Marketing is free. Yes, there are paid options, and you may decide that some of those options are right for you. But when it comes to some of the most powerful marketing platforms for small fashion businesses, the cost is zero. By joining social platforms where there’s already a strong presence of your target audience, you can increase your reach organically.

Visual platforms are especially great for fashion | apparel brands because the products are so visual themselves. Fashion | apparel brands with a presence on Instagram are hugely popular and can receive over 16k likes per post and upwards of 100 comments. Smaller fashion |m apparel brands that don’t get high engagement numbers aren’t necessarily failing, though — engagement quality is much more important than quantity.

Here’s what you can do to effectively market your fashion brand:

Create a Voice and Tone for Your Brand
Every brand has to have a voice that customers will recognise, and that voice has to carry over across all of your content, from your website and product descriptions to your marketing. Make your voice authentic. Find something unique about your brand. Be clear about what you sell and welcome all customers.

Fashion brand AYR has this down pat. Even their newsletter sign-up pop-up is written in their chatty, cool way: “Want 10% off your first order? We write good emails, too.” Then you can choose either “Yes, please” or “I’m out.”

Personalise Your Mobile Marketing
The mobile experience you offer customers shouldn’t be a carbon copy of your website. Your customers are doing a lot on their devices, from researching products to comparing prices and making purchases. Tactics like offering customer profiles, remembering each customer’s purchase history, and recommending g and cross-sell products can be done on both desktops and mobile. However, personalised notifications are a mobile-only strategy, cluing your customers in to discounts, sales, and premium content they may not otherwise hear about.

Use Videos to Promote Your Brand
Video marketing is huge: Social media posts that have videos instead of text and images get 1,200 percent more shares. With more social media platforms offering video support than in the past, you can use your profile of choice to share your videos — no YouTube account needed (though YouTube is hugely popular). Women’s retailer Bershka uses all sorts of videos in its social media marketing, from silly graphics to promo videos that show off new collections. Polished videos can go up on your main feed, while behind-the-scenes footage and rough cuts work great on Snapchat or Instagram Stories.

Engage With Customers
The boom of online shopping has forced consumers to find different ways to communicate with brands. Even if you have a brick-and-mortar store, many customers are going to opt to shop online. Just as they would have questions in your shop, they’ll have questions when shopping virtually too. Conversational commerce, the act of engaging with customers virtually instead of in person, is a necessary part of your fashion brand’s marketing plan. Thanks to intelligent chatbots, a lot of this can be automated, only passed along to live customer support when an issue is complex.

Connect With Influencers and the Press
By partnering with an influencer who will either show your items on their feed or make a guest appearance on your feed (or both), you can quickly grow your audience. Small fashion brand Kestan teamed up with Instagram model @infrontofapple to expand their reach. While many of their posts receive around 100 likes, the partnership post scored more than 1,600.
While influencers are a coveted part of a fashion marketing strategy, the press is still a fantastic way to get exposure. Having a feature in a widely read magazine or on a popular website that caters to your target audience can get you a ton of quality exposure. Your audience will trust the source too, more so than promotions from influencers they’re unfamiliar with.

Harness the Power of Technology
Some of the biggest fashion brands are using virtual reality to offer a virtual shopping experience to attendees who can’t be in there in person. Even smaller fashion brands that hold shows or events can offer the same front seat experience. The idea of being present, even virtually, points to a bigger trend in the VR industry. Companies are now carrying out virtual testing by asking participants to interact with a simulated store shelf in order to track how they choose, pick up, look at, and decide to purchase products. Online shopping is undeniably huge, but there’s still a large segment of customers who need an in-store experience to go through with a purchase.

Last Thoughts
Fashion | Apparel brands have the challenge of convincing customers to purchase their products. Since fashion is not a necessity (clothing is, but not fashion), it can be tricky to encourage sales. With savvy marketing and numerous ways to present your items in the most flattering way possible, small fashion brands are able to reach their core audience, build a base of loyal customers, and continue to grow from there.

Source: https://blog.markgrowth.com/marketing-tips-for-small-fashion-businesses-4545ef1b17f1