How to Promote Your New Online Clothing Store

If you have decided to open an online clothing store and make it successful, then you need to create a three-legged stool that will entice customers to buy from you. One leg of that stool consists of your website, the second leg is your social media activity, and the final leg is your pay-per-click advertising. If you let one leg be shorter than the others, then you end up reaching fewer customers and having a lower conversion rate.

Website

As an online clothing store, your website must be mobile-friendly, and it must load extremely quickly. If yours does not load in under a second, consider which things that you can eliminate. Another option is to load the main content while other things continue to load in the background.

Your website must lead customers through each step of the buyer’s journey. You need to attract customers to your website through your social media channels, your pay-per-click advertising, and your search engine optimization.

Once customers arrive on your site, then you need to make sure they see a well-organized website. They should be able to get to your most important policies, like your refund and shipping policies in two or fewer clicks. You should also ensure that your contact information appears on each page. This helps build trust with your customers and adds to more sales.

Your product descriptions need to be unique. Each description should point out the benefits of owning your clothing instead of focusing only on the features. For example, if you are selling a pair of vintage bell-bottom jeans, you might write step back in time with these bell bottom jeans featuring 20-inch openings at their bottom. Your product descriptions should paint a picture in the customer’s mind.

Once you have the customer primed to buy, then your checkout process should be as easy as possible. Apply lean business principles to your checkout procedures by eliminating any unnecessary steps. Do not ask a customer to join your email list until after you have closed the sale.

Social Media

Stop and think about who is buying your clothes. Then, consider which social media platform they are using and when. Generally, the best time to post on Facebook is on Wednesdays. If you are counting on Instagram to deliver results, then try posting on Tuesday through Friday between 11 AM and 3 PM in your customer’s time zone. If you are going to use Twitter, then try posting about 11 AM on Sunday mornings.

Regardless of which platform you choose, you should follow an organized pattern. Start by setting out your goals. There are many different possibilities, including:

• Building brand awareness
• Driving traffic to a landing page
• Getting people to interact with you on social media
• App downloads
• Conversions
• Catalog sales
• Get more traffic into your local location

Always be proactive in connecting with people who comment on your posts. People have become very distrustful of brands. Therefore, you need to use social media to put a face behind your brand.

Setting up a Facebook advertising campaign is simple. You may find this the most effective way to advertise your clothing business. After you have created your Facebook advertising account, then you will be asked to name your promotion. The next step is to be as specific as possible about your target audience. While you may eventually want to control where your ads are chosen, at least in the beginning, let Facebook choose where to place your ads. Set your budget and create your ad.

When creating your ads, keep Facebook’s limits in mind. For image and video ads, you have 25 characters for your headline, 30 characters for your link description, and 125 characters for your message.

Run your ad, making sure to watch to see if it is performing as you expect. You should continuously be running two ads against each other. Then, choose the one that is doing best while creating another one to try to beat it.

Advertising on Instagram is highly effective for many clothing companies. Start by choosing photos for this platform that showcase your products in real-life situations and are of exceptionally high quality.

Use hashtags that will connect with your target audience. You are limited to 30 hashtags per photo, so you can use them to connect with different segments of your target audience. You can use tools to choose your hashtags, spy on your top competitors to see what they are using, or look to see what hashtags are being used by influencers who are promoting similar products.

As with any campaign, you must measure your statistics and try to create campaigns that will beat your current one.

Pay-per-click Advertising

The third leg of the stool is paid-per-click advertising, and the most important is Google Ads. The first thing that you should do is learn how to setup your own PPC Advertising and create a great search campaign ad. When you win one of these auctions and get your website to appear on the first page of search engines results, then you have great chances for customers to click on your site and make a sale.

Another very successful idea is to bid by seasons and special occasions. You should set an editorial calendar so that you know when to bidding on specific categories. You may want to consider starting to offer on these categories about a month ahead so that your ads will be running when customers are looking. Key dates include:

• Valentine’s Day
• Mother’s Day
• Father’s Day
• Back to school
• Halloween
• Black Friday
• Cyber Monday
• Christmas season
• Post-Christmas sales

Another beneficial pay-per-click advertising technique is to sell by season. Start promoting your lighter-weight clothes as the weather warms up where most of your target audience lives. Then, move on to summer clothes as the weather gets warm. Fall is the perfect time to start promoting your cooler weather clothes before winter’s chill arrives, and you begin promotion of your winter lineup.

Concentrating on creating a three-legged stool will help you keep your digital marketing in line with your company’s goals. Always set goals for every campaign. Try to beat your old statistics with every change that you make.