Clothing Content Marketing: A Beginner Reference for Agencies

CopyPress

July 4, 2022

Marketing agencies work with a variety of clients. Some are business-to-business (B2B) brands and others are business-to-consumer (B2C) enterprises. For agencies working with fashion B2C companies, you may wonder how to get your clients to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) with so much competition in that niche. Today, we’re breaking down the steps agencies can take to get the best results for their clothing content clients with topics like:

Why Would Clothing Brands Care About Content Marketing?
16 Clothing Content Marketing Tips for Agencies
How Can We Track the Progress of Clothing Content Marketing for Our Clients?

Why Would Clothing Brands Care About Content Marketing?

You might wonder why clothing companies would care about content marketing at all. Clothes are a necessity, so why would brands in that industry need the extra push? Fashion is a high-competition niche. From high-end brands to fast fashion or crafty startups on Etsy, generally, all clothing is the same. What’s going to increase brand awareness and showcase why one company is better than just with products alone? That’s a job for content marketing.

Thinking outside the traditional marketing and advertising box of retail sales helps fashion brands capture leads higher in the marketing funnel. Then they nurture those leads from brand awareness into returning customers. But once fashion brands and their agency know this is the right strategy, the focus shifts. It’s no longer “why should we do this?” It’s “how should we do this?”

16 Clothing Content Marketing Tips for Agencies

As an agency, the goal is always to do the most for the client to get them the results they expect and deserve. Use these tips to help with content marketing for all your fashion clients:

1. Perfect a Brand Story

What is your client’s company all about and why should people buy clothes from it? That’s the simplest question to guide any content marketing strategy for a fashion company or any company. Knowing and telling a brand story helps your agency team get a better idea of who they’re working with. What goals does the company have? What are their values? How did the company come to be? When the agency team understands the brand, it’s easier to convey the best parts of the company to the right audience.

In 2016, luxury clothing retailer Burberry turned the story of its founder, Thomas Burberry, into a three-minute short film. It helped tell the story of Burberry’s visionary work to create a new kind of practical fashion for its day. It also showed how the company had a hand in key events in British history. While your clients’ companies may not have the same rich history as Burberry, there’s still always a story to tell. When done right, it captivates the audience and makes them intrigued to learn, and shop, more.

2. Know the Audience

Who is your client’s target audience? Is their clothing made for 90s nostalgic Gen Z kids or business-savvy professionals? To get the content marketing spot on, understand who they want to market to. The channels you use to share content, the tone you take, and the information you share have to align with that consumer niche. Gen Z might browse TikTok for their fashion looks. Office professionals might prefer blog posts with lots of pictures and tips on how to style business casual outfits from the workday to after-work events.

CopyPress has a way to help you determine what your client’s audience wants to see and how to create pieces they’ll love. Request a free content analysis report for each fashion client you serve. This report shows how your client’s current content compares to that of their top three competitors. Then it presents areas of content gaps. These are topics your client’s content doesn’t cover yet, but should, to give the audience what they want.

“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”

Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

3. Get Personal

Building relationships with consumers through content is important. According to Sprout Social, when customers have a connection to a brand, 76% of them are more likely to buy from that company over a competitor. Creating hyper-personalized content for your clothing clients doesn’t have to be difficult. Especially in the digital age. With the always-on availability of channels like social media and the direct communication of email and mobile marketing, it’s easy to give the audience the information they want, when and where they want to see it.

Using customer relationship management (CRM) tools lets you centralize the data you collect about your clients’ customers, and then learn more about them to create hyper-personalized strategies. For example, many fashion brands develop targeted email campaigns for their shoppers. After someone makes a purchase, the system stores what they buy and a few weeks later generates an email of suggested products that may interest the consumer based on past purchases.

This is a way to create shoppable content for the audience. The email is still content, but it has a transactional purpose. It saves people time and effort because they don’t have to browse the online store for new product ideas. And it makes customers feel like brands “get” them and know what they like. This deepens that connection they have to the company and increases customer loyalty.

4. Use Social Media as a Springboard

If you’re working with a fashion brand geared toward younger audiences, social media is one of the most important places to share content. According to Statista, about 56% of social media users ages 18-24 made at least one purchase on a social media channel in 2021. About 44% of social media users total in the United States, from ages 14 to 65+, made a purchase from social media in the same period. It’s not just the young kids buying off social media, either.

No matter your audience, you can find the right platform to showcase your clothing content in a way your audience wants to see. Fast fashion brands like Cider found footholds with Gen Z on short-length video platforms like TikTok. Features like “Get Ready With Me” videos, best friend style comparisons, and weekly trend report content captivate the brand’s audience.

Image via Instagram by @americaneagle

Longstanding brands like American Eagle still appeal to their millennial audience on visual platforms like Instagram. They share text and image posts, long-form videos, short-form video reels, and stories to increase brand awareness. They also use one of Instagram’s newer features, Guides, to create mini blog posts right on their account using curated content from their own profile and from those who have tagged the brand in posts.

The Instagram “Shop” feature allows browsers to look at images, prices, and product descriptions right on the app. It also gives browsers the ability to save products for later and visit the company website for more information.

5. Find the Right Influencers

The fashion industry relies heavily on influencers to sell products. Getting the right people to wear the right clothes in front of the right audience is important for brand awareness. It also encourages the “want” factor from the audience when they see people they like wearing certain outfits. This isn’t a new concept in the fashion industry. They’ve been using runway shows for years and selecting top models who become celebrities in their own right to show off the newest trends. These models generate more interest and sales in that clothing.

While runaway shows and modeling are still top-sellers for fashion marketing, influencers are the next best, and today probably even bigger, promoters. Why? Because they’ve built their personal brands on social media. That allows them to share content 24/7 with prospective buyers and create more personal connections with their followers. And if it’s one thing consumers crave, it’s individualized attention and personalization.

But not every influencer is right for your client’s brand. A mommy blogger influencer isn’t going to be the one to get Gen Z college students to buy leggings. But a TikTok star might. Finding the right influencers for your clients’ brands comes back to knowing the audience. Where do they spend their time online? Do they fit into an even narrower niche category? For example, Sarah Rae Vargas is a YouTube influencer who caters to plus-size female fashion. She partners with brands like Express to do try-on haul videos to show women how their clothing fits on a real body. She also gives styling tips and fashion advice in her videos.

6. Focus on Looks

Fashion isn’t just about buying things that fit or buying what’s available. It’s about the look. And what that look is differs for different demographics, geographic locations, and seasons. One of the most clever ways to do content marketing for fashion brands on any channel is to focus on the looks you can create with various products from the same clothing line.

Let’s say a customer is looking for a pair of jeans. What are the things they’re thinking about? Likely, sizing, pricing, and fit. The fit aspect is where showing off looks come in. Especially when online shopping, people can’t always figure out the cut or fit of clothing without trying it on first. But they can if you do your content marketing right. Whether it’s through photographs, videos, or another interactive form of media, show audiences how the clothes could look on their bodies and how to style them.

When you focus on outfits and looks within content marketing, you’re creating additional opportunities for sales within the brand. Maybe someone originally just wanted that pair of jeans. But after seeing a Lookbook real on Instagram, they see how nice the jeans look paired with a sweater from the same collection. Then, they add both to their cart. Engaging with Lookbook content also encourages customers to find new ways to make pieces more versatile. Photos and videos may show someone taking a skirt from a business casual day at the office to a night out with friends.

7. Change with the Trends

Trends in fashion change fast. Beyond seasonal trends, the colors, cuts, and aesthetics of fashion constantly turn over. Trends from the past always seem to come back around. Your client knows these things and adjusts their inventory accordingly. They’re on the pulse of what’s in style locally, globally, and with their niche audience. But your agency team has to be ready to make these kinds of shifts, too. It’s important not just to follow the trends in fashion, but to anticipate what’s coming next. Working closely with your client helps with this.

But as the content marketing provider, you also need to change with the trends in your industry. Staying current on best practices for all content channels helps make sure your pieces reach the top of the SERPs. Be sure to research topics like search intent, position zero, and artificial intelligence (AI) to learn about what’s coming next for the marketing industry and SEO.

8. Engage the Customers

Getting the target audience directly involved with a brand is a way to encourage their loyalty and increase their chances of buying a product. When the brand engages with real consumers, it makes those customers feel like they’re not just shoppers, but part of the brand. Whether it’s getting a like on social media or receiving a coupon for 25% off their next purchase during their birthday month, these things take the brand from an untouchable entity to a community.

What’s better, there are plenty of ways to engage with fashion followers in all your content hosting spaces. Social media makes the perfect place to hold live chats with customers to get their feedback about certain products or campaigns for the company. Email marketing and social media are places to hold contests and get customers to create user-generated content that makes them feel included. This also decreases the number of marketing materials your agency has to make for the company.

9. Embrace Other Causes

In today’s market, consumers aren’t just concerned with what a clothing company sells. They care about what the company does. What are the company values? Do they support charities? Are they committed to social issues like inclusion and sustainability? According to 5W Public Relations’ Consumer PR Culture Report, 83% of Millennial and Gen Z consumers say it’s important to them that a company’s values match their own. In the same report, over 50% of people in all age categories from 18 to 55+ said they’ve boycotted a company they previously purchased from because of its stance on an issue.

Image via 5W Public Relations

Brands won’t please everyone with their stance on social or political issues. But they might turn potential customers away if they don’t take any stance at all. Talk with your clients about the issues they support and the charity work they do. How can you incorporate those values into content marketing? Is it significant enough to the business model to be the basis for an entire content campaign?

10. Trust Direct Marketing

Direct marketing is a prime tool for content creation for clothing brands. We already discussed how email marketing strategies aid hyper-personalized content creation. But curated product lists are just the tip of the iceberg. You can use direct marketing to help clients engage with customers through email newsletters, style recommendations, and promotions.

For example, Thread is not a clothing company, but a fashion content service that works through email marketing. After taking the free quiz, users receive personalized style ideas sent to their inbox each week. Thread isn’t a subscription service. Users don’t receive a box each month and then have to choose whether to buy and keep the items inside. Instead, the style advice is all virtual and free to use unless the customer decides to place an order. The company partners with over 700 big-name and independent brands to curate a shop tailored to the customers’ style, size, and budget.

This is a different take on the personal style and personal shopper experience other services offer. It blends with direct marketing seamlessly to reach leads in their inboxes every week.

11. Go Behind the Scenes

Video content is a great medium to show people what happens in the production areas of their favorite fashion brands. These are the areas they wouldn’t normally get to see online or when they visit a store. Whether it’s designers working on the latest sketches or shipping teams preparing style boxes for excited customers, people go crazy for behind-the-scenes content.

Why? It adds value to people’s experiences with the brand. They get to see all the hard work that goes into getting the clothing from an idea and into their hands. It also humanizes the brand and shows the people behind the clothing. It allows team members to show their personalities and connect directly with the consumer audience in a way they might not get to do otherwise in their roles.

12. Prioritize Photography

Even if you’re big on the written word or videos, you can’t underestimate the impact of photography on fashion. Aside from product images on websites, there are tons of opportunities to show off your clients’ clothing with content photos. Social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest thrive on photo content.

Image via Instagram by @staud.clothing

With Instagram, you can create an aesthetic campaign with fashion photography. Look at how Staud used a particular set of photographs to show off its summer capsule collection with Birkenstock. The colors, clothing, and location all have a theme. It invokes thoughts of summer vacation, road trips, and wanderlust. This type of photography aesthetic is another way to brand content and get people to associate certain color schemes, poses, or even locations with a fashion brand to increase recognition on other channels.

13. Use Innovative Marketing Techniques

Don’t be afraid to think outside the written word, or even the camera lens, when developing content for your clothing brand clients. Augmented reality (AR) is becoming a more popular way for people to shop, especially with more online clothing sales taking place after the COVID pandemic in 2020. Apps like Reactive Reality’s PICTOFiT allow shoppers to take a full-body photo of themselves and then try on pieces from a company’s inventory in a virtual setting without ever leaving their house.

Image via Cooler Insights

Other apps like Stylebook allow users to take their closets on the go. Fashionistas can create looks, packing lists, and calendars to reflect their fashion habits. The app has clothing content all its own with a shopping feature, access to style expert blog posts, and a photo inspiration library. Could your clients benefit from some form of interactive and innovative content, like an app or an AR tool?

14. Stay Consistent

Does your client’s company have a consistent look and branding? Does its current or previous content have a consistent brand voice? If so, you want to make sure that all of your content marketing efforts flow seamlessly with what the company has already established. Use the company colors, taglines, and logos to accompany your written or visual content.

Consistency of the brand voice is just as important as the visual segments. Is the tone casual or serious? What kind of slang or language does the brand use? The brand voice often directly relates to the target audience and the company’s origin story. If your client doesn’t have visual branding or a concrete brand voice yet, that’s one of the first things to address. Work with them to determine how they want to sound and look to their audience. Then incorporate it into the content you create to establish their branding.

15. Optimize Everything

Don’t just focus on creating the content itself. Even if you write the best blog post about tie-dye t-shirts that the world has ever seen, it won’t correlate to sales for your client if nobody reads it. That’s why you need to be hyper-focused on also using a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for every piece of content you create.

At CopyPress, we put SEO at the center of everything we do. It’s the key to ranking higher in search results and reaching your target audience online. We work with our clients to develop clear goals and metrics to pair with key performance indicators. This doesn’t just send content to the top of search results. It helps develop the best long-term strategies to get every piece there, every time.

16. Remember It’s Not All About the Sales

In retail and other B2C markets, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that making sales is the most important part of the job. For agencies, it may be difficult to convince some brand leaders and owners that not all the content they create has to be strictly promotional. Yes, sales are a top priority for almost every company. Without sales, there wouldn’t be a brand. But the Marketing Rule of 7 states that someone has to be exposed to a brand or marketing message at least seven times before they make a purchase.

This doesn’t necessarily mean someone wants to see the same ad for tank tops seven times and then they’ll automatically want to buy one. Every single lead you encounter with content isn’t at the bottom of the marketing funnel, ready and eager to make a purchase. That’s why it’s important to focus on the top and middle of the funnel content, too.

Blog posts with fashion tips and advice. Behind-the-scenes videos. Social media giveaway contests. All these things are ways to help reach your target audience without making a hard sell. They work to expose new people to a brand and get them to encounter it repeatedly. This sparks interests and slides them further down the marketing funnel until they’re finally ready to make that conversion. Non-sales content also makes for good shareable content. That increases your chances of reaching even more prospective customers.

How Can We Track the Progress of Clothing Content Marketing for Our Clients?

As an agency, you know your clients focus on results. If they’re not seeing change and traction in their business from content marketing, why would they continue to work with you? But content marketing is a slow-burn strategy. It typically takes between four and six months and up to a year to see actual results on SERPs. While you might not see your clients’ content jump to position number one days after publication, there are other metrics to track to prove to them—and yourself—that the strategy is working. These include:

Brand awareness: Are people talking about your brand online or on other channels? Using things like social listening tools helps you determine how much of the market share your client’s brand captured with new content.
Cost Savings: Are sales increasing even if your client decreased their marketing budget? Content marketing is a smart, cost-effective way to increase conversions by investing in quality, results-focused resources.
Cross-selling: Is content that promotes one product also increasing sales of another? Review each piece of content to see where it has the largest direct impact on sales and see if you can target other verticals with the same piece.
Customer feedback: What are people saying in the comments of your content? Customer ratings and reviews let you know what people enjoy and find valuable, and what content turned them into paying customers.
Direct sales: Is your content sending people right to the bottom of the sales funnel to make a purchase? Any time you can prove that a purchase came from reading, watching, or interacting with your content, that counts as a direct sale.
Lead quality: Is your content appealing to the right audience? Testing the quality of your leads or determining which people are most likely to convert and make a purchase tells you if you’re reaching the right people.
Product awareness: Are people talking about your client’s specific products online? Social listening isn’t just for brand names and can tell you where information about specific clothing items appears across the internet.
Search rankings: Though these can take longer to change thanks to Google’s algorithms, an increase in search ranking and positioning shows that the content is gaining traction with the target audience.
Social media shares: How far is the content circulating in social media circles? The more shares and engagement clothing content gets online, it increases brand awareness and shows how well the content resonates with the target audience.
Subscriber growth: Is your client’s email list or social media following growing? The more people that interact with a brand online give more opportunities for people to get interested in what your client sells and turn them into paying customers.
Time on page: Are people spending more time on specific pages on your client’s website? The more time people spend on the page shows the content is helpful and user-friendly, which gives Google good signals to push it higher in SERPs.
Web traffic: Is your client’s blog, website, or eCommerce store receiving more web traffic after a content publication? Compare new and returning visitors to see who is benefiting most from the new content.

Let CopyPress Handle Your Clients’ Clothing Content Marketing Needs

Leave your clients’ content marketing to the professionals. CopyPress is an agency solution, so we provide the content for you to provide for your clients. We work in a variety of industries like retail and fashion and curate the perfect team to meet your clients’ needs. Ready to set up an agency partnership? Schedule your no-hassle introductory strategy call today.

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer