Your Basic Guide To Online Promotional Techniques
To develop a successful fashion business, you have to consistently communicate with your target audience in the places that they’re at. These days, depending on your audience, that’s primarily online. Research shows that 76% of US adult consumers shop online. Therefore, to help your business thrive, you’ll need to utilize online promotional techniques.
Online promotional techniques are a set of planned marketing actions consistently performed through the most suitable online channels. They are amongst the most effective and affordable ways for your business to promote its fashion brand, generate leads, increase revenue, and maintain relationships with your audience.
Before putting these techniques to work, you need to understand what each one involves and what opportunities they offer your business. Here is a basic guide to the top online promotional marketing techniques to help get you started.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the highly targeted process in which your organic listing in search engine results improves position. SEO can produce high traffic volumes if the search intent has a high volume. High SEO rankings can also help consumers to see your brand as credible. Compared to pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, SEO is a relatively low cost, which can be beneficial for small emerging brands.
However, it would be good to note that on the flip side, due to high competition, complexities, and content changes in algorithms, investment in SEO won’t guarantee returns. Mastering SEO takes time and strategic efforts to garner the top positions in results needed to achieve the desired results.
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing
PPC marketing refers to ads published on search engines, the display network, or social platforms where your company is charged every time a viewer clicks on the ad. Google Ads is currently the most popular paid search platform. PPC marketing is a highly-target marketing technique used to reach your target audience when consumers search for particular products or services.
Although it offers a controlled acquisition cost and can be used for remarketing, it can become costly in competitive sectors. In addition, many social platforms have made it more difficult to achieve organic views of ad campaigns. As a result, PCC ad spend can account for a high percentage of your brand’s budget.
Online public relations
Online public relations (PR) uses owned, paid, and earned media, such as social media and press releases, to build a positive perception of your brand. It offers good targeting at a relatively low cost and can support SEO through backlinks.
Many fashion brands hire PR agencies in the early stages of the business to help build brand awareness. PR agencies can use help to get the brand featured in a top online magazine, blogs, product placements, and so on that they otherwise wouldn’t be included in.
Affiliate marketing
With affiliate marketing, promoters can earn commission by marketing or advertising your brand’s products or services. They can promote your product through a blog, video post, or featuring your ad campaign on their website and are paid for every sale made through their link. Basically:
You collaborate with a blogger to show an ad or a unique link for your brand on their website, blog, or social network.
Then, a customer clicks their unique link.
The customer makes a purchase on your website.
The affiliate network records the transaction.
Your company confirms the purchase.
You paid the blogger a commission.
Affiliate marketing can help build creditability for your brand and increase reach by utilizing someone else’s audience. However, this top promotional technique is helpful for businesses with online sales. There is also the downside of costs for setup and management.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the newest types of promotional strategies. This technique uses influencers and companies with a strong social influence to promote your brand. For example, your company will hire or collaborate with an influencer or multiple influencers to promote your products on their social media pages or websites. They can utilize a variety of promotional methods. For example, they can testify about your product or offer a discount code that is exclusive to them and their followers.
If executed correctly, influencer marketing can become a long-term, cost-effective arrangement. However, you have to consider that although it can build brand awareness, it doesn’t always necessarily translate to sales.
Email marketing
Email marketing can be considered the digital version of direct mail and is one of the most effective types of online marketing. It allows your brand to reach a vast network of customers with newsletters, ads, or brand updates through email. It also creates a direct link between the customer and your website when you use compelling call-to-action to drive traffic.
Although beneficial, email marketing requires the target audience to opt-in for effectiveness. There’s also the issue of your emails being diluted among other emails being received by the viewer. Nonetheless, it is a helpful method for customer communication to get a message across to the consumer.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) refers to the use of social media platforms and websites to connect with your target audience and promote your brand. Its primary purpose isn’t necessarily to drive sales, but it is a valuable tool for building brand awareness, increasing engagement, and maintaining a connection with customers.
Social media platforms boast millions of users. Therefore, social media marketing provides access to many potential leads at a low cost. In addition, existing customers can become advocates as users navigate the platforms to interact with each other.
Over the years, changes to social media algorithms have made it more challenging for brands to achieve organic reach. Subsequently, brands have to use paid ads to reach their audience, which can become costly and risk damaging if unsolicited messages are sent to the wrong target segments.
Online advertising
Online advertisement uses various formats such as banners and videos across publishers and social network channels to remarket to consumers about brands they have interacted with. It helps with growing brand awareness and encourages click-through with retargeting. Unfortunately, online shippers have become “blind” to banner ads and can often overlook their presence over the years.
The solution to that is native advertising. These formats are the newest versions of online advertising where the ad matches the form and function of the platform upon which it appears. This allows for a seamless transition for the viewer without noticing that they are looking at an ad which helps to boost its effectiveness.
For instance, imagine you clicked on an article about “The Best Beach Destinations In The Caribbean,” which took you to the Travel Styleist blog post. The Travel Styleist company pays the host website publisher for your click.
Using this introductory guide as a framework will provide you with all the tools you need to start effectively marketing your company online. Now that you understand the different types of online promotional strategies, it’s time to put them to use to market your company and grow your business.