As your shop window to the world, your website has incredible potential to build your brand and introduce your products to a huge number of shoppers. But with increasing competition in the online fashion scene, the need to take advantage of every opportunity to direct shoppers to your site has never been greater. In this guest post, The Fashion Network asked the experts at Manchester based online marketing agency I-COM for some tips.
The third and final topics covered will be Videos, Blogs and Social Media. Find out about Title tags, Page descriptions, Product descriptions and Images here and see the previous post, that covered SEO, Keywords and Back-Links, here.
Video by Matt Davies
“Videos on your site can enhance your visitor’s experience – you can increase the allure of the items from your store by uploading videos of them worn by models, for example, or make your brand more memorable with an exciting promotional video or advert.
“They also provide a fantastic extra source of exposure – Youtube has become the world’s second most used search engine, ranking just behind its owner Google, which regularly includes videos from Youtube’s inventory and other sites such as Vimeo in its first few results for relevant terms. You can help the search engines to find and index your own videos, whether they’re hosted on your site or elsewhere by implementing a video sitemap, a relatively modern innovation that is now supported by all the major search engines.
“Blogging provides another way to engage with your visitors and promote your products in a less direct way than your primary e-commerce facility. By writing about your items – who’s wearing them, how they fit into current trends, what they’d look best with etc. – you can apply a soft sell approach while also encouraging more hits from natural search, and visitors to return to read future updates. Blog content also tends to attract more backlinks than e-commerce pages.”
Social Media by James Roome
“Social media has the potential to be an extremely effective marketing tool for your fashion brand, provided you go about it in the right way.
“Start by considering the reason you are using social media in the first place; are you hoping to grow awareness for a fledgling brand, encourage online engagement with existing offline fans or drive more traffic to a website? Based on your decision, create objectives for your social media activity and think about which social platforms will be most likely to help you fulfil them.
“For any fashion brand Twitter and Facebook are pretty much a given, but there are also hundreds of niche fashion social sites like Lookbook, Weheartit and Polyvore that are worth looking into. Do a little research and see which one you think best suits your brand.
“There are thousands of fashion bloggers, and some of them are highly influential. Seek out a few bloggers who you think will like your products and make friends with them. Comment on their posts, follow them on Twitter and like them on Facebook. Before long, you’ll find they are coming to you interested in writing posts about your products.
“Sync up your offline PR with your online social media promotions. Use one to promote the other and vice versa. There are a lot of similarities between social media and PR; a good working relationship between your social and PR companies can pay dividends.
“Once you’ve got your social accounts off the ground, make your fans feel special; give them sneak previews of new lines and access to exclusive offers. Not only does this turn them into your biggest fans, it also encourages others to like and follow your accounts.
“And finally, be up front. Social media is inherently social; it isn’t intended as a marketing tool. What’s more, no-one likes to be lied to. Make sure the people you interact with know that you represent a brand in order to avoid an unpleasant backlash further down the line. “
Find out about Title tags, Page descriptions, Product descriptions and Images here and see the previous post, that covered SEO, Keywords and Back-Links, here.
