Welcome to this tutorial style zero-to-60 post for fashion brands, fashion houses and designers. You might have arrived here because you want to improve ad copywriting for fashion or you need a fashion advertising copywriter. In this post I’m going to share with you a framework for getting results fast in fashion marketing and how you can quickly build sales for your fashion brand. But first, a word about me.

[wow-icons lib=gmi name=face color=”#81d742″ size=”nm” align=”alignleft”] I’m Tendai Mutunhire. I’m a fashion copywriter and growth hacker. Towers Of Zeyron is my fashion growth hacking agency.

My specialty is developing marketing campaigns that significantly boost sales. The following is drawn from my own experiences as well as tactics that are working for others. My strategies work for Shopify growth hacking, digital fashion platforms, Amazon, Etsy hacks for fashion, as well as other ecommerce approaches.

While I have primarily been working with copywriting clients, you’ll want to watch out for the as yet to be announced launch of my proprietary fashion brand. Hopefully geared at style-obsessed professionals like yourself!

When it comes to fashion ecommerce growth hacks, fashion brands suffer from marketing misconceptions that can hold you back. Some fashion brands believe:

• Fashion ecommerce marketing is too hard
• You need a big budget
• The internet does not work for fashion brands

As we will see, the internet does work for fashion, marketing is not too hard, and you DON’T need a big budget if you want to growth hack a fashion store.

Don’t be like me when I first got online with my first website, HackishWord

Don’t go for knee-jerk marketing tactics like posting in directories and pushing out your message on every social networking site you can find. The traffic you get will be untargeted and low quality. Chances are, putting in so much effort for so little result will set your brand building efforts back, months.

What you want is to do the hard work to stand out on a few, carefully selected platforms where your message can resonate. Our approach to growth hacking fashion brands is 80% strategy and 20% tactics.

You don’t have to subscribe to the Pareto Principle. Everyone quotes it so I kind of hate it. Yay! I stress contrarian thinking in whatever business I am in. You don’t have to, that’s just my secret sauce 😉

However, make up your own figures about what few things you want to focus on and really master that can push your brand forward the most.

It is possible, however, to get results in a short time-frame. This is why we will divide the strategies into two sections

PART 1: How To Go From 0 To 60 In 8 Days Or Less

Part 2: Strategies That Build Up Your Fashion Brand Beyond Quick Wins To Lasting Success

If you have an established brand but you need ideas to get new customers in through the door, the quick wins will help as well. Your focus as a brand builder, however, should be much more on the strategies that can make your fashion store a key player in a certain market well into the future.
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PART 1: Grow Your Fashion Brand In The Next 7 Days

Use Facebook Paid Promotion For Your Fashion Brand

Facebook is a goldmine for fashion businesses. This applies whether you have an online store based on Shopify, Magento, and other platforms, or your brand’s  products are listed on eBay, Amazon or other platform.

As of Q3 2017, Facebook had amassed more than 2 billion users. Whatever product your store is selling, therefore, you can pretty much find an audience on Facebook. If you can get users’ attention with your brand, and tell a compelling story through writing copy that hooks your audience, you can write your own ticket.

To understand the need for paid promotion, consider the following trendline of Facebook organic reach. This comes from am Ogilvy research study.

Hopefully you can see that organic Facebook reach alone is not going to do the job.

This is even more so when you want results fast!!! If you want instant brand lift for your fashion store, you are more likely than not going to need to pay for it. But is it worth it?

You bet! With Facebook Ads, your fashion brand can have the best week of the year around the time you run a 1-week promotion, if you execute it right.

The video below covers how to look at planning a Facebook promotion for your clothing brand.

With a Facebook promotion, there are 2 big alternatives you can go for.

1. Promote your own fashion brand landing pages
2. Promote your mailing list

Personally, I would prefer to see a fashion brand pushing fans to sign up to their mailing list on their own website. The reason is that you are effectively building relationships with new fans of your brand. That takes time, naturally. This is a key pillar of my Fan Formation Theory, which I apply in my copywriting and growth hacking projects.

However, if you have a special promo, such as 30% off or even 40% off, you can entice highly targeted viewers to purchase your fashion items.

This is obviously a great idea for big holidays like Thanksgiving or New Year’s. The key, however, is to use it yourself during times of the year when there’s little competition for the exact same fashion marketing activities. That’s how you apply contrarian marketing ideas to take advantage of conditions and cycles in the market.

Promoting your mailing list comes with huge benefits downstream.

Finally, when it comes to Facebook paid promotions, you should consider building LIKES to your page! Why? Because LIKES literally build your brand reputation. People that liked your fashion page are more likely to visit again, bringing their friends along with them! This video covers a better way to get Facebook Likes.

Running a paid promotion on Facebook is a great way to quickly get your fashion brand moving, with increased traffic to your products and higher sales. How much should you budget for this step? Use whatever you can afford for your budget, but start small. If you want to learn more about how to craft fashion copy for your Facebook campaign, you can check out my comprehensive course, the Luxury Seller’s MasterMind, which will show you ways to accelerate your brand using copy and growth hacks.

Create A Youtube Pre-roll Ad That Drives Sales For Your Fashion Store

With the opportunity to show off your apparel brand visually to billions of Youtube viewers, Youtube pre-roll ads are a fantastic way to go from 0 to 100 in the shortest possible time. Getting your story right for Youtube ads takes a lot of work, but the pay-off, when done right, is huge!

As with a lot of things marketing, Youtube video ads suffer from a number of myths as well. How many of these do you have to get over?

• Videos are expensive. It costs more than $10,000 per video
• Youtubers would never be interested in my formal-wear brand, or whatever other description of your brand here
• The CPC (cost per click) is too high. Can’t we find something cheaper?
• Getting video ads right is next to impossible

While it’s true that creating video can cost a hefty sum, it need not be. Some of the best video marketing has been created on very tiny budgets. In fact, the large budgets of big TV productions can lead to stilted, uncreative campaigns.

Here is a chart showing that the majority of viral videos require a lower budget than you might think.

What you want with video ads is to give your brand a creative, playful treatment. Having a lower budget than you are comfortable working with can help you think outside the box and come up with winning ideas.

As an example, take a look at the following video marketing example by a car insurance company. What this company did was place stickers of scratches on expensive cars. Then they filmed the owners’ reactions. The stickers, however, were easy to remove. They they invited people to order the stickers, and ran out in a matter of days.

The results for this viral video show the enormous wins that can come from a well-executed video marketing campaign. The video got 10,000 views in its first month, and went on to achieve more than 100,000 views. Word quickly spread about the video and the insurance company behind it. The cost? About 1000 Euro.

So you don’t need a big budget to strike the right chord with your target customers. All you need is to pick up a camera, play around with some of your favorite fashion items and get something going. A good idea is to get out of the building as this insurance company did. Go outdoors, away from the formality of offices and indoor spaces. Visit a basketball court, if you sell sportswear, or the beach, or an ice cream shop. Play around and have fun. Walk around. Then create some footage.

Later, have your best creative person review the footage and consider some possible storylines to develop further. You can then write a full video script yourself or hire a copywriter to develop scripts for the video ad.

When coming up with the video copy for the Ad, here are some tips that can help you get better ROI:

• Take an entertaining angle that showcases your product and creates curiosity so the viewer clicks the link to your page
• On your page, show the product and why the user must buy it. This calls for crafting high-converting landing page copy for your fashion items that makes buying a no-brainer. Giving exclusive offers is an easy way to do this. But be creative, there are many, sometimes much better performing ways, to craft irresistible copy
• Whatever you do, don’t bore the viewer. That kills your campaigns.

A great strategy I recommend is to look at reels of Youtube ads that have performed outstandingly as inspiration. This will get you thinking in terms of the right patterns of video ads that work.

PART 2: Set Your Fashion Store Up To Make Sales Well Into The Future

A short burst of promotion on Facebook or Youtube or even promotional email are all good strategies for getting a short-term boost in fashion sales. If you have a small budget and want to get some instant sales, you can deploy any of these as strategies.

Thinking into the future, you will need to once again choose very carefully where you place your attention. Selecting the right strategies to focus on now and acting on them consistently brings you closer and closer to your goal. Choosing tactics, even good tactics, at random, means that your brand can miss some important growth opportunities due to lack of focus.

Create A Targeted Marketing Funnel For Your Fashion Store

Creating effective funnels for marketing fashion is a mix between science and art. Here are the central elements you need to get right:

• Your website. This is your shop, typically, though you might also sell on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress and other online shopping platforms
• Your landing pages. You should be investing in a TON of landing pages, and optimizing them like a madman. Once you have something that works, drive oodles of traffic to it and watch the sales come in. Rinse and repeat.
• Your products. You want a number of products at multiple price points. E.g. if you sell women’s fashion, a low-priced hat or bracelet gets new brand customers in the door. Some T-Shirts or purses can also work here. Then have a slew of medium-range items. A lot of your sales will come from this range. This could be a bunch of skirts, formal-wear, shoes and the like. Then you will have a smaller number of top-tier items such as nice watches, exclusive jewelry and other premium items.

Carry Out A Fashion Growth Hacking Campaign Across Social Media Channels

Along with building an effective funnel, you will want to do fashion growth hacking experiments that result in clear insight into the best traffic channels for your brand.

For instance, you might experiment with posting some of your products on Reddit, Twitter as well as Facebook. You will track the response and engagement you get on each of these channels, down to how many sales each channel generates.

From the experiments, you might discover that, say, posting on particular Reddit channels is the most dollar-efficient form of marketing for your brand.

Well, now you have just gained an invaluable business insight for your brand. You will then assign as much of your marketing budget as you can, into Reddit marketing. That then becomes an important customer acquisition channel for you.

If Facebook was more effective, you would do likewise, except focusing your ad dollars on the platform, and reassigning from other, less effective channels.

In a personal campaign I ran in 2017, I concluded that Facebook ads returned a better ROI than Reddit. For your brand and the type of marketing you are doing, that may not be the case at all. Other growth hackers and marketers I discussed with reported finding the best results on Instagram.

The thing is, results will vary due to the differences between each product and campaign. This is why copying someone’s results verbatim does not yield the best results. However, if you are absolutely unsure how to proceed, copy what someone else has done successfully.

As your experience and confidence grows, however, you get the privilege of testing growth hacks and tactics for growing your fashion store yourself. The proprietary data you gain from such growth hacking campaigns can become one of your most important competitive advantages.

As a starting point, you will want to refer to the channel selection tips we shared earlier. You will find that the users on a social media platform are typically going to rally behind a certain kind of product. With large networks like Facebook, though, it is often the case that you could be selling ice to eskimos and you will still find an audience for what you have. If in doubt, start with Facebook, then brand out to large channels like Instagram. Snapchat and Pinterest would be other channels to consider for your fashion promotion.

If you are targeting customers who are non-English speaking, you would invest in the channels on which speakers of those other languages tend to congregate.

Educate Yourself In Fashion Marketing, Maybe Take A Course

I know, I know! You hate marketing courses!

But if you are building a fashion brand, or any kind of brand online for that matter, and you are unwilling to take a growth hacking or marketing course to enhance your brand, you are like a general who wants to win the war but cares little for knowing how to procure the best gunpowder.

Men have lost wars for much less!

So, take a look around. The best brand builders tend to be superb marketing people. Yes, knowing how to design a killer watch, or handbag, pair of shoes, or silk tie can make you very rich. But if you have no marketing mojo, or are unwilling to learn how to growth hack, chances are you are going to lead your brand, over time, down a ditch.

I don’t recommend a particular course, there’s several good ones out there. Just find one and skill up. You will understand so much better how to go about consistently creating new opportunities for your brand to grow.

Pitch 100 Influencers, Regularly, Online And In-Person. Then Get Some Media About Their Response If The Response Is Good

Reach out to influencers, compliment them on their work, and ask if they would be interested in receiving a free sample of your product. Say, “If you like it, we ask that you would please share it with your followers on social media.”

If they are a down-to-earth person, and if they genuinely like your product, chances are you are going to have some of the best brand days you have ever had. Of course, much depends on the size of the network of the influencer to whom you’ve given your fashion samples.

But suffice it to say, if they are big on Instagram or Facebook, and they send out a message promoting your product, you will see the orders come in. This is why it pays to not just network, anyone can network, but network with big people who can move your brand’s entire growth trajectory. If you are a small fish, you should always be looking to break through to the next higher level of influencers that can give your brand a 10X month. And once you get to that level, you start looking for an even bigger stage to showcase your brand.

Your success in pursuing this strategy will ultimately depend on the quality of your brand, and if it can measure up to the quality of the influencers in the top-tier circles to which you will want to end up pitching.

Another key thing to remember is that seemingly random, none-important things influencers do can be news in some publication or other. A rapper wore your shirt to a concert? That’s big news. Get photos and approach a number of media publications and tell them you can comment on what the brand stands for – you created the brand so you had better know! A model took your purse and has recommended it and posted some pictures to her fans on Facebook? You amplify the effect by hitting the streets and finding 30 fashion bloggers or more to cover the story. And if possible, add your own voice by giving an interview to the publications so you can frame the model in a positive light. They are helping you, so you playing the role of the helpful fashion executive is just an act of enlightened self-interest.

Big Brands Are Already Using This Playbook. Now You Can Too!

Your hustle is going to weigh heavily on how much you can do. However if you take the ethos of working with influencers to heart and give it all you can in a constructive mindset, you can build your brand faster than you ever thought possible. When buyers and fans of influencers see your brand being associated with the cool cats in their circles, all of a sudden they start wanting what you are selling too.

The biggest brands in the world understand this very well, and you will see them playing this growth-hack to maximum effect. You might have a smaller budget, but there’s no way you shouldn’t get in the game too.

If you enjoyed this post, please share, and leave your comments below. Get more fashion growth hacks and copy strategies in my comprehensive course, The Luxury Seller’s MasterMind.

I help solopreneurs get MORE PROFITABLE in WAY LESS TIME, grow and scale their one man businesses into time independent 7-8 figure machines that make money even when you’re asleep. Learn how in my Renegade Solopreneur Profits Bootcamp.