How The Fashion Industry Maximises Digital Media

In the last week, London Fashion Week has dominated the world stage... but in case you missed it, London Fashion Weekend starts tomorrow. While the catwalks were filled with new creations and the fashion pack eagerly awaited new trends, the industry's ability to maximise and leverage social commerce during this period was strikingly clear.

Content marketing manager, Jack Oldham, at marketing engagement platform EngageSciences looks at the success of the industry and suggests three ways in which digital marketers can learn from their fashionable counterparts.

Every February and September, global fashion brands reveal their latest collections at Fashion Weeks around the world. In recent years, Fashion Weeks have become increasingly digital, expertly bridging the offline with the online to enable social commerce in real-time. Employing social media, real-time shopping, and using social influencers as brand advocates, fashion brands have excelled in leveraging new technologies to reach young, savvy audiences.

This month, leading fashion brands Burberry (below) and Paul Smith announced “Insta-gratification” strategies, allowing consumers to instantly buy the clothes they saw on the runway. Such innovation-led tactics demonstrate how adept fashion brands have become at engaging consumers – by placing social at the heart of their brand campaigns.

Burberry shares highlights from its LFW show on its Instagram account.

Here’s what brands outside of fashion can learn from this dynamic industry.

1. Analyze your social data to plan product lines

Using social tagging, brands can individually analyse online consumers’ content preferences over a lifetime period, in real-time. Here’s how: marketers can tag posts and updates on social networks like Google+, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram with a chosen taxonomy, and then review which content themes and products get the most reach, engagement and resonance. With this actionable data, the brand marketer can then effectively plan and adapt product type, quantity and placement with timely precision across multiple channels.

2. Turn your website into a social selling hub

Two thirds of the content in the ‘digital universe’ is created by consumers, and research shows that consumers are far more influenced by credible and authentic content created by their peers than glossy imagery created by brands. Leveraging user-generated content (UGC) is a useful tactic that turns consumers into brand advocates.

The fashion industry has been at the forefront of embracing its own brand enthusiasts and actively promoting them as authentic brand champions. For example, the Net-a-Porter-owned NetSet (below) selects social media content uploaded by influential online users and makes it instantly shoppable.

The Netset app provides a live feed of what's currently trending, making items available for consumers to buy.

Enabling purchases directly from social content is more likely to generate a sale, as consumers are more receptive to buying directly from content they find engaging, as opposed to disruptive interstitial ads from brands.

3. Showcase your influencers in-store

Fashion retailers now have the infrastructure to ‘sell the look’ or ‘complete the package’ in-store, encouraging a higher volume and value of transactions through the checkout. Implementing in-store social displays with curated consumer content provides a fun, tailored and interactive shopping experience.

Topshop offers a luxury, but complimentary shopping service, that allows shoppers to tap into the expertise of on-hand and in-store stylists.

As we step into 2016, consumer-generated data continues to increase. Brand marketers and retailers across various verticals can take a page out of fashion’s playbook to help better optimize product performance, engagement and to drive socially-referred commerce for seasons to come.