Digital Marketing Strategies for Fashion and Luxury Brands
The global luxury market is worth almost $1 trillion annually.
The luxury industry is changing and so are its consumers. Luxury buyers are getting younger, their values are changing, and digital now influences most, if not all, luxury sales. While luxury sales globally are expected to grow, much of this growth is being driven by millennials and Generation Z. A high-value, personalised experience as well as a focus on quality, scarcity, and sustainability is valued by millenials. Additionally, the internet has become an integral part of the purchasing habits of consumers worldwide.
Also Read: SEO For Branding: How to Use SEO to Build Brand Awareness
What does this mean for brands targeting luxury consumers?
Luxury brands need to adapt to this changing landscape. In this blog, we explore strategies that can help luxury brands thrive in this digital world:
Build a Digital Strategy strategy tailored to your consumer:
A well-built, comprehensive strategy will go a long way in ensuring digital success for a luxury brand. Build strategies for luxury brands with the following key components:
Clearly State Your Objectives: Start with your goals. Take a critical look at your brand, market position, competitors, and organisational capabilities. These will look very different for a 200-year old watch manufacturer versus a luxury e-tailer. Are you looking for brand awareness? or Increased sales? Relevance perhaps, or finding your next set of loyal customers. Ensure that your goals are measurable, realistic, and clear.
Understand Your Target Audience: Define your target audience. Who are your existing customers? Where will your future customers come from? Understand what your audience values and why – this will help shape your strategic vision.
Build Your Marketing Plan: Keeping the above in mind, build a long-term and short-term marketing plan. Evaluate your existing marketing strategy, if any, and find gaps and opportunities. Audit your past communication and current presence digitally. Are you focusing only on your offline efforts right now? Is your website beautiful but not functional? Map the missing links in your strategy and build a plan with timelines and tactics, keeping your resources and constraints in mind.
Design a great website
Build a great website that is stylish, functional and unique. Employ best-in-class UX and UI specialists that will ensure that your website is functional and easy-to-use. Some great examples are Farfetch, Bonobos, and Gucci.
Luxury brands often come with legacy of prioritising brand identity and stylishness over function. Don’t fall into that trap! We recommend running focus groups with users to ensure that your website is intuitive and responsive. Invest in SEO services to improve discoverability and optimise the website for an improved conversion rate with a better website design.
Build a unique brand identity through storytelling
Why do consumers buy luxury goods? The reasons may be emotional, aspirational, status-related, or plain wish fulfilling. Storytelling is the best way to connect with those emotions. Communicate the story behind your products, the values that your brand denotes, and the heritage and legacy behind the brand. An example of a brand that talks about its history effectively is Maison Goyard. Another beautifully done example is Rolls Royce.
Find your core narrative. Identify what makes your brand unique – is it luxury, quality, performance, innovation or style ? Develop a unique brand voice that expressly carries this narrative through your website, in-store experience, social media, blogs and all other channels.
Some guidelines to creating effective content – ensure that it is aspirational, educational, and feels exclusive. Push boundaries and innovate – use video, VR, and non-traditional ways of communicating. Chanel and Dior have a stellar content strategy, which carries the same thread through their stores, their website, and social media.
Don’t Ignore Social Media
Social Media is the #1 way millennials discover luxury brands. Social media can contribute to brand awareness, help shape perceptions, and create brand evangelists.
Choose the right social media channels. A luxury brand doesn’t need to be present on all channels, prioritise quality over quantity. Instagram is now the top social media site for luxury retail shoppers, both in terms of followers and engagement. Fashion marketing with Pinterest, Youtube, Facebook all have their own pros and drive traffic to websites.
When marketing luxury products, visual storytelling is powerful. Employ video liberally as one of your key storytelling tactics. Video is often used for behind-the-scenes, fashion shows, etc. Sabyasachi uses Instagram video exclusively to connect with his audience on social media and showcase his upcoming collections.
Build a calendar that works for your brand as well as its target audience. User-generated content builds trust in the eyes of the audience and helps a luxury brand feel more accessible to a new customer. Keep big sale days and gifting dates for the year in mind – create style guides, gift guides, and how-to videos for popular holidays to encourage customers to keep your offering in mind.
Email Marketing gears you for Long-Term Success
Email marketing is one of the effective digital marketing service for building customer loyalty and increasing sales. It helps you reach out to your customers individually and inform them when you have new products or sales.
Keep building that customer list – it is your most valuable asset. There are a number of tools in the market that can help you segment this list well, and even automate communication based on this segmentation. Keep your communication in line with your overall content strategy and focus on maintaining a sense of exclusivity and uniqueness.
Paid Advertising Spells Growth
Paid digital advertising makes up a huge percentage of marketing spends for luxury brands. We recommend using multiple channels such as social media advertising, search, display, and even video.
Engage in nuanced targeting – you can segment your audience based on their demographics, habits, and location. You can also target people based on their behaviour – abandoned cart ads and retargeting ads another popular way to acquire customers.
With a high level of segmentation and targeting, Facebook ads and Instagram ads can open up new avenues of growth. In the past few months, we’ve seen LVMH use Instagram Stories for advertising extensively.
Keep an eye on conversion and ROI – spend your marketing dollars wisely.
A luxury customer wants to feel special. All luxury marketing should have exclusivity and aspiration at its core.
Exclusivity can be created through private member groups, loyalty programs, concierge services, or reserved perks. Build a community of highly-engaged, valuable customers that consume your content and engage with your brand often. This community can be nurtured for user-generated content, future product launches, cross-promotion, and as brand advocates.
Blogging is still Valuable
Provide valuable information to your customers through blogs. Post regularly on trendy topics related to your brand. Creating a valuable, interesting blog will help nurture visitors who are not customers yet but may be in the future. It will also allow you a place to directly communicate with visitors on owned media, offer advice, and showcase longform stories.
Tory Burch’s blog is a great example of content and commerce coming together – it is an editorial blog that talks about a variety of topics.
Omnichannel is Integral
Omni-channel, the strategy of creating seamless experiences through multiple resources, is certainly the future of retail, and for several luxury brands it’s already the present.
While luxury customers are digitally savvy, they wish to touch and feel the products themselves. They expect digitally integrated experiences – be it shopping on tablets post a fashion show {Burberry}, or personalised jewellery creation vending machines {Tiffany}.
Burberry is a best-in-class example of omnichannel integration in the luxury space. It encourages customers to walk in to their stores through their online brand awareness campaigns, and in-store, they’re encouraged to share content, watch livestreams, and shop through ipads.
Influencer Marketing is the new Black
Influencer marketing has huge potential to increase brand awareness and reach a younger audience.
Work with luxury influencers to create authentic content which brings social validation to your brand. However, influencer marketing is complex – it will need a strategy to determine the right partner and the right message. With influencer fatigue piling up, this can backfire if not done right.
Dior did a huge global influencer campaign for the launch of its limited edition #30Montaigne bag:
Mobile is the Present and the Future
All consumers that engage or will engage with your brand use mobile. Luxury consumers, since they are on the upper strata of incomes, stay ahead of the curve by investing in sophisticated mobile technologies.
Ensure that your website is responsive and works well on all screens – from tablets to phones to desktops. Adjust your strategy to include the mobile preferences of your consumers. You may even explore the need for a mobile app. for e.g., Ritz Carlton has an app for its frequent visitors:
Your content and ads should take into account mobile usage and browsing patterns – the messaging should be succinct, clear, and easily digestible.
Invest in CRM
Customer Relationship Management can help you improve customer relationships, improve retention, and drive sales. Invest in practices that record customer behaviour, preferences, their lifecycle, and interactions.
With luxury, customers expect a high level of personal attention. CRM takes on an even more important role then – to provide top-notch customer care, attention, and nurturing.
A strong CRM system will help you track audience interactions. These can be optimised for conversion. You can also leverage automated messaging to nurture your leads. Gain insights into your customer to a granular level – it can further help you develop loyalty programs, referral programs, and explore new avenues for growth.
Track and Revise
The beauty of marketing is that all your efforts are measurable. Identify certain KPIs, based on your objectives, that you must track. These could be traffic, unique visitors, conversions, ROI, bounce rate etc.
Over time, you will be able to set benchmarks for success. Continuously monitor, adjust and revise your digital marketing strategies to gain better results.
Innovation and continuous improvement is important in all industries. Create new content, encourage your team to try new channels and tactics, conduct A/B tests, and listen to your customers out there. It will help you determine what you’re doing well as well as pain points, gaps and opportunities.
For luxury brands, a comprehensive plan is the first step to successful online presence and growth. This plan must be executed well and constantly monitored and revised to keep up with the changing ecosystem.
To make that happen, we can help! Contact us at +91-9910308266 to set up some time with our luxury marketing specialists.
FAQs
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How do you promote a fashion brand on social media?
You can promote a fashion brand on social media by:
- Choosing the right social media channels
- Leverage a mix of channels to promote – Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest etc.
- Storytelling is the new black – especially powerful imagery and engaging videos
- Create a content calendar
- Leverage user-generated content
- Engage with customers often
- Paid advertising brings in new prospects
- Partner with influencers and other brands to expand your reach
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How do I get my fashion brand noticed?
A powerful brand story, an excellent website, and a comprehensive digital strategy can help you get your brand noticed. You must build a strategy tailored to your consumer, designed to reach them and communicate in such a way so as to have maximum impact and drive recall, engagement, and curiosity.
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What is the advertising strategy for luxury brands?
Luxury brands focus on three main things when advertising:
- A unique brand story
- Exclusivity
- Aspirational content
In the digital world, luxury brands can leverage social media to share on-brand imagery and reinforce premium product desirability. They invest heavily in CRM and nurture the lifetime value of their customers. They use different channels to spread evocative stories. Luxury brands tend to avoid mass-market advertising and create a sense of exclusivity and limited availability with very targeted outreach.
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How do you increase sales in a luxury retail store?
- Expand your target audience and involve the millennial generation in your outreach
- Go above and beyond your customer’s expectations
- Provide an omnichannel, seamless experience
- Use personalised and customised marketing tactics
- Offer services that your audience finds valuable
- Let data drive your decisions
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How to sell high-end products?
- Make your USP and reason for high prices very clear
- Provide excellent customer service
- Build a marketing strategy that focuses on “exclusive” and “premium”
- Advertise to a targeted affluent base
- Elevate your content