the pros and cons of each platform. Instagram, for example, is a visual paradise, and as we all know, your clients buy with their eyes. However, if you’re going to promote your content on Instagram, you’ll need superior quality visual content (preferably produced by professional photographers), and the competition among the brands is also fierce on this platform. Every social media platform has perks and drawbacks, and it’s essential to weigh these up when creating a content strategy for your fashion brand.
Related article: How fashion can empower women.
Craft your content plan
An editorial calendar will help you outline a plan for your content marketing. This eliminates the frustration of playing a guessing game every day with which pieces of content to share on which platforms. An editorial calendar is your best prepping tool to ensure you’re keeping up with when content needs to be created, published, and shared with your audience.
Once you have a solid content plan in place, you can choose to go about the content production on your own or partner up with 3rd party business process outsourcing (BPO) vendors like writers and photographers. Dedicating one of two days a week to content production should be sufficient to help keep you on track with your plans.
Localize your content for the global fashion industry
Although your brand caters to a specific niche of the global audience, they don’t speak the same language, and their cultural expectations can have a significant impact on how they perceive your brand. In order to engage audiences from different regions across the world, you need to localize your content. Hence, it feels like they’re not just reading a translated version of an English blog post, but instead, an article that was crafted with their specific expectations in mind.
According to the Ultimate Guide to Localization, the vast majority of consumers prefer supporting and engaging with brands that provide content in their native language, centered around their culture. You should work with a language services provider that specializes in localization for this since it goes way beyond mere translation. When done correctly, your localized content will engage audiences from a variety of demographic areas with content relevant to their cultural and linguistic expectations.
Consider bringing influencers on board for your fashion brand
Influencers like bloggers and vloggers that are already engaged with your ideal audience can be a great way to market your content and raise brand awareness. By reviewing and recommending your products, influencers can help drive sales, and it’s also a great way to promote your brand to a different group of potential customers.
Some of the best fashion marketing strategies combine the power of social media marketing and influencers. Think of influencer marketing as a high school setup. The influencers you work with are the popular kids. Their existing followers are the other kids in school that want to be just like the popular kids. And as we all know, having the right people on your team is one of the best ways to boost your own reputation.
Effective fashion marketing strategies aren’t rocket science
Any fashion brand that wants to market its products on a global scale needs excellent content that will engage audiences from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. But without smart fashion marketing strategies for that content, it’s pointless.
In this post, we’ve listed a few of the basic (yet most effective) content marketing strategies that you can harness to market your brand’s content to your target audience, promote your products on the international stage, and boost brand loyalty.
With a little careful planning, an external hand or two, and a dash of creative juices, producing, publishing, and promoting your content isn’t such a daunting task after all!
AUTHOR BIO: Jennifer Hahn Masterson is a lifestyle blogger and senior content strategist at Spread the Word Solutions digital marketing blog, having a keen interest in a wide array of topics related design, fashion and travels. In her leisure time, she likes to immerse herself in a good book and try to satisfy her perpetual wanderlust.