The industry which witnesses changing trends almost every week is fashion retail. We can safely say that the only thing constant in the fashion world is that fashion never goes out of style. With changing times, the fashion industry is also embracing technology. Here let’s talk about how social listening for fashion retail can help you monitor fashion trends, handle controversial fashion choices or disasters, and to find fashion influencers.
The scope is never ending with social listening for fashion retail. Most of us like to glam up once in a while. Social media is full of influencers, amateurs seeking advice, fashionistas looking for new collections et cetera. If you keep listening, there is no end to the kind of insights you could gain.
Social Listening keeps You Fashion Fresh
“Great design comes from interaction, conflict, argument, competition, and debate” – Onur Mustak Cobanli
Fashion and style are personal and unique, of course. It is a designer who makes the world aware of new clothing possibilities. In fashion, the buyer persona is often defined by the stylist, social listening might not be of help here. However, social listening helps you gauge public opinion and other marketing insights like your share of voice, response to campaigns by you or your competitor.
Create an index to keep track of your competitors or the leaders in your industry. Luxury fashion brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Armani, and the others have effective strategies to make their social presence known. Studying their social visibility, sentiment scores, and other competitive metrics can help you gather ideas for designing your own social media marketing strategies.
Vogue and Gucci engage their clients via fashion podcasts. Chanel has been setting quite an example when it comes to social engagement. They don’t just stream podcasts, they even have movies about the history of their company – a fine example being “Coco Before Chanel”. Monitoring the chatter surrounding such brands will help you judge the weaknesses and strengths of rival brands and strategize your own marketing mantra.
Understanding Your Stakeholders
The world of fashion deals with a lot of people – your customers, brand endorsers, investors, influencers, celebrities, and media to name some. Whether you aim to build a high fashion clientele or make yourself known more like a street style brand, you will need to know the influencers and the key people talking about such things.
A fashionista interested in your product is more likely to become your shareholder/investor than others. Planning for a big launch? Hiring a celebrity, who is known for her chic dressing, to launch a boho collection might confuse your target audience.
Listening to social chatter and tracking impressions can help you identify the important people in your industry. And, social media listening tools make it simpler. While tracking the comments, a social listening tool will give you the influence scores and impressions of every commenter.
More than just finding the influencers, social listening allows you to know more about the customer base, the demographics and the interests of your target audience.
Fashion Weeks/Events – Get the News before Anyone else
Every brand grows by learning from others. There are times when monitoring fashion weeks, a campaign or a fashion event may help you gather key insights about your industry.
A moment to moment real-time social monitoring tool helps you track what is influencing or impacting the conversations around the event. Whose spring-summer collection is topping the charts and why so?
Doing What it does Best
Lastly, social listening is the ultimate tool for feedback. While fashion is artsy, it might not impress all your customers all the time. Listening for feedback is essential, especially so in the fashion world. It can be your new handbag line or some celebrity line of clothes you launched. Gauging the chatter around your product helps you analyze the sentiments and work on the pain points. Simply put, social media listening provides you feedback which can help you deal with negative feedback well in time.
In conclusion, every learning and marketing opportunity is up for grabs with social listening. Social media and the fashion world are closely knit. Every trend, new sensation, and fashion story is religiously covered on social media. All you need to do is to listen!