Let us get the basics right.
It is well known that businesses aid from advanced tech to leverage against their competitors. Online competition has become a space where market intelligence is driven by AI and tech tools, giving your company the upper hand. 70% of consumers want to learn about products through content as opposed to traditional ad methods.
We thought about writing a technology-driven article with regard to digital marketing but felt it might be better to cover the basics first before leaping you into the future of digital marketing. Before we overwhelm you or, quite frankly, scare you, we decided to cover the journey in steps that do justice to our audience and that would make our digital marketing partner proud.
Here are our five basic recommendations that you should be aware of for successfully implementing your digital marketing strategy.
Social media marketing
A brand must make its presence felt on different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. Although growing in numbers, these noisy platforms provide huge potential for growth where you can promote your brand, post different upcoming brand events, product launches, etc., and hence are a full-time job to maintain. According to HubSpot, Facebook is the primary content distribution channel for marketers today. Using these platforms has become mandatory for brand awareness and potential conversion of customers if you intend to sell your products.
Using these platforms consistently with transparency helps develop a trusting relationship with the brand or business when it has an active social media existence. It also becomes easy for both the customers and the retailers to stay connected. This connection helps in nurturing positive experiences and customer loyalty.
You can avail yourself of many tools inside these platforms that can enhance engagements like social media use of hashtags, using the latest offering inside the platforms like reels on Instagram or stories on Linkedin to position you better in the virtual marketplace.
At Fashion Foresight we provide consultancy helping brands plan their next move.
Influencer marketing
Love them or loath them, influencer marketing does have its perks and benefits in connecting and bringing awareness to your target audience.
Brands connect with celebrities, sites, or other experts in their field to capture the market. These personalities help to influence your consumers to opt for your product. For example, if you have a clothing brand, tweets or posts from a fashion influencer wearing some of your outfits are the best way to attract your customers. Different brands choose their brand ambassadors based on their popularity and how much of an impact their personalities have on other people. Fashion Brands can build big with the success of their brand ambassadors, take Rolex and Roger Federer for that matter. Although your brand might not budget for such ambassadors, the idea here is to choose the right influencer.
The key is to ensure the right influencer has the right audience that you want to target, a high number of followers doesn’t necessarily mean you are making the right investment in the influencer. Their content should be well polished, inspirational, and more about the audience or their niche, and how they creatively have an impact on that niche. For example, if your influencer has over 20k followers but 50 likes, or inconsistent engagement on similar images or posts – seems fishy and not great for business.
Tip: Audit your influencer to ensure they don’t have bots following them or paying for engagement on their profiles which a lot of brands find frustrating and try to manage.
Email marketing
Emails are a personalized source of digital marketing. Here you target your audience with tailor-made messages, to create a personalized experience; this is where copywriting becomes important! This route helps build relationships with customers by sending customized newsletters, offerings based on past shopping history, brand engagements, or promotions of new product developments. When it comes down to e-mail marketing, personalization is what creates successful fashion campaigns. Customers do not just want personalized messages with their names; they want their whole experience with you to be personal. They want you to know them and their preferences or their interests. A reminder message can be sent through an email when a visitor has added something to their online shopping cart and forgot. ‘Thankyou’ gestures can be expressed after the purchase by sending gift cards or shopping points that can be redeemed on the next purchase. You can start a contest via email, in which participants can enter the promotion by signing up for an email newsletter, liking or sharing a social page, or so on. Email marketing has the highest return on investment for small businesses (Campaign Monitor).
Enhanced website
Honestly, this is where we come in and we believe in advanced websites, brilliant websites that are beautiful and showcase your offering in ways that are next level but also make sense for your audience.
If we talk about the last 1.5-years, COVID has sped up the online way of living. Strict lockdowns, minimum time constraints, and safety measures have limited our mobility. Because of this, shopping habits have changed, and consumers are increasingly preferring to shop online rather than visiting a physical location. Visuals are important for all online brands, but more so for fashion brands that depend on aesthetics to attract and retain customers, let your products speak for themselves. If you upload something that’s meant to be seen, make sure it’s high quality and looks good.
We create websites that do not feel like websites but rather experiences that keep users engaged and get your core message across whether from service providers or selling products in e-commerce, contact us for a free one-on-one consultation.
Blogs
The ultimate goal of digital marketing is to drive as much traffic to your website as possible and blogs complement this process. Each blog post creates an indexed page on your website i.e., one more opportunity to show up on search engines.
Regularly blogging good SEO factors increases your ranking online, as it conveys to the search engine about your website being alive and active. Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic.
And yes, blogging helps with gaining online trust and presence. We learned this as well for our site and here you are reading this article because one of our digital marketing strategies worked!
Whether it is informing, educating, or sharing thoughts and ideas, blogs are always a good idea and loved by Google’s bots analyzing and scoring your website for trust.
Technology round-up!
This is where we come in, with the online space becoming incredibly competitive companies are now turning to advanced tech to stay ahead of their competitors. This can be quite frustrating for brands and even agencies that have little to no idea about technology and are applying traditional rules to a game that has leapt ahead substantially over the years!
No, we don’t consider ourselves a digital marketing agency, but we do consider ourselves ahead in understanding and accessing tools that help our clients achieve their goals.
Companies now using tools for prediction, analysis, forecasting, competitor insight, and marketing intelligence are the ones preparing for the future of an online space that is moving fast and to us, this is next level and exciting!
With the rapid transformation of digital marketing, competition is fierce and in our next article, we will share our insight on tech-driven digital marketing, for now, we hope we covered the basics well for you.