Fashion Marketing During the Pandemic
How to move online with your apparel brand?
The pandemic has challenged most businesses. If yours is one of them, and you feel like you haven’t quite managed to keep up with the new era’s expectations, we’ve collected some tips that might help you turn the situation to your benefit. Consider this as effective marketing 101.
If you’ve kept up your original business model until now, you might feel a little behind, and anxious for that reason. However, it is not too late to start acting now. If you have followed the events and trends, you can still add some more ideas to your to-do list.
Know Who You Are
You must have a vision, a final future goal where you want to lead your business.
Remind yourself of what your brand represents, what your mission is on the way to your goal. What qualities make your presence important on the market.
This includes your style and the character of your brand, but also added values that are connected to the lifestyle and experience that you are selling along with tangible products.
Know Who You Serve
You have to know your most recent customers to respond well and also to expand the group of your shoppers.
Who is open to your products, vision, mission, and the presentation of these? Draw personas of your recent users. Name only three prototypes of people who are your potential customers now. Give them attributes like age, choose a photo to represent the character, detail their lifestyle – shortly, mentioning their hobbies, jobs, goals, and the way how they think of themselves.
Know Who You Could Serve
After organizing the group of your recent customers, look for some specific behavior traits to understand how you can best reach your recent audience or extend the group of them.
Separate users by generation to make it easier to analyze and adapt to their behavior. As marketing options are changing and some of them are limited due to lockdowns and restrictions, you might have to turn the marketing concept upside down. Instead of serving your original target group, you might have to adapt to the covid-situation and target the groups of people who are available online.
Baby boomer generation (1946-1964)
This group of followers will most likely use a desktop computer for online shopping or search. This determines your possibilities and focal points. If this group of people is in your target, pay attention to providing the best desktop webshop experience. When using social media, focus on Facebook over other sites. Traditional media like newspapers, magazines, and billboards work well for targeting them. But due to the virus crisis, physical media might not reach them the way it would have before. Billboards might also not work well, as they spend less time away from home. Try to focus on the baby boomers who are available online and reach them with slow-paced, less intense, info-driven content. Build loyalty with cash discounts and coupons. These marketing ideas work well, due to their post-war background where they were thought to value every cent.
Generation X (1965-1980)
They consume a variety of digital media via both laptops and smartphones. Regarding marketing tactics, Gen X responds well to email marketing combined with entertaining yet informative content, like videos. They research thoroughly before committing to purchase. As their cautious behavior might suggest, they highly value quality and they are willing to pay the price for it. They can be transformed into loyal, returning customers if their needs are met. Highlight your unique selling points (USP) and consistently emphasize them to win them over the long term. Thank their trust with loyalty programs.
Generation Y or Millennials (1981-1995)
This group is the most well-known when it comes to online presence. They browse the web through smartphones so try to reach them on phone-oriented online platforms like Instagram. As they keep checking their phones endlessly, you must keep up with their behavior, and entertain them with consistent communication. This generation gets easily distracted, so try to keep them excited with appealing visuals. Your messages should be short, interesting, and direct. Social proof takes an important role in making decisions for them. Include a review section online or post opinions of others on your social media platforms. This is also the reason why influencer marketing works perfectly with members of this target group. The people you choose for this must align with your brand values for successful campaigns. Connect with them in the comments and via messages as part of your excellent customer service.
Generation Z (1996-present)
Generation Z is an evolving group but we already know some tactics for sure. These young people value appealing visuals and stay engaged for an even shorter time than Millennials. They expect almost immediate delivery and highly value authenticity. Reach out to vloggers, bloggers, and other micro-influencers who match your brand perfectly, ones who represent their style in a transparent, honest way. Go live, show the products in use, post videos of unboxing without filtering or prerecording any of these events.
Try to match your brand’s mission and style. Find the right target group and live with the possibilities that the pandemic offers. But be careful, don’t bite more than you could chew. Focus on your realistic possibilities and the resources you have at the moment. Focus on one group professionally rather than trying to please all groups.
Whenever you’re planning a campaign, think of the people of your target group and your personas. No brand ever succeeded among everyone. You have to see who and why turns to your products and services and how you can best convince them.
Adapt to Needs
Life in the pandemic created new needs, while some had completely vanished. Your potential customers spend most of their time at home, so they are looking for loungewear, lingerie, and maybe comfortable business casual. Other types of clothes, like elegant suits and fancy dresses, are not needed now due to the lack of occasions. If you can adapt to the recent needs, while staying true to your identity, you might be one of the lucky ones. Work on solutions that match your vision and mission but also help you survive, or even flourish.
Focus Online
If your customers are already available online, reach them with the matching tools. If they aren’t, try to bring them online if you can reach out via phone or newsletters.
Some fashion-related business models are more media-oriented than others. Understand where you stand and create your new covid-proof tactics accordingly. Learn from others’ mistakes, like Primark which had no e-commerce before the pandemic. It is unimaginable to survive without selling online these days.
Other big obstacles are fitting and touching the material. Try to help your customers in every way you can. Take videos of the fabric, show them how it feels and drapes. Have helpful measurement charts and videos that teach them how to measure their bodies for the perfect fit. Provide free shipping and delivery.
Concentrate on the most important pages of your web shop. Form your product descriptions to highlight not only the features but also the benefits of products. Don’t let any possible questions stay unanswered. Invest energy in the shopping process from the first impression to checkout. Make every step of the way comfortable, personal, and supportive.
Practice Good Content Marketing
Content has many forms from podcasts, videos, and blogs through Instagram posts and stories. Good content is not only about your products and their features, but about your customers’ benefits and the lifestyle you offer. Good content should help, educate and entertain them. Focus them, and on information about what they are interested in, without a strong pitch of the brand itself. Keep them engaged without obvious self-promotion and choose humane connecting instead.
An element of sensitivity is important about the situation, but small businesses still need to make money. One of the benefits of a small brand is that you can authentically connect with customers. Make meaningful connections with people stuck at home, looking for a distraction.
Tell your story. Explain what customers mean to you, tell them what the business means to you. Show the real you and show them that customers are not numbers. Tell them how the situation is affecting not only you but the people you are responsible for. This will add a personal, human touch, so people understand why you keep promoting.
Show them how they can benefit from buying your products, how it can elevate their life at these hard times. Offer them an experience, a time of relaxation and distraction from stress or boredom.
It is also a good time to ask them what they need from you and how you can best serve them. Use Instagram stories for casual surveys. Don’t lead the answers. Ask them what they think of the brand and what they expect. These efforts usually come with unexpected results that you can benefit from.
Team up with other brands in trouble. Join your efforts through collaborations or create a meaningful movement with hashtags or TikTok trends.
Analyze Data
Data analysis is an important duty that small businesses often miss or neglect. Analyze the customer behavior on your website. Find a pattern in why they returned items or left items in their carts.
Get to know what the top pages are online and what they are engaging with. Understand the kind of content you can make more of. Realize where visitors come from to help you with marketing strategies, so energy can go to places where it pays off.
Analyze the email open rates and see how your social media campaigns serve you. Finally, based on your experience, create best practice rules to help you in the long run.
Have Systems
Business owners always feel like 24 hours is not enough time in a day. Try to maximize the capacity and minimize waste by having systems in place. See what tasks you do most regularly. Save time with things that can be fixed with pre-set solutions. For example, if you get the same questions regularly, open a FAQ page or create an email template. Be careful with such time-savers though and don’t overdo them. Remember, one of the benefits of owning a small business is that you can stay personally connected with your customers.
Have a social media schedule and planned content to avoid last-minute panic posting. Unplanned posting is bad for the style and layout and also the written content and brand message. Keep consistency but also plan ahead for a put-together and stable brand identity.
Integrate general organization. This might take some time in the beginning, but easily accessible physical and virtual files will make your life easier and your workflow faster.
Hope for the Best
After you’ve done your part, you can only hope for the best and keep up the good work. Buying clothes is a social need to help us belong to a community, to express our identities, and add a pop of color to our everyday lives. The habit of shopping is not going to disappear. Customers will be at an arm’s length from us, the question is if we can reach out and understand how to best serve them.
