Digital Fashion Marketing: Talk With Marketing Expert David A. Schneider, MBA

David A. Schneider has been involved in marketing and sales for over 12 years. He founded his first company at the age of 18 and has been fascinated by the possibilities and impact achievable through good marketing ever since. Today, he takes on a managerial role in a family business with 150 employees and shares his knowledge as an author, blogger and business consultant.

Fashion marketing is the entire marketing process that designers use to market their fashion label to the target group. This includes classic media such as print media, trade magazines, or TV commercials, but also modern, digital marketing channels such as social media or search engine marketing. The positioning of the brand plays an essential role - especially for smaller fashion labels that cannot or do not want to appeal to the masses. As consumers, we know the result of good advertising campaigns. But the way to get there is often far-reaching and complex in the background.

In the fashion world, marketing must be adapted to the dynamics of the industry. Trends change rapidly and many designers launch several collections a year. The most successful fashion brands send authentic messages to their target group through different marketing channels. Adapted strategies satisfy customer needs and create long-term brand value.

"As with the marketing of any product, marketing must focus on a need or a desire that the customer fulfils with it. In the field of fashion, this is obvious: we all need clothes.

However, fashion marketing has to take into account many more details. These concern both the individual target group of the fashion label and the conditions in the market. These include, for example, current trends in the fashion industry, which can dictate a certain style. Seasonal differences must also be taken into account. After all, swimwear will sell poorly in winter. Likewise, fur boots and down jackets will also find only a small clientele in summer.

Then there is the price as a decisive factor in fashion. After all, there is everything from sustainable fashion labels to cheap goods for the mass market to ultra-luxurious designer fashion in the industry. Pricing strategy should also ideally be built into marketing to make it more effective. For example, if you want to work heavily with discounts and special offers, this should already be considered in the marketing campaigns," says Schneider.

The most dangerous thing in online marketing at the moment is to hand over much of the campaign design to automation and AI. Google, for example, offers to create fully automated campaigns. So do Amazon and Meta. This is primarily intended to encourage newcomers to online marketing to use these platforms and advertise there without much prior knowledge.

Especially the hype around this topic tempts even professionals to accept this offer. It sounds great not to have to do any work because the "all-knowing" AI takes care of it for you and earns money in the process. Unfortunately, the results in reality are very sobering. It is not uncommon for the entire advertising budget to be used up - without any useful results.

Handing over the marketing design can be dangerous because we never know exactly what the advertising campaign is doing in this case. Google and Co. are primarily interested in their sales, not in the success of our fashion label.

To manage campaigns effectively and thus also generate a return on investment (ROI), we need above all a precise understanding of where our users come from, how we have acquired them, and what exactly these users have done in our webshop, for example. For this, tracking programmes such as Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics must be correctly set up and installed.

Meta has its counterpart with the pixel, which must be integrated into the website. These programmes and their function are like our cockpit. Without these values, clicks are just clicks and don't tell us anything. Only when we understand exactly the search behavior and the customer journey behind the clicks we can optimise our campaigns based on this data and real user behaviour.

But even with these programmes and metrics in mind, online marketing is not a no-brainer. Keywords, bids and click prices must be monitored at least weekly and adjusted if necessary. The auction prices of the ads can rise and fall depending on the competitor's situation. Here, too, the advertising budget can be used up in a short time if you do not act quickly and analyse the results again and again.

Digital marketing offers incredible data collection to reach a specific target group. Every click of ours, every scrolling movement, every second we look at an image or video - all this is monitored, measured, and stored. Based on this and many other data, Google, Facebook, and Co. know much more about us than we can imagine. What is less pleasing for data protectionists can become a paradise for marketers.

This allows me to precisely control my marketing activities. It is important to have defined a target group beforehand and to know as much as possible about my customers. Because every detail I know about my customers can be used to make my marketing more effective.

For example, I can run ads that are only seen by women between 20 and 40 who have a pet cat, are interested in canoeing, read L'Officiel magazine, and listen to a certain type of music. You could add any number of other targeting criteria until eventually there is only one person left. So if I know exactly who my customers are, what they like, how they spend their free time, etc., I can target my advertising budget only at this customer group.

The otherwise gigantic wastage in marketing (for example in a television advertisement where millions see my advertisement but only a few hundred are interested in my product) is thus kept to an absolute minimum. This means that I can achieve a lot with a smaller budget these days - provided that the campaigns and marketing activities are properly coordinated.

I even have two tips.

First:

Feedback, feedback, feedback.

Even the best designer has to take off her designer hat when starting her label and wear the hat of an entrepreneur, at least temporarily. A new label is therefore a start-up - a company that first has to find a viable business model. In the process, there are usually many unanswered questions that have to be answered:

• Which designs do customers like best?
• What price will customers be willing to pay?
• Where is our target group active?
• Why do some designs sell better than others?
• Which advertising messages will get us the most attention? Etc.

Unfortunately, I can't answer all these questions - but your customers can.

That's why it's so important to actively seek feedback, interact with customers, and ask for their opinions. This is the only way to make sure we have the right marketing message and make the right products for the right people.

Secondly:

Testing, testing, testing.

When it comes to choosing the "right" marketing for your label, you are also faced with seemingly endless questions:

• Which marketing platform will be right for a new fashion label?
• How can we make the message of our label tangible for people?
• Which sentences do we use to address our target group?
• Which images and videos will best evoke reactions? Etc.

With properly applied digital marketing, different marketing campaigns can be quickly created and tested. It is important to also pay attention to the details and test these as well - such as a background image or the wording of a sentence.

In the fast-paced era of social media, we need to be able to capture the extremely short attention span of a potential customer in a flash. Therefore, even small things can mean a difference in performance. To find the right way for your label, you therefore have to do dozens of tests to finally be able to build a plannable marketing and sales channel for your business.