An Exploring Effective use of Social Media Marketing by Fashion Brands

Abstract

The social media platforms have offered a wonderful opportunity of marketing for fashion brands globally. Both emerging and established fashion brands are using social media for marketing functions and growing sales in market. Digital marketing has transformed brand promotion paving the way for globalization of fashion. Present research explored how effectively fashion brands are utilizing sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for their marketing using qualitative phenomenology as a research design. Branded entertainments used on social media by fashion brands were explored with the help of semi-structured interviews. Non-probability purposive expert sampling technique was used to select eighteen participants for semi-structured interviews. Our results showed that fashion brands can achieve great exposure due to smart utilization of social media as a marketing strategy. We found that effectively designed marketing content for social media can achieve better brand engagement, brand image, customer-value, and most importantly competitive advantage among competitors. People use social media almost 24/7. Therefore companies upload their information three to four times per day, or according to their desired schedule. Facebook is a great medium to increases brand out-reach, whereas Instagram is more effective in effectively reaching the desired target market. Previous studies have highlighted that commercial advertisements on Facebook can give much superior results in comparison to other web advertisements. Traffic is directed to brand website by providing cross-links on the Facebook or Instagram posts. Presence of brand on social media increases its credibility as it is ranked among top five social media platforms.