Influencer marketing has become a key strategy for clothing brands to reach new audiences and boost sales. By determining what a hoodie producer’s target market is and partnering with influencers that people in that market look up to, brands gain a promising avenue to showcase their products. They tap into engaged communities, leveraging influencers’ visibility to drive brand awareness and promote themselves.
The benefits of hoodie mockups and how to prepare them
In order to determine which images you’re going to use to achieve your goals, you first have to use a mockups hoodie to determine what people in your target audience are responding to the best. This is an extremely cost-efficient way to test out different image elements, colors, and logos without actually having to spend money producing them.
Here are certain metrics you can follow to figure out which modification is performing the best.
- Add-to-cart rate: this is one step people are taking toward actually making a purchase. This metric has to be high.
- Sales conversion rate: perhaps the most essential statistic at the end of the day
- A/B testing: this helps compare two different versions of a product to isolate all other factors by placing them both in the same environment.
- Clickthrough rates: this shows how often an ad is clicked on once displayed, thereby showing how often people are inspired enough to take a look at it.
- Social media indicators: likes shares, and comments in addition to social media platform analytics.
- Time spent on page and bounce rate: these each respectively show how much time people are considering a product or conversely how quickly they ditch the page altogether.
- Clickmaps: this shows what people are focusing the most on on a website page or an ad. It helps to show which logos and text get a lot of attention.
Real-life examples of successful collaborations between influencers and clothing companies
There are many well known collaborations between manufacturers and influencers that have gone wildly successful. These provide insights and inspiration for other companies to follow a similar path. It is also likely that the number of influencers will only continue to grow as Forbes recently reported that being an influencer is among the top desired dream careers for members of Gen Z.
Bella Hadid and Nike
The supermodel partnered with Nike for a range of athletic wear, including the Air Max sneakers and a variety of activewear pieces. Since Hadid was already known for being a fitness influencer, the two were a perfect team and Nike experienced greater engagement and direct sales.
Addison Rae and American Eagle
American Eagle sells casual, cozy, and trendy clothing items. This fits nicely with the TikTok influencer’s online personality in appealing to Gen Z, which is who the clothing brand targets. Their clothing items sold out quickly as she featured them in Instagram stories and TikTok videos.
Benefits influencers offer
Although trust and reach are a couple of the benefits anyone assumes are achieved by inking partnerships with influencers, it’s worth looking at the full range of benefits a promoter or a manufacturer enjoys.
- Authentic engagement: many people follow certain influencers because their content and personality resonate with them on a deep level. They often aspire to be like them, and thus has built a high level of trust.
- Social proof: influencers make them feel much more personal than a mere image could achieve, even with numerous elements of realism added.
- Styling expertise: These are often fashion-savvy individuals and can thus wear them in flattering ways that the manufacturer might not have come up with. The more times these items are shown off, the more people will remember them and consider buying them.
- Niche markets: Specific online personalities have lifestyles that vendors target, as the people who watch them are often in the age, gender, and income bracket that typically buys their products. For instance, people who watch the Nomad Capitalist YouTube channel tend to be men above 40 on the higher end of the income spectrum. Therefore, commodities vendors like to target such maverick channels.
- Exposure: Influencers show off the vendor’s merchandise in everyday situations, creating even more situations and styles for people to view the apparel in.
- Global reach: Many influencers have international audiences, especially if they speak a certain language or are of a certain nationality. This helps brands reach more markets than they’ve already penetrated.
Best practices for maximizing impact with hoodie mockups in influencer marketing
Once you’ve chosen an influencer, you need to adapt your product in an appealing, professional manner that the influencer’s target audience can relate to. Here are some good practices to ensure your success in your collaboration.
- Test your mockups for high performance: make sure that whatever design you submit to your influencer, you have tested in mockups and they have shown the best metrics, such as clickthrough rate, sales conversion rate, and time spent on the page.
- Ensure high-quality mockups: make sure that your mockups are tested, realistic, and lifelike. You want to avoid being generic and make sure it stands out.
- Professional design: Make sure the image is professional, since this will be the audience’s first impression and they will judge the image’s quality to be like your quality.
- Align with the influencer’s aesthetics: if the influencer wears an urban style, make sure your style is casual and dynamic. If they usually don high-end outfits, go for luxury and sophistication.
- Consider interactive elements: You have the option to use polls, swipe-up links, and stickers, encouraging people to interact directly with the product, which can increase conversions.
- Work out ideas with the influencer: they know their own style and are often quite savvy when it comes to creativity, so you should both work together to determine what will resonate the most without making things feel forced. Talk to them about what you’re doing for the background and how you’re tweaking the hoodie design itself.
- Track influencer campaign performance: track performance metrics with your influencers just as you tracked individual mockups for. Determine how much benefit you’re deriving from the influencer.
- Exclusive designs: come up with limited-edition designs for a particular influencer and highlight the urgency and scarcity. Involve the influencer in the design. In fact, Psychology Today discussed the power of sudden “drops” of limited-edition designs, which can propel people to pay as much as $25,000 for a hoodie.
Personal story: have the influencer tell a personal story of how they use the clothing item. This will make it even more relatable, but make sure it’s authentic.
