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How to Grow Your Fashion Brand through Influencers Marketing

Businesses can’t survive if they remain stagnant; they need to grow. This doesn’t just happen on its own, though. For that to happen, they need to make more sales. And as much as we wish the alternative were true, more sales don’t magically appear either; they necessitate an increase in reach that is achieved by penetrating new audiences. Fortunately, this is made easy with influencer marketing, which is said to deliver 11 times higher ROI than traditional marketing (maybe this is why 73% of luxury brands are now making use of it as part of their strategy).

How is this possible? To answer that, think back on secondary school. Remember the popular group everyone else sought to emulate? Now think of that, but in a larger scale — that’s influencer marketing. In essence, you’re pairing your brand with someone in your niche who has a large following that looks up to them and respects what they have to say. Once you do that, you’re making use of influencer marketing.

Influencer Marketing and Fashion:

When you get down to it, fashion is visual. As for fashion eCommerce, this translates to a certainty that no matter how good a text description is, it’s never going to convert as many people as a compelling image. Here’s where influencer marketing comes into play.

The fashion influencers of today usually find their home in social media, meaning that they can amplify their voice — and your brand — across many channels. This, in turn, means that consumers are seeing people they look up to on a daily basis, which is completely changing the fashion landscape. Instead of seeing ads that, let’s admit it, can be annoying, consumers are now seeing products on people they like.

That’s what influencer marketing does; not only does it place you in front of more people, but also in front of more people who will be more receptive to your message because you have someone they admire on your side. The best part is that, while influencers are better known than your average person, they’re still seen as regular people, albeit with a stronger voice.

As Todd Cameron, Head of Content at Tapinfluence, said,

“[i]nfluencer marketing is the first real consumer-driven marketing channel. It’s real people talking to real people.“

At the end of the day, influencer marketing is a very powerful tool fashion brands everywhere can use to grow, and here’s how you can use it too.

Find Your Target Audience:

Influencer marketing in fashion eCommerce is most effective and successful when brands target the right audience, hence the term, ‘target audience.’ It comes down to the fact that, no matter how good your content, you can’t get results you want if you’re marketing at someone who has no interest in your offerings. In other words, your campaign won’t achieve a high ROI if you’re not reaching the right people.

To reach them, you need to know who they are. For instance, if you specialise in luxury footwear for women, your target audience is going to be women over a certain age who can actually afford luxury footwear. That is to say that while a girl in university may like your shoes, they’ll likely hold off on an expensive purchase until they can afford it. For this reason, you need to narrow on the group of people you’re trying to convert, AKA your target audience.

In this stage, start by creating different buyer personas you want to reach. For example:

● How much money do they make?

● How old are they?

● Are they men or women?

● Do they live in the cities or in rural areas?

● Etc.

Find Your Influencers:

Once you find your target audience, it’s time to lay the groundwork for the campaign by finding your influencers. Like most marketing campaigns, this begins with research. Keep in mind that this is someone who’ll be attached to your brand, so make sure that their views align with yours. If doing the research is something you’d rather avoid, one of your options is to get outside help from any digital agency that specialises in fashion ecommerce .

Another consideration to make is whether you want a big-name influencer or a micro-influencer. While the former can have hundreds of thousand, maybe even millions of followers, the latter typically has a following that ranges from the low thousands to about 50,000. If you go with a big-name influencer, you’ll extend your reach dramatically and penetrate audiences you never thought possible, but you’ll also incur a higher cost that tends to deter most small to mid-sized fashion brands. Additionally, they may be promoting a lot of products at once, which may lead to yours getting lost in a sea of brands.

If you instead choose to go with a micro-influencer, your reach may be lower, but you’ll also avoid paying hefty fees and may even be able to compensate them with some merchandise. Because they have smaller followings, micro-influencers also tend to have deeper connections with their audience than their big-name counterparts, which translates to significant more influence over those who do follow them.

Create a Campaign: Even though it may seem like influencer marketing isn’t as structured as other marketing endeavors like display or text ad campaigns, you still need a solid plan that you’re going to follow, and this includes setting up a campaign with goals and a strategy in place. Starting with goals, remember that making more sales is certainly important, but it’s not the only thing to focus on. For example, you may want to increase sign-ups, which will help your overall marketing efforts in the long-run.

Apart from goals, where is your influencer most active and where do they get the highest engagement? Depending on where that is, you’re going to want to tailor your content accordingly, as some content works better on certain platforms over others. Along similar lines, influencers can create a variety of content types, such as:

• Product reviews
• Live videos
• Giveaways
• Lifestyle images
• Polls
• Etc.

Choosing one type over another will ultimately depend on your goals. One more thing, remember that if you choose to forgo creating a campaign with a strategy and goals in place, you risk communicating the wrong message to your newfound audience.

Track Your Progress The last thing you need to do is also something that many fashion brands completely overlook or deem unimportant: tracking progress. Like any other marketing campaign, you have to know whether or not your efforts were worth it. After all, whether you’re compensating influencers with money or merchandise, you don’t want to waste your time and money.

For starters, did your sales increase? If so, by how much? What about your social engagement, AKA your likes, comments and shares? Similarly, did your follower count increase due to your influencers’ posts? And specific to your website, was there a spike in traffic and/or email sign-ups? Tracking your progress, of course, depends on the goals you set in the beginning of the campaign, so keep those in mind as the campaign progresses so you can modify and optimise if need be.

Final Thoughts Influencers are people with a unique spot in your niche market. They’re the ones you turn to if you want to grow your audience and branch out to new markets, making them an integral part of marketing in the fashion world that cannot be discounted.

**This blog post is published by Sabrina. She is a content writer for Appnova Creative agency based in London that specialises in luxury brands seeking to grow. She writes on a variety of topics that range from influencer marketing and search engine optimisation to mobile app development. **

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sabrina Sedicot .