As an online fashion brand, retailer, or blogger, getting your content found is a must. Besides, what’s the point of having great material if no one’s going to be able to see it? Although social media can be a great place to share, interact, and feed an engaged audience, we’re going to want to go beyond micro traction and strive to get some new organic visitors to your website.
So what can we do to improve your digital presence?
Step 1: Outlining your goals & objectives
Before implementing any new digital strategy, it’s important to outline some core goals and objectives. In order to outline informed targets, it’s important to understand your available resource, operational environment, and your market niche.
- Are you a freelance blogger?
- Do you work with a team?
- Can you handle an increase in web traffic?
Dissecting your current situation will allow you to outline a strategy with attainable goals and objectives which are relevant to your website’s market niche.
So now that you understand your available resource and capabilities, we’re going to want to outline some key strategy targets. Below, are some example outcomes to work towards as a fashion related website:
- More social media followers – Having an improved organic digital presence can prompt an improvement in social channel following, as a result of the increase website's traffic.
- Improved website credentials – If your looking to monetize your online presence, then you’re going to want an increase in web traffic and metric improvements.
- Increased “relevant” traffic – Getting traffic on-site is one thing, but if it’s not relevant traffic, how do you expect them to convert/engage with your content?
Now that we’ve got some goals and objectives outlined, we can go ahead and start planning how we can meet these targets.
Step 2: Becoming an expert within your niche
The fashion industry is creative industry which is always changing. To attract more viewers, we’re going to want to be putting out some great topical content.
Creating topical content ensures that the content is both relevant to your website and the operational environment at the time your content is posted. Showing expertise within a particular niches makes web content enticing and engaging for viewers – especially if it covers a hot topics within your audience’s interests.
An example of how e-commerce lingerie brands can adopt market niche thought leadership is by providing an infographic for their consumers. Take, for example, this lingerie gift guide from Bare Necessities that visually outlines the steps partners need to undertake to successfully purchase lingerie for their partner; producing something similar for your fashion brand is a great way of visually expressing your expertise, whilst serving as a useful guide for customers looking to purchase your products.
A great way to achieve this: Creating content for other websites
Creating unique content can serve as a usp for people to stay, engage, and re-visit to your website. But this content strategy can go much further than just creating it on-site.
Getting some of your topical content out there to relevant websites within your particular, field, subject area, or scope (but just not competitors) will help you to expand your content reach. Branching beyond on-site work will improve your earned media expertise, whilst encouraging more people to derive on-site as a result of seeing your offsite content. This is known as referral traffic.
Not only will you capture audiences and viewers through posting great content on external sites, but it actually has some pretty positive benefits for the strength of your website. Getting other websites to talk about your own website can serve as a major trust signal for search engines, gaining more of the search engine trust (DA, DR, or SEO juice) can really benefit your website's search rankings.
Step 3: Adopting influencer marketing
Having great social, referral, and organic traction is a great recipe to becoming an influencer, especially within the fashion field. C2C communication has never been more relevant in an age where consumers can quickly interact with one another.
So how should you adopt influencer marketing?
For Bloggers:
As a blogger, this can be a great way of monetizing upon your digital content. Having a great online presence and metrics can be a selling point for companies looking to offer sponsored content and feature product placements. Therefore, with an improved online presence, you stand a better chance of presenting a desireable marketing portfolio for businesses looking to enter or market to an audience in your particular fashion niche.
Influencer marketing is a great to work towards when looking to improve your digital presence credentials. But remember, don’t over do it! Sponsored content can be easily spotted, and if your audience pick up on corporate involvement, you may lose the initial connection you’re content transpired to your audience.
For Brands and E-commerce:
For fashion e-commerce website's, we’re going to want to have products featured on other websites as opposed to featuring other people's products. By understanding your business's customer segment, you will be able to then have a great idea of the type of influencers to represent your brand.
Influencer marketing is a great strategy to adopt within the online fashion world. Many fashion e-commerce retailers launch celebrity lines as means of creating a short term buzz for their new clothing lines. However, celebrity clothing lines aren’t the only form of influencer marketing. Social media platforms, such as Instagram, have proven challenge and stretch the influencer marketing form.
For example, e-commerce fashion retailer WearAll use ‘instafamous’ icons on their own instagram page. These images are often ‘selfies’ and are photos that the fashion icon have taken themselves. This allows the product features to be consumed by a target audience with much less intrusive perception, when compared to traditional ad re-targeting.
Getting influencers with strong social media followings to feature your brand and products can be a great way of influencing your business's target niche. Customer to customer communication and endorsement is considered a lot more trustworthy than communication deriving directly from retailers. So why not pick up a few social influencers to represent your brand online?