Ever since Chiara Ferragni started her blog The Blond Salad, we have seen a hype around the possibilities offered by influencers to promote brand’s products through their channels.
At the beginning it was more like an exchange of a product for visibility on the influencer’s social channel, but like everything, where there is a flow of money there is the need and opportunity for a more structured approach.
Today, in the 2021, fashion companies invest a relevant part of their digital marketing budget to promote the brand via influencers. With the Covid-19 pandemic Fashion companies have accelerated the switch over from paper fashion magazines to digital channels.
Social media marketing is effective because it is similar in his principle to the word of mouth, or it’s like to have a suggestion from a friend or a person we trust.
92% of people around the world said they trust recommendations from friends and family (earned media) above all other forms of advertising.
Nielsen
This hasn’t changed with covid nor with the digitisation.
How do we measure the Return On Investment on Incluencers?
To get to the answer we need to analyse the benefits expected from the social media marketing activities:
- Increase in Brand Awareness: number of followers, research on google, website traffic
- Increase in Engagement e.g. questions, shares, comments
- Increase in Online Sales within the channel i.e. social shopping or from the ecommerce website
How to organise the social media marketing team
Some companies are dedicating teams of community managers to engage with the fans on social media. The community managers should have the hard skills to interact with fans on social media according to the rules of the channel, but they should also have the “Customer Service” attitude and the “Sales” competences to deal with customers who may have specific enquires and to convert prospects who are ready to buy through proactive communications.
If a customer asks for the price of a product, the community manager should be able to quickly reply to the customer, which means the Community manager should have the price list, the product code, if there is any discount or promotion active on that product, if it’s available in the prospect country or geographic area. In other words the community manage acts like online sales assistant.
Which channels should we use?
As we all know there are several social media available and it would be very hard for a medium size fashion brand to be present effectively on the majority of them. Wikipedia report around 30 social networks with more then 100 million registered users. If we have to choose which channels we should actively manage we can choose thoose channel that we are able to manage, which means we are able to speak “the language of the channel”.
| Social Network | Language & Tone of voice | Target |
| Images and Videos | Men and women, millenials and older | |
| Tick Tok | Funny videos | Gen Z |
| Product news, Shopping opportunities | Millenials and older | |
| Youtube | Emotional of informative Videos, Live videos | Prospects and customers |
| Corporate news, Runways shows live | Professionals and students |
What is the down side of social media for fashion companies?
One of the main risks associated with the development of a strong fellowship on the social media platform is lack of ownership of the contact details of the followers. Because the social networks control everything that happens on the social media own platform, it’s actually possible that the platform at some point may change the algorithm that determines the visibility of the brands on the platform, this could cause a decrease of visibility of the brand posts, that may determine a loss in visibility and/or sales for the brand.
The reason behind this possible change is that the social media platforms are free for the private users but they need to make money from advertising. And because it’s the company accounts that pay for the advertising the social media platforms have an interest in reducing the companies accounts visibility so that they invest money in advertising to gain back the visibility lost.
The copyright on the social media platforms.
The second downside of the social media is that the brands give up the rights on the content they upload on the social media platforms the very moment they upload them. Both Youtube and Facebook
… a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This means, for example, that if you share a photo on Facebook, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others (again, consistent with your settings) such as service providers that support our service or other Facebook Products you use. This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.
… a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). You can end this license anytime by deleting your content or account. However, content will continue to appear if you shared it with others and they have not deleted it. Instagra
Instagram
Which KPIs can we use to measure the performance of social media marketing?
Let’s divide the KPIs into Micro-conversions and Macro-conversions: the first thing we want to track it’s of course the number of followers that we gain through the social media campaign and then the number of comments and also the sales.
That’s good but it’s not enough. We need also to evaluate the quality of the engagement, the quality is determined by how relevant are the comments. If the comments are just made with the purpose of getting visibility to the person who made the comment are not qualified comments.
The comments that you consider as relevant are comments like: where do I find the product, how much does it cost. Or people who tag other people, like their friends, and they generate word of mouth.
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