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Promote Your Fashion Brand by Apparel Search - Terms of Interest to the Fashion Industry |
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In this section you will learn about how to promote your fashion brand.
Promote
Your Fashion Brand
Is there anything
more important then promoting your brand ??? Well, I guess
the "quality" of your garments are more important.
However, for the sake of this article lets move forward on
the assumption that the promotion of your brand
is the most critical issue that you face. With this assumption
in place, lets now talk about some of the methods to turn your unknown
brand into a brand to die for...
Clearly the
best place to promote a fashion brand is at the Apparel
Search website, but their are also many other very good
resources. Although the internet has become a mammoth in regard
to advertising and self promotion, it is our opinion that offline
brand promotion is still very important. Lets segment this
discussion into two primary categories of promotion.
1) On-line
Promotion
2) Off-line
Promotion
Off-line Promotion - Television,
Magazines, Billboards, Radio etc.
In regards
to fashion their is much to be said for finding your brand gracing
the cover of a
fashion magazine.
Even if you do not grab the cover, having your garments or fashion
accessories listed in the body of a style mag certainly
provides excellent credence to your brand name. One question
you may be asking is how do you get your brand listed in an important
magazine such as
Vogue,
InStyle,
Elle,
etc. Does luck have a role in getting into a magazine?
Probably not... To get published in a quality fashion magazine
it most often takes either hard work or money (some times both).
When I say hard work, you can spend ample time contacting editors
and writers at the popular magazines. This may eventually
lead to having them agree to write an article about your brand.
However, more often then not, you may have to spend money advertising
in their magazine. Or spend even more money and produce your
own runway show so that they are almost forced to write something
about you or your event. In summary, magazines are great for
fashion brands to get recognized. If you can get published
in one, we suggest that you do so.
Similar to
magazines,
newspapers serve with an almost equal value. I say "almost"
because I think that the fashion and style "magazines"
are more appropriate for pushing your brand name on the consumer
then a newspaper. Lets be honest, the magazines have a better
method of providing color images. Simply stated, fashion articles
look better in magazines (when they include images). When
thinking about Newspapers, we have to look past the New York Times,
Wall Street Journal and your local newspapers. It is very
important in the fashion industry to also consider the trade papers.
Newspapers like the
DNR,
WWD and
Apparel News
are clearly powerful resources for the apparel industry. A
good article can help you, and a bad article can possibly hurt you.
Keep in mind that store buyers typically read these papers.
It is important to impress the ultimate consumer, but it is also
very important to impress retail buyers. Although the internet
provides a method to sell products directly to consumers, if you
want to develop a brand name, you really want to have your product
in the retail channel of distribution. So, you better get
yourself published in the trade papers to get yourself in the mind
of the
retail buyers.
If you have
a great deal of money, you may wish to consider advertising on television.
That is all that I plan to say about TV advertising... Sorry, too
expensive for me.
Although I
personally do not have experience with Radio or Billboard advertising,
my understanding is that this is a less expense form of advertising
then television. In my personal opinion, for developing a
long term brand awareness strategy, billboards may serve you better
then radio. Please do your own research in regards to radio
ads and billboard ads to promote your brand.
Well, I think
that I have talked more then enough about offline advertising methods.
Do to the fact that the Apparel Search Company is an online media
company, the on-line promotion is where we have the most experience.
Lets move along to the fun stuff...
On-line -
Yes, we mean the internet.
Unfortunately,
we can not tell you all of our secrets to online success.
However, we will try to give you a few hints to point you in the
proper direction. If you already have a brand developed
and a website to go along with it, our very first suggestion is
to try and meet either Larry Page or Sergey Brin. If
you are lucky enough to meet with either of them, we strongly recommend
that you immediately attempt to seduce them in any way possible.
It does not matter if you are male or female, just seduce them and
offer your hand in marriage. For those of you that are not
aware, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the co-founders of Google
(currently, the most important online resource in the universe).
Anyway, with all kidding aside, if you want to promote your apparel
brand online, it is important to have your website
search engine friendly.
In order to
keep your site search engine friendly (meeting standards set forth
by the search engines; and internet standards groups), you may wish
to consult an SEO company (Search Engine Optimization). In
our opinion you will need to be careful because even the SEO
companies may not fully understand the most current search engine
ranking methods. Therefore, they may offer you advise that
will ultimately hurt your search engine ranking rather then helping
you. Each search engine has different algorithms. In
addition, the search engine algorithms do not stay constant. The
bottom line is that you should do your best to make sure that your
site is developed properly. If you do not have the confidence
that you can develop the site well yourself, you can search for
an SEO company to assist you (Again, just be careful because I image
that some of them would provide good suggestions and others
may provide suggestions that will actually hurt your search engine
ranking). For your reference, currently we do not use any
SEO services. However, we may turn to them for advise in the
future. In summary, MAKE SURE YOU GET LISTED ON THE SEARCH
ENGINES.
If you site
is fully developed and ready to be promoted, we suggest that your
first stop be at the Google site. They are clearly the leader. You
will want to have your site listed on Microsoft's search engine
as well. In addition, you should also submit your website
url (website address) to other smaller search
engines. In my opinion, start with the engines
that allow "free" submissions. You can later go
back and register for search engines that require a fee if you think
that is appropriate. However, before spending money to get
onto a smaller search engine, you may wish to investigate ways to
get more exposure on the larger search engines. For example,
rather then pay to be on a small engine, you can investigate the
AdWords program at Google. You
can find similar programs at Microsoft and Yahoo. If you have
a budget to handle it, you may want to try all three. From
personal experience, I have this year tested Google, Yahoo, and
Microsoft with their advertising programs. It is too early
for me to analyze the effect (I will try to do this for you for
a future article). By the way, the only reason that I use
the Yahoo program is that I think that their search engine results "suck".
Because for some unknown reason, Apparel Search does not currently
show up in Yahoo. Therefore, the only way to have exposure
on that site is to advertise. Yes, that is super annoying
and it makes me dislike Yahoo... (anyway, that is entirely
another story). Getting back on the subject, MAKE SURE THAT
YOU GET LISTED ON THE SEARCH ENGINES.
After your
fashion site is developed and you are listed on the engines, it
is time to promote your brand on the fashion directories,
fashion blogs,
online fashion news resources, etc. In addition to creating
your own fashion blog, you can also promote your brand by asking
other bloggers to post articles about your company and brand.
As a matter of fact, you are welcome to post fashion relevant blog
postings at the
Fashion Newspaper.
In addition to style blogs, you can promote your brand on news websites.
In my opinion, it may be easier for you to get listed on an online
news resource then it would be getting published in an off-line
news resource. Actually, if you are interested, I would be
happy to post articles about your fashion brand here at Apparel
Search. You can view our
fashion
articles section to see what we have done for others
(at the bottom of this page you will find a method to contact us).
In regard to getting your company listed on directories, you can
add a listing here at Apparel Search and you can also create a listing
at the
Clothing Industry Directory website. You can
also search the internet and find numerous other fantastic apparel
industry directories to join. None are as good as
Apparel Search, but you
will find many excellent resources.
Another way
to promote your fashion brand is to join a
Fashion Industry Network.
From a fashion business network,
you can meet other like minded people. It is very possible
that they will offer better suggestions then I have provided in
this article.
Don't forget
to visit
fashion trade shows.
Even if you do not register a booth at the exhibits, you can at
least walk the show to try and develop business contacts.
If Apparel
Search can assist you with turning your new brand into a "popular
brand", let us know. We are happy to assist
if possible.
Oh yeah, I
almost forgot to mention. You should look into the possibility
of working with a
Public Relations company (PR firm). You may be
surprised how well that would work out for you. They can assist
you with all of the issues discussed above in this article.
By the way,
if you dreams fail miserably and you can not actually get your brand
off the ground, you can still fall back on a career in fashion.
If that time comes, you should visit our
employment section.
OK, I agree that much of what I have told you above is common sense. However, I guess it could not hurt to have read this information.
Good luck...
We truly wish you the best. Don't give up. Hey, don't
forget to invite us to your fashion shows when you are a famous
fashion designer. Thanks in advance.
Social Bookmarking Fashion Websites Follow Apparel Search on Twitter You may also wish to read about Social Bookmarking Fashion Website. Learn about viral marketing. For an example of viral marketing for the fashion industry, you may wish to view the fashion gadgets, fashion widgets, and fashion rss. The use of gadgets, widgets or rss feeds could be considered a form of viral marketing. You may also want to learn about lifestyle fashion brands. |
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