Inbound and outbound marketing are two different approaches that many brands, and that includes fashion brands, take when promoting their products.
Outbound marketing is when a brand puts its products right in a consumer’s face, with the use of traditional marketing strategies, such as billboards, TV, media outlets, or runway shows. Inbound marketing on the other hand works in reverse. When it comes to inbound marketing, it’s all about making sure the customers come to you. It’s like fishing, you don’t dive into the water and chase the little fish around, you put some desirable bait in place, and wait for them to come to you.
Both of these concepts sound pretty straightforward, and they are. However, inbound marketing is far more complex than the simple old tricks you’ll see in outbound marketing, and in order to give you a better idea of why that is, let’s dive a little deeper by explaining more of the differences between inbound vs outbound marketing for fashion brands:
Outbound Marketing:
Outbound marketing is the OG method that was used by fashion brands for decades on end to promote their products. This was mostly due to the fact that modern digital technology wasn’t around for most of that time, so inbound marketing hadn’t existed. Back then, brands had limited means to get their names out there. Billboards, infomercials, red carpet events, interviews, and runway shows were all the rage in the brand promotion game, and are still utilized today, but not as much as inbound marketing. Here are a few reasons and examples why:
If you want to promote your brand using billboards, then sure, you’ll definitely get noticed by almost every passing car on the highway, but the problem with billboards is that they’re super expensive. Not only that, you’re paying a ridiculous amount of money for something that is temporary. Remember, by having a billboard made, you’ve merely bought yourself some limited advertisement time, but you didn’t buy the whole highway and claim ownership. It doesn’t belong to you, so eventually, that ad is going to be replaced by another one, and your spotlight is gone.
The same thing goes for interviews, events, runway shows, and commercials. Your brand will only have a limited amount of time to be promoted on any of these platforms, and you can’t go back to these places every single day to introduce your product over and over again. It’s just not realistic.
Therefore, the dated tactics of outbound marketing are just not that effective. They do have some benefits at the moment, but in the long term, those 15 minutes of fame eventually die out.
Inbound Marketing:
Inbound marketing is the superior practice for almost every fashion brand these days. The reason for that is that unlike its inferior counterpart, outbound marketing, inbound is a lot less expensive, and will have long-term benefits for your brand in terms of garnering visibility, awareness, and customer loyalty.
It all starts out by knowing your respective target audience and using digital platforms, such as your website or social media page to get your brand on their radar. To do that, we highly recommend the use of proper SEO strategies for your website when writing up a biography or anything related to your products. For example, if your brand is all about size inclusivity, then that term should be taking over the majority of your blog text because that’s what your ideal target customer will be typing on their google search engines, and will increase your brand’s chances of being at the top of the search list.
Another strategy is social media, where if you want people to find your brand, it’s also about using the right wording, such as hashtags on Instagram. By using the proper hashtags, you’ll automatically place a spot in the filtered searches of your audience.
After you’ve attracted your customer, you need to be able to keep them interested in what they’re seeing on your website or social media page. In order to keep them engaged, you should really think about the tone of the words you’re using on your website because you don’t want to sound just like any other commercial brand out there that just sells clothes to sell clothes. To put it in simpler terms, you want to sell a story as much as a product because that is what’s going to keep your potential customers hooked long enough until they eventually become leads.
Selling a story is pretty easy. It’s all just about being 100% real with your customers, communicating who your brand is, what inspired you to want to birth it in the first place, and most importantly, what makes it so unique to the current market. You have to let these customers know why they should invest in your brand’s products instead of purchasing them from a whole other business. Some common examples of brands that stand out are brands that are more inclusive, whose products have more durability of life, or who create products that haven’t yet been introduced to their specific community.
Lastly, when you’re successful in turning your customers into leads and buyers of your products, it’s time for the final step, which ironically, is not so much as final but more continuous. Here’s what you should already know. One purchase from a customer might be great, but it certainly isn’t what’s going to keep your business going. Your business will only continue to flourish if you can keep those customers coming back, and that is going to take some delighting.
Delighting is when you’ve acquired a decent customer base, but need to also keep them around because you can’t afford to lose them. No customers equal no business. To avoid that from happening, you should keep the floor of your brand constantly open for communication. It’s all about showing your customers that you actually care about them, and what they have to say. Your brand should be practicing with surveys, collecting analytical data for website traffic and activity, and dropping some suggestion boxes in your Instagram stories. By making your customers feel heard, you’ll be developing long-lasting relationships that will keep them loyal to your brand.
To sum up, inbound and outbound marketing strategies both have great benefits, but let’s face the facts, inbound marketing is the most ideal approach for any business today, that’s looking to become and stay a successful business. Outbound, however, has short-term benefits and just has a lacking success rate in the world we’re living in now.
We at The Stylatude will use every source of knowledge, strategy, and creativity to help your fashion business achieve long-term success with the help of our inbound marketing strategies. So, with that in mind, feel free to contact us, so that we can help your fashion brand achieve the potential that it has to become a real success story.