What is Digital Marketing in Fashion Industry?

Digital marketing is traditional marketing done on the internet. That's just it. It's still marketing, but instead of doing it the traditional way, it's done the modern way. 

Now, the traditional way of doing marketing is advertising in a newspaper or magazine, print billboards, television advertising, fliers, radio advertising, or going from house to house trying to advertise or sell goods and services. But nowadays, no need for all that. Advertising can be done online, via social media channels, SMS, websites, etc., and that's what digital marketing is all about. 

So, when we are talking about digital marketing, we are talking about social media, SMS, website, SEO, SMM, email marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing, etc. Keep that in mind. 

On the other hand, the fashion industry is one big vast industry. When we're talking about the fashion industry, we're talking about an industry that encompasses clothing, footwear, accessories, etc., and that's a whole lot. 

Although, when we talk about fashion currently, people just think about clothing style, there's more to it than just that. When we talk about fashion, we're talking about self-expression in a particular context. We're talking about people's ideas and opinions about how they should look, especially in a specific context. 

For instance, the style and manner in which people dressed in the 15th and 16th centuries are far different from the way people in the 21st-century dress. But despite the difference in the dress sense of both eras, we can observe that within each era, people still had/have their taste, method, or perspective of how they want to look.

Some people prefer to look more cooperative, and serious, while the others prefer to look more relaxed, free, and casual - now, that's fashion. It's not just the cloth and its style, it's the idea in the mind of the person who's putting it on. 

There is a current rise in the availability and use of the internet and social media. There are numerous social applications with thousands of users. Over time, some of the people we love (celebrities; musicians, politicians, activists, actors, pastors, etc) begin to influence our sense of dressing, and then only we get updated to see their ideas and opinions of putting clothes on is through these social media channels.

For example, if Rihanna posts on her Instagram handle about how she showed up for a TV interview or the Grammys, trust me, a lot of people will take cognizance of her dress sense. And, while some other persons might be criticizing her looks, some other sets of persons are admiring the outfit; they might even go the length of trying to replicate the outfit in other to look like her (Rihanna). 

Just to be more specific here, how about ‘Sagging'? Do you think people just started doing it all of a sudden? Not at all. We're not robots. People saw and admired sagging from the people they love and respect. And because those influencers were sagging, they felt it is cool and appropriate, and they started sagging. Social media (which is an aspect of the digital space) helped in marketing this fashion idea, and expression of sagging, people bought into it and today it's all over the globe.  

So, without the presence of social media, the popularity of this self-expression about dress styles and patterns would not go widespread. A few years back, just recently, Ankara was abloom. Everyone around the globe wants to look African by putting on an Ankara, and the shooting of the "Black Panther" movie even made the dress widespread. Digital marketing was a major player in that. 

Also, fashion companies have used social media to sell their products. Most fashion companies now have official social media handles. What they do on these handles is display their products (clothing line, shoes, caps, accessories etc ) so that their fanbase (or target audience) can get to see them. By doing this, they're marketing their goods to their target audience. 

And on a deeper scale, having a social media handle, for most fashion companies, is getting an opportunity to have a real-time connection with their customers. So, when they upload pictures and videos of their new products, their customers have the liberty of voicing out their opinions about the product in the comment section of the post (more like a review), and that is exactly the kind of connection most fashion brands and companies want; it allows them to design production just the way the customers want them. 

Lastly, the fashion industry is one very unstable industry. And what I mean by that is, the fashion industry is always full of trends. Today, one style is trending, tomorrow a new one is trending, the next, something else is trending. It's always unstable. Sometimes, it's even difficult to catch up with. And, one basic factor that's responsible for the effectiveness of new trends in the fashion industry is social media.