How fashion uses content to drive sales

The fashion world has made an art form of blending editorial and sales. It has the advantage of pretty people and gorgeous clothes to grab readers’ attention, but here are four fashion content strategies every industry can follow:

Mark the occasion

There’s always a reason to buy new clothes, and fashion just loves an occasion: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter bonnets, wedding season, summer holidays, the first snow of winter. But every business can produce content for its website that highlights forthcoming events or peak periods in that industry, and explain what they can do to help customers capitalise on them.

Give good advice

Net-a-Porter has grown from scratch into a €2.75bn online retailer (after merging with Yoox in October) by meeting demand for a guide through the world of luxury fashion. The website offers suggestions for how to wear each item and sends a ‘this week’s most wanted’ email to customers, illustrated with highly-desirable items to click through to and buy. Brands such as Gap, L.K. Bennett and Boden have embraced the approach and use emails linking to their web content to hook shoppers.

Make it look nice

To grab eyeballs, particularly on social media, making your online store an attractive and interesting place to be relies on high-quality images as surely as store design and branding do in the real world. As fashion has always known, if you want people to spend a lot of money on your product or service, making the experience a pleasure is vital.

Cater to social media tastes

Find out whether you have Facebook customers or Instagram users or Snapchat fans, and then tailor your social media campaigns accordingly. Fashion success story Asos has a youthful target market who delight in the online approval of their peers. The company’s new loyalty scheme offers customers a reward every time they post a picture of themselves on Instagram wearing Asos clothes, using the hashtag #asseenonme.