It is no secret that if you want to build out a fashion brand today, then content marketing and social media are critical elements to your success. Over 90% of fashion marketers consider content marketing to be critical for the success of their organization. No panic, we are going to share with you exactly what successful marketing pros revealed about what they do to make them successful. Also, we decided to make this research really actionable. So we went beyond the traditional high-level questions and got seriously nitty-gritty about it, and asked questions to the level of formats (lookbooks, blogs, ..), research tactics (keywords, ..) and more.

Fashion is extremely visual. So we figured that the tools used in the fashion industry would be significantly different from the blog-driven business-to-business marketing. And indeed, our research confirmed that fashion content marketing has (or should have) its own set of tools.

Apart from product pages and product descriptions, social media is by far the #1 tool used by fashion content marketers. Other widely used tactics are online lookbooks, video, blogs and newsletters. However, because a tactic is widely used does not always mean it is the right one to use. So we asked people who were using a specific content tactic, if that tactic was working for them or not. Who wins? Again, the clear #1 winner is social media. 83% of marketers indicated that this tactics was working for them! Other tactics seemed harder to master, as the success rate of the next content tactic immediately drops below 50%. Nevertheless, these might be worthwhile to try: newsletters, online catalogues, online lookbooks and print catalogues all have a success rate between 45 and 50%. There is a lot of information in these statistics. But before we jump into our recommendations, let’s quickly talk about why we would recommend or not recommend certain tools. It is about beating the odds. The way we see it, if 29% of marketers say that blogs are successful for them, then you have a ⅓ chance of being successful too. Probably even less, since you are starting out and you have to go through a learning curve. Unless of course… you have an “unfair” advantage which will help you beat the odds. The advantage does not have to be that unfair. In the case of blogs, it is possible that you previously created a blog already, with success. So you might feel that you can be better than the average. If this is so, feel free to ignore our recommendations and follow your instincts. But don’t blame us if your instincts were wrong :-).

We also wanted to see where content marketing was going to evolve to in the next year. So we asked marketers who were not using a specific content tool if they were planning on starting to use that tactic in the next 12 months.

Again, social media is obviously a fashion marketing favorite. Out of the few (13%) people who do not use this tactic yet, 50% is planning to start using it in the next 12 months. We will also see more and more lookbooks popping up, as 44% of people who are not doing lookbooks currently, are planning to start producing them.

The two main ways for distributing content are organic search (68%), email newsletters (65%) and paid social media (61%). What? We counted the responses here several times, just to make sure.  We were quite surprised that only 45% of marketers use keyword research, yet so many more trust in organic search to bring them traffic.

We also asked which of these content tools were successful for them. Top earners were paid strategies: both paid search and paid social media got A-ratings for being successful. In a second place we saw (still) organic search and email newsletters.

Social media is obviously a fashion marketer’s go-to content marketing tactic. So we delved a bit deeper into how fashion marketers are using social media. First question we wanted to see answered: which social media channels are fashion marketers using?

Facebook and Instagram are the absolute two favorites. These are used by over 90% of fashion marketers. Somewhat surprisingly (at least for us) was that Twitter is used by more marketers than Pinterest. However, when we asked content marketers which of the used platforms they considered critical to their company, we got an answer more in line with our expectations. Instagram, Facebook, Youtube and Pinterest as visual social media platforms came out nicely on top.

In social media, it is pretty clear who the big beneficiary of the fashion industry’s hard-earned advertising money is. Facebook & Instagram (wait, that is Facebook as well) are by far the two most utilized channels for paid promotion. However, a solid 56% of fashion marketers using social media indicates they do spend any budget on paid promotion. If we look at the organizations who are successful with content marketing, this number is higher: 65% engages in paid social media.

If we look at the data per social media platform, then we see that the percentage of successful organizations utilizing paid strategies is higher for Instagram (57% vs 46%) and Facebook (71% vs 63%). For other platforms, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Youtube, the number is lower. However, less successful organizations do spend on paid social media for these latter platforms.

If you are reading this, chances are that you are one of the growing numbers of marketers who are adopting content as a strategy to boost their marketing. Content marketing & social media are extremely relevant and important in the fashion industry.

The number one reason for increased success is not surprisingly producing a higher quality of content (75%). Other really important reasons are producing more content (41%), better audience definition (41%) and strategy changes (37%).Looking at the other side of the coin, what happened to marketers who saw their content marketing success decline in the last year.

Lack of time and money are the two most cited reasons why content marketing did not improve in the last year, and 1 out of 3 marketers also indicates having trouble creating good visual content.

The number one source used by content marketers in fashion to find the right content is customer feedback. Secondly, marketers tend to study their competitors, likely to see what they are doing. The percentages for these two factors are not very different between successful and unsuccessful organizations, so we could not find a distinguishing factor. However, when we looked at keyword research, we saw that 54% of successful organizations used this to determine the right content, while only 33% of unsuccessful used this. So it does seem that keyword research is linked to being successful in content marketing, even in fashion.

When we look at the number of tactics used to determine the right content, we see that successful organizations spend more attention to this. On average, successful organizations use on average 2.4 tactics, while unsuccessful ones utilize on average 1.9.

OK, budget and money is important, but how about having the company’s commitment and support, and having a documented strategy and KPIs?

85% of interviewed marketers said there was a strong sense of commitment to content marketing. If we look at the difference between successful and unsuccessful, we see a clear difference. 98% of successful marketers says there is a strong sense of commitment for content marketing, compared to only 50% of unsuccessful content marketers.

It seems there is still some work to do on the strategy and KPI-setting part though: Only 45% would agree with the fact that there is a documented strategy and KPIs in place.

However, we once more see a clear difference between the successful and unsuccessful content marketers. It is almost a black & white contrast: 72% of successful marketers agree with having a documented strategy and KPIs, while only 13% of unsuccessful marketers say they have a strategy in place.

One of the tricky parts of marketing is always a correct budget allocation. So we asked folks about their experiences.

We see that most marketers content marketing budgets are in the 10-25% of total budget range, and the 25-50% and 1-10% ranges. However, if we look at how much the marketers who achieved success with content marketing spend, we see a notable difference.

Successful content marketers tend to spend significantly more, especially if we compare it to people who said they were unsuccessful. The large majority of successful content marketers spends over 10% on content marketing, and most spend between 25 to 50% on content marketing. In contrast, when we look at the budget allocation from unsuccessful content marketers, we see that most spend less than 10%, and few spend over 25% of their total budget.

The question we wanted to confirm last was “Should you measure content marketing?” We all instinctively believe and hear from many sources that one should measure. But being the skeptical human beings that we are, we felt the need for some data to prove that measuring data is valuable. I know, this is getting quite esoteric.

Wow. An incredible 36% of marketers does not measure the ROI of their content marketing. And 24% is unsure. Meaning that there is only 39% of marketers who measure ROI and communicate about it. There is work to be done here.

But more importantly, does measuring ROI give you a better chance at being successful? The numbers would indicate so. 49% of successful marketers indicates that they measure ROI, while only 8% of unsuccessful ones do so. Across the board though, communication about ROI is quite poor. 1 out of 4 marketers does not even know if anything is being measured.

Traffic and product sales are the two most common KPIs measured, with social sharing in third place. Interestingly, we see that both soft or vanity metrics like traffic, social sharing, and community growth are measured together with hard metrics like product sales and conversion rates. Do we see a difference between successful and unsuccessful content marketers?

As expected, successful marketers do more measurement. KPIs that are more measured by successful marketers are website traffic, social sharing, and also product sales, conversion rates and time spent on website. Community growth and inbound links is used about the same by both groups, and SEO rankings is actually more used by the unsuccessful content marketing group.