I came up with 50 different ways to promote your clothing brand in 2022! Why? Because, promoting and marketing your clothing brand is one of the most important things you will have to do when running your clothing brand. But nowadays, a lot of people are stuck on this point.
People dont know how to promote their brands. They either don’t know how to promote it or promote it in a lazy way such as commenting “Yo bro check out this cool clothing brand I found” or “Please can you check out my brand and tell me your opinions”
Although we can respect the ambitious approach, this is simply not effective enough and there are way more effective ways that will reap higher results.
In this blog post I’ll be covering how to promote and market your clothing brand in 50 different ways!!
I’ll also be adding a bonus tip at the end, so read all the way to the end!
Before You Start Any Type Of Promotion…
Before you start marketing and promoting your clothing brand you need to set your business goals. When you think of this, try to be very specific and pick a goal that will benefit your clothing brand the most in the given moment. In addition, you can also consider adding a time scale you think its doable in.
Some examples include: boosting sales by 25% by the end of the year or increasing your email list by 1000 people by the end of the year.
Once you’ve figured out your goals you’ll need to gear your marketing campaigns towards those goals. This way it becomes much easier to know which promotion techniques and marketing campaigns to execute.
Now lets get into how to promote your clothing brand.
The 50 Different Ways To Promote Your Clothing Brand In 2022
1. Connect With Bloggers And Send Them Some Of Your Products.
You will need to think of where your audience would be. DO NOT just send it to any random blog, unless you want a cooking blog reviewing your product. Make sure the blog is somewhere your audience is likely to be and also likely to read.
A good place to start is with this blog site here! Thats one of the aims of this site, to promote underground clothing brands. If you want me to feature and review your clothing brand on this site you can contact me by shooting me a dm on Instagram or you can simply comment down below or email me.
2. Have A Social Media Presence
If you’re a clothing brand without an Instagram page or any other social media presence then what are you doing? A social media presence is the first and probably easiest way to promote your clothing brand, specifically with Instagram.
Use social media to tell your story and raise brand awareness. This is your chance to brand your business to customers and sell them a particular image/lifestyle you’re going for. You can even start up a whole hashtag for your brand that you and your audience can use.
Heres a quick idea of social media apps you can use and how to utilise them:
Instagram – Showcase your products and what your brand stands for e.g why you started it. You can even generate more sales by adding a shopping cart your Instagram feed and product photos.
Snapchat – Show manufacturing processes and behind the scenes work.
Twitter – See what customers are saying about your brand and communicate with them or other clothing brands. Also, you can use it as a customer service tool.
Facebook – The biggest social media app meaning there are so many people you can target. You can also set up a store on there.
Reddit – Ask for opinions on your products and give feedback on other peoples brands. I don’t recommend promoting on there as its spam and you will get backlash.
Email – Create an email list. Collect emails and send offers and updates to subscribers. This also helps generate more sales as email is more personal and direct.
YouTube – Showcase trailers of your drops, introduce the team or again, show some behind the scenes work of your brand.
Pinterest – This doesn’t need much explanation. Its a great place to showcase your products as fashion has a big presence on Pinterest.
TikTok – Tiktok is massive right now, and it has a large amount of active users on it daily. It is also not as hard to gain exposure unlike other social media apps. Once again, you can showcase your products and show behind the scenes work however I also recommend adding funny twists to the videos or even following some of the challenges and trends on there. Regardless of what some might think of TikTok, put your pride aside and try it!
3. Offer Vouchers, Discount and Coupon Codes (Whatever you want to call it!)
People love getting deals and bargains. People also love free stuff so if that’s something you can afford to do, DO IT! Some examples include free shipping or merch such as pens or keyrings. Simply promote deals and offers on your pages. But for higher conversions, make it personal and send it via dm on social media or email.
4. Make Video Trailers
Video is one of the most engaging pieces of media today. Definitely use it to your advantage to not only showcase your products but also tune in on the details of your product. Make sure the video is good quality and well edited. You also want the video to soft-sell an image people want to be part of.
That’s what branding actually is.
5. Send Stuff To Influencers
This is a no brainer, and you’ve probably come across influencers messaging you about this. Make sure they have the right audience you want and their page is good and well presented with good quality shots. It’s worth also checking out their analytics and insights to get your money’s worth. Some influencers do this for free, particularly influencers with smaller followings, so it’s worth checking them out.
Be careful with the influencers you choose to work with as some can scam you out of your money or products by not posting your product at all.
If you want help finding influencers suited for your brand, check out our agency and contact us.
6. Paid Ads
This includes any type of advertisement you have to pay for. In general, you would ask someone or a platform with a big audience for some space on their platform. It can include ads on different sections of a website, an Instagram feed or any other type of media space that has a large audience.
7. Social Media Ads
If you’re gonna pay for ads, I strongly recommend doing them on social media, specifically on Instagram. In addition, If you want to save some money on this, use story ads, they’re cheaper and have the capability to yield better results.
The most important thing to do is make the ad eye catching. Keep it simple and engaging. Don’t add too much as that can fail to grab attention. You also want to be careful about how to spend and distribute the money to pay for these ads.
You can check out our agency if your interested in running ads for your brand!
8. Find A Stockist
I know this may seem like a long shot, but it’s worth it. There’s no harm in trying and you never know what could happen. Choose a store that you think your audience will shop at and shoot your shot! I will be opening a store on this site for underground clothing brands soon, so if you’re interested make sure to contact me anywhere!
9. Attend Events and Festivals
Let’s be honest, some of the most fashion conscious people go to festivals or events. Therefore, this makes it a great place to grow your customer base and spread awareness about your brand. Try giving out small freebies and business cards and try to catch as much attention as you can. Be an attention seeker!
Because there is such a wide audience to target, attending the right festival or event isn’t that much of a problem. However, if you want higher conversions and really narrow down your sales, get an idea of the audience’s fashion styles and choose a festival/event that you think will match the style of your brands’ items.
10. Use Stickers And Flyers
Or any other print media. Hand these out and, place them through letterboxes and stick them around your local area. You can even do this when you’re travelling out of your local area, especially with stickers.
These can also include magazines or posters. Although it may seem a bit old school, depending on your brand and your location, this can definitely be worth it. Be cautious of any rules in your area regarding this style of promotion and be nice and enthusiastic when handing these out to people.
11. Establish Your Brand Philosophy
I’ve already covered this briefly in this post but to elaborate, you need to have a reason WHY you started your brand? What’s your Story? What’s your purpose? WHO do you represent? WHAT message are you trying to spread across? WHAT is your brand identity?
Set a vibe and feeling your brand is associated with such as luxury, happiness, non-conformity etc. The right people who want to feel that way will buy your product.
This should ideally be the first thing to do when thinking of starting a brand. If you didn’t do this and don’t have a brand philosophy, don’t worry! Build, learn and develop this as you go. You may have to tweak your name, branding or designs a bit but it’s worth the effort.
Once you have established a brand philosophy, it’s easier to make designs, know how to brand your business and also speak to customers and get your message across when promoting and marketing your clothing brand.
12. Create An Emotional Connection With Your Customers
Using emotional elements in marketing is a powerful way to turn prospects into loyal followers of your brand. Now, this can be done in multiple ways but the most obvious way is to use it in a slogan. Check out the examples below.
By emotional, I don’t specifically mean sad or upset. Make your audience feel included, appreciated or feel like you’re directly addressing them.
13. Comment And Engage On Social Media
Like I said in the beginning, you don’t want to be one of those people who spams everywhere “Yo bro check out this cool clothing brand I found” or “Please can you check out my brand and tell me your opinions”.
Instead, you want to TREAT other users like humans and engage with them with honesty. Take time to leave good comments. They can be funny or attention grabbing. Engage in conversations whether its a dm group, comment section or direct message. Leave your feedback and opinions on other clothing brands. You can even try shoutout for shoutout. I don’t recommend follow and unfollow or spamming likes on loads of accounts because Instagram knows! Trust me! and this can ultimately hurt your account.
14. Analyse The Analytics
Did you know there is a better way to use your analytics, rather than just staring at them and getting either excited or disappointed by results? Well what if I told you your analytics can help in creating marketing and promotion campaigns or can make you more money by examining them?
Some good places to start this would be MonsterInsights and Google Console.
15. Hold A Giveaway
Holding a giveaway is a great way to spread awareness about your brand and promote it. Some people have had incredible results with it and gained tons of traffic!
Tip: Make sure to tell your customers to share your giveaway around or share with tag a certain amount of friends.
Here are some great giveaway apps you could use:
16. Shoutout And Collaborate
These are great ways to steal and tap into new audiences and grow your customer base. Collaborate on combined collections or stay in contact and create good relationships. You never know when they come in handy. It’s best to do this with brands slighter bigger/smaller than yours.
17. Have Brand Ambassadors
Give popular people in your school, workplace or local area some of your clothes, for FREE! This can definitely hurt the pockets but if it’s done well you can make that money back as people influence others. I would definitely set aside a budget for these sorts of activities. Have multiple brand ambassadors, people who heavily like your brand. When people see multiple wearing the same brand of clothing it will raise curiosity and interest and soon enough word will get around and you have new customers!
18. Have A Referral program
Offer incentives to customers who refer your brand to new people. An example of an incentive is to offer a discount off their next order. This way you have multiple cycles of sales generated.
On the other hand, you can also have an affiliate program, where ANYONE can promote your product and you can pay them a commission for it.
It’s basically like having volunteers promote your clothing brand!
19. Optimise Your Website With SEO and Copywriting
When you optimise your website with SEO and copywriting, people surfing the web for a particular product will find your product if it’s done properly. I definitely recommend researching this.
20. Have A Blog
So this option might not be ideal to do and maybe a bit hard, but hear me out. With a blog you have the chance to tell your brand’s story discussed in tip 11, in addition, you can explain your inspirations behind some of the collections or products you’ve dropped. You can also create a gallery or lookbook or your clothing brand or collections.
21. Sell On Multiple Websites And Marketplaces
Get your products known and widespread! Marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon have multiple users active on their sites daily. It’s reported that Amazon has 310 million active users worldwide while eBay has 167 million active users.
Use this to your advantage and don’t only settle with your own website. Try and experiment with sites of all sizes and put more focus on the ones that bring you the most sales.
22. Take Good Photos Of Your Products
I recommend investing in a good photographer, models or cameras for this but if you network well or have friends who can do this, you can get away with this for free. Some modelling pictures on Instagram can go viral especially if you’re using photos of bikini models in your products. This generates lots of attention around your brand making it an ideal way to promote your clothing brand.
23. Set Up A Store Or Popup Shop Selling Your Own Or Multiple Clothes
This is probably one of the best ways to market your clothing brand. Set this up on your local high street, city centre or near other clothing retailers. make sure you’re in a place where lots of people are around so you can get a lot of attention.
Selling multiple clothing will probably be better as customers will already be familiar with some of those brands. So if you make your products very visible and stock them up the most, people will definitely be aware of your brand. It’s crucial that your designs are good, otherwise, people won’t buy them.
24. Send Your Clothes To Semi Famous People Or Celebrities
I’ve also covered this briefly but believe it or not. Some of them allow you to just send them clothes and if you’re lucky enough they will wear them. Don’t rely on luck though be sure that your design is dope and the quality is good. There’s no harm in trying! Imagine what would happen to your brand if one of them suddenly wore it! Just make sure to respect privacy and laws surrounding this. Do this with morals in mind.
25. Sell Or Giveaway Mini Merch
I know it may be a bit weird to giveaway or sell merch for a clothing brand but some clothing brands have actually found success with this. There’s even a brand that has based their products purely on these types of items.
Ideas for merch include:
tote bags
sunglasses
pins
stickers
keyrings
water bottles
pens
and the list goes on
You can really get good results if you get creative and choose the right merch that fits with the aesthetic of your clothing brand.
26. Set Up An Event
In an earlier tip I talked about attending the events. However, creating your own event is generally better. This may not be suitable for startup brands as it’s expensive but with some smart thinking, you can be very cost efficient with this and be able to do this even if you are a small brand.
Your event can be any type of event that will target your clothing brands audience. My strongest recommendations would be a fashion event or a music event where local musicians can perform. You can even make extra cash if you decide to charge for tickets but you can also make cash by simply making tickets free as there will be more people attending. Be sure to name the event after your brand so that awareness is spread. This is a good way to promote your clothing brand because it’s so subtle. People love events!
27. Create Physical Lookbooks and Magazines
Believe it or not, but magazines are not as dead as you might think. Fashion is a great niche for this type of promotion because it’s mainly images and doesn’t require that much reading. Showcase your best pieces and upcoming collections. A good place to hand them out in is hair salons, barbershops, dentists etc as they’re common places to find them.
Make sure the book comes out good and has good quality photos, it may be a bit of investment considering you’ll have to use a high quality printer but you never know what your investment can yield.
28. Have Top Notch Customer Service
If your customer service is good, word will get round. And word of mouth is one of the best ways to promote your clothing brand. Have easy return policies, talk polity and be friendly to customers and make sure you’re patient and prompt with customers’ requests. I know some of them can be a pain or you may not have the patience but it’s certainly a key aspect of your clothing brand that you shouldn’t overlook.
29. Guerrilla Marketing
This is also one of the best ways to promote your clothing brand. Guerrilla marketing involves using unusual or extraordinary ways to promote your clothing brand. This type of promotion is good because it surprises audiences and catches their attention. Ultimately, it raises curiosity or hype around your clothing brand which helps you gain fans of your clothing brand. Below are some of the best examples of guerrilla marketing. I’ll also leave a link here which goes more in depth about this.
30. Heavily Rely On Word Of Mouth
For a clothing brand, word of mouth can be so powerful and generate terrific results. This is because fashion is influential. Your favourite celebrities wearing certain clothes you’ve never seen makes you want it. Seeing a large number of people rocking the same brand makes you want to be part of that group. Don’t take shame in telling your customers to support you. Try and tell friends and family also to promote and shoutout your clothing brand. You’ll be amazed how word of mouth can influence people.
31. Create Scarcity and Exclusivity
Have you ever wondered why Supreme is so successful? It’s literally because of this. While it may not be only this, it is definitely a key factor that garnered to their success. Supreme have built up their brand and hype around it so much that once they implement scarcity and exclusivity, people will scramble to buy it. This is more of a psychological effect. People don’t like missing out or losing, so to avoid that, they take the necessary actions they can so that they don’t have to face it. Another example is 1340 Collective from Justin Escalona. The only way to enter his website is via an access code which he gives out to customers at every launch he does.
Some obvious way of creating this is by creating limited colours or pieces. You can also place a countdown timer on your website or product photo to indicate how long a product or offer is available for. There are multiple ways to do this, so I recommend researching into the topic.
32. Use Social Proof
Every time a customer makes a purchase, get them to leave a review of your product. Gather as many reviews as you can as a lot of customers like to get reviews of what they want before buying it. You can also use social proof in the form of video where people are talking good about your brand or you can repost customers wearing your products on social media pages.
33. Create the Ultimate Customer Experience
People love to feel important and good about themselves. So create that feeling when people shop with you. This way it turns them into loyal customers who make repeat purchases from your brand. Here are examples to execute this:
Improve your packaging – make the delivery package feel luxurious or exciting, you can even include extras in the package like pack ins, thank you notes, discount offers and hangtags
call them by their first name when speaking to them, people love hearing their name
be friendly and polite
make shopping and returns swift and easy for customers to navigate through.
34. Run Holiday Campaigns
Lots of people look out for clothes they can wear on occasions. And holidays can generate lots of traffic, leads and attention to your clothing brand. Once you’ve revealed some products for a holiday, create hype around it a week before and just promote it throughout the week. A good way to maximise sales is to extend this campaigning after the holiday to maybe 2-3 days longer but no more than a week. This can give customers who’ve missed out, a second chance at buying your product.
Obviously, you don’t have to launch a product for holidays, you can simply launch a sale or offers for the holiday week.
35. Get With The Trends
Trend forecasting is a useful skill that clothing brand owners can learn. It’s basically predicting upcoming trends and doesn’t actually sound as hard you’d think. By nature, people are “sheep” and they’ll copy each other to fit in, use this to your advantage and launch products for those trends as people will always look for substitutes which all depend on design and price. So you want to maximise your potential by focusing on those two as other brands will definitely catch on to the trends.
36. Form A Community
Get in touch with your audience and get them involved. Once you form a community, you gain a cult like following of loyal customers. This links with forming an emotional connection and creating a good customer experience. This will result in FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), curiosity, word of mouth and herd instinct or mob mentality, which all help in promoting your clothing brand
37. “Warm up” People Who Aren’t Ready To Buy From Your Brand
This idea comes from the sales funnel model, which I have explained in depth on my blog in another article. To sum this up briefly, when you gain prospects (potential customers) they are new to your brand and don’t know anything about it. Your job is to brand your clothing brand to them and show them WHY they should buy from your brand. Tell them your story, your philosophy. Show them WHAT they’re missing out on.
38. Network, Network, Network.
Network and engage with others as much as you can. Build relationships and learn from others while you also provide value to them. This is an overlooked and underestimated way of promoting your clothing brand and should be taken way more seriously. You never know when one of them can come in handy for help or what the future holds for anyone, so network!
39. Create Mystery Boxes
Everybody reading this has played subway surfers and anticipated what they would get once they’d tap that box. Well, you can use this same principle here to promote your clothing brand. People like surprises and mysteries, so if you’re able to create mystery boxes and mix them in with some of your merch and products, you can gain a lot of people’s attention and interest in what the boxes have to offer. You can even experiment with this by including pieces from other clothing brands. A popular YouTuber has a whole series on opening mystery boxes so you can get an idea of how this roughly works.
40. Apps And Notifications
You can gain a lot of traffic by simply: having an app or sending push notifications. You spread awareness about your brand if your app gets seen on the store or if you’re sending push notifications. A great place to start is with Subscribers, by Neil Patel. It lets you send notifications on mobile and desktop. They have a FREE version you can start with so check it out!
41. Magpie Your Competitors
“If you describe someone as a magpie, you mean that they like collecting and keeping things”
To elaborate, you want to copy your competitors! Not literally, because that’s unethical. What you actually want to do is see what competitors are doing and simply do it BETTER. Find out what works for them and then also do it but do it in your own, IMPROVED way. Look at how they promote their clothing brand, assess its strengths and weaknesses and capitalise on that so you have the edge.
42. Support Causes
This doesn’t need much explaining. People love to be part of something great and supporting a cause will put you in a good light and build you up a good reputation. However you need to stay as transparent and authentic with this as you can. Keep your integrity and actually donate the money you raise to your chosen cause. Don’t lie to your customers! I cant stress this enough.
43. Grow Locally
One of my favourite promotion techniques is to promote a clothing brand locally. You want to “Act Local but think Global”. Focusing on representing your local area whether its a town or city can boost your customer base insanely. Its why a lot of artists such as the likes of Pop Smoke and Aitch are liked so much, because they represent where they grew up. Don’t neglect the idea of growing globally, still keep that goal at the back of your head. But once you grow locally first and garner a local following you can focus on going out from there.
44. Use Public Promo
Don’t underestimate using public ads. These can come in the form of billboards, car wraps of small board signs. This can be combined with promoting your clothing brand locally, like I covered in the previous tip.
This type of promotion can be expensive so it’s good to do your research. However, generally speaking, prices will depend on your town/city and its size.
45. Build Your Personal Brand
A lot of clothing brands’ success today comes from the fact that people who’ve started that brand were known for something else or have a different background from having a clothing brand. One example is Cole Bennett where he recently launched a merch line for his company, Lyrical Lemonade. Think of celebrities, Youtubers and Influencers with their own merch line, their fans buy from them because initially, they’re the product, they want to represent their idol or someone they look up to.
Further examples include Virgil Abloh, Ken Ijima and Jerry Lorenzo.
46. Get Friends And Family To Help
This is a no brainer. Ask them to support and promote your clothing brand. Give them free stuff and get them to wear it around. They are friends and family for a reason, right?
47. Get Feedback And Execute On It
Make sure you’re always getting feedback on your clothing brand, whether it’s from friends, family or customers. This will help immensely in improving your brand and scaling it so that your brand can grow. Once you get feedback you can look at what designs you can do and how you can promote upcoming products in the future. Always try to improve and learn from previous marketing campaigns so that next time you can maximise results.
48. Soft Sell A Lifestyle
This is probably the foundation of how to promote your clothing brand. It links to my point about having a brand philosophy but in this point, I want you to focus more on soft selling. When you soft sell, it’s like warming up your audience and getting them ready to buy your product. Most people don’t buy impulsively and will need reassurance and a reason to buy your product. So sell a lifestyle that will make your audience want to be part of that lifestyle. Use the herd instinct to your advantage.
49. Build A Small Motivated Team
Growing a clothing brand is hard. Let alone growing one on your own. You want to build a team of people you can trust, are motivated and you can rely on. You can try building it on your own but somewhere down the road you WILL need help.
Having multiple people help you run your brand can generate lots of different ideas and ways to promote your clothing brand. You can also hire a mentor to help which I strongly recommend as mentors have done what you want to do so they give you their proven method and strategies to help you grow and promote your brand.
50. Think Long Term
You want to make your decisions based on a long term approach. This is because short term approaches often lead to unethical activities to achieve short term objectives. When you think long term you can build your brand better, grow a bigger and better customer base and just sustain your brand for longer and likely years down the road. On the other hand, short term approaches will only bring you quick and temporary results so it’s better to be patient and think long term.
Bonus Tip: You NEED to have patience and consistency here. As cliche as it sounds, you don’t grow a clothing brand overnight. Focus on around 3 different promotion techniques and expand by trying out the other ones. You don’t want to try too many at a time. Some of these tips depend on the size of your brand. You don’t want to try too many techniques but then again you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket by trying 1 technique.
If you're looking for any help marketing or promoting your brand, be sure to check our marketing agency targeted at streetwear brands. We're currently offering FREE consultation calls when you enquire.
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