ASIA-PACIFIC: The fashion industry continues to diversify into digital and away from its long relationship with traditional media such as glossy magazines, with social media influencers emerging as a “natural destination” for fashion brands.

Data from media-buying firm Zenith Media showed that fashion brands increased digital spend by 63% between 2013 and 2016, while spend on magazine advertising fell by 8%.

“We are starting to see companies try to stitch together an online and an offline footprint of their customers to create this unified view,” said Daniel Hagos, client success director at marketing software company Emarsys, on a recent Econsultancy webinar exploring the digitization of the fashion category.

Fashion brands can implement “small things”, such as welcoming new sign-ups, thanking customers for the online purchases they have made, and asking for feedback about their experience or verdict about the product.

Such gestures allow brands to “show that you care, that they’ve spent their money and that they’ve invested with you,” Hagos advised. (For more on digital strategies in the fashion category, read WARC’s report: Digital brand building: What fashion brands must know.)

Using influencers is de rigueur in the fashion industry, with nearly three in four luxury brands engaging influencers in their marketing plans.

According to an Econsultancy report, The New Face of Luxury: Maintaining Exclusivity in the World of Social Influence, more than half of all respondents said influencer marketing was at least effective, while 14% of luxury brands and 21% of non-luxury brands found it very effective. One third (32%) of luxury brands and a quarter (26%) of non-luxury brand found it slightly effective.

“Nearly all of the respondents indicated that their organisation’s approach to influencer marketing was effective, with a mere 2% of brands surveyed stating that their approach was not effective,” said Jeff Rajeck, Econsultancy’s APAC research analyst.

To measure success for influencer campaigns, most fashion brands go with generating web traffic (79% of luxury brands and 73% of non-luxury brands) as their metric, while the number of times the content was shared (67% of luxury brands and 73% of non-luxury brands) was second.

“Somewhat surprisingly here, we see that non-digital metrics, such as revenue and press coverage, were less popular than digital ones,” noted Rajeck.

“In terms of long term value, if it’s well executed and well planned, the influencer will be able to prefer to deliver that kind of long term value to what brands strive to achieve,” he said.

Sourced from WARC