Marketing for Fashion Brands; 5 Mistakes to Avoid

Want to get more customers to your fashion brand and make more sales online? Then you’ll need to stop making these 5 mistakes! I work with a lot of customers on their fashion marketing and I see the same mistakes over and over; these things are the first changes I ask my Clients to make. I thought I’d share them here on the blog so that you can avoid making the same mistakes in your business.

Want to learn even more about fashion marketing? Why not grab The Fashion Sales Kit for training and swipe files to speed up and level up your marketing?

Mistake #1

The first mistake that I see people making is that they try to sell to everyone. And the problem with this is it does become a case of trying and failing. If you're trying to sell to everyone, you'll end up selling to no one.

I do sort of get the logic here, people assume that most people will want to buy clothes at some point. So people think that by promoting their products with everyone in mind, chances are someone somewhere is going to buy eventually. Actually though, you end up having the opposite effect because if you think about it, if you're promoting loads of different things people aren't going to want to follow you because they just don't know what to expect from you. If you're promoting something a visitor loves one day and then the next day it's something that they hate, the inconsistency will become annoying for them and in the end they just won't bother following along anymore.

Instead, it's much better to be super specific. So, rather than trying to sell to everyone, try and really hone in on who your ideal customer is and promote your brand by including things that are really important to them specifically. Sure, this is going to put people off who aren't a good fit for your brand, but don't see that as a bad thing. If they're not a good fit for your brand, they're not going to buy from you anyway. By being really specific, you can build a connection with potential customers, build a brand that they're going to love and not only will that help you to attract them as a customer in the first place, it'll help them to keep loyal and keep coming back to you as well.

Mistake #2

The second thing that I see people doing is relying too much on social media. And I have a quote here from a recent Forbes report, which talks about how Instagram convert only 3.1% of people into buyers. That means the other almost 97% of people aren't going to buy from you if they see you on Instagram. And that's just one particular quote from Forbes and it's something that I hear all the time and not just for Instagram. In general with social media, the conversion rate isn't that great on its own. Typically people need to see your brand multiple times before they go from the initial time they saw you and found out about you, to become a customer.

So unfortunately, marketing isn't as simple as just posting a few pretty pictures to Instagram. Customers need to keep seeing your brand, which means that you need to have an entire strategy in place to increase the chances of a potential customer actually transitioning into a buyer. So instead, rather than just focusing all of our attention on social media, we want to create something that I personally call a sales journey. You've probably heard of something similar, maybe a sales funnel, a marketing funnel.

There's different terminology for it, but I like to use the word sales journey and that's a strategy that I use and use with my customers too. Basically, it's a process to make sure that we have these different opportunities for the customer can come into contact with our brand, which helps use as brands create trust. Potential customers can then start to engage with our brand more. Perhaps they started off seeing us on social media and then went to our blog, signed up for our email list and then eventually went on to became a loyal customer. And that's so much better than just having someone who double taps on Instagram, but leaves it at that. You really need to have a whole strategy in place rather than just posting to social media.

Mistake #3

The third mistake that I want to talk to you about is not building an email list. Email marketing is huge right now and although I'll admit in recent years, it's become a little more complicated, it’s still a great way of reaching your audience. If you're one of those people who hasn't done this, I strongly suggest that you get onto it, because email marketing is one of the few promotional methods where you have control. It’s not like Facebook or Google or anything else where there's an algorithm that you have to contend with and only a certain number of people are going to what you post. You control whether or not people receive an email from you, for the most part. You are the one who has the ability to get them to open it by using catchy subject headings. And most people check their email at least multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day, so they're going to have multiple opportunities to see your message. If they're on, say Facebook, they won’t see all of your posts due to the algorithm, whereas with email, there's a much higher chance that they're going to see that message from you.

So instead of not having an email list, you need to focus on growing your email list today! Even if you don't have a business yet, you need to start working on this because you don't want to launch your business and then not have anyone to sell it to. An email list is really one of the first things that you need to do for your business. So, if you haven't started already, make this the next thing on your to do list! Email marketing has a much better conversion rates than a lot of other marketing methods. And for the most part, as we said, you're in a lot more control than you are with another platform.

Mistake #4

The fourth mistake is that people talk about themselves too much. It's all me, me, me, and it really should be about the customer rather than your self promotion. People don't want to hear about you all the time. They want to know what's in it for them, so rather than constantly promoting, instead you want to help your customers. Try to change your mindset and think of marketing in a way of ‘how can I help my customer today’ rather than ‘what can I sell them today’? That mindset shift and the way that you come across your customers can have a huge impact on your performance.

The majority of your content should be helpful to the customer rather than self promoting all the time. Now that's not to say that you can't include your products, obviously you want to still be referencing your products and talking about them, but don't do it in such an obvious way. People will get fed up of receiving promotional messages and will eventually unfollow, or zone out. Whereas if you give your audience something that genuinely solves a problem for them, then they're going to want to keep interacting with your brand, keep going to your website, keep reading your blog, whatever it might be. I know that it's a little bit of a hard concept sometimes for people to understand. So if we take an activewear brand as an example; one of my clients has an activewear brand and on his blog he writes about different workouts that you can do, different ways of warming up, smoothie recipes to improve your workout and anything he feels his audience will find useful. So, people go to him because they want to know what the new smoothie for that weekend, or want know what the latest technique is for their warmup. So because this guy is helping his customers, it means that they keep going back because they got helpful information from him. But of course, any photography that's in those posts, any products that are referenced, are all his products. So even though he's still marketing and still promoting, it's not an obvious ‘buy this now’ kind of way. It's a lot more subtle and it means that his content gets a lot more engagement from customers because they're getting something useful out of it.

Mistake #5

The final mistake to share with you today is I see a lot of people who aren't automating any of their marketing. Without systems in place to automate a lot of this process, it can really become a full time job. And, I know a lot of you guys are small or your startup and budgets are tight. You don't have the budget to hire a full time marketing employee to work for you. So, it's super important to get processes set up so that you're not spending all of your time marketing. Instead of doing everything manually, you want to make sure that you're using scheduling tools, automation software, and at the very least bulking tasks together, like photography for instance, so that you can save a lot of time and make sure that your actually able to work on your product, your customer service and other things, rather than marketing constantly. It will also really help you to be more consistent with your marketing, because you can schedule, for example, Instagram posts to go live every day, so you don't have to be sat there waiting to post, or remember to do it.

This is the exact strategy I use; I have content that I upload in bulk and then it just goes out on schedule. I don't have to be thinking about marketing every day, which especially good because you do want your own time at the weekends, rather than thinking about marketing 24/7.

I hope these tips have been helpful and given you a lot to think about! If you want to learn more about marketing, you can

Fashion Marketing; 5 Mistakes Brands Make Video

Click the image above to start the video!

As requested by you, I’ve started producing short video content! This is the first episode in which I share some of the common marketing mistakes I see fashion brands making. I’ll also share my tips for what you can do instead, so that you can grow your fashion brand, attract new customers and sell more of your clothing.

As I’m sure you know, marketing is a big topic, but super important too! Over the coming weeks I’ll be developing more video to help you grow your fashion business. As always, you’re welcome to ask me questions - most of my content is developed after I’ve received a request!

In the video I mention some other links that you might find helpful;

Attract Loyal Customers Course

This short course helps you to get traffic to your brand and turn potential buyers into paying customers.

Related content;

Is Instagram Hurting Your Fashion Business?

The Fashion Sales Kit - Digital marketing tools for fashion brands.

I hate spam too - if you sign up to this email list, your details won't be sold or leased to anyone else. I will email you from time to time with helpful content and occasional offers, which you can unsubscribe from at any time. 

How To Attract Loyal Customers To Your Fashion Brand - Fashion Marketing Tips

In this post, I want to share my favourite tips for fashion marketing and attracting customers to your brand. The good news is, these tips are perfect for any brand - even if you have a tiny marketing budget because many of these marketing strategies can be implemented for free.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I love to get feedback and suggestions from my audience, so that I can provide you with even more useful and relevant content. Recently I was asking subscribers what they struggle with the most and many said that getting customers through the (virtual) door was something they found hard. And not only that, converting browsers into buyers, on the few occasions that they do get website traffic.

Make it about them

It’s super important to think about your customer when you do anything for your brand, but especially marketing. Sales is so much about psychology, emotion and making a connection with someone, so it’s important to know who your customer is (or who your customer will be, if you’re a new brand). If you’re not sure what information you need about your audience, there’s a blog post here which can help.

I see so many brands talking about themselves, their collection, their promotions, but you really need to change the conversation and make it about what’s in it for the customer. How will your product help them or make their day better? Talk about the benefits of your products and how they will effect the customer, rather than just listing generic features of them (tip - this also works for product pages on your website, too).

Also, make sure that you’re not just talking about yourself. Think about your customer’s other interests too and create content (like blog posts, videos, social media posts, even podcasts) on a few key topics and try to problem solve for your customer - people are a lot more likely to click on something which offers a solution to something they’ve been struggling with. For instance, if you have a fitness brand, you could share tips for smoothies that give you energy, your favourite workout routine or ways to minimise feeling sore the next day - whatever you think your customer would find helpful.

Think past social media marketing

There’s a lot of other options out there, both free and paid, so it’s important to consider if social media is the best option for you. I’d encourage brands to choose 1-2 marketing methods to start with and do them really well, rather than doing too many things and not achieving much in reality. Some other effective marketing ideas are;

• Improving your SEO, so you appear in search results

• Pinterest; although technically a social media platform, this works more like a search engine and your posts last a lot longer

• Email

• Referrals - encouraging previous customers to share their experiences with others

• Podcasting

• Collaborating with other brands

• Affiliate marketing

• Influencer marketing

• Guest posting on other websites and writing articles for magazines

• Pitching to the press and being featured (one of my favourite marketing methods - it’s free and gives your brand credibility)

• Holding events relevant to your audience’s interests

• Online ads

To name a few. As you can see, there’s a lot of options out there and chances are, you chose social media marketing because it’s familiar, free and easy to set up. If you are stuck for what to post and are spending a lot of time on social media with minimal results, you might want to check out The Fashion Sales Kit here, which has 90 days and beyond of content ideas for your brand.

Think about the whole ‘journey’

It’s really important to think about all of the steps between a customer going from never having heard of you, to making a purchase. If you read my recent article on Instagram, you’ll know that you need to do more than just tag some pretty pictures on social media in order to make the sale! Data tells us that customers need to see our brand multiple times before making a purchase, but as most of your followers won’t see your posts online due to social media algorithms, you need to come up with a strategy for not only getting the customers interest in the first place, but keeping their attention, giving them a functional and engaging web experience, getting them to keep coming back and helping them to trust you. Eventually, when a customer is invested in you and trusts you, you can make the sale. I have specific steps I follow for this process, which I call the A.C.E.S method.

It sounds like a lot of work, right? Sales do take work, but the great thing about this method is that you build a community of ‘raving fans’ (a concept created by Ken Blanchard which refers to a customer who loves a brand so much, they can’t stop telling people out it). Raving fans not only become your best customers who keep coming back to buy more product, but they also spread the word about you and your brand. Plus, you can actually automate a lot of the process so that you spend less time on marketing and more time working on things you enjoy. It’s always an amazing feeling to wake up to sales and I know that with the ACES method in place, this is possible for any fashion brand - it’s true there’s a lot of competition out there, but with the right marketing proposition, any fashion brand has the opportunity to make it.

I hope you’ve found these tips helpful! If you’d like to learn more about growing your business and marketing, I’d like to invite you to checkout my Fashion Sales Kit. I’m super excited about this kit, which includes content ideas, swipe files and links to high quality photography that you can use for free. Basically, the kit is designed so that you can spend less than 10mins a day on your social media marketing. Sound good? You can view all of the details and register by clicking here. Alternatively, if you have any questions on the course, I’d be happy to answer those for you - you can click here to get in touch, or email contact@thefashionbusinesscoach.com

Is Instagram Hurting Your Fashion Business?

If, like most brands, you want to grow your customer base and get more sales for your business, you might be using Instagram. So, you might be pretty surprised to see the title of this blog post, particularly as there’s so many posts out there which explain about how Instagram can be good for business. It’s true that Instagram can be a good marketing tool, I even teach some Insta strategy myself. So, why am I saying it can hurt your business?

Bottom line? Instagram is a tool. Not a marketing strategy.

Instagram and other social media platforms are a small piece of the puzzle. You need more than just people clicking ‘like’ and ‘follow’ in order to have a successful business. I say that Insta can hurt businesses because lots of people focus so much of their time on posting and interacting on social media, they seem to lose sight of why they’re even doing it. They also look at the wrong metrics. I get people asking me how they can grow their following, when they should really be concerned about the end result – making the sale. Having a large social media following isn’t a measure of business success. A follower doesn’t put money in the bank, so why spend so much time trying to get followers?

So many of my 1-on-1 clients come to me saying their marketing strategy is Instagram and I explain to them that marketing should only be part of their strategy. In this post, I’ll share my feedback and help you to understand how you can attract customers to your brand...

What is a Marketing Strategy?

 The answer to this is pretty complex and will vary greatly between brands, but in a nutshell, it’s a process which takes a potential customer from having no idea who you are, to making a purchase. Typically customers need to have several ‘touch points’ (or, interactions) with your brand, before they have enough trust in you to make a purchase. Don’t forget too that many people who find you might not need something right now, so it’s your responsibility to keep them engaged long enough to remember who you are when they do need something. Generally, the more expensive the product, the more of these ‘touch points’ you’ll need.

For a fashion brand, social media can be one part of the puzzle. Someone might discover your brand on Instagram, but you need to do more. It’s of no help to you if they just ‘like’ the photo and leave. You need them to interact with you, visit your website, join the mailing list, contact you, read your blog, etc. Potential customers need to become invested in you and eventually, they’ll trust you enough to make a purchase. Keep in mind that Instagram, along with other platforms, has a complex algorithm, so only a smaller percentage of your followers will actually see your posts. You can’t expect that everyone will see what you’re posting and it’s important to have a more direct way of communication, like email for example.

Distractions

Instagram is distracting, not just for you, but for customers too. Think about how you use Instagram, or your platform of choice. Can you honestly say that you’ve visited the websites of all the brands you’ve ‘liked’ photos from? Do you even leave your feed to check out more photos from the brand? Have a you ever made a purchase as a direct result of seeing someone on Instagram? Most likely not. Reason being is that as users, we get shiny object syndrome; we see so many pictures we like and just keep scrolling. This is why Instagram has become one of the lowest converters. Meaning that people will be less likely to buy from you after seeing you on Instagram, vs other methods of marketing.

Social media can often be described as ‘busy work’, meaning that you can spend so much time on it and you can tell yourself that you’re ‘marketing’, but at the end of the day, what have you actually achieved? If you spend all your time commenting and posting online, you’ll be missing out on things that have a much bigger impact on your sales, like having a website that’s designed to covert (meaning it creates the maximum amount of sales from the visitors you have). Even if you have millions of followers, if they click on your website and it’s not appealing to them, they won’t even stick around, let alone buy from you.

Content

When posting to Instagram, you need to think past simply sharing an interesting picture. As a business, the aim should really be to get people to visit your profile and click to your website. You’ll even need to think this simple aim too; when people get to your website will they be directed to something relevant and worth sticking around for? Or, are you just sending people to a generic homepage of little interest, so they instantly click away? Every post you create should have purpose, both for your business and also, for the customer. It’s important to give a reason for someone to visit you. If you can help someone with a problem they have, big or small, or if you can entertain them in some way, you’re giving them a reason to click through. And stay on your website.

This is why content creation is so important. Creating interesting videos, articles, photo galleries, podcasts, what ever it might be, to help your customer and keep them engaged.

In my view, smart content creation is the key to successful marketing. It can help customers to have an interest in you and keep coming back for more. It helps you to post to Instagram with purpose and with a strong CTA (call to action), giving customers a reason to visit you, rather than simply double tap.

Tips For Using Instagram, Without Hurting Your Business;

• Create interesting content that will make customers click through to your website, rather than just ‘like’ your pictures

• Use well considered links to your webpages

• Post with purpose, have an objective for every piece of content that you share

• Don’t spend all day on this, your time is often better spent on other parts of the marketing ‘journey’, such as email marketing, content creation and also factors that will create sales, like a well organised website and great product descriptions

• Don’t get distracted. Use one of the many tools available to schedule your posts and reply to comments, so you can quickly do what’s required and move on

• Back up your Instagram with other forms of marketing and sales tactics. Don’t expect to just post a picture and get sales.

• Create a whole marketing strategy, including all of the stages a potential customer will go through before making a purchase

I hope this has helped you to rethink your approach to marketing and attracting customers for your brand. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, my new course, ‘Attract Loyal Customers To Your Fashion Brand’ is available for enrolment now. The course includes over 4 hours of video training on this and other topics, including; ways of getting customers to keep coming back, automating your process so you don’t spend all your time marketing, getting press for your brand and much more. You can learn more about the course by clicking here.

I hate spam too - if you sign up to this email list, your details won't be sold or leased to anyone else. I will email you from time to time with helpful content and occasional offers, which you can unsubscribe from at any time.