Who loves to give advice? Everyone. When it comes to marketing. What do you do when the advice requires a budget? What happens after that?
I am the founder of a small sustainable, socially responsible, and zero-waste fashion label that works with a community of women single parents in North Macedonia. It can be challenging to operate from a country with limited resources. The company was founded by me back in 2013. It started as a marketplace for local designers and quickly expanded to include international designers from all over the world.
We became a fashion label after four years. I wanted to make a change in the society I lived in. The seamstress became a single parent when I was working with her. I was impressed by her strength and determination, as well as her iron will to provide her child with better circumstances than she was born in.
I decided to make Bastet Noir a socially responsible brand. Our community of women single parents grew with the business. We work with five woman-owned studios that are operated by either women single parents or women micro-entrepreneurs.
A global brand with customers from all over the world has grown into a small local business.
We used every tool in our arsenal to make it happen, just a pipe dream and persistence. I want to talk about what we did on social media to make it happen.
You should still have an up-to-date presence even if you don't invest in social media. One way to automate your brand's social media is to automatically share new posts with your followers.
Our marketing budget is practically non-existent because of our boot strapped company. We reinvested everything we make back into our community of single parents, so we had to think of creative ways to attract customers. Social media was very successful.
Let's go back for a second. When we started out, it wasn't a thing. It took us a while to get to our target market in the United States. It took us almost a year to figure out how to grow and attract the right followers after we got on the platform.
Our first few hundred followers were based in Macedonia. We didn't have the money to pay for ads, which was the only way to target the U.S. How did we make it work? By establishing a captivating and powerful story behind the brand, through a lot of trial and error.
We were trying to tell a story in our posts and stories. We were a sustainable, zero-waste, and socially responsible label that worked with women single parents in North Macedonia and helped them earn more than the industry average monthly income of $300. The feed needed to have an aesthetic that would be recognizable for our brand, so we chose several color tones that best represented our label.
We planned our content a month out, which gave us time to hone the copy and research hashtags, which we found to be our first priority. The social media planning tool Later helped us a lot with the visual part of how the feed would look.
We tried to bridge the gap between our social media and content strategies. We used People Map to create a list of the women we wanted to cover. We used the app to find editors, writers, social media managers, and women entrepreneurs in the U.S.
It's important to follow all applicable rules around cold emailing and give people ways to opt out.
We wrote an email to each woman, explaining our business and telling them what we liked about them. Most of them didn't reply back, but the ones that did were more than happy to help us out, and we got a number of women to do interviews with us.
We gained credibility because all of the women worked for publications likeHarper's Bazaar and Vogue Business. Since most of them shared their stories on their social media accounts, we started getting engagement from their followers. They were sharing the links on their feeds and stories, so we got traction on our website.
Since advertising wasn't an option due to lack of funds, this was the only way for us to use the power of influencer marketing. Our entire investment was the production of the piece and the shipping cost to send them the outfit, and all we asked for in return was a few photos of them wearing the pieces, so we could include them in our posts.
Even on social, you can start small. To help, here are three ways that you can automate your account so that you can focus on the more personal parts of marketing.
Many of the communities prohibit advertising and anything that they consider to be spammy, like sharing discount codes and links to your own website. You need to engage with the community in a different way. Start a conversation, answer questions, and show that you are an authority on the topic. If they are interested in learning more about your brand, you can share links. If you do it before someone asks, you could be banned from one of the most engaged internet communities.
r/FemaleFashionAdvice was the most important one for us and we joined a few other subreddits. We knew that this community would be interested in our brand. We started giving styling advice to people. I started posting photos of my outfits, wearing Bastet Noir. I shared links to the website when people asked where I got some of the items. We saw a huge increase in traffic, and orders started rolling in.
We started working with them at the beginning of 2020. I guess you could say we arrived a bit late, but in our defense, we believed we weren't able to afford their rates, which was true to a point. A brand mention on a video that has more than 10,000 views costs at least $3,000. It's not a dedicated brand video. It's too expensive for a brand like ours.
We decided to see if anyone would like to promote our clothes for free. We prepared a list of hundreds of YouTubers who we believed had the same aesthetic as our brand. They were found by searching for "minimal style", "ethical fashion", and "environmentally friendly fashion" on the internet. It makes sense that most of them didn't reply at all. They offered to cover our brand because they were so taken by our cause.
Here is an example from Cat Creature and one from Chloe Kian. As a result of these reviews and their support, we were able to bring in more traffic to our website and create brand awareness.
The best place to find new things to buy is on pins. Since the platform itself is very visual, people usually go there to organize their shopping lists. If your store is on the platform, you can use the app to get rich pins, which means that the description and price will be pulled directly from your website.
Sharing boards, community boards made by Pinfluencers are the best way to increase followers and get reps. How do you find these boards? You can either use a search engine or use Pin Groupie. You can find boards according to categories, number of followers, and other criteria.
If you decide to use pins on the board for your business, here are 5 tips.
We are members of about eight boards. Fashion + Friends has more than 600k followers and is the most important one for us. Once you have been approved by the admin, the things you post appear on the feed of every follower in that board. That means millions of potential customers around the world. The boards helped us rank higher on the internet.
One tip is to go for boards with a lot of followers. Boards with fewer followers will just sit on your profile and collect dust.
We used our no-budget social media strategy to increase traffic and sales.
The article was first published on the Zapier blog. The original post can be found here.
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