Influencer Marketing for Fashion Brands

Why do you even need an influencer campaign? What's the overall goal of your strategy? Are you looking for ways to connect on a deeper level with your current clients? Do you want to enter a new market or just announce a new collection? There are many reasons why fashion brands decide to partner with an influencer. Before planning a campaign, you need to determine why you need it.

The internet is oversaturated with content which makes it harder to win customers' attention with traditional advertising methods. That's why instead of taking an old spray-and-pray approach, many fashion brands turn to influencer marketing. Contrary to traditional methods, this tactic offers organizations tangible results and has been recognized as one of the most effective tools in a marketing toolkit.

Here are five main benefits of launching influencer campaigns for your fashion brand.

Intense competition, changing customer behavior, and decreasing attention spans – all these make it difficult for your brand to get the most precious of the modern-age assets: your customer's time.

Your customers have limited time and a lot of options for where they can spend this time and their focus. With influencer marketing, your brand can refine its strategy and combine its expertise with influencers' creativity.

Working with content creators (this is another term for influencers – they are also referred to as opinion leaders sometimes) allows companies to share their message in a more authentic way and engage with the audience. Although it doesn't guarantee that your campaign will go viral, when implemented correctly, it can put your company in the spotlight.

Fashion is a fast-changing industry: customers change their minds often, and recent trends fade away while old trends re-gain ground. When planning a campaign for a fashion brand, you need to keep in mind multiple factors.

Most businesses don't always understand their customers as much as creators understand their audiences. Fashion brands build relationships with different stakeholders and try to accommodate for their various interests. Content creators don't have this problem of dealing with multiple stakeholders and catering to their needs.

By partnering with an influencer, your company can get an insight into what motivates and moves your target audience. You might learn something new about your clients – something that you've never considered before. This will help you refine your strategy further and incorporate this knowledge into other campaigns.

Do you think your brand doesn't look approachable enough or do you have a hard time creating an association between your brand and luxury? When done correctly, collaboration with opinion leaders can help you solve different problems with branding or performance.

Influencers are people with personalities and their audiences resonate with them for all kinds of reasons. Depending on your mission and values, you can find social media profiles that focus on sustainability, diversity, inclusion, self-care, and so on. These are no longer buzzwords that businesses use sporadically in their message. By partnering with creators who are active advocates for one of your values, you can make your stance clear and communicate your views in a more visible way.

If you've been mostly using traditional channels for promotion, awareness, and advertisement, you know well what your ideal customer profile looks like. You have all the targeting settings and lookalike audiences ready to be used at any time. Your team is fully aware of what your campaigns need to communicate and how to do this in the best way possible. You have good processes that have been working for you and your team.

While these all are impressive achievements, sometimes your organization can get into a trap of doing the same thing over and over again. By partnering with influencers, you'll be able to break out of your usual routine and add a new perspective to your strategy.

Instead of using pre-determined audiences in targeting settings, you'll be dealing with followers who are real people. They might not necessarily fall into your usual Ideal Customer Profile. This will give you an opportunity to win over a new audience.

No matter how great your team is, no one can be consistently creative. By partnering with a fashion influencer, you'll have a chance to work closely with someone who's an outsider to your brand. They can have a completely different approach to communication with their audience and creativity. By working closely with them (and working closely is something you should strive to do), you'll be able to reignite internal creativity too.

This is one of the things that make influencer marketing much more powerful than brand ambassadorship, which is very popular with big fashion brands. Ambassadors are usually celebrities. Most of the time they don't have a say in the planning stage.

On the contrary, influencers have negotiating power when it comes to campaign creation and planning. They will create content that aligns with your guidelines but when given freedom, they can bring a unique perspective too. In other words, a brand and an influencer are equal partners.

There are various ways you can promote your fashion brand. For example, some businesses use direct product promotion or endorsement. Other companies choose discounts or organize giveaways to engage the audience.

Sometimes you might want creators to give reviews on your new collection or partner with them on a more subtle product placement, which is less obvious than a direct endorsement.

Regardless of the option you choose, make sure that you understand its ins and outs and whether it is the best option for you.