Using Influencer Marketing for Your Fashion Brand

Marketing is something of an arcane art and not something that all fashion businesses can successfully manage internally. Between an expansive internet and a saturated market, it can be hard to be properly heard – particularly as an up-and-coming fashion brand with a lot to prove.

While younger businesses do not have the capital or contacts to go toe-to-toe with the full-scale ad-campaign budgets of larger fashion brands, there is an area of marketing where the playing field is more or less level: influencer marketing. But what is it, and how might your fashion brand use it well?

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing describes a relatively new and unique form of marketing strategy, which directly utilises the reach and cultural power of internet celebrities to see the promotion of a given business, venture, or product. In many cases, influencer marketing is a new iteration of product placement, whereby someone with a strong digital presence features a product in a pre-agreed number of posts on their social media accounts. 

Partnerships can also be struck, wherein celebrities and influencers lend their likeness to adverts as well as sponsored posts and supplementary content on their social media channels. Some iconic brand moments have occurred this way, as with Halsey and Magnum over in the US.

The Benefits of Influencer Marketing

The purpose of influencer marketing is to effectively piggyback off the audience and reach of a given influencer. This is indispensable in the fashion industry, where influencers can make or break trends; getting a contract with a fashion influencer to guarantee product exposure on their platform can be transformative in this regard.

With the right influencer partnerships, trust can also be built between the product and the audience. As your campaign wins over new customers, the affiliation between your product and their favourite influencer adds stability to the pipeline; your product benefits by association.

Challenges Posed

Of course, as powerful as influencer marketing can be for reach and engagement, it can also be something of a double-edged sword. The influencer industry is a fast-moving one, and one propped up entirely through individual personalities – fallible personalities, which can turn from beneficial to damaging within a single misjudged post. 

To use influencer marketing is to put trust in others to show your brand in the best possible light, and to take the risk of poor PR if an influencer is maligned or ‘cancelled’. Between tight contracts and regular liaison, facilitated through counsel and advice from fashion specialists, it is possible to strike the right balance of risk and reward; however, what exactly is that reward?

The other challenge presented by leaning into influencer marketing is the tracking of ROI. This can be difficult to measure accurately and given the relative youth of this type of marketing strategy, results can also be volatile. Still, it is important to attempt to read figures equitably, and to figure when a change in tack may be necessary.