Social Media Marketing for fashion brands: how to leverage Instagram

It appears clear that Instagram is essential for fashion brands looking for enhancing the effectiveness of their marketing strategy producing effects on a long-term.

According to a themed market study conducted by Meta a few years ago, Instagram is the best and favourite place for customers to discover fashion products, which means being the number one choice for people willing to find new fashion trends, styles and inspiration over the other social media platforms and the classic media like specialised magazines and advertising on TV.

Why fashion brands should use Instagram in their marketing strategy

Looking at the Instagram marketing stats published by Hootsuite is easy to understand why Instagram must be included in the marketing strategy of every company, especially in the fashion industry. Let’s check some important data:

• Instagram is in several top 10 charts, concerning the most visited websites in the world, the most searched keywords on Google and the most used social media platforms, and is the most downloaded app in the world too;
• Instagram has more than 2 billion active monthly users with a balanced audience equally divided into men (52%) and women (48%);
• Instagram is the favourite social media for Gen Z and for Millennial women;
• Instagram is the best platform to connect brands with people through effective engagement and storytelling;
• last but not least, Instagram is Gen Z’s favourite social commerce platform and 35% of all users would purchase products through this marketplace.

Instagram is the market and drives website traffic

This list of points makes clear that Instagram is not only a great lever for marketing, but it’s the market where fashion brands have to work on their online placement. Indeed, for companies from the fashion industry, Instagram represents a perfect showcase to attract fans and new potential customers and lead them to visit the official brand’s website. 

Instagram builds brand awareness

We just said that Instagram is a showcase for fashion brands and that’s exactly this. In fact, through a proper content marketing strategy on social media, which we’ll deepen later in this article, fashion companies have the possibility to build brand awareness supported by great content and effective communication.

Instagram joins with influencer marketing and connected products

Instagram and influencer marketing connect each other so perfectly and this represents a huge possibility for fashion brands willing to empower their own market placement. Influencers are key marketing partners in the fashion industry and can guarantee big performances for the brands in terms of engagement and awareness, making followers interested in the brand’s products and how to best use and combine them.

A very nice example of how to leverage the impact of influencer marketing refers to connected products: they are very powerful solutions to improve the quality of the purchase journey directly from the product, through a very smart digital system, consumers can instantly access content related to specific garments posted by influencers (or even other customers) and collect ideas for new fashion styles and combinations. Of course, this is a very strong feature to make marketing actions effective and generate engagement.

Instagram drives sales

All of these factors allow companies to increase sales, which is the most relevant goal for a business after all. In fact, Instagram is actually the most powerful social commerce platform used by more than 130 million people for shopping: in particular, more than 25% of consumers up to 34 years old shop on this app and especially women purchase products via social media.

How to manage content marketing on Instagram for fashion brands

To produce its best effects, Instagram needs more than any other social media to be keen and professional in the management of the content marketing strategy, which plays a very important role for fashion brands on this platform.

A very interesting factor to take into account is that Instagram is the social media with the highest engagement rate with an average engagement per post around 0,54%. From the fashion brands’ point of view, through a consistent posting schedule (basically one post every day) it is possible to improve this parameter and reach an average engagement per post around 0,68%, especially for brands with an audience of fewer than 10k followers.

Let’s take a look at some nice examples of how fashion brands should use Instagram:

• Paul & Shark and its strong brand identity and use of branded hashtags;
• Ballantyne and its great content management (posts and stories);
• Giuseppe Zanotti and its amazing connection with influencer marketing.

Instagram brand identity: how to leverage profile bio and visual impact

One of the most important best practices to leverage Instagram for fashion brands consists of making a strong brand identity, which means making your own brand unique and easily recognisable by consumers. In order to achieve this is key to:

• Make your brand’s name clear as a username;
• Write an effective brand bio by using the keywords representing brand’s soul;
• Make sure to include a link in your bio to your own website;
• If possible, create and use original and unique hashtags for your brand;
• Give your posts a recognisable style in terms of settings, colours, messages, etc.

Instagram posts: schedule your brand’s content and consider UGC 

As we’ve seen earlier, a consistent posting schedule is key to performance. So it’s clear that fashion brands need to schedule all their Instagram posts paying a lot of attention to what’s possible to communicate with people every day.

First of all, brands should keep in mind that there are four main purposes for social media content, which are:

• Educate, giving interesting information to all the users interacting with the post;
• Entertainment, making sure that users like and leave a comment on a post;
• Inspire, being a positive source of new ideas for the users getting in touch;
• Promote, communicating the top qualities of products, why users need exactly that and how to proceed to purchase.

Fashion brands have the potential to achieve all these purposes with a good social media posting schedule, of course including original pictures, stories with different functions (e.g. surveys, call to action, reposts, etc.) and reels. But that’s not enough: a strong key factor which helps to make the difference is to use in the brand’s content strategy some user generated content too.

UGC is a powerful method to create value for fashion brands through the engagement of users with indirect content marketing actions, which positively affects both brand reputation and customer satisfaction.

Instagram fashion hashtags: what are the most popular?

Last but not least, here come the hashtags. These famous tags have always been key tools in the social media universe representing the power of text in a visual platform like Instagram. For what concerns the fashion industry and its marketing activity on social media, hashtags play a very important role in the optimisation of content. 

The most popular Instagram fashion hashtags (and the counting of their posts) are: 

• #Fashion (+1 billion), #InstaFashion (+179 million), #FashionStyle (+105 million);
• #OutfitOfTheDay (+82 million), #OOTD (+418 million), #OOTDFashion (+30 million);
• #WhatIWore (+21 million), #What IWoreToday (+9 million), #WIWT (+17 million).

Nevertheless, Instagram is plenty of so many different hashtags for specific fashion sectors and product categories, such as: 

• women’s and men’s fashion;
• handbags, shoes and jewellery;
• streetwear and swimwear fashion;
• worldwide fashion weeks.

Alongside general hashtags, another very good method to enhance the effectiveness of a fashion brand’s communication on Instagram refers to the creation of one or more branded hashtags to build a solid brand identity and look immediately recognisable.