The trickiest time for brands that focus on winter clothing is when the cold spell ends. How do you promote your products when the weather turns warm?
Most winter-focused brands begin their marketing push at the end of August and carry it in full swing into March. During these months, conversion is higher. In areas where it gets cold, people are always in need of replacing, say, their worn-out jackets.
An obvious tactic for summer marketing, of course, is to sell your winter products at a discount.
While many people won’t be thinking about hats, mittens, or winter coats during the summer, well-timed sales can convince a few select customers into buying their winter-wear well ahead of time.
Some brands, on the other hand, turn to typical digital marketing strategies to boost organic traffic:
This can greatly round up organic site traffic for you, so long as the blog content you publish is timely and relevant.
For instance, you can educate your customers about the benefits of buying winter apparel early. Then, make use of internal links throughout your content to improve on-site navigation and content discoverability.
Ranking high on Google's search engine results page (SERP) increases your content's visibility. So, any type of content marketing initiative benefits from on-page SEO. Also, a high number of organic searches means you're effectively reaching your audience.
Here are some useful tools to help you with your SEO efforts:
Guest blogging is another great strategy, especially if you're posting content on a big influencer's website. You can also place backlinks to direct readers towards your own webpage.
This is a straightforward approach of getting your winter apparel in front of your potential customers. However, it could be more expensive.
Pay-per-click (PPC) Facebook ads or Google ads are common examples. They can also be used for retargeting, which means they'll appear in front of people that have visited your site once—since they're more likely to return.
There are other ways, however, to keep your products relevant even during the off-season:
As people re-enter spring, they might be looking to free up some of their closet space, and they’ll be seeking out ways to offload some winter clothes they decide they can buy more of in the fall.
Brands should be ready to take advantage of this moment. One way to do this is to create a recycling program. Buy back clothing products for low prices, and then resell them as lightly used or vintage clothing later.
Patagonia’s Worn Wear program is a leader in this space. When customers send back their clothes to Patagonia, Patagonia pays them through a store credit, so that way it can retain the customer’s spending dollars while also reselling and reusing lightly worn clothes.
The recycling program also promotes a more sustainable approach to fashion.
Brands should consider building email lists and newsletters. That way, brands can engage their target audience and keep them thinking about winter clothes even when the weather turns hot.
Sending them useful tips on how to care for your winter clothes in the summer months, or where to store a puffer jacket in a cramped apartment, can be a great way to keep people thinking about your brand even as the weather turns warm.
FYI: Supplement your email marketing initiatives by redirecting your subscribers to product-related landing pages.
Even in the heat of summer, there are still outlets for the die-hard winter sports fans to go out in the cold.
Big Snow America in New Jersey, Snow World in The Netherlands, SnowDome in England, and Snowhall in Germany offer full-scale indoor skiing and snowboarding locations, so that winter sports fans can stay active even in the hottest seasons.
Winter apparel brands can partner with locations like these in order to reach the customers who will still be actively shopping for winter clothes in the summer.
Most winter apparel brands drop their cold-weather collections in August or September, but those who start pushing their winter wear early have found surprising successes.
In 2018, the high-fashion winter apparel brand Moncler dropped new coats every month starting in June. Because the coats were made in collaboration with big-name designers, they had an instant sense of exclusivity.
Some of those collections were available only for a limited time, or were sold initially at a discount, in order to convince customers to buy them in the summer. In China, that push translated into a double-digit sales increase in June, usually an off-month for Moncler.
When winter turns to summer, brands should shift their core marketing strategy from trying to directly convert sales to, instead, building more general brand awareness.
A great way to do this is to build a funny presence on a social media platform—like TikTok—that gets your name out there.
Say it’s the middle of a hot summer day. A tongue-in-cheek ad or TikTok video reminding customers how great winter is and telling them to sign up for your newsletter to stay up-to-date about new drops can be a fun way to get customers thinking about your company.
Just a little bit of ad spend can be enough, however. Brands don’t want to strap their ad budgets in the summer, when sales will inevitably be at a lull.
As the cold approaches, there’s no better way to convince people that you have what it takes to keep them warm for the winter than to showcase that professionals who experience frigid temperatures on a daily basis trust your brand.
Canada Goose, for instance, uploads social media posts and other high-quality content on its website about its work with the Iditarod musher Lance Mackey or the polar explorer Ben Saunders.
FYI: For social media marketing campaigns, have your endorsers use brand hashtags in their TikToks, Tweets, etc. Letting them host forums, podcasts, or webinars with your brand is also a great way of engaging your audience.
Chatdesk Teams provides customer service representatives who are authentic fans of each brand. These fans also answer questions or concerns your customers have, whether it’s in a live chat on your website or in the comments on social networks like TikTok.
To see how Chatdesk supports business owners, companies, and small businesses in their efforts to boost their website's organic traffic, schedule a demo.
