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Influencer marketing is a lucrative strategy from all points of view.
Many brands who use influencers wisely will get increased awareness, loyalty, and profit.
This statement holds for fashion brands.
Studies show that the global fashion influencer marketing market will grow by about 35.7% CAGR until 2027.
You can hop on that train, too.
Keep reading to find out more about influencer marketing for fashion brands.
We’ll discuss our case studies, plans, creative briefs, and insider tips as we delve deep into our experience.
Fashion influencer marketing harnesses the power of fashion influencers on social media platforms to shape consumer behavior and trends.
This strategy involves collaborations between fashion brands and content creators with a significant following within a niche audience.
Operating across various digital platforms, this form of marketing taps into the influencer's personal style and aspirational lifestyle, establishing a deeper connection with the target demographic.
As an influencer marketing platform, we’ve seen it work a thousand times.
By leveraging influencer-generated content, our clients captured consumers' attention and increased engagement with potential customers.
This approach is integral in today's ever-evolving world of fashion marketing, where relatable content reigns supreme.
Here are five advantages our clients have reaped by leveraging influencers:
Fashion brands collaborating with influencers experience heightened engagement rates, as influencers' followers are highly invested in their content.
This personalized and relatable content leads to more meaningful interactions between the brand and its audience.
For instance, a 2022 study revealed that fashion influencer campaigns can boost engagement rates by up to 5.7%, significantly higher than traditional marketing channels.
And according to Influencer Marketing Hub, an increase in influencer marketing spending by just 1% can lead to an almost 0.5% boost in engagement rates.
This suggests that reallocating budgets towards influencer marketing could significantly enhance engagement, with potential increases of up to 16.6%
Leveraging influencers allows fashion brands to tap into a wider audience, including demographics that may have been previously unreachable.
Micro-influencers and mega-influencers bring diverse follower bases, expanding the brand's visibility across multiple social platforms.
Research indicates that influencer marketing can extend your brand's reach to a higher-quality target audience than conventional advertising, according to 51% of interviewed marketers.
That’s probably why 81.4% of fashion brands use influencer marketing.
Authentic endorsements by influencers often translate to higher conversion rates for fashion products.
Businesses earn, on average, $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing strategies, with some companies seeing returns of $20 or more for every $1 spent.
And that’s because consumers trust recommendations from their favorite influencers more than traditional advertising.
Fashion influencer marketing presents a cost-effective solution for customer acquisition.
The collaborative effort between brands and influencers can significantly reduce customer acquisition costs, offering a more affordable alternative to high-budget marketing campaigns.
Data suggests that brands can save up to 30% on customer acquisition costs when employing influencer marketing tactics.
Influencer marketing fosters a deeper connection between fashion brands and their consumers by promoting a more personal and engaging brand narrative.
This approach builds trust and loyalty, essential components for long-term consumer relationships.
A survey highlighted that 37% of consumers trust influencers more than brands, so influencer partnerships can transfer some of that trust onto your brand.
Influencer marketing for fashion brands isn’t free of challenges.
Here are just a few we’ve noticed in our work.
One of the primary challenges in fashion influencer marketing is navigating through the vast influencer marketing market size, which includes millions of content creators.
Fashion brands struggle with identifying influencers who truly resonate with their key demographic and fashion community, potentially leading to partnerships that don't align with the brand's values or aesthetic.
Ensuring that influencers' content style and personal brand are consistent with the fashion company's image is crucial.
Mismatches between the brand's ethos and the influencer's persona can lead to diluted brand messaging and a confused target audience, undermining the marketing efforts.
Fashion influencer marketing involves coordinating campaigns across various social media platforms, which can be overwhelming without the right tools.
The complexity of managing different content creation timelines, engagement metrics, and influencer communications can lead to lost opportunities and fragmented campaign execution.
A significant hurdle in influencer marketing campaigns is quantifying success and ROI.
Without clear key performance indicators and robust tracking mechanisms, fashion brands risk not capturing the full impact of their campaigns, making it challenging to justify marketing spend and assess campaign performance.
The risk of partnering with influencers who have inflated or misleading follower counts is a real concern.
Such discrepancies can lead to overestimated reach and engagement, affecting the anticipated conversion rates and overall effectiveness of influencer campaigns.
Creating comprehensive influencer contracts and proposals that protect both the brand and the influencer can be intricate.
Issues such as unclear deliverables, copyright infringements, and payment terms can lead to disputes and potentially harm the brand's reputation and relationships with creators.
Efficiently tracking program progress and ensuring timely influencer payments pose logistical challenges.
Inadequate systems can lead to dissatisfaction among influencers, potentially affecting the content quality and the overall enthusiasm for the campaign, thereby impacting the desired results.
Now, the section you’ve been waiting for.
The ultimate influencer marketing plan we’ve also used for our clients.
Setting clear goals and KPIs allows you to assess campaign performance and align your efforts with business objectives.
Pro tip: We always advise our clients to set clear goals and then derive clear KPIs.
Goals can range from boosting brand awareness within the fashion community to increasing sales of specific fashion products to enhancing customer engagement on digital platforms.
KPIs must be tailored to these goals:
Tracking the cost-effectiveness of marketing efforts through customer acquisition costs and the ROI of marketing campaigns can provide valuable insights into the financial impact of your influencer marketing strategies.
Pro tip: Use this free cost-per-acquisition calculator to keep track of your campaign.
Understanding your target audience is essential in fashion influencer marketing, as it determines the type of content that resonates most.
You can start by gathering all the data you have on your target audience from sources like your sales team, WhatsApp chatbot conversations, or social media listening tools.
Use this info to create a comprehensive buyer persona.
This approach makes it easier to understand the types of influences and messages that would resonate.
Pro tip: We advise our clients to go beyond crafting a buyer persona toward understanding what they need.
Fashion consumers seek:
The demographic is also keen on seeing a wide range of influencers, including lifestyle influencers and beauty influencers, who can introduce them to new trends and ideas, thereby enriching their fashion content consumption.
Now that you have the right influencers, it’s time to find the best channels.
Otherwise, your messages will go unnoticed, and all your efforts will be in vain.
Let’s look at some stats again:
TikTok is gaining speed, though. This platform caters to Gen Z, and it’s only evident that brands targeting this audience would want to connect to people on their home turf.
And that’s the critical statement: connect with your audience on their home turf.
Remember: It doesn’t matter whether 99% of fashion brands use a particular medium. Ask yourself what works for you, according to your brand’s style and needs. Craft your brand’s persona and ask yourself what they will be browsing.
For example, if you’re targeting 20-year-olds from upper-middle classes in Western Europe and North America, you’ll use Instagram and TikTok.
If you’re targeting 40-year-old business people from China, you’ll use WeChat or Weibo. For some brands, a website is the best option for better user engagement.
Pro tip: If you are just starting to establish a fashion brand and looking for website ideas, you could check some beginner-friendly fashion website templates and themes.
Yes, you should build a creative brief before finding your influencers.
In our platform’s experience, it’s easier to find the right influencers who match the content you need rather than vice versa.
Here’s our agency’s influencer brief for Luxbox to inspire you:
A well-structured creative brief for influencers should clearly outline the campaign's objectives and expectations, ensuring alignment between the fashion brand and the influencer.
Key elements to include are:
Insider tip: To ensure smooth campaign execution, provide a clear timeline for content creation, reviews, and publication dates.
Take it from us; fashion consumers heed the advice of a specific type of fashion influencer.
This content creator should:
Pro tip: For you as a company, influencers play a crucial role in collecting consumer feedback to refine brand strategies.
So, pick creators who really have a pulse on their audience and fashion trends.
To pick the right influencers, consider:
For instance, if you have a small-medium fashion brand, you can consider micro-influencers.
Studies show that micro-influencers have 22.2% more buying-related conversations, and almost 85% of those happen face-to-face.
That’s why they have more chances to convince customers to buy your products.
There are two steps to consider:
Insider tip: We wrote an in-depth article on searching for influencers here, plus our inBeat platform is free.
So, ultimately, these fashion influencers should fit your brand’s image to a T. Our advice is to identify your customer persona and find influencers who closely match it (age, gender, niche, size, etc.).
Selecting the right strategies for your fashion influencer marketing efforts is key to achieving your brand's long-term objectives.
Creativity in your approach can significantly enhance your campaign's visibility, leading to an uptick in social media users, audience engagement, and ultimately, product sales.
Here are some strategies that brought our clients steady success:
If you want awesome inspiration, BBC Three explained how a new fashion brand launched its Cannes collection with six key influencers, including Lorna Luxe.
Selecting the most effective influencer marketing tactics specifically tailored for fashion brands allows you to captivate your audience and drive engagement.
Here are some dynamic tactics to consider:
Asia Jackson offers an excellent example of a catchy fashion video by showing her audience how she repurposes her old clothes into new outfits.
And her engagement is skyrocketing.
Although she currently has 647,000 subscribers, this video below has over 4.7 million views and 1,764 comments.
Implementing your fashion influencer marketing campaign involves a series of practical steps to ensure smooth execution and alignment with your strategic objectives.
Here are key actions to take:
Monitoring and scaling your fashion influencer marketing campaign helps you maximize its impact and achieve your desired outcomes.
Here’s how our clients effectively manage this phase:
We’ll review different types of fashion brands below so that you understand the practical aspects of influencer marketing.
Besides, you can find plenty of actionable content if you read below:
Deux Par Deux isn’t a renowned fashion brand the size of Balenciaga.
It’s also a kids’ brand, which doubled our challenge.
However, we understood the company’s essential need: partnering with influencer moms with beautiful families.
That’s how each micro-influencer we found added five new customers for the brand.
And, if you’re reading our case study, you’ll learn that these influencers’ posts were value-for-money.
At the end of its campaign, Deux Par Deux had over 150 pieces of original content and hundreds of new customers.
Lessons learned:
New Balance was a challenge because we needed to cast sports micro-influencers.
After studying the sports fashion industry, we came up with several conclusions:
Lessons learned:
Nordstrom collaborated with the direct-to-consumer brand Wildfang to introduce a non-binary clothing line on their e-commerce platform, marking a significant step towards inclusivity in fashion retail.
The primary challenge was crafting an influencer marketing strategy that celebrated inclusivity and represented all identities equally.
inBeat Agency’s campaign for their product launch generated over 4.1 million impressions and created 160 content assets, underlining the initiative's vast reach and content diversity.
The campaign deliverables included influencer sourcing and management, product fulfillment, creative direction, and meticulous coordination of the collection drop.
The goal was to leverage the influence of over 100 content creators to amplify sales and awareness for the new WF/BP collection on major social platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Lessons learned:
When you start building your campaign, choose a relevant influencer.
One of the determining factors should be their audience’s financial status. In other words, make sure their demographic can afford your prices.
Pro tip: Some influencers can promote both haute couture and high-street products.
For example, Molly-Mae Hague is renowned for her partnership with Pretty Little Thing.
However, she often models Louis Vuitton or Balenciaga apparel.
She can pull this off because her following of 5+ million people is likely very diverse.
If your influencers have a loyal audience, your high price points aren’t determining factors.
Balenciaga addressed French and UK Gen Z-ers with an excellent TikTok Christmas campaign.
This campaign got them 4.5+ million users on their landing page, even if most of these users don’t usually buy haute-couture apparel.
Some people may not afford to dress head-to-toe from your brand.
However, they look up to the values and style you advertise.
These people are likely to save money for a few months to afford one original piece from your brand.
The #GucciModelChallenge is an excellent example of how you can address this target.
Gucci asked its audience to use their clothes for Gucci-inspired looks, therefore raising people’s awareness.
@jessicajehaa Reply to @kiaaja878 joining the trend 🤭💕 lanjut gk nih? #supermodel #guccimodelchallenge #guccichallenge #gayaditiktok ♬ original sound - Forgotten_supermodel
This article has journeyed through the importance of setting clear goals, knowing your audience, crafting creative briefs, selecting impactful strategies, and implementing campaigns effectively.
Each step underscores the delicate balance between brand vision and influencer authenticity.
If you’re venturing into or looking to optimize your influencer marketing efforts, the key lies in finding influencers who resonate with your brand ethos and can authentically engage your target audience.
To streamline this process, platforms like inBeat offer a solution.
inBeat specializes in connecting brands with the ideal influencers, simplifying the search, and ensuring a fit that aligns with your brand's goals and values.
And we could help you out like we did the brands above.