Introduction

Developing an online presence is a must for any ambitious fashion brand. Mobile commerce and e-commerce statistics leave no doubt, buying online is an unceasing upward trend. 

But sales aside, what matters the most in driving profitable customer interactions is not simply providing your clients the opportunity to buy online, but instead allowing them to find information about your company, taking full advantage of social media reach.

Information gathering plays an essential role in persuading your customers to consider your brand as a great solution for the problems they are trying to overcome. 

The truth is that not all media content is equal in informing your customer’s opinions. 

As we’ll see in the progression of this post, the type of information your users will find on social media is one of the most influential, persuasive, and relevant in growing your brand. 

To help you assess how relevant a strong social media presence is for your brand, in this post, we’re going to shortlist the top 5 reasons why you should consider investing time in growing your social following.

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

#1 Once You Connect WIth Your Customer, You Can Tap into Connections

As you develop your brand, one of the first marketing challenges you will have to overcome deals with identifying the most profitable customer segments. 

Customer analysis and segmentation is an essential component of your media strategy. If you’re interested in reading more about this topic, here’s an article that can help.

By applying the S-T-P (segmentation, targeting, and positioning) framework you can cluster up different types of users, identify the most relevant customer types for your value proposition, and develop a series of value associations that can attract them to your products and services.

The challenge is that applying traditional methods, the information you can collect may relate to their age, income, address etc.

This “descriptive” segmentation can sometimes fail to hit the right target, as the types of customers you’ll be looking for are likely to be best described through their habits and behaviors. 

By using social media, you can connect to these customers by using social engagement tools (likes and shares) that will connect your product within the circles and networks of your more established customers. 

Despite currently being challenged with limited organic reach, when brands create valuable, informative, or compelling content, social media can really play the role of a “resonance chamber” for your brand.

#2 Social Media is the Most Persuasive Platform in the Customer Journey

As discussed in the introduction, even if your brand is fully physical, the customer journey that leads a customer to your brand can take advantage of online searches. 

By conducting searches online customers are provided with different types of content, which is designed to inform or entertain them while providing advice on what products are a good fit for their challenge.

As your customers surf the web, they will find different content typologies, but not all media is the same. 

Different types of content and media can serve different purposes. 

There are three kinds of media that are used to build a customer journey on the internet: owned media paid media and earned media. 

Owned media is content directly owned by a firm. It is fully managed by the organization and therefore not very persuasive, as a brand can say whatever it wants about itself.

Paid media is advertising, which again is most helpful when customers have high-purchase intent. At the early stages of their online searches, this is not the case, usually.

The last of the three, earned media, is the information that you can find online that connects to your brand, through third-party publishing. 

Because of the fact that a brand can’t control this information – as it’s comprised of other people’s opinions and experiences – earned media is considered particularly influential over customer decisions.

To compare and contrast different media types, we created a free article that delves into the topic and that you can find here.

The customer journey map is a great tool to visualize how your customer can interact with your brand touchpoints, all the way from gaining awareness of your existence to the purchase stage. To read up more about this, here’s an article that can help.

#3 Social Shopping and Mobile Shopping Are On the Rise

Social media drives traffic from desktop and mobile devices, and it is a great source of value for your brand. Unless you have a physical store on a high-value footfall area, or a fully operational, Public Relations office, chances are many of your customers will engage with your brand through ads and organic content on social media. 

Due to browser cookies and retargeting, it is now commonplace to keep a potential customer in check, by providing highly targeted advertising which works great on social media, as it connects with your client’s downtime.

If you’re looking to tap into mobile sales trends and optimize your ecommerce platform with mobile navigation tips and tricks, in this article we’re discussing the subject in depth.

#4 Connecting With Your Audience Can Help You Create Better Products

Building a community is a long-term asset for your brand, and one that you could potentially monetize over and over again. 

A strong social community can help you understand what your brand does best, or maybe what it should fix, after listening to your customer’s reviews and experiences. 

Maybe there is a need for a brand extension, or there are some values that you need to incorporate in your brand, as customer expectations increase and demand brands to do better. 

All in all, the community you’re able to foster on social media can become a great “sounding board” for your organization and you should acknowledge the value of a perfectly attuned audience who is going to be happy to give you all the advice you need to grow your business. 

If you’d like to learn more about the ways in which you can use your followers to grow your business, here’s an article that can help you.

#5 Provide Market Validation

Last but not least, a strong social following is a good proxy of market validation. It is important to say right from the start that sometimes social media statistics are a form of vanity, as a strong social media following is not an indicator of profits or growth. 

At the same time, when companies are in their startup stage, for lack of better metrics, social media can show that a brand has made a strong, authentic connection with its customers. In other words, it has great potential for growth.

This can be helpful, as it can become a type of data validation that may be interesting for investors and for possible funders of your project. 

In this sense, a strong social media presence remains a highly valuable asset, that can lead to profits in multiple ways, from directly impacting your customer’s decision to buy to showing evidence of success and active community engagement. 

Great, now that we’ve covered all 5 tips,  let’s move towards our conclusive remarks.

Conclusions

There you have it. In this post, we’ve listed 5 top reasons why it is still important to develop a strong social media presence for your brand. 

As discussed the point of developing a social following should not be just inflating one’s ego, but on the contrary, using some of the “special powers” that social media can provide.

Just as we mentioned when talking about customer journey mapping, it is important that the development of a social media strategy is aligned with an overall brand strategy. If you’d like to read more about this, here’s an article that can help.
Don’t hesitate to check out our blog where we’re providing a wealth of free posts on topics spanning from fashion business to international marketing. Enjoy!