Creating and selling t-shirts is one of the lucrative businesses with a wide target audience. T-shirts have grown from being a quintessential element of your wardrobe to a fashion statement and even a marketing tool for businesses. As a business owner for your t-shirt brand, once you have finalized the basics such as fabric, business model, target audience, logo design, website etc, it’s time to put your energy into promoting it.
One of the key bocks today for any marketing strategy is a strong social media presence. Hence, start by creating a social media page for your t-shirt brand. Add the necessary elements such as your brand’s story in About us, an attractive image or video as your profile and cover. Make sure you add your website address so that you can encourage your social media followers to visit the website. Once these basics have been taken care of, comes the difficult task of promoting the brand on social media.
Here are a few tips on how you can promote the social media presence of your t-shirt brand:
1.It’s all about creating a visual representation
Social media is all about attractive visuals which capture the essence of your brand. Add captivating images of your t-shirt, fabrics, various prints etc in your social media posts to make a vibrant and colourful representation of your brand.
As the feeds of social media users are flooded with posts of hundreds of pages, bright and alluring images used in the posts are bound to grab their attention and bring your brand into the spotlight.
2.Be consistent on the social media page
Social media is great to build and promote a brand, especially a new brand which needs to make its mark in the market. Create a brand message for your business and stay consistent in order to establish it. Be consistent with your posts throughout all the social media channels. For instance, if you are launching a new product, offering a discount or even have adopted a new t-shirt printing technology, all your brand’s social media pages must be talking about it.
Another great trick is linking your product posts to the actual product webpages so that the viewers can reach the buying point instantly with just one click. Staying consistent helps portray the brand’s authenticity while maximising on trust and visibility.
3.Make influencers your brand’s ambassadors
When it comes to fashion, fashion gurus have often said, “It may not matter what you are wearing, what matters more is who wore it first”. Influencers bring in an existing loyal fan base. Add to it the recommendation of the influencer and you can jump-start your brand’s social media existence. With influencers, it's not just famous people wearing a t-shirt, they even talk about it, on their Vlog, youtube channel, Snapchat and Instagram stories etc. This makes it a great trick to attract young and social media savvy audience.
4.Create Ads with a specific target audience
The possibility of business owners creating ads and sponsored posts for their business has created a huge platform for brand promotion. Each product is created keeping in mind a very particular set of audience. Create sets of these intended audiences when you promote or sponsor a post for maximum impact.
You can relate the t-shirts with the people who have similar interests. Such as if you are selling t-shirts with harry potter quotes, it would make sense to add people who like harry potter books and movies and so forth.
5.Join and participate in various facebook groups
Facebook groups have replaced chatroom forums where users converse, share their views and even post queries. There are even fully functioning seller and buyer groups where you can post details about your products and increase your brand’s visibility.
6.Build a relationship with your target audiences
Social media is a great medium to open and maintain a dialogue with your audience. It also helps to reel in hesitant customers or past customers who haven’t made a purchase in a while. Include discounts or exciting offers for such customers to attract them back in your camp. You can also re-target these visitors by creating special adverts for them. Another great way to spark a new life with old spenders can be by sending carefully crafted email newsletters. This shows them that you value their business and would love for them to shop with you again.
7.Attract more followers by hosting contests
One of the most common ways to drum up more followers on social media and spread the word is by hosting contests. Contests like create your own t-shirt, complete the quotes, guess the words etc make for great interactive contests. Add to the usual guidelines some special requirements such as share the post, tag some friends etc and you can attract more new followers while at the same time promoting your brand.
8.Mail regular and interactive newsletters
Have you visited a site where they asked you for your email id or subscribing to the newsletter in return for a discount code? This is one of the most common methods of collecting email ids.
Newsletters work similarly to the advertisements we see on television but on a selective audience and via email. They are a great way of bringing you to your potential customer’s mind during the day. Add to it a lucrative offer and it can likely urge the reader to make a purchase. The key is to make your newsletter interactive and appealing so that the reader can register it amongst the sea of emails received druring the day.
9.Follow up for feedback and customer service issues
Frequent follow-ups, prompt customer service and satisfied reviews makes for a great social media image for a brand. It instils trust in the minds of your customers and re-assures them that their views and satisfaction matter.
Bad experiences often get more negative views for a brand as compared to happy customers. Therefore, tackle dissatisfied purchasers with kindness, you can offer a refund, exchange, freebie or even an additional discount on their next purchase. Attend to negative comments and posts and do swift damage control.
10.Add Chatbots for quick and easier responses on social media
Chatbots create a great customer experience. As soon as the user sends a message, he/she receives a pre-decided relevant message. This helps businesses provide 24/7 assistance to the customers and gives your customer support team some extra time to look into the matter and handle it accordingly. It also helps businesses streamline the messages so that relevant departments can be forwarded the query for swift action.
Many small scale businesses are entering the t-shirt business. Some existing businesses can now add custom t-shirts to their current line of merchandise using a comprehensive online t-shirt maker. These were some of the tips and tricks which can be used to take the social media regime of such businesses to an entirely different level.
The key is to keep in mind your target customer when creating and sharing content. The more relatable your brand and its content, more easily customers can relate to it and hence increase the brand’s visibility. Make sure you utilize all social media platforms to their full potential and tweak your content according to the audience as well as the socialmediachannel.
Hola! I am Heena Ray and I am a freelance graphic designer. I am also an aspiring blogger. I use Designhill to connect with prospective clients. An expert on various tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Coral Draw, I have successfully designed several application interfaces, android apps, logo designs, sticker design, business card designs, letterhead designs, envelop designs, flyer designs, brochure designs, web banners, etc. I write about my experience in my posts on Designhill Blog.