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When we spend money on our business, we hope there’s a return. Especially with advertising, the money earned from new customers should outweigh what was spent on the advertising itself— this is a sign of an efficient campaign. But how do we get to this point?
With the fashion industry expected to grow in the coming years, now is the time to advertise and take advantage of the wave. If you aren’t yet seeing the results, we have five tips for you in this guide. Catered towards the fashion and beauty market, this guide will address some advertising questions and hopefully push you towards a better return on ad spend (ROAS) this year.
Before anything else, you need to choose the right platform for your advertising. Sometimes, it’s not the campaign that’s failing to perform but the fact that you’re simply using the wrong platform for your campaign and audience. Most businesses are able to strike a balance with Facebook and/or Instagram because they yield the highest engagement, have billions of users and valuable targeting options.
With over 2.6 billion active monthly users, Facebook seems to be in every available market online. While Pinterest is overwhelmingly female and Instagram is largely young, Facebook seems to strike a balance between genders, ages and other demographics.
However, we recommend going for a video ad as opposed to a standard ad. Why? Well, engagement is at over 6%, which is much higher than link, photo and simple status posts. A simple animation can work wonders when people are scrolling their feeds. According to Facebook, 10 seconds is the average watch time for people viewing their videos. This is more than enough time so long as you pack the important information into the first ten seconds.
For the same reasons, we also recommend using Instagram stories to boost conversions.
For millennials, 85 out of 100 perform research before spending their money and 60 out of 100 visit the website of the product or service in question. Therefore, it’s important to maintain and update your blog. Especially when you want to be a market leader, your blog should be highly engaging and targeted to fashion and beauty lovers. With engaging content, you should see a boost in engagement.
When it comes to content, your options are limitless; you could produce how-to guides for your products, whitepapers for the industry, survey and opinion pieces, industry news, helpful tips and guides and more.
Whatever you create, your blog should complement ad campaigns and boost ROAS. Your ads will guide consumers to your website, and the website will convince them to spend their hard-earned money on your brand.
When some people look at an ad, they like the piece of clothing they see but worry about how it will look, whether it will suit them and how they should wear it. Ultimately, consumers in this niche see the person in the ad and want to look like them. At the same time, they also realize that the clothing chosen for the model has been arranged in a certain way. Of course, there’s also skepticism about the lighting, the staging, and all the other things the average person doesn’t have in their day-to-day life.
To solve this pain point, we recommend creating style guides for your customers. This allows them to learn how best to wear your clothing and pair individual items with other styles; there’s even an opportunity for upselling. As you discuss how the item works, they will feel compelled to get the whole look rather than just one piece.
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More and more, customers are demanding personalization with their experience—sometimes before they even land on your website. By the time they’ve discovered your Instagram Story or PPC ad, they already need personalization. For us, this comes through two different ways:
Currently, fashion eCommerce websites have a conversion rate of around 1.3%. If your conversion rate is significantly lower, we recommend retargeting campaigns. If somebody has shown an interest in a product, target them again before they change their mind or choose to go elsewhere. It might be a Facebook campaign so that they see your name and products again while scrolling through their feed.
If you want to see personalization in the shopping experience in action, you don’t need to go any further than the internet’s largest marketplace, Amazon. Every time we log into our account, we get suggestions for products we might like as well as a history of products we have browsed in previous sessions. Amazon considers both our previous purchases and customers with similar interests when it makes suggestions. This is personalization at its finest.
In the fashion industry, people crave product recommendations and often enjoy seeing suggested items. To boost your ROAS, use retargeting for those who have engaged with the business and its products and make the shopping experience as personal as possible. If a customer shows an interest in one pair of shoes, why not recommend others that are similar?
In the fashion and beauty sector, as in any industry, it’s vital to understand your buying audience. Take Blank Label, for example. It launched with the aim of targeting young creative professionals, which it assumed remained its target audience for the first few years. After finally sitting down with the research, it soon learned that the average customer was in their late-30s as opposed to their early-20s. What’s more, it learned that its customer base largely consisted of attorneys and accountants, not artists and creative types. Rather than going back to its original plan, Blank Label rebranded and leaned into this news.
The lesson? Rather than assuming you know your audience because sales are coming in, take the time to learn who is actually buying your products. This will help to shape future products and future ad campaigns, and therefore boost ROAS.
If your dive into the data shows a different audience than the original, you can choose to stick to the old plan, or follow in Blank Label’s footsteps and accept the change. Either way, make sure your marketing materials reflect your decision, and don’t aim to target both unless you have a careful strategy and the right resources. Many brands have half-heartedly gone after both audiences only to lose direction and sales.
In the fashion and beauty industry especially, if you want to boost ROAS, you should strongly consider working with an influencer. In this market, there are influencers out there with ready-made audiences. They have millions of people tuning into videos everyday, so why not take advantage of their popularity? There is hardly any difference between working with a traditional celebrity or an influencer to advertise your product; the result is the same. The only difference is that now celebrities can be born on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok and form their audiences there instead of in the music or film industries.
Why does it work? Not only do millions of millennials consume influencer content, nearly three-quarters read the opinions of others before purchasing a product. The influencer should be somebody consumers can trust. If their favorite influencer is wearing your makeup or clothing, you immediately have trust and credibility in the market—it’s the paramount customer review.
If you’re going to complement your ads with influencer content (or even use an influencer in your ad campaign), we have some advice for you. Firstly, disingenuous or deceptive advertising saturates the influencer marketing industry, and one wrong move could be a huge hit to your campaign. Engaging in partnerships honestly is critical. Secondly, for this reason, we advise getting on board with someone who genuinely likes your products (and whose content you genuinely like in return). The more natural the relationship, the better the results.
Lastly, always choose an influencer in your own niche. In the world of fashion and beauty, this should be relatively easy.
How do you boost your ROAS? Make sure you’re on the most effective platform, and remember that video ads perform very well (especially on Facebook). After this, team up with influencers, update your blog with high-quality content, personalize your advertising, learn the buying audience and create style guides for assistance and upselling.
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