A Guide to Influencer Marketing in the Fashion Industry

Fashion influencer marketing connects people with the runway in ways that TV commercials and magazine advertisements can’t. Instead of relying on supermodels to sell clothing, brands can create powerful campaigns using real people and the power of social media.

There’s a shift in how the fashion industry connects with its customers. We’re increasingly inclined to get inspiration from the real-life personalities we follow online. 

This guide is the perfect place to start if you’re a fashion brand interested in leveraging influencer marketing to promote your products.

Key takeaways:

• To position your brand as accessible and relatable, connect with creators who have built an engaged social media following instead of working only with celebrities.
• To work with fashion influencers, you don’t just have to send free products. There is more value in them promoting your sales, hosting giveaways, and offering exclusive discount codes to their audience.
• To ensure a successful campaign, it’s all about choosing the right influencers. Select your influencer partners based on your target audience and who will best represent your brand values.

What is fashion influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is all the rage. It provides brands with an entirely new way to connect with potential customers. In the fashion world, everyone from luxury designers to fast fashion brands are partnering with influencers to see success. 

Just look at Aerie, which partnered with TikTok personalities to promote its products.

When influencers use their platform – whether it’s YouTube, Instagram, or other social media accounts – to talk about your brand, it’s a powerful way to get noticed. Sometimes all it takes is a single post for your brand’s popularity to explode online. 

Influencer marketing can quickly boost awareness and build trust as social media platforms reach hundreds of millions of daily active users. Vogue magazine, for comparison, reaches 22.5 million monthly readers.

Influencer marketing ideas for fashion brands

There are many ways to collaborate with influencers depending on what is best for your brand and long-term goals. The more creative you get, the more your campaign will stand out. This generates positive results such as increased social followers, engagement, and sales for your brand. 

Here are a few ideas:

• Product promotion: The most common fashion influencer campaign approach is sending free products to influencers, or giving them access to shop in your online store with a set budget in mind. Then, they can style the clothes and feature your products in blogs, social media posts, stories, etc.
• Promote sales with affiliate links: To ensure your next sale is a hit, have influencers promote it on social media by sharing some of their favorite products. By using an affiliate link, influencers can earn a commission on each sale, making it more enticing to drive new customers to your brand. 
• Exclusive discount codes: Everyone loves to save money, so creating unique discount codes for each influencer can be a great way to drive sales and measure which influencers deliver the most traffic to your site.
• Have a social media takeover: If you’re looking for something different than a typical sponsored post, try a full-fledged social media takeover. For example, an influencer can take control of your brand’s Instagram account for the entire day. Enable the influencer to post updates to your feed and Instagram Stories and Reels to present a fun, relatable way to drive their fans to your social pages.

3 tips for a successful fashion influencer marketing campaign

An influencer marketing campaign requires careful research and planning to achieve results. Keep these three tips in mind to help make your fashion influencer campaign a success:

1. Decide what you want to gain from the collaboration

Before diving in, outline the goals for your influencer campaign. What are you looking to achieve by working with a fashion influencer? Do you want to boost brand awareness, grow your social following, or drive sales?

Knowing your end goal also tells you which metrics to track to see if a given influencer relationship is successful. If you see that a campaign has performed well, you’ll know that a particular influencer is worth working with again in the future.

2. Determine the type of campaign you’d like to run

Ultimately, you want to consider the type of campaign that will best help you reach your goals. Do you expect the best results from a sponsored social post? Or would it be more effective to host a giveaway or offer an exclusive discount code?

As you experiment with influencer marketing, you’ll better understand what works for your brand and what doesn’t. The key here is testing, learning, and continuing to iterate on your marketing strategy.

3. Choose the right influencers for your campaign

As a brand, you always want to work with influencers with an audience you want to target. If an influencer’s existing audience isn’t going to be interested in your products, the campaign won’t be successful. Don’t just choose someone because they have a large following. A loyal, engaged following is key, so influencers with a smaller follower base can still make for a powerful collaboration.

Another important element to consider when choosing your influencer partners is equity and inclusion. Each marketing campaign is an opportunity for your brand to incorporate influencers from various backgrounds and different body types to ensure your messaging is representative of your target audience.

That’s a wrap!

Influencer marketing isn’t going anywhere. If you want to ensure people talk about and recommend your brand, now is the time to get started. 

Get in touch if you need help finding the right influencers for your brand.