10 Most Effective Marketing Strategies for Fashion Brand

Every fashion brand needs a good fashion marketing strategy in place to help it stay ahead of its competition. With the industry expected to reach $38.2 billion in 2023, A good strategy will not only help them stay afloat in the treacherous sea that is eCommerce, but also grow as others flounder in confusion. As for you, it doesn’t matter if you’re brand new to the fashion world or a seasoned veteran — no matter where you lie, you need an effective marketing plan for your clothing brand. Digital marketing for fashion brands specifically has changed dramatically over the past few years and it’s vital that your business is constantly looking to adapt and evolve to stay ahead of the competition.

How to Start a Clothing Brand in the UK

Starting a clothing brand in the UK can be an exciting venture, but it requires careful planning and execution to be successful. Here are some steps you can take to get started:

1. Develop your brand concept and strategy

Think about the type of clothing you want to offer, your target audience, your brand values, and your unique selling proposition (what sets your brand apart from others).

2. Conduct market research

Analyse the market to understand the current and future fashion trends, competition, consumer trends, and the demand for your type of clothing. This will help you refine your brand concept and strategy.

3. Develop a business plan

Create a detailed plan that includes your brand concept and strategy, financial projections, marketing plan, and operations plan. This will help you stay organised and focused as you launch and grow your brand.

4. Register your business

Register your business with Companies House, obtain any necessary licenses, and set up a business bank account.

5. Source suppliers and manufacturers

Find suppliers for materials and manufacturers to produce your clothing.

6. Create a website and social media presence

Build an online presence for your brand by creating a website and social media accounts.

7. Launch and market your brand

Launch your brand with a strong marketing campaign that includes influencer outreach, social media advertising, and email marketing. We’ll discuss some of the best clothing brand marketing ideas in this post to give you inspiration.

What is fashion marketing?

Fashion marketing refers to the promotion and advertising of clothing and accessories in order to increase sales and brand awareness. It involves using various marketing strategies and techniques to create a strong brand image, attract customers, and drive sales.

Fashion marketing typically includes activities such as:

• Market research
• Advertising
• Public relations
• Social media marketing
• Event planning
• Product development

Marketing Ideas For Clothing Boutiques

Acquiring foot traffic for a small business is never easy, especially in light of the current global events. It will be the brick-and-mortar stores that can best promote their brand and are successful at drawing in customers who will be most effective during these times. It may seem futile to try and compete with online stores that offer the cheapest products time after time, but 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience.

To help promote this better experience, there are many things you can add when creating your marketing plan for a clothing brand, including:

• Create a Loyalty Programme
• Have In-Store Events (In a safe manner)
• Incorporate Social Media Into Promotions
• Create a YouTube Channel
• Support Your Local Community

These simple, tried-and-tested ways of clothing brand marketing are great for small clothing boutiques to offer a great customer experience, which is one way that you can provide competition to the large, international brands who offer the cheapest prices.

Digital Marketing For Fashion Brands

That being said, digital marketing should still be considered a key part of your overall fashion marketing and branding strategy. With so many brands now going digital, it’s vital that you make yours stand out from the crowd. So, let’s take a look at how to market a fashion brand:

Retarget Visitors: You can target visitors by displaying reminder ads that make them recall a product they saw previously on your site. This can even include lucrative discounts as well as retargeting those who have an item in their cart but haven’t purchased yet. These ads help to increase turnover, and an effective retargeting campaign can produce a great ROI.

Connect With Influencers: To focus on your target market effectively, work with influencers such as fashion bloggers and vloggers who have a following that is similar to the type of customers you want. Influencers are viewed as a trusted voice by their followers, and many will prefer this format to more traditional methods of marketing such as television. They can help increase your sales by reviewing or recommending your products while it allows you to have your products advertised to a different group of potential customers. If you’ve chosen the right influencer, it can lead to new customers as well as create a repeatable form of digital marketing for fashion brands.

Engage With Your Audience: Build brand loyalty begins with engagement. The key is to constantly engage with your target audience to help improve their perception of your brand. This enhanced sense of community is what helps drive further sales. The best way to engage effectively is to showcase campaigns that connect and resonate with your audience. This could be through running contests on Facebook, responding quickly to messages on Twitter or promoting giveaways on Instagram that highlight the values and products you have to customers.

Digital marketing for fashion brands is full of a variety of different approaches that your business can take making it incredibly difficult to know just where exactly you need to start. Here are 10 tips to help you create a successful fashion brand strategy when marketing clothing businesses and brands.

1. Get a Website

Women’s Wear Daily reported that more than 1,875 fashion stores closed last year, yet according to Statista, revenue in the fashion segment is expected to increase from £360.7B in 2018 to £534.5B in 2022. This seems contradictory — how is revenue increasing if so many stores are closing? The internet. Shopping habits have changed and consumers are increasingly preferring to shop online rather than visiting a physical location. For you, this means getting a website if you don’t already have one; this means going from a fashion brand to a fashion eCommerce brand.

2. Have a Mobile Presence

Now that you (hopefully) have a website, we move to digital marketing for the fashion industry. Similar to our propensity for online shopping, we’re substituting keyboards for screens and are opting to browse the web with our smartphones rather than desktops. As a fashion brand, this means getting a responsive website that resizes content according to the screen it resides in. Not doing so will lead to a subpar experience for your mobile users, which will deter them from further interactions with your brand. This is especially important in the fashion industry because many consumers see things they like as they go about on their day, and if they happen to see something you offer but can’t load it on your site, you can be they’ll go to a competitor.

3. Join the Social World

Social media marketing for fashion brands is an absolute must when it comes to building a digital marketing strategy for fashion brands. Not only can you use it to connect with your audience and build a relationship with them, but you can also use certain platforms like Instagram to show off and promote your products. Additionally, you can integrate your store with certain channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, meaning that if your audience sees something they like as they browse through your catalogue, they can buy it right then and there.

4. Attach an Influencer to Your Brand

Speaking of social media, some of the best fashion social media campaigns revolve around influencers. For those who don’t know, influencers are people within your industry/niche who have large fan followings and command attention — when an influencer posts, others follow. For example, one of the best ways to promote your clothing line is to get an influencer to Tweet pictures of them wearing some of your clothes. At the end of the day, influencer marketing is like high school; influencers are the popular kids, and their followers are the other kids who emulate them and want to be just like them. Of course, it is not all about celebrities and mega-money influencers. Micro-influencers are proving to be highly effective. A micro-influencer has a highly-engaged audience. Their fan base is made up of people who genuinely want to engage actively in what the influencer posts, typically following them from the very start. It is not about the number of followers, but the quality of them.

5. Leverage the Latest Technologies

We’re currently in the midst of a technological revolution marked by rapid advancements in technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). For example, chatbots. Chatbots act like 24/7 customer service reps that guide your customers through their journey to checkout as soon as they land on your site. If your users have a question, they’re there to answer it. And if they don’t have the capability to answer that question, a human rep can take over.

6. Personalise Everything

Shopify reports that 43% of purchases are influenced by personalised recommendations or promotions, and that 75% of consumers want brands to personalise messages, offers and experiences. What’s important to note here, apart from the fact that personalisation will help you sell more, is that consumers don’t just want personalised messages with their name; they want their whole experience with you to be personal. They want you to know them and their preferences, and if you’re going to promote something, you better make sure it’s something they’re interested in. When it comes down to it, personalisation is what creates successful fashion marketing campaigns.

7. Remarket to Your Users

The beauty of remarketing is that you’re targeting people who have already visited your website in the past, so right off the bat, you know that there’s something there for you to work with. Additionally, you’re increasing the chances of conversion over a normal ad because you’re showing them something they were already looking at on your website, not a random item they may or may not be interested in. Remarketing, then, gives you more brand exposure, better audience targeting, higher conversion rates and improved ROI.

8. Focus on Your Visuals

Visuals are important for all brands, but more so for fashion brands that depend on aesthetics to attract and keep customers. If you upload something that’s meant to be seen, whether it’s an image or a video, make sure it’s high quality and looks good. These may seem like no-brainers, but you’d be surprised at the number of brands with pixelated or blurry images that paint their products in an unflattering light. Don’t be like them — always capture as many angles as possible and let your products speak for themselves.

9. Start a Blog

Ask any digital agency to name you a few fashion brand must-dos, and they will undoubtedly tell you to start a blog. As a hallmark of content marketing that does everything from improving your organic search rankings to exposing new users to your brand, blogging is one of the most important marketing tools you have at your disposal. For starters, every blog post creates a new landing page for your audience to find you with. Moreover, you can use a blog to disseminate any news or updates you may have, introduce new styles with a couple of HD images to show them off, or help your audience with some style guides as the seasons change.

10. Have a Contest or Giveaway

Finally, the last fashion brand marketing strategy for clothing businesses we’ll cover today is to start a contest or giveaway. Whether it’s to promote a new product, celebrate a holiday, or simply just because, contests and giveaways are excellent ways of acquiring new customers and engaging with existing ones. The best part? They’re perfect for fostering brand awareness and growing both your audience and business. Apart from the buzz you’ll generate around your brand and products, you can have participants enter the promotion by signing up for an email newsletter, liking or sharing a social page, and so on, which can give you valuable consumer data you can use to tailor your clothing brand marketing strategy down the line.

Examples of Fashion Marketing Campaigns

To help you get inspiration for your fashion marketing campaign, we are going to take a look at three brands that have done it well. You can use a powerful fashion marketing strategy example to help spark ideas and unlock greater success in your business.

1. Swoon for Monsoon - A lot of fashion brands have created their own shoppable magazines. In fact, “The Edit” by Net A Porter is deemed one of the best. However, Swoon for Monsoon shows that this is not a marketing tool reserved for high-end brands online. You can access it via mobile, tablet, or desktop, and there are different visual elements, from videos to GIFs. It is a sleek piece of shoppable content that shows you how to do shoppable content right.

2. Keeping up with the Bakers by Ted Baker - Ted Baker is known for their inspiring and unique marketing campaigns. Keeping up with the Bakers, an eight-part sitcom that played out on Instagram, is a prime example of this. Every day, users were encouraged to participate in different challenges that were released with every episode. If that was not rough, a 360-degree shoppable film was unveiled, enabling users to browse the Baker home and buy products discovered within it, adding more of a gaming element to the shopping experience.

3. Love Immigration by Jigsaw - Finally, we have this incredible campaign by Jigsaw. In recent years, there has been an increase in socially conscious campaigns. Consumers look to align with brands that do more than simply sell. However, the balance is not always easy to get right. Just look at the Kendall Jenner x Pepsi ad failure. However, when Jigsaw launched the evocative and bold Love Immigration campaign, which celebrated diversity within British fashion, it hit the mark perfectly.

Holiday marketing strategies for fashion brands

The holiday season is a crucial time for fashion brands to drive sales and increase brand awareness. We’ve got six strategies you can use to help you get started:

1. Create a holiday-themed campaign - Develop a creative holiday-themed campaign that incorporates your brand message and products. This can include social media posts, email newsletters, and ads that highlight your holiday collections, promotions, and deals.
2. Offer special promotions - Offer special promotions such as discounts, free shipping, or a free gift with purchases to encourage customers to shop with your brand during the holiday season.
3. Utilise influencer marketing - Partner with influencers to promote your brand and products during the holiday season. Influencers can create content that showcases your products and promote your holiday promotions to their followers.
4. Use email marketing - Send out holiday-themed newsletters that feature your latest collections, promotions, and deals to your email subscribers. You can also use email to send personalised holiday greetings and exclusive offers to your loyal customers.
5. Create gift guides - Create gift guides that feature your products and offer suggestions for different types of recipients (such as "gifts for her" or "gifts for him"). This can help customers find the perfect gifts for their loved ones and promote your products at the same time.
6. Participate in holiday events - Participate in local holiday events such as markets or pop-up shops to showcase your products and interact with potential customers.

Tip Rewind: 10 marketing strategies for clothing manufacturers and brands

There you have it, 10 of the most effective marketing strategies for fashion brands. Follow one or all (preferably all), and they will definitely help you out as you either start out or grow in the fashion world. Here they are all over again:

1. Get a Website
2. Have a Mobile Presence
3. Join the Social World
4. Attach an Influencer to Your Brand
5. Leverage the Latest Technologies
6. Personalise Everything
7. Remarket to Your Users
8. Focus on Your Visuals
9. Start a Blog
10. Have a Contest or Giveaway

This blog post is Last updated on May 15th, 2023.