How Fashion Brands Can Scale Profitability
Oftentimes, marketing VPs leading new brands will ask: What are the initial steps a lifestyle brand should take to lay the groundwork for future scalability?
As you'd probably suspect from a former in-house marketing director turned agency owner, scalability is going to be threefold.
Do you have a product that your target audience (avatar) will want?
Do you have a marketing strategy that allows you to capture your target audience's attention?
Once you do convert this audience, will they come back and buy more?
And obviously, you took this job to figure this out so odds are you do believe there is a way to ‘win’ during your brand's GTM phase. But how will this strategy enable future scalability?
I always come back to dissecting owned, earned, and paid media strategies and making sure that each type of media has some tent poles to hang on.
Within owned, you might hone in on one social media channel (in 2024, probably TikTok) and email marketing. If you can get these two initiatives planned to a place where you suspect 20% of your traffic will come from them, you are in a good place (another 20% should naturally come from SEO at the beginning).
On the earned side, you need a PR firm that has experience in your industry and a super solid track record to get you press coverage. I would recommend working with a PR team two months prior to launch and committing to running PR for a minimum of nine months (press hits don’t happen overnight). Press coverage, along with creator assets, which your PR firm should also manage (as well as affiliates), will give you the right ‘earned’ content for paid ad assets. PR and creator partnerships aren’t going to drive a ton of traffic, or sales, but they are necessary for future scale. Assume 10% of traffic comes from these efforts.
For paid media, the team/agency you work with is going to need to be in lockstep with what you are doing organically on social media and what your PR team is up to. These bits will influence their media plan, and a good plan is gonna account for 50% of your traffic during the early months. Depending on spend, this is gonna be spread across a few paid platforms. Generally speaking, we suggest a minimum of $10K per month per platform.
How important is strategic planning in the process of scaling a business, and what key elements should be included in a scalable business plan?
Planning is everything. However, you have to be agile and nimble enough to pivot (strategically) when the initial plan doesn’t work. From a DTC perspective, this all maps back to owned, earned, vs paid.
Once you know how many sales or revenue you need, you can start to back into the projections of how to stack up all your marketing efforts. This stack is with the expectation to deliver the business objective, but the reality is that during these first few months it’s all about proving that: “We have a product that our target audience wants.” “We have a marketing strategy that catches the attention of our target audience.” Once you hit these two early objectives, you can start to finesse and fine-tune marketing efforts.
What role does building a scalable marketing infrastructure play in the growth of a business, and how can a head of marketing ensure they are making scalable decisions from the outset?
You’ll want to align the managers and day-to-day operators of your marketing initiatives (including creative and site dev) against your goals. Early buy-in from these individuals is gonna be key to success. Having team members who are self-starters and problem-solvers will be key. Oftentimes hiring help from consultants and agencies will be a recipe for success given they have experience in bringing brands to market and therefore you can lean on them for advice.
If I were managing marketing for a GTM brand, I would hire the following people. In-house: social media manager/strategist, retention manager (to oversee email/SMS and any type of loyalty), marketing generalist, and a designer. Agency/consulting support: paid ads management, PR (influencers and affiliate marketing), design firm to outsource additional design needs.
What are some effective marketing strategies for future collections and product drops?
When we move into new collections, we use the month before the drop to amplify reach and exposure. More ad spend is utilized against efforts to grow our email and SMS list for launch. We’re also seeding the collection to the creator partners we’ve secured and dropping collection hints across owned and earned media. If necessary, we might recommend a large promo right before the drop so that we get that additional lift in customers to hit with the newness and increase our CLTV off the bat.
There are so many techniques and tactics and launching a business or a seasonal collection does not have a one-size-fits-all playbook. I’d suggest staying really authentic to the brand and the consumer base over growing at all costs.