Media buying in womens clothing industry

T

TheMightyOne

Internet Visionary
Sep 16, 2007
98
1
0
U.S. of A
anyone have any insight on this? any ecommerce pros have any experience with media buying in apparel industry?

We're operating an ecommerce womens clothing site, have our own merchandise and 90% of our growth this year has been organic, we're at around $75k in monthly revenue and would like to sustain the growth with marketing, media buying, ppc, and social media in particular...hoping some of u can provide some pointers.

Would love to hear from other folks in here that are involved in apparel ecommerce and were able to scale their revenues not only organically by with paid traffic as well....any advice would be helpful

Hoping, I didn't post this in wrong thread :/

To show my appreciation, i give you tits

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What is your target demo?

How is your Pinterest marketing coming along?

You could do well establishing your brand on Tumblr as well.

I just launched my own ecommerce product. Target demo is middle-upper class women 35 to 55 years old. It is a health tea. Have any pointers on generating the organic growth like you have?
 
Paper_Chase said:
Target demo is middle-upper class women 35 to 55 years old.
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We share the same age & gender demographic, but with upscale boutique (brick & mortar) and 2 ecomm stores.

Our product is fashion, leather footwear for women.

I've very interested to discuss online/offline fashion retailing via skype.
TheMightyOne & Paper_Chase, PM for contact info.
 
Why not spend some money on display network and see what type of sites are converting? Then find the converters and negotiate a buy w/ them direct.

Also, look into some big data companies or retargeting companies that use demographic data (mediaforge or adroll) They can take your customer file/retargeting list and find similar customers for you to advertise to... chances are that campaign will lose or breakeven but will be completely acquisition.
 
Thanks for quick responses

@ Paper_Chase: We're in young adult niche so our target demo is low-mid class females age group 24-36, predominantly African american and Hispanic.

We're working on Pinterest but having a challenge keeping the audience engaged, def would like to increase our exposure there, haven't attempted to tackle Tumblr yet, wasn't sure if it was worth pursuing. if you have any pointers, I'd love to hear them.

In terms of organic growth, believe me, we were somewhat surprised ourselves to see this kind of growth over the course of past year, since the store has been around 2007 but the gross revenues were in very lows $X,XXX - $XX,XXX until March of this year when it started really producing. However for last few years we didn't concentrate on branding AT ALL, we optimized our SEO for few high traffic KWs in young adult clothing niche but now we're looking to build the brand now that we rank for more general terms. Hope that helped

@ Jake1125: We have a similar set up, 2 physical locations in South Florida (one inside a mall) and 2 ecomm stores, where the other one ecomm store is more of an outlet store to clean merchandise at cost, that doesn't sell at retail prices. I'll PM you and Paper_Chase my skype info

@Makavelimob: Would you recommend any display networks to go after? I've been looking into self serving platforms like SiteScout, but totally new to media buying (although, we possess the budget to learn the ropes :)). Media buying is a beast I really want to tackle as I know the traffic quality can be great...however, I've been reading a lot about it here, but it seems that most of the conversations about media buying are for CPA offers....I'm curious to hear from someone who had success building a brand with this marketing method, if you could point me in the right direction, that would be great

Spent an hour on phone with MediaForge and AdRoll, but they seem a little pricey for the service that they offer (offering retargetting with average $2 CPMs) kinda feel like I can diversify our marketing budget more vs throwing it at one company...any advice here would be quite valuable
 
This thread is highly correlated with my interests as I'm in the early stages of launching a women's beauty product.
 
If youre new to media buying, try google display network, you can atleast see what type of sites are converting for you before you jump to sitescout or direct. Also i work with mediaforge on a rev share, not sure why they quoted you $2 cpms. Youd be surprised how many services you can get access to with a simple low percentage rev share.
 
You need to engage the powerhouse that is the fashion blogosphere. They love giveaways and almost all the prominent ones sell ad space.
 
Pinterest can be a gold mine for this kind of site. Keep posting. Every day. Engage with users as well. talk to them. see what they want.

Social Media cant be an afterthought here. it can be HUGE rev.
 
@Makavelimob: Thanks for advice, I'll look into it, We signed up for free trial of WhatRunsWhere to see what our competition is running, but so far unable to locate any useful intel...our goal is to jump into media buying but at the same time make educated and researched decisions in terms of what inventory to buy, where etc...would you say this is a good strategy to persue with media buying or am I missing something here? Of course, majority will be trial and error but we are trying to avoid blowing our budget on "learning the ropes"

@kingofsp: We've been collaborating with lots of bloggers, deal, mommy, celebrity, fashion etc hosting giveaways, product reviews and such and are continuing down this road and although the results have helped us get the additional exposure, I feel like there is more we can do...and besides, the way we locate these bloggers is by simply googling "top fashion blogs" or something similar and contact them directly....the unfortunate part is that only 2-3 out of 30-40 reply back...if you have any experience in this dept, i'd be greatful to get any insights

@thunderlips: Pinterest is indeed a gold mine for our industry, just having problem with engaging the user, we post almost every day, have creative and colorful boards made, but seem to have an issue with gaining traction with the user/customer...some days feel like I'm beating my head against the wall with all the pinning and little results :-/ I know if we can ramp up our social media presence, visitor to customer conversion is bound to go up, just getting to that point is a challenge

I appreciate your response guys, this is good stuff here
 
TheMightyOne said:
@kingofsp: We've been collaborating with lots of bloggers, deal, mommy, celebrity, fashion etc hosting giveaways, product reviews and such and are continuing down this road and although the results have helped us get the additional exposure, I feel like there is more we can do...and besides, the way we locate these bloggers is by simply googling "top fashion blogs" or something similar and contact them directly....the unfortunate part is that only 2-3 out of 30-40 reply back...if you have any experience in this dept, i'd be greatful to get any insights
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On the rare occasion that I start doing actual work, a lot of it is this. If only 5-10% are responding, something is wrong with your pitch. Try to word your message to show a genuine interest in what they are doing. They are significantly more interested in themselves than whatever business you are trying to run. Also, some people just suck at checking their email. If I really want to get someone's attention, I'll do it on Twitter or FB.

Also, Googling for new targets is okay to start, but it should only be to start. If you read their content and check out their sidebars, you can find all kinds of other quality targets, and not just the ones that rely on Google traffic.
 
TheMightyOne said:
@kingofsp: We've been collaborating with lots of bloggers, deal, mommy, celebrity, fashion etc hosting giveaways, product reviews and such and are continuing down this road and although the results have helped us get the additional exposure, I feel like there is more we can do...and besides, the way we locate these bloggers is by simply googling "top fashion blogs" or something similar and contact them directly....the unfortunate part is that only 2-3 out of 30-40 reply back...if you have any experience in this dept, i'd be greatful to get any insights
Click to expand...

I bet these blogs get inundated with requests to review / pimp / give away products and most of those probably go in the trash, so start split-testing your titles and body content.

If you're interested in doing a media buy directly with them down the road, I'd make that clear from the get-go and I'd mention a specific dollar amount. Also, I'd give them a phone number to reach you at rather than just leaving it up to email. Anything you can do to make yourself sound more professional and to stand out farther from the crowd will go a long way to generating more responses.

Also, be persistent without being annoying. Offer to pre-pay a bit of your campaign... anything to get your foot in the door. Once you've got some sort of working relationship, it'll be easier to leverage them down the road.
 
Use google content network targeted by url [and seperately by KW] to run some test traffic and see what converts - place their conversion pixel and use their retargeting feature from the get-go its just as far reaching as adroll's but much less financial risk/exposure as you're bidding per click.

You know who your demo is so finding url's to target that they visit shouldn't be difficult - the adwords kw & placement research tools do a reasonable job to help you get started. Start with the big name stuff and work out from there.

Sitescout is great once you know what you're doing but the safer place to get your feet wet and get some experience is google content nw, (alongside search).
 
Are you using PPC campaigns to fuel your organic spend? If not that is definately something I would look into.

Most firms will charge you 20% of PPC spend, but if you look around there are a few of us out there that work cheaper with an annual contract.

I'd push a major portion of your online advertising budget into PPC to start.

Some well placed media buys wouldn't hurt either. Have you looked at Google's Adplanner or Quantcast? Dig up some sites that your target demographic is appealing to. Then figure out what network owns their inventory. Contacting the larger one's for a direct purchase could work out for you as well.

Lots of opportunity, sounds like you just need to get on the grind already. :)
 
@kingofsp: Thanks for the info, man, I appreciate the advice. you are right, google is only a start as most of those bloggers have pretty expanded blogrolls with other targets. However, I will take your advice on adjusting my pitch. I guess the key is to make whatever I'm offering jump out at them in midst of all other nonsense they get bothered about throughout the day. Thanks again

@Mightier: I never really thought about mentioning the dollar amount right off bat, but I'll def try it, I just dont want to bombard them with emails...but I guess once the dollar sign is mentioned, it's bound to get their attention. Def will expand on it going forward

@edward_b: thanks a lot for the break down, makes total sense...and being a complete noob in this, I'll start with something more basic before getting involved with more intricate systems...would care to provide any sort of metrics in terms of how to sort thru winners and losers (how much $ to test to determine if the target is worth pursuing, how many impressions can be considered a thorough test - essentially any stats you can throw at me when it comes to media buying, I'd really appreciate it) We have a full time graphic designer on payroll so she can bust out 10-20 creatives in matter of hours so we can test which convert better, but I'd like to know more in terms of how much money I should be throwing at this beast right off bat...thanks again for your advice!

@AYGJoe: We're doing PPC, however it's not optimized AT ALL....its profitable so we're def in the black with our campaigns but there is A TON of room for improvement which is what I will be taking over starting next week in addition to media buying and locating bloggers. How would I figure out which property belongs to which network? I'm currently running a trial version of WhatRunsWhere but to be quite honest, the traffic sources I'm getting from that software are either wrong or I'm not doing something right because I can't fathom why someone like Forever21 for example, would buy media on coffee beans review site...I'm def missing something here.

But in terms of PPC, it's def work in progress because we were lucky enough to create 4 profitable campaigns right off bat ($4k monthly spend, brings in $11.5k in additional revenue) and therefore we just left it to run on its own for last 2 months...but I'm sure with some optimizing I can quadruple my ROI on the spend....if that's your area of expertise, please PM me I'd love to pick your brain.

This is very awesome stuff here, I truly appreciate all your responses guys, I guess a pair of tits can go a long way here :-p
 
Bro, I might hand off your PPC campaign to a HIGHLY REPUTABLE PPC agency. Think rimm kaufmam. They will have your shit tight, and the 800 a month you give them will be well worth the money they make you moving forward. This is something that should definitely be outsourced so that you can focus on other important elements of your business.
 
Pay celebs to wear it, when they get their pics online media buy along side of them with links to buy what they are wearing.

Pay other popular girls, youtube celebs, bloggers, ect. Link to your store.

Pretty ez..
 
@OnlineMoniez - never really thought of outsourcing the PPC, but then again, we never really gave much thought to it once we created those 4 campaigns, we figured if its making us money, why mess with it...but now i see that the ROI can be quadrupled if optimized properly

@BigWill - we've been in touch with YouTube "celebs" and numerous vloggers but the prices they try to charge are crazy and I honestly think we can do more with our marketing budget than to hand it off in exchange for a mention or two by someone popular on YouTube....and we're working with bloggers now, hosting giveaways, product reviews etc...just looking for another marketing channel in addition to what we're already doing...thanks for the response though!

@Onedollaridea - Thanks for the advice, I've decided to start in display network and branch out from there, judging by some responses here, display network would be a good starting point for a media buying noob like myself....if you have links to those case studies, please share, I'd love to take a look. If you have any personal advice in terms of how to set up a display campaign in adwords, I'd be forever grateful

Thanks again
 
When a individual chooses to hook up his or her action with the fashion industry nothing comes to mind except one its element - fashion design. Probably, few people actually know that it's a individual field of style market. In fact, there is lots of other careers and areas of expertise in style such as developing outfits, style style, style marketing, style marketing, etc
 
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