With how competitive the fashion industry is, designers and fashion brands do not have the luxury of wasting time and resources because if they do, they will basically be playing catch up to the point where if they don’t reach their goals or create a good marketing strategy that guarantees results like leads and conversions, they may become irrelevant. They basically have to get it right the first time.
In this article we will look at:
- Key Components of Fashion Marketing
- Phases of Strategic Fashion Marketing
- Do you need to be a designer to be a Fashion Marketer?
Key Components of Fashion Marketing
1. Market research
Market research is very important in the fashion industry because brands need to understand market size, emerging trends, and consumer spending habits. They need to definitely do their research before they even begin to create a new fashion campaign. Fashion marketers can definitely rely on insights from top publications like Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, and Instyle, among others.
This helps in decision-making with regards to fashion designs and business processes. They perform both quantitative and qualitative research into fashion trends and consumer behaviors.
2. Target market
Fashion marketers need to identify the type of buyers that are most likely to buy the product and an effective marketing strategy should comprehensively capture the target market for fashion products. For example, if it is a high-end fashion brand, they need to figure out how to capture the eyes of that specific demographic.
Fashion marketers contribute to the decision on how brands price and distribute their products. Through their market research, they can be able to tell which distributions channels are better performing and how to price the products for each channel. This helps the brand to maximize their profits from both retail and online stores.
3. Brand and product positioning
Market perception is an important element when trying to develop marketing campaigns. The questions that need to be asked are: Are they perceived as the go-to brand for fashion items when on a budget? What IS the perception of the fashion brand and its products? When they understand that, they will be able to create effective campaigns that reinforce positive perception and change negative ones.
4. Competitive Analysis
The fashion industry is very competitive and if a brand ignores their competition, it would be to own detriment. A good fashion marketer needs and will want to know who the competition is, whether the brand’s products are different from the competition, the market segment that they work in, and how the brand they are working for can have an edge over the competition.
5. Effective marketing strategy
The only way to find and nurture leads and convert leads to sales is to create an effective marketing strategy. It can be measured in terms of impressions, leads, and sales. The main question that needs to be answered is “How do I find and attract the target market?” Once you identify that, fashion marketers can use various tactics to reach them.
Besides creating compelling advertisements for the products, fashion marketers also have to manage media planning to ensure that the ads are distributed as scheduled. They are responsible for both traditional and digital advertisements.
6. Marketing budget
Fashion marketers should be able to predict how much money they will need for a marketing campaign. The budget should be planned weekly or monthly and should have a ceiling for each activity so that the marketer does not waste funds on a strategy that will not generate ROI.
7. Marketing metrics
A good fashion marketer should be able to measure the success of the campaign from start to finish. They should also be able to compare the budget spent on the entire campaign vs. the actual ROI. They can rely on services such as Google Analytics to measure the metrics online and it will help with measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.
Phases of Fashion Marketing
In order to have in place a powerful roadmap and a successful set of marketing campaigns, fashion marketers usually undertake the following three phases in developing a strategic marketing campaign:
Planning Phase
The fashion marketer does a market analysis so as to have a clear picture of the state of the brand. At this phase, the following functions are performed; Analysis of competition, Research on the brand’s existing and potential customers, Brand assessment, Industry trends. After those functions are completed, the team comes up with a marketing plan.
Implementation Phase
The marketing plan is implemented and the team organized resources, designs market organization and develops marketing schedules that can be look back at to see if there needs improving. That plan created during the first phases is used as a reference point for marketing tactics.
Evaluation Phase
At this point, the Fashion Marketer should be able to ensure that the results that were achieved from the marketing plan coincides with the business goals that were set from the beginning. Any modifications should be done if noted before so that the marketing campaign stays on track. They are also seeking to maximize the positives and the progress of the marketing campaign is monitored and evaluated very carefully.
The questions that are asked during this time are:
- Are the actions aimed at achieving the set goals effective?
- Are there milestones that have been set to enable the marketing team knows when then they’ve achieved the goal?
- Can the strategy be interrupted by uncontrollable outside forces?
- Is the marketing strategy backed by a financial plan?
- Is there a contingency plan to deal with any unforeseen problems?
- Are all the factors- political, economic, social, and technical – that may affect the marketing campaign taken care of?
Do you need to be a designer to be a Fashion Marketer?
Simple answer is no. However, they do have a big influence on the products and designs of the company. They definitely have a say on the types of products that fashion brands put out on the marketing. They are also in a better position to understand fashion trends because they are the ones doing the market research.
Conclusion
Fashion Marketing takes a lot of research into the competition, the target audience, and potential customers. It is very important for marketers to understand everything there is to know about what is going on because if not, whatever marketing strategy they come up with in the beginning to the process will not be effective and there will be little to no ROI. Changing strategies can also be an interesting tactic because in order to stay relevant, the campaign needs to be a step above the rest.
