You Need Deep Pockets Using This Type Of Fashion Advertising

This is a classic example of the "image" style of fashion advertising which I saw in a magazine recently…

Why do I say you need deep pockets to run this fashion advertisement? Someone has paid a large sum of money $1,000 or more to run this advertisement to ‘brand’ their clothing label and fashion business. This "image" style of advertising, unless run frequently (at a significant cost), often will not have an impact to the sales of the fashion business. Deep pockets = lots of money wasted … ouch!

Fashion Retailing Meets The Titanic

I get correspondence from a surprising number of fashion retailers who own smaller stores where the annual sales revenue is ‘stuck’ at $200k, $300k or even $500k per annum. I’m told that not only have ‘sales growth’ have been stagnant this year, but for many years.

When I write back to ask them what fashion marketing, advertising or customer relationship activities they are working on – I usually get this response…

"Oh, we need to buy some new stock and move our displays around. We should have this all done soon. Maybe we can look at marketing next year."

Talk about "Shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic!"

If 100% of fashion marketing ‘activity’ is stock ordering and moving it around the store… Beware!!! It’s like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.

Albert Einstein once said "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a difference result".

Yes, buying new stock and making the store displays attractive is important. Good visual merchandising does lead to increased sales. However, it can’t occupy 100% of the fashion business owner’s time.

At least 1-3 hours a week should be devoted to fashion promotion and working on the marketing calendar. You can’t expect store sales growth without this activity. It just won’t happen.

So when I get the ‘deck chair replies’ – I say to myself … "Insanity"!

If you are a fashion retail store owner and do spend 1-3 hours a week on ‘non-titanic’ activities – well done.

If not, or if you don’t know how to break-through to higher sales revenue, contact us about our fashion marketing programs. Not only will you save time and money ‘experimenting’, you will get actual proven and tested promotions ‘ready to roll-out’ for instant sales and more cash in your bank account.

Click here to contact us, or click here to join our entry level Fashion Retail Insiders program for only $47 per month.

Using The Mailbox Flyer Fashion Marketing Strategy Successfully

"Fashion Retailer Brings In An Extra 51 People In One Week!" – but, first a little background information…

Often fashion retailers approach me and say they don’t have a lot of money to spend on advertising. If their fashion shop is in a residential area, or in a suburban shopping centre, I often recommend the mailbox flyer marketing strategy.

A mailbox flyer is a one page pamphlet stuffed into residential mailboxes (letter boxes).

Many retailers may have tried flyers in the past, but stopped because they didn’t get a good result. However, John’s Shoe Store brought in an additional 51 people in one week last month (they tracked them) using the flyer from our ‘Customer Marketing Sales Kit‘.

Getting a good result from a flyer design down to simplicity with a marketing message that entices the reader to visit the store.

Often retailers will focus too much on a ‘branding’ message rather than a design focusing on new styles and looks. Sure, you can achieve a similar result from Community Newspaper advertising, but occasionally I like to ‘mix-up’ the marketing to reach local, surrounding homes for stronger store recognition and branding. Oh yeah, a tip: I prefer the A5 size (1/2 A4) as it doesn’t require folding (as you would need to do for the A4 size), you get double the amount of flyers when printing, and the A5 size is easy for someone to put in letter boxes.

Getting Good Results From Your Fashion Advertising

Having a quiet week? Want to bring in more store traffic – right now?

Good, consistent store traffic year round is the holy grail of fashion retailing. There’s no point spending money on good stock, hiring the best sales staff, having the nicest store with the best customer service if people don’t come in. Ensuring regular people traffic is one of the major challenges for most fashion retailers.

Our Fashion Retail Insiders know the twelve (12) specific ways to bring in more traffic to a fashion store and they understand the specific tactics that make them successful. Many of the twelve traffic strategies will be familiar to you, like … print media advertising, internet fashion advertising, good building signage, referral programs, and so on…

However, in order to get a good result from any fashion advertising or marketing campaign, a specific tactic or marketing message, is required.

For many smaller retailers especially (and larger fashion retailers too), the focus needs to be on generating a customer. Yes, absolutely branding is important, but if it’s the sole message in the advertisement, it will be a costly expense for the retailer – as we say in the marketing game – "you need deep pockets". A better way, is to employ a marketing message that brings in paying customers AND builds your brand at the same time. That way your fashion advertising and marketing will pay for itself.

Take for example; Fashion Retail Insider  Gill from John’s Shoe Store. Gill took one of our designs and tested a very small advertisement in the local community newspaper – it brought in $1,382.70. Granted it was a very small advertisement and dollar sale, but you can see the potential of running a similar advert weekly. i.e. $1,382.70 x 52 weeks is $71,900.

I’m sure adding almost $72,000 in annual revenue would be welcome by any fashion retailer.

Not only is the revenue important, but see what else happens :

• 12 new customers were introduced to the business (from one week) – that would be 624 new customers a year. Those customers would return to make additional purchases and refer other people to the store, and,
• The retail store would achieve brand awareness with the readers of the local community newspaper.

And that’s a good result from fashion advertising!

When Is The Right Time To Open Your Next Fashion Retail Store? Part 1

Oh boy, this is literally the million-dollar question.

When it comes down to it, there is only so much sales revenue and profit you can generate from one fashion retail store. You are usually limited by floor space and how much stock you can display.

However, you can generate a lot more revenue from one store than you might think. I love this real-life business story…

“Tom O’Toole turned a failing little bakery in an isolated and dying Australian country town (Beechworth, VIC) with a population of 3,000 into a company with an annual turnover in excess of $12 million, serving over one million customers per year.” “A bakery that has become one of the highest earning single bakery retailers in Australian history.”

So how do you grow your revenue in your existing fashion store. Again, in a nutshell, it comes down to good branding and fashion marketing, good products and great customer service.

You may have read or heard of my comments about branding – essentially I subscribe to the Dan Kennedy marketing rule… “Branding should be a by-product of good marketing”.

In other words, advertising or marketing that generates customers at a profit and pays itself – should always be your primary goal. We’ll discuss this further at another time.

So, to summarise – you don’t always need to open that next store, right now. You can squeeze out a lot more profit out of the store(s) you own already. But, if you’re still thinking about that new fashion store – I’ll go through on my next post some very important things you’ll need to consider before you put down a deposit on that new lease. Watch this space.

Retail Shopping Centre Fashion Advertising

Do you have a retail store located in a shopping centre? If so, I’m sure you’re familiar with the extremely high rent and outgoings bill you receive every month. Besides the building and services component – a portion of your monthly fee to the shopping centre company also covers centre promotion and advertising. It’s the shopping centre’s role to bring in people so they can charge the retailer a fee for the space. Nothing new with that. However, it’s actually a good idea to know how much of your annual rent is attributed to receiving store traffic (browsers and customers).

Let say you have a 30m2 store. Figure 1 : Your current shopping centre rent (let’s use $50,000 per annum for simpicity). Figure 2 : The cost of renting a 30m2 office in a street in the back lots of an industrial area (let’s say it costs $15,000 per annum). The difference $35,000, is the annual cost paid for the ‘better’ location (shopping centre v.s. back lots).

Some retailers choose to have a store located in a quieter street location and not in a shopping centre, but in order to create the same revenue, much more money needs to be spent on fashion advertising.

i.e. Shopping Centre = high rent, lower individual store fashion advertising expenses.

Quiet location = lower rent, higher individual store fashion advertising expenses (in order to produce a similar annual revenue).

There is aways that trade-off. Whether one option is better or not for your store really comes down to your level of experience in fashion retailing, your brand and sales system.

Improving Retail Store Traffic : How Many Browsers & Customers?

When it comes to finding out how effective your fashion advertising is (and even the advertising of the shopping centre management – if this applies to you) in bringing people into your store, you’ll need to have a system to measure STORE TRAFFIC.

Even if you don’t advertise – you’ll need to understand which days of the week and which months are your quiet times and which are your busy times.

Simply looking at your retail store sales figures only tells you half the story – how many people made purchases, not how many people came in.

The best way to find out how many people came in is to install a store traffic counter across the entry (or entries to your store). Armed with this information, you can create a more effective marketing calendar and fashion business strategy.

Here’s a small list of some of the benefits of having an automated store traffic counter…

• Be able to monitor how effective your advertising and marketing promotions are.
• To be able determine your sales conversion.
• Know whether you are generating enough store traffic to ensure target sales revenue.
• Ensure you have enough staff during peak times and be able to reduce staff at quiet times.

Closely monitoring your store traffic will allow you to refine your marketing and even reduce money wasted on ineffective marketing campaigns! IMPLEMENTATION : You can get electronic store counters from ‘Total Count’ in Melbourne. This is their web site address : www.totalcount.com.au

They have inexpensive counters and all the way up to advanced models. And before you ask. No, I don’t get a commission by recommending them. Our clients have been using the counters from Total Count and they have been reliable.

THE KEY POINT : You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Automated systems work best because they don’t rely on humans – if you don’t have a store traffic counter – now is a great time to get one!

Fashion Advertising : How To Get People To Visit Your Fashion Store Website

People visiting your website (or traffic as it’s called in the internet world) can be a source of new customers for your fashion retail store.

In my last post, I talked about the advantages of having a website for your retail store. The next step is to discuss ‘traffic’.

Just like in your physical brick’n'morter store, the more people that visit your website, the more new customers and sales you will generate. Before we can look at ways to increase traffic to your retail store website using advertising, let’s examine the ways people usually search for, or come across a website…

Method 1 – SEARCH) They search for an existing brand using a search engine. e.g. They search for "Nike".

Method 2 – SEARCH) They search for an existing product using a search engine. e.g. They search for "Nike SB".

Method 3 – NEWS / PUBLICITY) They skim the news topics in online, or in traditional media, find an interesting fashion article, read it, and then visit your web site.

Method 4 – ONLINE ADVERTISING) They see a product they like advertised on a portal / directory / web site they visit frequently.

Method 5 – OFFLINE ADVERTISING) They see a product they like advertised in traditional media like newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, etc. Then they type the URL of your web site into their web browser, or search online for your store name.

Method 6 – ONLINE LIST ADVERTISING) The product / brand / label is promoted via email to a list of people who have subscribed to receive an e-newsletter. The link in the e-newsletter takes them to your website.

Method 7 – DIRECT) The prospect / customer visits the retail store and at some point visits your fashion web site by typing the URL into their web browser.

These are the main methods of bringing traffic to your retail web site. Most retailers will need to look at utilising several of these marketing methods, not just one. My recommendation is to take some time to sit down to think about and create an online marketing plan and how that plan ties in with your current website design and sales strategy.

For example, are you using your fashion store website to get people to visit your store, or to make a purchase online, or to subscribe to your online newsletter?

Will A Web Site Make You More Money For Your Fashion Business?

I’m sure every fashion retailer would be in favour of having a web site for their business – but not every retailer actually has one. Why is that?

As always, I believe the question comes down to cost and return-on-investment (ROI). Websites aren’t cheap. There is a cost to designing an unique site and the hours of graphic and web programming involved. In order to figure out the return-on-investment for a fashion retailer, let’s look at the some of the benefits of having a good website :

• 24 / 7 convenience : A customer or a potential new customer can browse your website to look at the latest styles and fashions you have available.
• Customer assistance : A customer or a potential new customer can look up your contact or location details. They could view the outside of your store, it’s location on a Google map, or find what your opening hours are.
• Mailing list : A customer or a potential new customer can sign up for your fashion eNewsletter which is a great strategy for increasing sales.
• Web search : A potential new customer who has never heard about your retail store before comes across your website after a search for a particular brand.
• Recommendation :A friend of a potential new customer recommends your store and that person visits your web site to find out more.
• Branding : If you are seeking to build your brand, a good web site will assist in the brand-awareness process.
• Publicity : Someone browsing the internet, comes across some news or information about your store on another site and then visits your website.
• Credibility : A good retail web site lends credibility to the business.
• Online Advertising option : A web site is a requirement for online fashion advertising. Online advertising is an effective way to bring more customers to your business.
• Online sales : Generate sales 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. People visit your site and make a purchase. Generally speaking, online sales are better suited to fashion items like jewellery, footwear and accessories. But, clothing can be sold too.

I’m sure you’re now impressed with some of the major benefits of having a fashion store web site, but in order to maximise those benefits the web site needs to be designed in a certain way. Keep an eye out for my next post…

Timing Your Fashion Marketing Event

I just got off the phone with one of our retailer clients and I was typing up the action plan for our next marketing event when I realised the timing required for a successful promotion. Here’s a brief list of some of the things we usually need to organise:

1. The media we plan to use. The answer comes from asking these questions… Who are we promoting the event to? Just to store customers? To new customers? All customers?
2. The running of the event : staff resources, signage, tables, displays, etc.
3. Photographs of the fashion apparel, shoes or jewellery we are promoting.
4. The design of the email and/or print marketing campaign.
5. The third-party advertising and marketing suppliers (if required). The SMS marketing company, the newspaper company, the flyer distribution company, the mailing house, etc.
6. The exact timing sequence. When do the adverts appear? When does the mail out need to arrive at the customer’s house? And so on.

Even though the action list items sound like a lot of work, in reality most events are small and don’t require more than 8-10 hours of preparation.

If we assist the retailer with the promotional event then most of the action items are handled by our company – the retailer can then focus on the event itself, without all the extra worry.

Media Ideas for Fashion Advertising

The first source of people visiting your retail store is the obvious one – walk or drive by traffic. Besides that, getting your store, brands and/or labels noticed by the public requires some form of advertising. Again, there is a multitude of media and places to advertise. Here are just a few…

Your city newspaper Local community newspaper Special interest newspaper Inserts (newspapers) Magazines Industry newsletter Trade journals Yellow Pages Taxi backs and bus sidings Coupon / voucher books

Shop-a-dockets Radio Television Internet Mailbox flyers (to residential addresses) Special event signage Sponsorship / Charity Shopping Centre promotions Cinema (which I don’t recommend as an effective media)

The choice of media depends on several factors including:

• Location; whether you have one local store or a chain of stores,
• General or Specific; whether you sell something specific like baby wear – so speciality media is a better option, and,
• Cost.

 

Magazine Fashion Advertising

Once you have thought about your target market and have designed your new advertisement aimed at that target market, you can now find out where to advertise. There are literally thousands of places to advertise your fashion items (clothing, footwear and jewellery).

I will discuss various advertising media in future posts on this web site, but for the moment let’s look at one obvious one, which is Print – magazines. To see which particular publication or publications match your target market, look at the readership demographics and psychographics information. Here are some of the ways to do this…

1. Pop down to your local newsagency and purchase a half dozen magazines based on your understanding of the market for each publication. Read through each magazine to get a feel for the target audience. Which ones are suitable for your fashion advert?
2. Borrow a copy of the Margaret Gee’s Australian Media Guide (you can usually find one at your state library).

The Media Guide is a comprehensive listing of all newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations in Australia together with key journalists’ contact details for each.

• Contact details (address, phone, fax, email) for both individuals and outlets
• The advertising rates and deadlines for each publication
• A concise summary of the audience of various media outlets
• Precise details regarding subscription, circulation and cover price of each publication

Now we’ve covered fashion advertising style, target audience and have chosen suitable magazine media. Go to it!

All About Fashion Advert Placement

Planning your fashion advertising campaign

Once you have decided what style of fashion advert you want – branding, benefit, sale/offer or event; you need to then think about your target audience before choosing a media to advertise in.

(If you’re not sure which style of fashion advert to use – click here to see our previous post on fashion advertising examples).

Target market questions… What are the demographics and the psychographics of your customers? Are you targeting females from the age of 18 to 30? Are you trying to reach older women with higher disposable incomes? To find out, take this short questionnaire.

Fashion advertising target market

1. Sex? Male or female or both.
2. Age bracket?
3. Price bracket?
4. Style?
5. Use? Day wear, evening wear, club wear, casual, formal, bridal, cocktail, etc.
6. Emotional appeal? To look sexy, to look younger, to look older, to look professional, to look wealthy and successful, to look powerful and in control (i.e. business women and men), to look desirable, fun loving, thrill seeking, etc.

The next step is to find a photographer, models and items of fashion (clothing, footwear and jewellery) that communicate that message in one visual image. If you’ve advertised to brand your fashion business and labels before you’ll know all about it.

What’s our take on fashion advertising? Simply, almost all fashion businesses and retailers prefer to focus entirely on expensive advertising to generate new customers with little or no effort taken to retain customers using good internal branding or marketing systems. Such systems maximise customer retention which in turn creates more word-of-mouth advertising and referrals – much cheaper!

For more information about how to achieve this in your fashion business, request a copy of our ‘Marketing Secrets Of Top Fashion Retailers!‘ – click here to download your copy.

What About Fashion Business Advertising?

Frequently Asked Questions About Fashion Business Advertising

Fashion advertising is a hot topic – common questions I get asked by retailers are – "How can I get more customers?" or "Where should I advertise?" or "What do you think of this advertisement?"

If you have an established retail fashion business (clothing, footwear, jewellery, etc) seventy percent (70%) of your advertising dollars should be spent on re-selling to your existing customers. Why?

It’s 5 times easier to sell something else to your existing customers than to get a new customer.

And yet I see most retail businesses spend thousands of dollars in the media trying to get new business – only to forget all about those people after they buy. If you were to communicate to your customers and ask them to buy again, you’d see an almost magic increase to your bottom line. Done correctly, this always works better than chasing new customers.

Listen, next time you are going to run an advertisement in the newspapers promoting a sale or whatever, try this. Reproduce the advertisement and send it to your existing clients. Attach a note saying . . .

"I thought you may want to see this, come in the day before to get your best pick of the bargains. Regards . . . "

This will work wonders if your sale has a genuine appeal!!

Fashion Advertising Basics For Retailers

Most fashion retailers at some time will invest money into fashion advertising. As with all fashion marketing there must be a purpose or objective. Generally this purpose is to lift the awareness of the ‘label’ or ‘store’ through image advertising, or, to drive more potential customers into a particular store or chain of stores.

Fashion advertisements typically contain the product being promoted (i.e. footwear, jewellery, clothing or fashion accessories) on their own or with models wearing the fashion product. Often, fashion advertising is heavily linked with sexuality, glamour, beauty and youth.

Fashion advertising usually falls into one of four main categories :

1. Branding. Model or models wearing the item with just the name of the label or store (with logo)
2. Benefit. A fashion advertisement containing words describing the benefits of the product.
3. Sale / Offer. Using an offer such as % (percentage) OFF or $ (dollar) OFF to bring in customers during a sale or as an enticement for a certain period of time.
4. Event. To promote an event such as a store opening, fashion parade, celebrity visit, etc.

Here are some examples :

Fashion advertising brand awareness example

 

Fashion advertising benefit example

 

Fashion advertising sale / offer example

 

Fashion advertising event example – Summer Fashion Parade

 

Image and Branding for a Fashion Business

Image and Branding is a strong motivator for fashion retailers but what do these concepts actually mean?

Simply, ‘Image’ is the perception (picture) that consumers have about a particular business at any one point in time. Whereby, ‘Brand’ is the relationship between the business and the consumer’s values. For example, when a consumer looks to purchase a running shoe they may think of Nike because of it’s alignment with winning and achieving.

Image and branding has everything to do with identifying your target market, identifying the values that are important to your target market and then creating an image and a brand that relates to those values.

Trying to cover all demographics and values is not recommended because it would be very difficult to achieve effective branding economically. The consumer will be disappointed with the product and the business.

For example, promoting luxury airline tickets whilst actually hearding travellers into small seats and delivering poor customer service will upset those consumers and word will get out and damage the ‘Brand’. Conversely, entering the marketplace promoting high levels of service at a cheap price, will hurt margins for the business and will unsustainable in the long-term.

Typically a brand will consist of an unique mix of values for a fashion business, such as :

• Consumer benefits,
• Style,
• Durability (clothes, shoes and jewellry)
• Quality,
• Price,
• Consumer age target (e.g. children, young adults, mature adults, Generation X, etc),
• Image projection (conservative, hip-hop, professional business, modern, sportswear, etc),
• Culture,
• and so on.

Branding can also be broken down into ‘external’ and ‘internal’. External branding is prodominately used to create new customers for the business via mass advertising, such as print, internet, radio and television.

Internal branding is reminding existing customers that you value their business of which the aim is to increase repeat sales from those customers. Internal branding will typically use such media as email, SMS, direct mail and the telephone.

Creating an image and a brand for fashion retailers is not about flashy and slick advertisements. It’s about getting your key customers (target market) to recognise your business as their prefered choice for the products you provide.

Clothing Manufacturer & Retailer Grows After Being ‘Stuck’ For Over 5 Years!

Elana Geldenhuys Director, Geldens Pty Ltd, Leederville WA.

"We signed up for Kinetic Media & Marketing services at a time when we had been in business for 20 years. We felt that we were no longer growing and had in fact become quite stagnant. Mark Fregnan from Kinetic, has guided and assisted us through several business decisions that have resulted in changes to strategy, and has provided us with the tools to grow. We have implemented clear policies and documented these. This has improved our selling technique and saved time as finally we are organized! We have graded our customers (A,B,C) and are setting up a proper customer base that will be an added asset to the business. We have changed our approach to marketing and advertising, and Mark advised us on our brochure information and layout, which has definitely resulted in improved sales. We have established a good relationship with Kinetic Media & Marketing, and will continue to use their services as consultants in marketing and advertising and in any way that will continue to improve our business. This has been an investment (not an expense), and I would recommend other businesses to join the programme."

Why did I create this site for fashion retailers?

 

Hello, my name is Mark Fregnan. I work with fashion retailers everyday. So, why did I create this web site?

Simply due to the frustration I hear from clothing, footwear and jewellery retail shop owners. I’m sure you can relate to some of these challenges:

• Flat out or dead quiet. You have some good days, but can’t figure out how to bring in more store traffic when you need it.

• Having hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital tied up in stock.

• Not moving forward. Annual sales which have reached a plateau or even declining.

• Expensive advertising which is ineffective.

• Increases in rent

• Rising expenses

• Staff problems

• The economy

The list goes on…

But, generally most of those problems can be solved by INCREASING SALES of your fashion products whilst MAINTAINING GOOD MARGINS.

You see after many years of studying SUCCESSFUL FASHION RETAILERS and conducting intensive research and marketing analysis I discovered literally dozens of simple, yet powerful strategies TO INCREASE FASHION RETAIL SALES and PROFITS.

This information has been collated and edited into a very special mini-course called ‘Marketing Secrets of Top Fashion Retailers’. Here’s what you’ll learn…

• Discover The Promotion That Brought In Additional Sales Of $53,858 To A Retail Store In 4 Hours!

• How To Increase The Value Of Your Fashion Retail Business By At Least $45,000 In The Next Four Weeks! This Is So Easy – Every Retailer Should Be Doing It!

• 3 Simple Steps That Were Taken By A Fashion Retailer That Increased Annual Sales By 126%!

• How A 430% Increase In Advertising Response Was Achieved By A Local Business!

• How To Add At Least $8,500 To Your Bottom Line In Your Fashion Retail Business By Avoiding This One Big Mistake!

• The Quick & Easy Way To Ensure A Good Consistent Volume Of Sales Each & Every Month. Never, Ever Have A Bad Sales Month Again!

• Revealed! How To Overcome Price Shoppers And Actually Enjoy 20% To 50% Higher Gross Margins Than Your Competitors!

• Plus many more fashion marketing tips & tactics!

Excited? Well, you should be. It wasn’t easy creating such a valuable resource. All of the fashion marketing information in the ‘Marketing Secrets of Top Fashion Retailers’ mini-course has been tested in actual real-life businesses – no theory here.

So, how much is it?

We understand that many fashion retailers are experiencing 20% (or more) reduction in sales due to the current economic climate, so we have decided to hand you a ‘gift’. This mini-course sells for $167.00, but for a limited time, we have decided to make it FREE.

FREE – For a limited time… Request your Fashion Marketing mini-course now!

FASHION RETAIL MARKETING INFORMATION…

Marketing Secrets Of Top Fashion Retailers!

 

FREE MINI-COURSE (Valued at $167)     Find out how to…     Bring In More Customers To Your Fashion Retail Store! Increase Sales! Improve Customer Loyalty!

To receive your Fashion Marketing Mini-Course simply complete the form below and click the ‘FREE Instant Access’ button.

FREE Mini-Course request form :     Full name:   *** IMPORTANT : The report will be emailed to you, so please ensure you have correctly entered your email address. Email Address: