Here at 440 Industries, we love content marketing. It’s such a great way to reach your customers avoiding the noise of advertising. 

Fashion is a competitive industry, but connecting to your audience should not be excessively expensive. 

Through content marketing, you can reach out to your target clients and make your brand the perfect solution to solve their problems. 

However, the challenge for a few businesses may consist in not knowing exactly what to do to get started with this innovative inbound marketing approach. 

In this post, we’re going to help out by providing a simple 4-step process to allow you to break any hesitation and develop a persuasive web presence for your fashion brand.

With no further ado, let’s dive right into it!

#1 Explore Your Brand to Identify Keywords

The starting point to this strategy is starting to think about keywords. 

Build a list of keywords you feel are able to describe the features of your brand, its value, and appeal, or even what your products can be used for. 

You’ll find that at first, you’ll come up with terms and vocabulary which may be general and able to describe a series of businesses, not just your own. 

This is why you need to persevere and identify, with intuition and brainstorming a series of concepts and ideas that make your brand stand out in the market. This might take time, but it’s a really important step, so take the necessary time to list keywords that uniquely define your product or service.

Once you’ve come up with a list of 20-30 keywords that are able to univocally describe your brand, it’s time to test them. 

You can look into keyword generator software to assess two essential metrics that describe keywords: search volume and keyword difficulty. Our advice is to use Ahrefs Keyword Generator. 

Let’s now look into what search volume and keyword difficulty are in more detail.

Search volume describes the number of people who use the keywords you’ve identified in their online queries. The higher the search volume, the harder is for your website to show on Google’s first page results. Ideally, you want to identify keywords with a search volume of about 500-1000 searches monthly. 

Keyword difficulty describes the degree of purchase intent that can be associated with a search engine query. A keyword like “how to wash a silk shirt” has less purchase intent than “Balenciaga shoes”. The higher the keyword difficulty the more challenging it will be for your website to be displayed on search engine pages. This is because with a higher purchase intent many websites will try to “intercept” a customer’s desire to buy. 

At the same time, however, even a query like “how to wash a silk shirt” can lead to profitable customer interactions, it just takes more work to build up a case to sell a product that a customer may not be planning on buying right away. At the beginning of your content marketing journey, a keyword difficulty of 20 or less is advisable. 

As your web presence gains momentum and your website acquires authority (due to its traffic and topical authority) the easier it will be to rank in search engines and compete in searches that involve more competitive keywords.

But the fact is that customers don’t just Google a keyword, they Google a sentence. This is the next step in our strategy development, which we’ll address in the next section of the post.

#2 Connect Those Keywords With User Searches

If you’re only competing for one keyword at a time, it will be difficult to bring highly profiled traffic to your website. 

In order to really attune your communication to your audience, you need to understand them and connect your product to problems that are part of your audience’s daily life. 

This approach is based on an understanding of your customer needs that is focused on learning how your product or service can become a suitable solution to answer your customers’ problems, following a marketing framework called “Jobs to Be Done”.  

If you’d like to read up more about this framework, in this article we delve in-depth into the subject. 

So how do you connect your keywords with your potential customers’ queries?

There are actually two ways to do this. 

Market Research

The first approach is to actually conduct research and try to understand what types of problems your customers are experiencing, that make them resort to your products as a possible solution. 

This research-oriented approach may be conducted in a variety of ways and it may entail questionnaire design, surveys, focus groups, etc. 

For as expensive and time-consuming as this research can be, it may lead you to identify what value your product has for your customer.  That insight could revolutionize the way you’re communicating your product.

Search Analysis Software

The second approach is based on search analysis. Using software like the one provided by websites like Answer The Public or Also Asked you can tap into the internet’s hive mind and identify the most asked questions that revolve around a particular keyword or term. 

This second approach is definitely faster and cheaper, but you should not downplay the value that can be found in conducting market research, as the results of such an endeavor may surprise you.

The goal of this step is to match your unique keywords with search queries, or questions that your target customers may be asking, and that you’d like to answer for them in order to make your brand stand in the front of the competition when the customer will have to buy a product to overcome a challenge. 

Once this step has been completed, we can then move to the next step of the strategy which entails developing informative and educational content designed to genuinely help your audience overcome a struggle.

#3 Develop Informative, Educational, or Entertaining Content that Helps Your Customer

This stage is when you’ll need to apply a little bit of elbow grease. Creating content is hard work, but it can really pay off in the long term. 

Once you have identified the queries you’d like to answer set yourself up to become a content writer or content creator to develop helpful information for your customers. 

Depending on the query this could come in the form of a blog post, a podcast, a youtube video, an infographic, or any other content typology designed to assist your customer in understanding the problem. 

The content you’ll be developing is what we call “Top-of-the-Funnel” content, as it has no other goal if not then of assisting your reader or viewer in understanding a challenge they are currently facing, so that they may decide how to approach it and solve it. 

It may seem that helping them solve a problem with no intent to buy or sell may be a waste of time but that’s not actually the case. 

First and foremost, you’ll be able to tap into your customer’s digital journey and build awareness for your brand. 

Secondly explaining a problem to customers, will allow you to then pitch a product, that is perfectly attuned to solving their issue. 

If your products and services are well aligned with the content you are creating and the problems you are addressing, chances are you’ll be in a great position to make a sales pitch at the end of your content piece.

We’ll explore this step in the last of our 

#4 Match Your Content With A Valuable Offer

At this final stage, as we’ve already introduced in the previous paragraph, your brand will get to use the attention it has collected to match the traffic you’re getting organically from search engines with some valuable offers your brand can make. 

This approach, is based on organic search results and maybe time-consuming at first, but is capable of delivering results that paid advertising never could. 

In this sense, it’s important to realize that by avoiding advertising bidding, you are finding a new – indirect – way to access customers without spending all of your marketing budgets on ad campaigns. 

Also, as you develop your content and help your customers you’ll be able to gain new insights that can lead you to better your products and services and or develop new ones by understanding your customer’s issues and struggles. 

In this sense, content marketing is not only research-based but becomes a research tool in itself as it creates an opportunity to empathize with your audience and really connect to them. 

Great, now that we’ve covered all 4 steps it’s time to draw a few conclusive remarks.

Conclusions

There you have it! In this post, we’ve covered the 4 essential steps to get started in content marketing. 

Now that you’ve learned the basics, you can start flying with a little bit of more in-depth analysis on the topic. If you’d like to learn more about content marketing and how to develop an edgy and highly converting media presence for your fashion brand, in this article you’ll learn how to do that.

If you’re interested in content marketing, you should not hesitate to visit our blog, where we’re sharing a wealth of information on content marketing and fashion branding.

If you’re interested in learning more about Content Marketing, don’t hesitate to take a look at our course “Content Marketing for Creative Rockstars“. Our short and to-the-point, online class covers a wide range of topics spanning from developing blog posts capable of driving profitable traffic to strategies for getting strong conversion rates on your landing pages. Here’s a link to the course, if you use the discount code BLOG20 you can access a 20% discount. Enjoy!